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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gothmog" data-source="post: 2951648" data-attributes="member: 317">I'm the one that originally made the comment Numion responded to in an old thread.  What I meant by my statement was in my experience playing D&D (20+ years now), the DMs that ONLY run high fantasy games tend to use magic as a band-aid for all problems, and that players tend to rely on magic to circumvent all problems.  Why try to KO a guard, bluff your way past other sentries, undermine structural supports and free prisoners to take down the bandit chieftain when you can go invisible, summon a horde of creatures, stone shape and fireball the place into cinders?  Not to mention with Detect Evil, Zone of Truth, True Seeing, and various divinations make it VERY hard to run a good mystery/investigation that can't be solved with minimal effort.  To counteract that and still make it challenging, every bad guy has to have just as much magic to counteract the PCs.  While some people might enjoy that much magic, to me it becomes a modus operendi for ALL adventures (witness the numerous scry/buff/teleport tactics, or Fly/Imp Invis/Fireball wizard done to death), and takes away fun and unusual opportunities that are present in a lower-magic game.Does it make me an incompetent DM to prefer low magic?  I don't think so.  I have better things to do than sit there and memorize dozens of pages of spell and item descriptions, looking for counters to each of the PCs abilities and/or trying to squeeze the system for every ounce of synergy I can.  I've been running a successful low-magic D&D game for 13 years now (characters around 12th level, with about 1/4 the magic suggested in the core books), and my players still love it and talk about old events in it frequently.  With my prep time for games becoming more restricted with time, I prefer to focus on plot, making memorable NPCs and villians, and raising interesting moral quandries than engaging in a magical arms race with the players.  Does that make ALL high-magic DMs incompetent storytellers or have less deep campaigns?  Absolutely not, its just not a playstyle I enjoy, and there is a tendency of inexperienced DMs to go very high magic and neglect other areas of their game.</blockquote>

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