How to un-cheese D&D?

[Mark CMG]

Gouda luck The first step would be to stop using creatures from the Muenster Manual.

And avoid the a Ring of Three Swisses.

 

[Alzrius]

Looking over the OP's post, it seems like what's desired is a low-magic "realistic" medieval setting. Simply put, when you're talking about reducing the presence of alchemical items, making all of the weapons historically accurate for medieval Europe, and using only "believable" monsters, then you just want a different campaign altogether. There are several settings out there that conform to that archetype, so they'd be the best bet. Otherwise, you've got a lot of work ahead of you.

Ah, the power of cheese.

 

[Nate Jones]

Kingdoms of Kalamar might warrant a look.

 

[Toben the Many]

Is there a set of guidelines for how to convert D&D adventures to use d20 Modern?

I don't think so. However, it wouldn't be hard. d20 Modern is designed to be used with the standard monster manual. So you could use most of the same monster stats.

D20 Modern, if used for a fantasy system would solve most of the problems that you have.

Magic is toned way down. It's much harder to become a magic-using character.

The ubermagical weapons are gone.

For one, I love the wealth system. It solves the keeping track of gp problems that I always had in D&D. If you're a Prince or a wealthy merchant, how much money do you have exactly? Who knows?

Actually...most of the changes you are asking for are already present in d20 Modern. I would probably just do that and be done with it. If you want stats for races like elves or halflings, you could by Urban Arcana, which has modified racial stats (less fantastic).

 

[Imp]

In a Low-Magic Item game, the cleric is king. Wizard is the next. Followed by druid, paladin, bard, sorcerer, monk, then ranger, barbarian, fighter, rogue. At issue will be buff spells (bulls str, magic weapon, haste) or abilities that improve PC combat ability (wild shape, rage) or heal (cure spells, lay on hands).

Or, in a low-magic campaign, you have to remember to clip the caster classes as well as the fighters, usually by limiting spells according to various criteria. Additional components/ sacrifices, casting time, associated skill checks, fatigue rules, assigning rarity to spells, required multiclassing, so on, so forth.

Clipping out exotics and alchemical/ahistorical items shouldn't be that big of a deal.

 

[xnosipjpqmhd]

Wow, thanks for all the great ideas and feedback! I'm interested in the "item levels" from Magic Item Compendium. That sounds like it might really help.

I was hoping that I could be lazy and find some resources already created, but maybe I'll just have to write up the conversions myself and present them here as variants, with as much forethought and guidance as possible. Then other GMs can apply them to published adventures and avoid having players roll their eyes when a half-black dragon/minotaur shows up swinging a +2 spiked chain (bonus points if you can figure out which adventure that encounter is from).

 

[molonel]

I was hoping that I could be lazy and find some resources already created, but maybe I'll just have to write up the conversions myself and present them here as variants, with as much forethought and guidance as possible. Then other GMs can apply them to published adventures and avoid having players roll their eyes when a half-black dragon/minotaur shows up swinging a +2 spiked chain (bonus points if you can figure out which adventure that encounter is from).

To be honest, I think the demands and desires of people who want to scale back and qualify those desires as "low magic" or "grim and gritty" or whatever the buzz word of the moment happens to be are so varied and sometimes contradictory that ultimately asking for resources and taking the salad bar approach is about the best thing you can do.

I'm running two d20 Modern games right now, and I like what I've cobbled together, but I doubt it would work for anyone else, or satisfy another GM as thoroughly as it does me.

 

[Crothian]

You might just want to switch over to Iron hereos. That gets rid of the magic cheese. Limiting the equipment and weapons and armor to the none cheese ones only is again really simple. Just black marker them and they are gone. No need to really replace them when they show up in modules just leave them out. There are actually few template creature cheese, but it would be easy to just use the normal versions of the monsters. and the economy you just have to change in your game to fit what you want.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

Magic level is only part of it. To me, B/E D&D was less cheesy despite being no lower in magic. Perhaps one aspect of D&D 3.5 that rubs me the wrong way is the exotic becoming routine. Exotic weapons, exotic races (including templates), an ever-expanding number of base classes, new and different magic systems... it's a constant push for novelty in game mechanics.

 

[EditorBFG]

The problem is knowing what "cheese" is. What you think is cheese may not seem so to me, and vice versa. Personally, my own definition of cheese is a setting that severely limits magic when using D&D in order to be more "realistic."

The thing is, I think the original idea with a lot of this stuff, like the original Monster Manual and Deities and Demigods (with the Cthulhu gods in it) was to only use the things that fit the milleu of your game. I don't think the authors of the old Deities & Demigods intended to have clerics of Yog-Sothoth, Aphrodite, and Quetzlcouatl killing grimlocks together. And up through 2nd Edition, the lines were split up in a way that reflected this. And don't get me wrong, there is something cool about hobbits vs. mi-go vs. Drizzt in the same game, but I think all these disparate elements lose their flavor as as they're stewed together.

The designers of 3E, quite rationally, realized everything needed to be more specifically compatible to avoid rules contradictions. So they put in things like each PC should have X gp worth of magic items at Y level, a necessary balancing element.

But somehow, throwing everything together has become the norm rather than the exception. Leaving out third party products, which really aren't the problem, just with core WotC books it becomes clear that the average D&D character at, say, 10th level no longer resembles any of the source material from which fantasy rpgs emerged. A halfling monk/sorcerer/paladin/dragon disciple bristling with magic items-- many disposable or purchased casually from the local magic item vendor-- who actually goes into ancient unexplored ruins filled with magic treasure for a living because these dungeons are so common should be unique, but instead he is just another adventurer of what must be thousands, at least in places like Eberron or Faerun.

As a result, the flavor of D&D is becoming no flavor at all. If you mix all 31 flavors at Baskin Robbins together, you just have a big vat of sugary goop that doesn't taste like anything at all (I know from experience). The polyglot of everything somebody can stat being in the mix has somehow become the mainstream D&D experience, thus destroying the unique excitement that comes from, say, Elric meeting Conan. Finding a magic sword is not a moment of revelation, it is merely a step towards an inevitable upgrade. I am not surprised the OP thinks the average D&D experience is not for him.

So I don't think "de-cheesing" D&D means imposing realism so much as making the unrealistic elements actually matter. There is a line in a Ferlinghetti poem that says, "I am awaiting the rebirth of wonder." I think, for many people, the wonder of the fantastic that drew them into D&D has been replaced with an arms race, in which everything is common and nothing is of interest.

A lot of the above has been said before, but I think imposing "realism" (if by realism you mean having 50 magic items in a dungeon instead of 100) is just a step towards making D&D's style of fantasy more recognizable to our own experience, grounding it in its many truly imaginative sources, and helping create a "rebirth of wonder" in an experience that once seemed to shimmer with limitless potential for many of us, but has now lost its vibrancy.

Even as escapism, I think this paradigm-- where miracles are common and actually kind of gawdy-- is difficult to invest in, since it becomes so difficult to picture abstractly, yet alone immersively.