Is it time for a low-magic setting?

[Hussar]

Realistically, the easiest road to doing low magic games, the absolute easiest, is to limit PC's to 10th level. All PC's will be retired at 10th.

There, I just made a grim and gritty low magic game. At 10th level, PC's have a fair bit of bling, but not a lot and the spell casters are not ruling.

Or, if you want to take raise dead off the table, limit it to 7th. Reduce xp and treasure awards by 1/3 and you have a two year low magic campaign. NPC's can still do funky stuff, since NPC's are not limited in level. All the truly nasty stuff stays in the background because the party will never be strong enough to take it on. Other than a couple of spells, the party will never have access to any powerful magic.

End of problem.

The mistaken assumption here is that DnD out of the box cannot be used for lower magic games. That's not true. Dropping wealth by 30% will take out most of the extraneous magic items and dropping it by 50% will take away all but the basics. In this set up level cap the spell casters so that they do not totally dominate high level play or simply supply the party with short duration magic. After all, Greater Magic Weapon still lasts for hours.

Unless you are stripping out nearly all the magic spells and items from the game, this will work fine.

Why would we need a whole book to do what can be done in thirty seconds?

 

[hong]

Realistically, the easiest road to doing low magic games, the absolute easiest, is to limit PC's to 10th level. All PC's will be retired at 10th.

I made this suggestion ~4 years ago on rgfd, I think. People didn't like it. The level-grind aspect of the zeitgeist is strong....

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

No, because I'm tired of the same bland midieval (sic) european crap.

As someone profoundly interested in running games based on low/no magic with (within reason) historically accurate cultures arms and armour. I’m astonished at this remark. Where can I buy this bland medieval stuff that you dislike? I know dozens of folk who’d be interested in buying it.

Low magic settings = lazy dm'ing.

This is, of course nonsense, even adding an ‘in my opinion to this statement wouldn’t redeem it. In my experience getting a historic background even close to accurate takes a lot more work than running an off the shelf ‘open the door, kill the monster, steal it’s treasure’ DnD game.

You can limit the pc's in every way, force them to solve adventures in a specific manner, rely on lazy writing for mysteries etc.

Limiting players? Do you mean that I, as referee can’t say ‘you’re not playing that in my game.’ You’re wrong! Force them to solve adventures? How? In thirty years I’ve never been able to force a player to do anything. Lazy writing will lose you your players

I'd say they need a product on how to write intrigue within the D&D rules much more. Most DM's just take the simple way out of fiat and say "x doesnt work" forcing the PC's to solve the adventure in a mundane fashion.

Detect alignment and detect truth spells make for very boring mystery games. My choice is to play an alternative system. DnD is not a universal system and despite what many gamers think I’ve come to the opinion that you’ll never get a system that works for every genre. DnD doesn’t even work for every fantasy genre.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Ultimately, whether or not it's possible to tweak real honest-to-Satan D&D for a low-magic campaign, I think there's a really great reason why Wizards of the Coast will not and should not create a low-magic campaign setting.

You can't publish a setting and not support it. It's pretty clear that Wizards of the Coast has concluded that even the "core setting from us, support from a third party" model isn't a good business model for them. They haven't done this since Oriental Adventures and Dragonlance - and I suspect the reason is that they don't want to split their customer base by effectively directing them towards another company's products. Especially after AEG made the (wise, for their purposes) decision to turn d20 Legend of the Five Rings into a d20 System game, not a D&D setting.

(Dragonlance is a special case because it's a little closer to D&D proper and people playing in that setting contribute to the fanbase for the novels, which are a gold mine for Wizards of the Coast.)

As for why Wizards of the Coast can't and won't support "Gutboy Barrelhouse" by itself . . . first and foremost, they want to avoid the pitfall of splitting their fanbase between too many settings. Second, it costs time, money, and staff to support a setting.

The Forgotten Realms is their most popular setting for "traditional" D&D. Eberron works because it offers people bored with the "traditional" worlds a way to play regular D&D in a different style (as opposed to hiving off with a d20 System or OGL game). The reason, I imagine, that Wizards of the Coast was originally willing to split off Oriental Adventures and Dragonlance to other companies was to avoid having to support the settings themselves; I suspect that in the former case, they had it demonstrated for them the pitfalls of funnelling their players away from D&D itself. Not many people were using Sword and Fist in their Legend of the Five Rings games!

Even if Wizards of the Coast thought that a low-magic setting could be done, they wouldn't support it because it would be like supporting a second version of the game. With either the Forgotten Realms or Eberron, you can include "generic" D&D material like Tome of Magic or Complete Adventurer automatically.

With a low-magic setting that changes the ruleset to compensate for the new magic level, that doesn't work. So now Wizards of the Coast has to either publish specific supplements for "Gutboy Barrelhouse" or it has to include conversion notes in their regular products - effectively dual-statting their whole product range.

Why on Earth would they want to do that? It splits their playerbase even more than a straightforward new setting does. The whole point of Eberron was to introduce a new type of setting that Wizards of the Coast could sell to people who played the D&D game they publish, but who weren't satisfied with the tone and feel of the Forgotten Realms (or the Greyhawk-lite of the core rules); "Gutboy Barrelhouse" would sell only to those people who want to play something that isn't the D&D the company already publishes.

That is why they won't and shouldn't do it: because it makes no sense to publish a setting that doesn't fully use the rules of the game you publish.

This isn't a "shouldn't" in the "Heresy!!!one eleven" sense; this is a "shouldn't" in the "it'd be a really ing bad business decision" sense.

 

[Hussar]

I'm going to admit to my ignorance. What the heck is a "Gutboy Barrelhouse"?

 

[hong]

I'm going to admit to my ignorance. What the heck is a "Gutboy Barrelhouse"?

It's a type of underbarrel shotgun attachment for the M16/M4 family, I think.

Some people will talk about a character in the 1E DMG, but don't you believe them. I swear, you get all kinds of people who refuse to check their facts before posting nonsense to bulletin boards.

 

[Kapture]

Edited for content

 

[Kapture]

On the flip side, sorry if I don't agree with the reactionary attitude of the 5 or 6 people who always chime in on every single thread which can however loosely be intepreted as some kind of attack on D&D as - is. I know some of you like every thread to be a universal cheerleading session for how perfect 3E is and how nothing should ever change, but not everybody feels that way. On the other hand, I'm equally bored with arguing the opposite point of view. I don't care if other people think D&D is perfect or not right now, I'm really only interested in exploring how it might evolve in ways that could be better in the future.

Can we back off using phrases like "reactionary" in a post about a role playing game?

It's a funny kind of question your asking. You're asking if a low magic setting is needed, and people are answering that it's already there. But no, you say: WOTC needs to publish a generic low fantasy setting. Which is already there. But no, you say, WOTC needs to publish a different generic low fantasy setting.

I don't get what you want, protesting everybody's answers. So I'll go back to the poll.

I don't chime in on many posts at all. Look at my post count.

I find low magic gaming to be boring, so I wouldn't buy it. I've never had a GM make low magic gaming interesting for me, and I have a big interest in low magic settings. I live in one.

The current EL/CR system, which made designing adventures off the fly easy, in my opinion, would need to be entirely revamped in order to make low magic really playable for me. The "balance" you so blithely cast aside a couple of posts up makes the game easy for me to play.

Lastly, what does an "old school" DND feel have to do with low magic? I played old school. It was pretty high magic. In fact, nothing typifies old school more for me than a Monty Haul capaign. Woo Hoo!

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I'm going to admit to my ignorance. What the heck is a "Gutboy Barrelhouse"?

Seeing as we have had high, higher, and highest magic campaign settings so far, is it time for WOTC to put out a low magic setting ? For sake of discussion I will call this the "Gutboy Barrelhouse" setting.

So there you are.

 

[jinx crossbow]

I did vote Yes, but... because

Yes its time for low magic for me.
But i've found my system: IronHeroes.
A new book is not needed

Jinx