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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 269729" data-attributes="member: 1288">You know, I like a lot of these ideas.  I might like to incorporate some of 'em--not into most of my campaigns, where blatant magic is okay, but into a few of 'em.But my concern--as others have brought up--is with balance.  The vast majority of a mage's offensive spells are the blatant ones.  If you take those away, you've drastically depowered the arcane casters.  How do you deal with that?Well, one option would be to do the same to magic items.  If the fighers and barbarians are fighting with the same equipment at 13th level they were at 3rd, it's less important that the mages haven't gone up dramatically in damage-dealing ability either.  Still, you need to retain some offensive spells, since even without magic items, fighters still get more attacks and better attack rolls.Obviously, you'll have to strip away most of the clerics' offensive spells as well.And to do all that, you've got to drastically tone down the monsters.  With no blow-em-up spells and no +4 bastard swords, forget about taking on an old dragon.  Heck, even a troll is almost completely out of the question.Basically, this could still work, but it would have to be a setting with very few or no monsters, using only human (or at least PC race) adversaries.  Kind of like the Grim-n-Gritty system, really.This doesn't mean the idea isn't worthwhile, just that it involves a lot of work, or at least it seems to me as though it would.However...So far everyone seems to be associated "subtle" with "weaker."  That's not necessary.Don't want big explosive fireballs?  Okay, replace it with a third level spell that causes a handful of people to start feeling weak and ill.  They take a small amount of damage the first round, a bit more the second, and so on, until they've taken the same amount of damage the fireball would have dealt.  It takes longer, but there's no visible effect, so they don't know why they're taking damage, or who caused it.  And it's subtle; you could describe it as a form of curse.I think most of the "flashy" spells could be changed like this, rather than dropped.  What you wind up with is a wizard who is no weaker in combat than he used to be, but draws substantially less attention and is far less obvious when throwing magic about.  And you have a world in which magic can remain mysterious, because it lacks any visible manifestation.</blockquote>

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