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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 8928536" data-attributes="member: 27957">The urge for low magic that doesn't meaningfully disrupt the pseudo-medieval setting is a mix of two things, IMO. One is Tolkien and his idealized pastoral gentry, and the other is the Hollywood mishmash of Arthurian epics and its near cousins of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe and the rest. If you want your D&D to be close to those, you want magic to be non-intrusive and minimally employed.If you go to any other literary branch, then it's a different story. The pulp science-fantasy style of A. Merritt and Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore was all about treating magic as a previously unknown science, and putting it in the hands of a clever protagonist mean exploring every shortcut and exploit possible. Or if you go over to the more sword and sorcery genre of R.E. Howard or Fritz Leiber, then magic may be a lot less safe but it's definitely omnipresent and highly influential.I think different people have different genre expectations of D&D, often with very little self-awareness of what those expectations are. It's had a lot of influences and different setting books have gone in different directions. It's possible to find (or make) a corner that conforms to what you want, but again that requires people to clearly understand what those wants are.</blockquote>