"Kill the Sacred Cow!"

[SSquirrel]

If your party isn't doing the smart thing and pulling back instead of charging ahead when they're nearly out of resources, then it sucks to be in your campaign. It's even worse if the DM is out to get you, in which case it doesn't matter what you do, the DM just wants to see characters dead.

We just had a DM who said we had just woken up 2 hours ago, we couldn't rest yet. The DM wasn't exactly out to get us, but he did like making a strong push to get us Heck, he knew I could make nastier bad guys than he did, so he asked me to specifically make some NPC that could counteract some of the party members. The funny part was that those players he wanted to be able to counteract never actually attacked the specific monster that was their planned nemesis, they were busy fighting one of the others

Besides all that, who's to say we wouldn't have a random encounter hit us while we were camped out to rest? I should maybe mention this guys is an old school gamer, Greyhawk fanatic, etc. Maybe that's part of why I just kinda hate Greyhawk. That and in high school a friend and I spent a weekend killing off all the gods in Greyhawk heh. Death's scythe really made some of those fights a bit TOO easy

You also need to remember that you *don't* need to cast *every* spell you have over the course of four encounters, assuming that you'll have the option to rest... because sometimes you won't.

As I said previously, many situations if the wizard hadn't cast all his spells, not everyone would have stayed alive. Sometimes even that doesn't help.

I've been rereading the modules. The low-level (1-3) modules don't have large amounts of magic items. It's only when you get to about level 7 or so that magic items start becoming commonplace, and even then you're talking usually +1 or so, sometimes +2, with the occasional +3 item being held by the bad guys who are using it against you.

Were these 1E, 2E or 3E modules? Every single 1E module I have has a ludicrous amount of loot. Many of them are yes +1 swords and such, but common orc leaders having multiple magic items at level 2 and such really adds up.

As for the Clarke quote, it's true, but it's not on point.

When magic becomes commonplace, it is no longer fantastic, it is no longer something awesome, it is no longer *magical*. It isn't anything that one looks forward to, it becomes familiar, something one starts treating with a degree of contempt.

That's what's missing; the sense of fantasy. "More Magic!!!1!" isn't going to change the problem.

We're just going to be different here I think. For years, I've always thought it was stupid that you had all this magic but the world wasn't any better. There were none of the sweeping changes that would happen if you had a society w/this level of magic. Eberron actually captures it well. I don't look at magic with contempt. I've always thought it could be a much better tool than it is. I still love simply tossing a fireball, or finding a new creative use for a common spell. Core magic in 3E was beginning to bore the crap out of me tho

The game designers don't need to take it into account, thanks to (in 3e) Scribe Scroll. If you can scribe scrolls, then you have the potential of always having those limited use, specialized, or utility spells available. The only problem with Scribe Scroll is the ridiculous XP cost requirement... why would you ever lose XP for creating a magic item, when in previous editions you either didn't lose XP, or you'd actually *gain* XP for making one?

You just hit the nail on the head for wondering why my group never had too many extra potions or wands and such. We would make the occasional wand and I know I made a few Int boosting items for my wizard, but the XP costs were lame.