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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7176548" data-attributes="member: 996">There's many different ways of taking 'low magic,' and, IMX, back in the day, it most often meant 'few magic items to find' and/or 'few other casters in the setting.'  Both of which, perhaps unintuitively, proved (again, IMX, having preferred to run such games in the 80s and into the 90s) to put PC casters at that much more of an advantage. I see an issue, Caliburn, I see you taking a condescending tone, making unwarranted and false assumptions about me in a transparent ad hominem attack.  But I'll snip all  that, and see if there's anything of substance to reply to... Though, RuneQuest wasn't as high magic as D&D is typically played, and GURPS, of course, runs the gamut.  That high-magic campaigns can be deadly, or even 'gritty' (mostly about tone and the morals & ethics of the heroes or anti-heroes in question), is only relevant to the discussion in a tangential way.  Of course high-magic can be deadly, usually thanks to very deadly magic, for instance, or gritty, thanks to magic being inherently compromising in some way, perhaps.  By the same token, low-magic shouldn't have to be deadly or gritty.  Even a no-magic campaign should be able have a more heroic tone to it, if desired.   Again, really depends on what you mean be 'low magic.'  5e works, by default, with very few magic items.  It works fine in a low magic setting, with high-magic PCs, they're just at a bigger advantage.  It does not work for campaigns such as the OP envisions, in which PC magical resources are tightly constrained.  In addition, it offers few PC choices devoid of magic.  Cut most classes & sub-classes, and add some missing non-magical elements, and you can get there. Pacing, on one hand, can be irrelevant, if all you do is shift the standard 6-8 encounter day to a 6-8 encounter week with the same resources available over its course.  OTOH, pacing (time pressure) is a fine tool to make a high-magic game work better, as well.   The whack-a-mole phenomenon is more recent and not integral to keeping D&D functional.  It is an odd little system artifact, the combination of the heal-from-0 rule, and otherwise fairly small-number healing effects, making leveraging that rule by letting allies drop, healing them a little only to drop again, &c -  that isn't ideal for all sub-genres & tones, nor even for many, but it doesn't bare directly on low-magic campaigns.  Whether you want a functional D&D that's exactly like 5e, or one that eschews whack-a-mole for less goofy, but still workable alternatives (heal-from-negatives combined with bigger-numbers healing being the clearest solution, IMHO), the game could do with some more support for low-/no- magic player-facing options, particularly sub-classes (or even the unprecedented, in 5e, resort of a class that doesn't use magic, at all, in any sub-class).</blockquote>

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