why the attraction to "low magic"?

[molonel]

Even a 6th-level Barbarian with no magic should expect to beat an ape, a lion, or a giant snake.

How about a dragon? Single handedly with nothing but a poniard and a single dose of poison? Two frost giants? Read "The Frost Giant's Daughter." The Enworld stats put him at 9th level about that time. Yeah, right. And that's after he'd stumbled away wounded from a major battle where, once again, everyone died but him. A giant slug with a ranged touch weapon of spitting acid that weighed in 50 feet long? Killed with a statue. An advanced man-ape, killed single-handedly in a grapple while wearing no armor at all and no weapon except a dagger? A golem that turned all normal weapons away, once again with a magical dagger? Read "The Devil in Iron."

Pretending that Conan, as written, fits into the D&D CR system and make sense according to those rules is just plain silly. Maybe if we add a special ability that he can roll and confirm a crit at will, perhaps. With any object, weapon or bladed instrument.

Is Conan bad-ass? Certainly. Is Conan more bad-ass than anyone else he encounters? More or less. Does he have a laundry list of magic items? No. Does he live in a world where magic items are for sale at a typical bazaar? No. Does he live in a world where sorcerers cast dozens of spells per day, every day? Not as far as I can tell.

I see you have a habit of nicely skipping over inconvenient parts of the discussion, like Conan's stats. That's okay. Just go ahead and keep repeating the mantra, "He didn't have a laundry list of magic items."

Read what I wrote. With stats like he had, he didn't NEED them, and he went through a list of magic items, if you actually READ the stories, which is much longer than you pretend. If you actually do choose to read the Ace paperbacks, please skip L. Sprague de Camp's Conan the Buccaneer. It's really, really bad.

If a DM told me I could play a 68-point fighter/barbarian, and then said, "But there aren't going to be as many magic items in this campaign," then I'm sure we'd both look at each other, deadly serious, and nod. Then we would both bust out laughing. And I'd say, "No, seriously."

 

[molonel]

Double post.

 

[molonel]

Which Silmarillion did you read? There only seem to have been a handful of balrogs running around, and they didn't actually do much outside of overt military action.

Read the Book of Lost Tales vol. 2. About 2 dozen balrogs were killed in the Fall of Gondolin alone, including Gothmog.

In the Silmarillion, when Ungoliant was about to consume Morgoth, he called out many balrogs to whip her with fire to save him.

 

[Sir Elton]

Sorry. Forgotten Realms lingo. It means Realms Shaking Event, ie "The Time of Troubles".

>Slaps self on the head.< Like, DUH!

Thanks, Mr. Greenwood. I feel bad for not being your game now.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Without even picking apart any of the arguments you just made above, I'll just point out that you left off any discussion of the ZERO LEVEL CANTRIP create water. I suppose that balances right out as well does it? Is the water impotable to plants and livestock? Because if not, it would allow high density human populations to overrrun almost every corner of the planet (or is your world a disk?)

Actually I discounted it by the virtue of volumes. Meaning there isn't enough. Humans require 1-2 gallons of water/day depending on work and environment. Draft animals require about four times that. At 10 gallons per casting (5th level caster), you'd exhaust half your spells just watering the standard 8-ox plough team. Which doesn't leave much for people, plants, or those create food/water and heal spells.

A cleric/druid can keep a group of people alive, but not a large group, something like 2-6 people per caster level just off the top of my head. Great for cults and parties.

 

[molonel]

I'm sorry, but this is pure sophistry ... etc. etc. ... The scrying stones are classic examples. Yes, even in a low magic campaign, the most powerful wizards in the entire world should have the ability to scry, that makes sense.

What sophistry? He said that among the high magics he didn't like was scrying, and then compared it to LotR. I can't help it if he likes to compare D&D to books he may or may not have read, and chooses not to remember inconvenient points for the sake of argument.

So, if I understand you correctly, you want those things to be in the hands of the NPC, and therefore the DM, but not the players. Thank you for proving my earlier point. So it's not scrying that bothers you. It's not the DM having scry that bothers you. It's players having scry that bothers you.

However, on the other hand, neither Sauruman nor Ganfalf could casually summon demons or fling meteor storms around at will or throw up prismatic walls ... and nobody in LOTR seemed to be able to cast ressurection or even raise dead. The magic in there is subtle, for the most part, and the few truly powerful items like the one ring or even sting or that mythril shirt stand out for their importance as a result.

I'm sorry, who was using the sophistry?

Even in standard D&D world, the number of people who can cast meteor storms (a 9th level spell requiring a 17th level caster) or throw up prismatic walls (an 8th level spell requiring a 15th level caster) is such that most people, and even most characters, will never see such things throughout the majority of their non-epic careers, much less than entire lives. You guys seem to switch back and forth between LotR and Conan, depending on the argument.

In 3.5 rules, in a standard world, the number of people who can cast Raise Dead (a 5th level spell requiring a 9th level caster, and a 5,000 gp jewel) is not great. Resurrection? Level 7 spell, 11th level caster, and a 10,000 gp gem. Ever looked up the availability of large, perfect gems in a standard city? Even if you can CAST Raise Dead, technically, that doesn't mean you have the components to do so. For many characters between 9th to 12th level, that might very well be worthy of a quest. You can smack me, and call me, "Suzanne!" but that sounds like an interesting adventure to me.

If you, on the other hand, prefer dead characters to stay dead, then that is simply a matter of taste. There is nothing we can argue about, because you can't argue preferences.

Well, you can, but it's pointless.

If it was a normal magic D&D game (let alone high magic) the whole group would have had mythril plate armor, they would have teleported to Mount Doom (or at least flew) and they would have slain all those armies of orcs at Helms Deep with cloudkill spells instead of bothering with strategy of any sort ... They also would have stopped at the first town they could find and bought up cases of potions of extra healing, scrolls of monster summoning, wands of fireball, rods of absorption, and +5 cloaks of protection before setting out on their journey.

Now we're getting into questions of game design, and fiction versus game-time. Yes, they probably would have flown to Mt. Doom, or done anything other than drag themselves through hundreds of miles of ash and blackened stone for page after page after page, being led along by a small creature mumbling to himself. And it would have been a more interesting game, as a result. Some things that work in fiction do NOT work in a game, and the whole trudging to Mt. Doom would have been a real snozer of a campaign. If someone has played in one of my games long enough to be able to use spells like Teleport and Cloudkill, I'd like to think I can reward them with a more interesting encounter than ... more orcs. Lots and lots of orcs. Helms Deep would have been a great adventure for characters around 8th to 9th level. And if you think that would be a boring encounter, then you've never run a mass combat in 3rd Edition D&D.

Read this article by Monte Cook:

http://www.montecook.com/arch_dmonly16.html

It's about designing high level adventures.

 

[Desdichado]

Read the Book of Lost Tales vol. 2. About 2 dozen balrogs were killed in the Fall of Gondolin alone, including Gothmog.

In the Silmarillion, when Ungoliant was about to consume Morgoth, he called out many balrogs to whip her with fire to save him.

The Book of Lost Tales are extremely early drafts of the legends that often bear little in common with what later emerged in the various versions of the Grey Annals or the Quenta Silmarillion. Notably, in the earlier versions the balrogs were much reduced in stature and power from their later incarnations, although there were much more of them. In other words, your argument doesn't hold up; that was an abandoned and discarded version of the story that your referring to to prove your point. In The War of the Jewels Tolkien seems to have narrowed down the total number of balrogs to single digits.

 

[Mystery Man]

Which Silmarillion did you read? There only seem to have been a handful of balrogs running around, and they didn't actually do much outside of overt military action. As for the commonality of dragons, there's really only Glaurung until the very end. Yeah, one dragon in the whole Silmarillion, until at the very end suddenly Morgoth releases Ancalagon and a flight of winged dragons. Which are subsequently killed by Earandil in short order. Hardly so's you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one.

Not so much the Silmarillion but the first age starting with Glaurung thru third age there were many. And yes, the dead cat analogy may have been a overstatement.

 

[mmadsen]

How about a dragon? Single handedly with nothing but a poniard and a single dose of poison? Two frost giants? Read "The Frost Giant's Daughter."

There's no reason to equate that dragon with a typical D&D Adult Red Dragon or those frost giants with D&D's Frost Giants though. If we use a Megaraptor as the dragon, that's a CR 6 creature; if we use a T-Rex, that's a CR 8 creature. Similarly, we could use Ogres or Hill Giants for the frost giants; Robert E. Howard certainly wasn't using the D&D Monster Manual.

The Enworld stats put him at 9th level about that time. Yeah, right. And that's after he'd stumbled away wounded from a major battle where, once again, everyone died but him.

Then either (a) those monsters aren't the high-CR monsters you assume them to be, or (b) Conan is higher level than you (and that web site) assume him to be.

We can agree that Conan is extremely bad-ass -- and more bad-ass than every foe (or group of foes) he beats. He is a high-power character. We can also agree that he doesn't need a laundry list of magic items. (He typically wields one or two bits of magic per story to defeat his supernatural foe.)

What I don't understand is why you claim that Conan's Hyboria isn't low-magic by D&D standards.

 

[mmadsen]

What sophistry? He said that among the high magics he didn't like was scrying, and then compared it to LotR.

It's pretty clear that's not what I said at all. I said that "scry/buff/teleport" isn't low magic. If you want a game that feels like classic fantasy -- either swords & sorcery or high fantasy -- you don't want scry/buff/teleport as standard operating procedure.

So, if I understand you correctly, you want those things to be in the hands of the NPC, and therefore the DM, but not the players.

Who said that?