Irda Ranger said:
I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Wheel of Time yet. As the series progressed it only became more high fantasy.
It's high magic, sure - there's lots of lightning and such being thrown around, and the use of magic is common among the main characters. But if you look closely, it doesn't really have much in the way of what's normally considered "game-breaking" in D&D.
There's no mind reading. Sure, there's Compulsion, but that requires defeating your opponent first. Bad if they're captured, but Rand can't just pull Moridin's plans out of his mind because he fails a saving throw.
Teleportation is extremely limited based on rules of the magic system that don't change based on how powerful you are. There are gateways, where you either have to know a spot well or have line of sight, and there's skimming which takes time, and you have to know where you are very well. Bottom line, you can't go somewhere you're not familiar with quickly, which is the most game breaking aspect of teleportation. And the line of sight gateways the Asha'man were doing, bouncing from mountaintop to mountaintop were pretty damn cool, but not fundamentally different from fast overland travel.
No flight. You can do invisible floating platforms and you can pick things up, but you can't pick yourself up. Now, of course, that may just be because they haven't figured out how to make big invisible wings, but I imagine that would take an inordinate amount of skill. At any rate, not even any of the Forsaken or Lews Therin know how.
No resurrection. Sure, the Dark One can resurrect the Forsaken, but it doesn't seem to be pleasant and it's not at all certain. Regardless, the One Power can't raise the dead, so it's not available to anyone but a small handful of baddies. The closest they can come is balefire, which rolls back time a few seconds (or minutes if you're Rand and going berserk) on the actions of the thing it zaps, but that's the equivalent of the nuclear option in that world. There's a general agreement not to use it from both sides or there'll be nothing left for either side to enjoy. It's been done exactly once to bring back a main character from an extremely sudden, random death.
Countermeasures. There are countermeasures for everything, including the ability to channel itself, and making a trick work (such as invisibility done with inverted weaves) relies more on surprise than skill with the One Power. Ganging up on even Rand, the most powerful channeler in the world, can and has been catastrophically effective.
And finally, a social factor. The Aes Sedai who've been bound can't use their powers to kill anyone who isn't placing them or their warders in imminent danger. Admittedly, there are lots of people running around by the end who aren't bound the same way, but they typically have their own agendas they're using their powers for. It sets a lot of the expectation in the world for how magic will be used. The stuff happening in the books is out of the ordinary.
The most "game-breaking" thing in the world, IMO, is the Asha'man. They're training to kill as a large military unit, using the One Power in ways that nobody in that world has seen before, excpet perhaps for the Forsaken. Everyone else tries to make a go at things individually or in a circle which boosts the leader's power level. Dumai's Wells was frightening. A group of Asha'man were surrounded by a large non-channeling army. They set up a defensive ring, protected by shields, and then proceeded to implode everyone around them in concentric rings.
