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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aristotle" data-source="post: 2016674" data-attributes="member: 5885">It seems to me that there is a faction of people who enjoy 'low magic' settings, although their definitions of low magic are quite varied, and there is obviously a great number of people who don't like such settings (as is evident from the anti-low magic posts that quickly flood most threads about low magic). Frankly, I fail to see how "less magic" = "more roleplaying". But there you go.I don't think most of the pro-low magic folks think that less magic offers greater role playing opportunity than a setting with more magic. I'm sure there are those who feel that way, and the exact opposite as well, but in my experience it isn't the level of magic in a setting that decides how much roleplaying gets done. That is ultimately up the the DM and the players. it might result in frustration, resentment and finding another DM.I don't think I've ever lost a player, or had a player threaten to leave, over something as trivial as the mechanics of the game. The only time this has ever come up in a game was when I wanted to run a game with a heavy religous influence (think Prophecy), and a very religous player expressed concern over possible content. Once again, in my opinion, it is the story that matters 75% of the time. Any setting (low magic, high magic, or whatever) rarely matters as much as the quality of the story, and the quality of the game master. A bad story or a game master that tries to control the players will definately lose players. And I actually prefer my players/PCs having lots of options since there are more chances that they will do something creative and interesting.I really don't see the "less options" argument. Low magic generally means (to me, at least) that encountering unfriendly magic is just about as uncommon as encountering friendly magic. In other words, the playing field is fairly even most of the time, and the proportion of options available to the player characters are kept mostly to scale with the number of options that can be used against them. I think creative players, who work hard at coming up with surprising sollutions to the problems you throw at them, can be creative regardless of how much magic is available to them (so long as the mechanics of the game allow for creativity). DnD is "high magic".... always has been, and IMO, it always should be.That may have once been true but now, more than ever, DnD is a tool used to power settings with all sorts of variation on magic, technology, and other facets of the game. Go to your bookshelf, or the local book store, and pull down a few different setting books. In some the changes are subtle, and in others they are less so. In my opinion the rules shouldn't dictate any aspect of a newly created setting absolutely. A DnD setting shouldn't be forced to include elves, magic, polytheism, or any other setting element simply because the 'implied setting' that ships with the DnD core rules has those things.  Low magic settings can be fun. You can have great adventures. You can experience amazing role playing. And, yes, all of those things can be acomplished in high magic settings too. Some folks just like a 'different' setting now and then. I've run incredibly high magic campaigns and campaigns with no magic at all. In the end my players' were rarely concerned with such things so long as they were given a clear picture of what the setting entailed beforehand and the story they took part in was enjoyable and memorable.</blockquote>

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