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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 1562804" data-attributes="member: 537">Strange. After two years of playing a game that finally ended at 21st level, I can honestly say I never want to go back to slogging through the mud, killing dire rats, ever again. Or at least for the foreseeable future.Note that in terms of the bigger picture, what D&D calls high magic isn't the top end of the scale. Starting characters in Exalted can match and outdo even epic-level stuff, and the same holds for the elder guys in other White Wolf games like Vampire. Those in Nobilis are literally gods (or at least godlings).The complaints about D&D-style "high magic" usually center around four things:1. Widespread magic leads to difficulties with world design and verisimilitude, especially if you're after that gritty, mud-slogging feel.2. Spells like scrying and teleport obviate many of the more classic adventure setups, like journeying cross-country or sleuthing for clues, while resurrection cheapens death.3. Many of the character classes gain their powers through magic items, which leads to the golfbag-of-items feel.4. Being able to do stuff like fly, chuck fireballs around, and whatnot goes against the grain of typical Western fantasy.Point 1 is really only an issue with _widespread_ magic. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that just because the campaign centers around 4-6 people with magic up to their eyeballs, the rest of the world must be like that. But that's not the case. PCs by definition are exceptional; just because they have lots of magic doesn't have any necessary implication for everyone else. At most, it implies that the NPCs (allies or adversaries) they encounter will be likely to have similar levels of magic: powerful people attract the attention of other powerful people (or, at a metagame level, because that's the simplest way to present an adequate challenge to the players). These NPCs themselves can still be a tiny proportion of the total population of the world.Point 2 has the most direct implications for adventure and campaign design. You could certainly nerf spells like scry and teleport without a great deal of complaint from a lot of people. You could even nerf resurrect, or at least make it harder to survive, but this can have repercussions for an ongoing campaign; it's stupidly easy to get killed at high levels, and without some means of coming back, continuity can get shot to heck. However, this is only one aspect of the overall high-magic feel; you can nerf all these things and still have people flying around, fireballs and flamestrikes going off, critical hits for 125 points of damage, etc.Point 3 is really a suspension-of-disbelief issue: it's not so much the powers themselves, as how they're presented in the context of the game world. If you change the presentation, the problem goes away. I do this IMC with an imbued-magic setup, whereby people can gain powers similar to those from magic items, by spending XP. It's like a halfway-house to games like HERO or Exalted, where you get just as many (or even more) powers, but it's all part of the characters themselves. It's easier to handle if you're used to thinking in effects-based terms: what matters most is the power itself, rather than the in-game explanation.Point 4 is the most subjective. Basically, if you _want_ to be low-key, gritty, and slogging through the mud, then it doesn't matter what tweaks you make to the system, it's not going to work for you. That said, making up specious rationalisations for _why_ you like it doesn't really do you any favours. And besides, there are more flavours to fantasy than just Conan or LotR. Some of the stunts pulled by people in Greek myths can easily be thought of as fodder for a high (if not epic) level game; people fly and sail through the air all the time in wuxia stories; etc.See, here you admit yourself that you WANT to be gritty, slogging through the mud, and so on. And that's fine. But that has nothing to do with "challenge", as the word is commonly understood. Indeed, some of the most tension-filled moments I've experienced have been as part of a twinked-out 17th level party, facing off against a CR 23 winterwight. The game was high magic by any definition, and I can tell you, we were still soiling ourselves every time we met one of those buggers.If anything, life gets even more challenging at high levels, when you start to attract the attention of CR 23 winterwights (and the things that command them). Just say that you don't have _fun_ throwing around oddball creatures like winterwights, and we can both agree.You can have just as much drama, tension and conflict with lots of super powers as without. Super powers won't make someone love you, and they won't make someone stop hating you. You can cast dominate person and make someone your _puppet_, but that's not really the same, especially if your intention really is to create situations with plenty of potential for drama or human conflict.As said above, yes, you can nerf stuff like teleport and resurrect if they cheapen some aspects of the game too much for your liking. You will still have larger-than-life characters who do larger-than-life stuff (which is essentially what high magic entails), even if they now have more opportunities for ANGST[tm].So don't do it. Don't take the D&D ruleset and overthink it.D&D is a ruleset designed purely and simply to facilitate what most gamers want to do, most of the time: adventure. The most common style of play is to go into dungeons, kill monsters, and take their stuff. For that, the stuff that D&D lets you do is great. However, it also has limitations, in particular in the field of designing a credible and self-consistent world. Think of the ruleset as facilitating and showcasing the actions of characters on a stage: the focus should be on whoever's on the stage, and the stage hands and props are basically just decoration. This has been the way of D&D since its inception: gamist through and through, even if 3E makes some concessions for the simulationists.One last thing: no matter what anyone says, only you can decide whether you're going to have fun with high magic. The choice to accept the idiosyncrasies and irrationalities inherent in high magic is a conscious decision, one that only you can make. One thing that can be said here is that idiosyncrasies and irrationalities will be inherent in _any_ sort of fantasy world, if you dig deep enough; high magic just makes it a bit more obvious.</blockquote>

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