Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 3498423" data-attributes="member: 13966">Uh, no.  You have to leave out a lot of monsters and stuff if you're going to run D&D itself with simply less magic available to the Player Characters.A lot of D&D critters have DR or Regeneration or other 'you can't really stop me without certain magic' abilities that are going to be pretty drastically bad for the PCs to face if they don't have normal amounts/potency of magical armaments and spells available.You need to either excise those critters or compensate/empower/equip the PCs adequately for the dangers they'll face.  The D&D rules are only balanced on certain core assumptions (some or most of which are mentioned in the DMG's chapter on encounters, adventures, and whatnot).  For instance, they assume the party will have a cleric or paladin to deal with undead; they assume the party will have access to level-appropriate healing magic; they assume the party will eventually have access to resurrection-style and death-warding magic; they assume the party will have access to offensive blasting spells; and they assume the party will have access to some utility magic in one form or another (even if only a Rogue loaded up with scrolls and the Use Magic Device skill).Similarly, enemy spellcasters will be more difficult to defeat, unless they suffer the same restrictions as PC spellcasters.That said, yes, it is possible to run low-magic D&D without different rulebooks, it's just tougher sometimes and tricky.Ex: Early in my Rhunaria campaign, before I devised and added my Gifts of the Warrior's Spirit houserule, the PCs had to face two chuuls, in separate encounters.  One they caught in a spiked pit trap, but it wasn't terribly deep and the chuul crawled out in 1 or 2 rounds, just as the PCs were moving in to shoot at it.  So they ended up having to engage it in melee once it climbed out of the pit.The chuul did horrific damage to a few PCs, nearly killed 3 or 4 of them (out of a 5 or 6 person party), and was only narrowly defeated after an intense battle.  The paladin or two in the group (I forget if we had 1 or 2 pallies at the time) only managed to barely keep themselves and one other PC alive (the others that nearly died only escaped through the grace of last-ditch miraculous grapple checks that somehow beat the chuul's grapple checks, followed by running away a short distance before getting up the nerve to try re-engaging).  The group had no spellcasters (besides the 1 or 2 Cure Light Wounds the paladins may have had), and no magic weapons (except for one of the paladins I think, who may've had a +1 longsword).  However, Rhunaria has normal spellcasting classes, the players just didn't choose to play any at the time (magic items, and training in spellcasting classes, are just harder to come by in Rhunaria; especially magic items that have more than just minor power/utility).Since I hadn't anticipated so much difficulty with the chuul, the PCs barely survived what would normally have been a slightly-tough but decent encounter.  This was my first time trying a slightly lower-magic D&D campaign and I forgot that the chuul's great strength, special attacks, and special defenses would be so tough for a 5th-level party to handle without the standard array of spellcasters and magic items.  I learned from that experience and other, less significant ones, which eventually led to me adding my Gifts of the Warrior's Spirit to help mostly-mundane PCs get by alright (before that I was just more careful about my choices of encounters); I had never played in or DMed a game before that session in which the party had no balanced party composition and suffered for it (my friends and I usually make a balanced party of PCs; 1 mage/blaster, 1 warrior, and when possible, 1 rogue and 1 priest/healer, at minimum).</blockquote>

Verification