First off, I'd like to say that this is a good discussion, and fair points made by most sides. I've played in high magic, high fantasy settings, and low magic but high fantasy settings, and low magic/low-fantasy settings. I feel that I've played a fair mix of different campaign styles, and I've seen DMs do both high magic and low magic campaigns. I've seen both styles suck, and I've seen both styles soar.
Having said that, I've seen low magic campaigns suck more often than they soared. Most low magic campaigns I've seen start out with huge ambitions. The DM's almost always, to a person, think to themselves, "Okay, now that all that nasty math and all those cheesy magic items are gone, now we can focus on CHARACTER!" These are usually reactive DMs who've gotten sick of high fantasy, munchkinny, min-maxed monty haul campaigns. They always have horror stories to tell, too. They thumb through online variants of the grim-and-gritty rules. They talk about the good old days of fantasy, and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books, or Robert E. Howard's Conan books. Or the Illiad. Or Tolkien's novels.
There are a few problems with this thinking, conceptually, before we even get into game mechanics. I just reread all of Robert E. Howard's Conan books. Of course Conan didn't need magic items. He was stronger, faster, tougher, had more skills and greater fighting prowess than anyone he ever met. If a player came to me and said that he had soloed all the creatures that Conan killed single-handedly, my response would be to think he was enmeshed in the most fastidious ego masturbation I'd ever heard, or his big brother was running the games, and didn't have the heart to kill his little bro's favorite character.
A lot of fantasy novels are designed, in game terms, to have one character (or maybe two) as the primary focus of the story, and the characers are powerful enough and resilient enough to face all of the challenges they encounter. Most D&D adventures assume, and often have, at least 3 to 4 characters, all of whom deserve screen-time and all of whom depend on each other. Like it or not, there are plenty of guys who enjoy action movies, sit in a boring desk job 50 to 60 hours a week and WANT to kick the
out of a dragon on Saturday. I see no reason why I should always try to force such people to sit through the roleplaying equivalent of a Jane Austen novel. One person in this discussion asked, "How do you break someone who thinks power gaming is the only way to play?" The answer: you don't. You give them the opportunity to play in another style. If they like it, great. If not, then you let them do what they have fun doing. You don't break them of anything. If your playing style is incompatible, you go your separate ways. Anything else is sheer arrogance.
People have mentioned Achilles, Odysseus and characters from Tolkien as examples of people who weren't loaded down with magical gear. But this is also a false argument, as others have correctly observed. The Beowulf poet spends a lot of time describing the exact make and lineage of armor, weapons, shields, helms. A chain shirt might not be described as "A mithral +3 chain shirt" because those sorts of terms would have been meaningless to an Anglo-Saxon bard. Does that mean that it is all non-magical and mundane in D&D terms? No. Beowulf's mail shirt frequently stood up to damage that would rend average steel links into breakfast cereal. Mythic heroes are often demigods, or have the power, strength, speed and toughness far, far above anything attainable by mortals. They frequently have artifacts. They are most certainly not 1st level fighters with a 17 strength, a leather jerkin and a cudgel. Aragorn spent a lot of his onscreen career fighting orcs. Lots and lots and lots of orcs. And some trolls toward the end. And he spent a lot of time hiding and running away. Some comparisons are meaningless. If you want to make your players run away from everything and hide whenever they face something tougher than an orc, great. I prefer campaigns with a wider variety of encounters.
Low-level D&D play *is* low magic, even by the book. A lot of DMs with low magic ambitions seem to forget this. A lot of them also don't seem to realize that the CR system in standard D&D assumes a certain level of wealth. I've seen several low-magic campaigns disintegrate between 4th to 6th level simply because the DM is not willing to put the extra work into keeping a low-magic campaign interesting. I saw one DM who was simply SHOCKED when his party was creamed by a single orc barbarian. He'd been making the whole party crawl through the mud, begging for nonmagical weapons, paying through the nose for nonmagical masterwork leather armor. And he couldn't understand why they couldn't stand up to a standard encounter for their level.
Sooner or later, the purchase or construction of minor gear becomes a background process in a longterm campaign, and it should. Yes, crossing the river Styx to pluck a few feathers from the wings of the Ice Phoenix by the light of the full moon is a great adventure hook for the fighter to add an important bane enchantment to his greatsword. But if every magic item in the party is constructed in such a fashion, the campaign can slowly become a story about the characters's gear rather than the characters.
Someone mentioned low-magic one-shots as offering a richer opportunity for people to run new and different characters. But I've seen that happen in one-shots no matter what the style of play. People frequently take risks with one-shot characters that they can't or won't take with longterm characters. They try new things. They step out. That's nothing unique to low-magic one-shots. I've seen people do exactly the same thing in high-level epic one-shots.
A quote:
"What I was trying to say was that my one brush with a 'low-magic' campaign left a very bad taste in my mouth. It wasn't so much a low-magic campaign as it was the DM telling us 'no' to everything character concept presented to him. He seemed to have some kind of vendetta against what he thought was min/maxing or powergaming or whatever he wanted to call it at the time." - somebody
Dear God, yes. I've seen several self-proclaimed low-magic DMs whose attitudes can best be described as, "Me heap-big DM. You will fear my monsters, puny player-thing." There is a certain sort of DM who seems to enjoy making players run away from stuff. I have a strong suspicion that such DMs are simply the flipside of the munchiny player with the phallic greatsword who always has to be the toughest, the strongest and the most badass player in the group. I've seen such DMs through a hissy fit with their pet monsters are beaten - and this particular flaw has no relation whatsoever to high-magic or low-magic campaigns.
A few of the arguments in favor of low-magic campaigns, and my thoughts:
1. Magic items become more special, and players treasure them more.
My response: Yes, please. And players therefore learn to expect that their items are sacred, and cannot be sundered, stolen or destroyed. Some attachment between players and their characters is natural and good. But one of the dictums I give my players is, "Adventuring is an inherently dangerous occupation. If you want to live forever, then stay at home." I discourage players become too attached to their items, and personally I like the fact that character wealth is often divided between one or two special items, and a lot of smaller utility items. That way when they lose something, or it gets destroyed, it doesn't feel like I've killed their character.
There is another problem with "special" items: The improbability of DM treasure gifts ruins verisimilitude for me.
DM: You find ... *drum roll* ... a magical spiked chain. Doesn't that make you feel special?
Player: Oh, wow. Another magical spiked chain. And fancy that - it's only slightly more powerful than the last two spiked chains I've found in previous treasure hoards. Who woulda thunk? Someone up there must like me.
DM: ...
2. Roleplaying in a low-magic campaign is more character-focused.
My response: Baloney. Since low-magic and low-power campaigns often go together, I have rarely seen campaigns where people are able to emulate Odysseus, Achilles, Conan or the Grey Mouser. Such character, translated into D&D terms, would have all 18s across the board, or maybe a 16 as a dump stat. They are stronger, faster, tougher and better-looking than everyone they meet, and somehow always know the solution to every problem they encounter. Of course they don't need magic items. Grim-and-gritty rules, which often also get bundled into low-magic campaigns, do NOT encourage people to value their characters. They learn that their characters are disposable like tissue paper, and once gone, never return without DM fiat.
3. The absence of Raise Dead and Resurrection spells makes people not want to die. Death MEANS something.
My response: Yes, it means that the character is irrevocably dead. It means that short of DM fiat, there is no way to bring the character back. I've seen people slam their hand down on the table and swear when their high-level character died, even though they KNEW the cleric in the group had a True Resurrection ready. The absence of Raise Dead and Resurrection spells rewards cowardice, and since I like to encourage heroism, I make them possible though not univerally available.
One of my favorite quotes from this discussion:
"Largely using mythological heroes as your basis for a 'mythic' flavor you want to emulate specifically is deeply flawed. The reason Odysseus survived his epic quest? DM fiat. Same reason he went on it. The reason Achilles stayed in Troy? DM fiat. Same reason he went there in the first place. The reason Frodo could chuck the ring into Mount Doom without getting spotted? DM fiat. Can you capture the *feel* of Odysseus in D&D's RAW? Absolutely. Your items are bronze. The adventures you went on helped you uncover the items you need because of the Gods' intervention. You are heroic in statistics, in level, and in power. True, it depends upon your items, but so what? If you never take off your +2 codpiece, then no one needs to know that's what's giving you +2 to your saving throws vs. 'shots to the junk.' Introduce sailing adventures, and a bunch of 1st level mooks to compare yourself with, and perhaps a vengeful deity, and you're golden. Can you capture Odysseus himself? Pheh. This is a game, not poetry, I don't want my character's life to hinge on weather the DM decides arbitrarily that Possiedon is having a bad day or not. It might make for an interesting epic poem, but it is crap for a D&D game."
For anyone who is interested, here is an article by Monte Cook on high-level game design:
http://www.montecook.com/arch_dmonly16.html
Overall, I understand the push toward low magic games. The best designed low-magic campaign setting I've seen so far is Midnight, or Testament, although I've heard some VERY good things about d20 Conan from Mongoose. I don't run low magic campaigns for the same reason a lot of people claim they don't run high-magic games: I want to focus on the story. I like giving players rewards, and magic items are just plain cool. I prefer players not to attach everything to one or two particular "special" items, and I prefer not to bind them to choices early in their players's career. The problem with "special" items is that they don't allow a character to hit a certain level, and say, you know what, I'm tired of this weapon. I'd like to try something different. I prefer to let players choose the course of their career, rather than me determining it for them by seeding "special" items into treasure hoards which - wonder of wonders - just HAPPEN to mesh completely with the goals of that character. I _like_ being able to run parties against dragons and demons, eventually, and without the sort of gear that the CR system assumes and requires, that is almost impossible. I like characters sometimes running from a fight they can't win, but I don't want them to do it ALL the time. When a character can customize their gear, that simply adds one more dimension to their character.
EDIT: Spelling
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