Unintended(?) Consequence of No More X-Mas Tree?

[LostSoul]

A mix of folklore, 1e stuff (it was gorgon's blood that blocked teleports IIRC), and imagination. Why do kings wear gold crowns? Give gold a *reason* for being valuable.

Ah, I meant the write-ups on the "magic items" to answer the question about house rules (they aren't).

 

[VirgilCaine]

I mean, if we can't tinker with the rules, how are DMs supposed to have any fun?

Lanefan

That won't stop people.

Doesn't stop people from running low-magic D&D games, won't stop people from playing badly designed house-rules or even badly designed original games.

They'll either find the problems with the rules benefits or ignore the problems.

What they won't do is actually find a system that does what they want instead of running the 1/4 mile in a VW Microbus.

The blood of a white bull mixed into mortar prevents teleporting into a building.

Why would you need this one?

 

[Raven Crowking]

I tried a game without spellcasting classes in the party at all, and no "magic mart".
I'd say that it's exactly how your house rules would play if nobody chose to play a spellcaster in the party.

You added a house rule.

A DM can generally make anything happen, so you can say that your game worked because your DM decided to make it work. But that doesn't mean that the ruleset worked, just that the DM decided that it had to.
There's a huge difference.

Here is probably our biggest difference. IMO, the purpose of a ruleset is to give the DM the tools required to make the game work. It is a given, IMHO, that the DM is trying to make the game work. If the DM isn't trying to make the game work, then no ruleset is immune to the crapfest that follows.

The InterWeb is home to thousands of people with less DMing confidence than you have, who are more than happy to claim that, however you want to play the game, it can't work, because they don't think they can make it work. The InterWeb is home to thousands of people with more DMing confidence than you have, who are more than happy to claim that, however you want to play the game, it can't work, because it isn't the way that they make it work. And that is a general "you" -- it applies equally to everybody. And, at some point in our InterWeb careers, we are almost all part of both of those tribes of "thousands".

There is no doubt in my mind that one can create a lower-magic 3e game using a single houserule and some common sense. No doubt whatsoever. There is likewise no doubt that, if your goal is to break the game, then you can break it....with or without that houserule, low magic or high.

Some rules can promote specific flavours, however, and how much work you need to do to create a flavour you like is a serious question to ask when examining a ruleset. And rules do influence flavour, often to an alarming degree. So, I will certainly agree with you that you may need to houserule to make the game exactly as you want it to be....regardless of how high or low you want your magic to be.

IMHO, "edition wars" are really about how close a given edition's ruleset matches (or appears to match) the flavour you prefer.



RC

 

[howandwhy99]

I think it has to do with over-foresting and the increased cost of transporting live plants all over the country. A lot of folks I know now have fake trees and I've actually grown to like 'em. I don't see why such cannot be a viable substitution for others. At least some ornaments and lights out front. Cruising around town and checking out the lights was always fun when I was a kid (I grew up, up north where we had snow and lots of lights).

I'm glad people still put up Christmas trees and I'd rather not have that tradition disappear.

 

[LostSoul]

I think it has to do with over-foresting and the increased cost of transporting live plants all over the country. A lot of folks I know now have fake trees and I've actually grown to like 'em. I don't see why such cannot be a viable substitution for others. At least some ornaments and lights out front. Cruising around town and checking out the lights was always fun when I was a kid (I grew up, up north where we had snow and lots of lights).

I'm glad people still put up Christmas trees and I'd rather not have that tradition disappear.

QFT.

 

[Njall]

You added a house rule.

Yeah, but if I didn't, I wouldn't have solved the christmas tree effect in the first place, because the PCs would have simply bought what they needed

Here is probably our biggest difference. IMO, the purpose of a ruleset is to give the DM the tools required to make the game work. It is a given, IMHO, that the DM is trying to make the game work. If the DM isn't trying to make the game work, then no ruleset is immune to the crapfest that follows.

Sure, but again, you can't say that it's the ruleset that's working.
In fact, you can pretty much play any game in any way you wish and have fun ( and this is true for every game, not just an RPG);
however, if I'm invited to play chess, I'll expect to have 8 pawns and one king.
Sure, the game can be interesting even if you remove the pawns, but the assumption behind the game will be pretty different and the rules won't guarantee that, say, the game doesn't end in the first turn of play, before my opponent can even act.
The same is true for D&D: you said that the game could "work" in a low magical enviroment, and, if the DM is making sure that no CR over 5 shows up in the game, this might be true.
But when people want to play Dungeons and Dragons they generally assume they'll be fighting Dragons and the such.
Most fantasy literature doesn't assume such a magic-rich enviroment, and nonetheless the characters face significant, scary challenges and come out alive.
Take for example U.K. LeGuin's Earthsea: Ged kills some dragons alone, and without magic items ( even though he is a wizard himself);
In LotR, the Fellowship faces a Troll and a dozen Orcs in Moria and they come out alive;
Conan kills all sorts of mid level magic users (most have save or die effects at their disposal);
heck, in real world's legends, Sigfried killed Fafner with only his father's magic sword,
St.George killed dragons, and he wasn't decked out in magic items.
Perseus killed a Medusa with just a few magic items.


When someone makes a character in D&D, those are among the archetypes he wants to emulate.
The game is built around the assumption that it will make the PCs capable of this.
Under your assumption that some challenges ( high CR ) aren't appropriate in a low level magic campaign you've just ruled that possiblity out.
Now, why are you assuming that you can't use these high CR creatures against the PCs in low magic campaigns? Because the ruleset implies that, if you do, the PCs will die.
The game, put simply, just doesn't support that. Thus, "it doesn't work".
Ruleset 1-DM 0.
So, as I said, you're not really playing a mid-high level campaign; you're just playing a low level campaign where high level PCs are the only thing with a high level

 

[Hussar]

There's a far and away more serious consequence of lowering the casters like that - PC's die extremely quickly.

No high level casters means no Freedom of Movement. Any larger critter with improved grab=dead PC at double digit levels. There's absolutely no way a non-magical fighter is going to beat a behir at grappling.

Never mind the ability damaging effects. Nerfed casters means that every poison/disease/whatever becomes extremely debilitating. Plus, with the reduced casting abilities, you have no protections against much of those effects beforehand.

If the melee crap doesn't get you, the other stuff certainly will.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I just bought Iron Heroes. Worked pretty well for me.

 

[PeterWeller]

When someone makes a character in D&D, those are among the archetypes he wants to emulate.
The game is built around the assumption that it will make the PCs capable of this.
Under your assumption that some challenges ( high CR ) aren't appropriate in a low level magic campaign you've just ruled that possiblity out.
Now, why are you assuming that you can't use these high CR creatures against the PCs in low magic campaigns? Because the ruleset implies that, if you do, the PCs will die.
The game, put simply, just doesn't support that. Thus, "it doesn't work".
Ruleset 1-DM 0.
So, as I said, you're not really playing a mid-high level campaign; you're just playing a low level campaign where high level PCs are the only thing with a high level

I think this is most important. RC's system works fine for a REH style world where dragons are just dinosaurs and demons are (apparently) just mildly vicious spirits (though I suspect that Conan D20 works even better), but the minute you want to start emulating a whole host of other "low magic" settings, your characters are boned. The system doesn't support fighting high end monsters without a load of magic gear (actually it doesn't support fighting many mid level monsters without magic stuff either), which means Bard and Saint George would have been nothing more than small piles of ash, unless their DM rewrote the stat blocks for their foes. There is, of course, always that option on top of any other houseruling, but now we're getting past "one simple house rule and some common sense."

Now, to bring this back to 4E, we've been told that Fighters and their sort are going to be on an equal power footing with spell casters. We've seen nothing to indicate that they will get magic wuxia abilities to do this. We have evidence that a party can be successful at fairly decent levels without a single magic item (the last Podcast). Ipso facto, 4E looks like it will be able to do low magic with much more ease than 3E.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Now, to bring this back to 4E, we've been told that Fighters and their sort are going to be on an equal power footing with spell casters. We've seen nothing to indicate that they will get magic wuxia abilities to do this.

I think I remember a post where they stated that at higher (paragon or epic), some powers might look a bit more supernatural than normal...

Damn, without a link handy I could as well write "I read it on the interweb, so it must be true!!!!"...