D&D (2024) Its till just me or is the 2024 MM heavily infused by more 4e influences?

[dave2008]

If magic visibly suffuses the setting, then it's a setting issue.

I am not sure I understand what your talking about and possibly vice-versa. So I am going to try to clarify:

1. The lore of D&D, from the beginning, is absolutely dripping with magic. Or as you said, suffused with magic. Powerful magic NPCs, powerful magic using villians and monsters, and magic items and weapons. The foundational settings: Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and the Known World have magic everywhere.
2. That hasn't changed. Those settings still have the same level of magic now as then. That has not changed, as far as I can tell, in 2e, 3e, 4e, or 5e.

What I am not talking about is PCs or game mechanics. Is that more clear?

 

[mamba]

I didn't realize that was the case in Dragonlance. I thought the colors meant you had good, neutral, and evil magic users.

yes, that is what they mean, but they are all mistrusted

 

[mamba]

I only read about 7-8 of the novels (one a series of short stories) and I didn't catch on that (that I remember, it has be 40 years). Was it part of the RPG products? I only had one module.

would expect that more in the setting books, the towers of high sorcery basically exist to protect casters from the people and vice versa

 

[UngeheuerLich]

you'll forgive my scepticism on this particular point when they said basically exactly the same thing in 2014 only for it to be later revealed that it was more or less assumed you'd have a caster concentrating on the Magic Weapon spell to facilitate the martials whenever you encountered something with nonmagic resistance.

That one is out!

 

[Micah Sweet]

I only read about 7-8 of the novels (one a series of short stories) and I didn't catch on that (that I remember, it has be 40 years). Was it part of the RPG products? I only had one module.

It was part of the setting. Showing up in a module would depend on what the module was about.

 

[Hussar]

To be fair though, pointing to the Towers of High Sorcery as an example of a low magic setting is a bit weird. The Tower of High Sorcery at Wayreth was an extra dimensional fortress that moved from location to location and was virtually impossible to find. Basically, the Tower would find you if it wanted to. Hardly a low magic location.

Dragonlance is not a low magic setting by any stretch. Good grief, the Companions of the Lance start with +3 weapons at 5th level. It's arguably a low caster setting - simply because there are so few actual casters in the original series, but, low magic? Not even remotely.

 

[MichaelSomething]

People need to be specific when they talk low vs high magic.

What metric are you using?

 

[mamba]

To be fair though, pointing to the Towers of High Sorcery as an example of a low magic setting is a bit weird.

I did not do that, yes there is high magic, but it is extremely rare, the baseline level is much lower than today / in FR

 

[dave2008]

would expect that more in the setting books, the towers of high sorcery basically exist to protect casters from the people and vice versa

Ok, I don't remember that from the novels so that makes sense. Thank you!

 

[Hussar]

I did not do that, yes there is high magic, but it is extremely rare, the baseline level is much lower than today / in FR

Again, it depends if your experience with Dragonlance is through the novels or through the modules. See, I was introduced to the setting through the modules first. And they were anything but low magic. The Companions, right from the outset, were absolutely dripping with magic items - at 5th level, every single character had multiple magic weapons, magic armor, and even artifact level magic items and the modules were absolutely chock-a-block filled with magical treasure.

None of that made it into the novels - although, this became a setting with time travel artifacts and whatnot, so, it was not exactly low magic.