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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1709465" data-attributes="member: 812">I understand that you LIKE verisimilitude. That doesn't mean you're right to take it for granted. People may enjoy (and sensibly, too) games in which verisimilitude is chucked out the window, where it's all about puzzle-solving and tactical thinking and killing things and taking their stuff.You like verisimilitude, that's great. But it is not in and of itself a virtue.Nonsense. The number of options in any given situation is dependent on the design of the adventure and the sensibilities of the DM. A DM may very easily create a high-magic adventure that railroads the PCs and negates their magic capabilities. Likewise, a low-magic adventure might provide PCs with more options than they can even consider.The fact that a high-magic adventure CAN provide more options does not make it a priori true that high-magic adventures ALWAYS have more options.***On a separate note, I'd like to point out that the fact that Conan kicks huge amounts of butt has NOTHING to do with whether or not Hyboria itself is a high-magic world. It's not. Or at least, compared to Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms, it's not. Sure, Conan is comparable to a high-level D&D character with lots of gear. Agreed, good point.But so what? The argument isn't that CONAN is low-magic, it's that HYBORIA is low-magic -- which it most certainly is. People saying, "I want to play in a world like Hyboria," aren't saying, "I want to play a character like Conan." Or at least, proving that wanting to play Conan is equivalent to wanting to play a high-level twink D&D character doesn't prove that wanting to play in Hyboria is ACTUALLY wanting to play in a high-magic world.And there are plenty of low-magic worlds in fantastic literature. Middle-Earth at the end of the Third Age is one -- regardless of what may have been in the case in earlier days, in the years leading up to the War of the Ring, it's very clear that there is almost no magic flying around Middle-Earth -- at least, not for the vast majority of its inhabitants.And that's a big part of it. For the vast majority of inhabitants of a typical D&D setting, magic is part of their everyday life -- most towns and villages have a couple of spellcasters, and magic-using monsters are often encountered. Contrast that with life in the Shire, where the only spellcaster to visit in living memory is Gandalf, and all he does is set off fireworks. Just encountering elves and dwarves is a big deal, something that most of the people in the Shire will never do. This is clearly true across Middle-Earth to a greater or lesser degree. The Rohirrim, the Gondorians, the men of Dale -- none of them have ANY spellcasters in their entire nations. The armies of Hyboria only rarely have the benefit of magical assistance -- usually in the form of a single spellcaster who dies at the hands of Conan. If you don't call that low-magic (at least in comparision to the standard D&D settings), I don't know what to say.The point isn't "Do some of these heroes display qualities that might be modelled in D&D terms using magic?" It's "Do these worlds obey the standard rules of D&D with respect to the distribution of magic?"And clearly the answer for both Hyboria and Third-Age Middle Earth (and Nehwon, and the world of the Black Company, and others) is no, they exhibit a vastly reduced distribution of magic compared with the standard D&D rules such as numbers of spellcasters in the population and frequency of encounters with magical creatures. You, molonel, might disagree with others as to what that distribution actually is, but I can't imagine you would suggest that Hyboria obeys the standard D&D rules on these points. If you do, please provide careful evidence, because I'm likely to be skeptical. Note that the average hamlet of two hundred souls in a D&D setting contains one wizard, three clerics, a druid and an adept. That sure doesn't sound like the Hyboria I read about.The conclusion is that a DM who wants to run a campaign that models the world of Hyboria or any similar world must make substantial changes to the standard D&D distribution of magic.</blockquote>

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