What is the right level of magic in your campaign setting?

[Starfox]

I'm a fan of fairly high magic/magic as technology. Magical classes as fairly conventional professional options for talented people. Characters have triple the book wealth as a baseline and work their way up from there. Extraplanar creatures are regularities. Magic is widely understood and used for practical purposes and regulated and monitored.

This is very much how magic is in my games, but that is partly because of the preferences of my players. IMC, the world is coming out of a dark age very much because magicians have started pooling their knowledge instead of hoarding it. This has repercussions in every other aspect of society.

But I can also see myself playing in a much more fairy-tale like setting, still with quite a bit of magic but with less magic as technology - no magic shops, no sharing of magic lore, and magic is a product of faeries/demins/angels or nature itself. This was how my Pendragon games ran - magic was actually fairly common, but never controllable or predictable.

 

[Ahnehnois]

But I can also see myself playing in a much more fairy-tale like setting, still with quite a bit of magic but with less magic as technology - no magic shops, no sharing of magic lore, and magic is a product of faeries/demins/angels or nature itself. This was how my Pendragon games ran - magic was actually fairly common, but never controllable or predictable.

I suppose I try to have it both ways. I have institutionalized magic, but there's also a mysterious faerie realm and a variety of races and places that are well outside of what the common races understand. The applications of magic are known, but the source is not.

 

[steenan]

I don't have a single preference here.

I like settings where magic is reasonably common, but narrow and specific.
I like settings where everybody uses low-powered magic.
I like settings where characters are highly magical and powerful.
I like settings where magic is so risky or tainting that players decide not to use it.
I like settings where there is no magic at all.

 

[Lanefan]

I generally like lots of magic, but I want it to be unstable - high-risk as well as high-reward. +3 Sword with Detect Magic once a day? Fine. But if you fumble and break it, or it fails a save sometime and breaks, there might not be much of you left to scrape out of the crater caused by the *boom*. Spellcasting is the same way - if a spell gets interrupted there's a pretty good chance of a wild magic surge when the summoned energy is released prematurely; these surges can be good, or silly, or bad, or deadly... (my surge effects table runs to 6 pages)

A real-life example might be the introduction of gunpowder-based firearms such as muskets - high risk to use, but high reward when they worked. That's how I see magic.

If there's less or no risk involved I don't want to see nearly as much magic.

Lanefan

 

[diaglo]

infinite level.
of course, none of the players are over level 5.

 

[Gilladian]

I run E6, so no spell over 3rd level, no ritual magic effect greater than a 4th level spell. I like low magic, but not really uncommon magic - at least not for the PCs. I usually insinuate that magic is dangerous and unpredictable, but PCs hate that, so it is less that the spells/items the PCs use might be unpredictable, as the things they encounter. Gates, magic zones, regions of elemental instability can all be highly unpredictable and quirky.