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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Incenjucar" data-source="post: 1710634" data-attributes="member: 6182">Personally, I prefer high-magic, low-availability.My setting includes powerful spellcasters with great variety (most magic use is more along the lines of a ranger or bard than a full-blown wizard or cleric), but, due to a serious lack of long-lived races or make-yourself-undead tricks, there's very very few of them that are powerful enough to overshadow more 'mundane' classes.  While there are powerful outsiders, most of them have a damnable time getting to the prime, and they're usually stuck with making deals with mortals for long-distance manipulation.  I find that making almost all magic concentration-based very very useful in explaining a lack of magic accumulation.There's plenty of magic out there.  But it's not overwhelming, and is even less accessable than normal science (anyone can combine vinager and baking soda when they're still using velcro, but it takes years of training to master hurling searing hot pebbles at people while dodging their sword thrusts.--I find that one of the main issues in keeping magic from getting to the 'tech' level is the duration/permanency issue.  The longer a spell effect lasts, the more effect it has on society.  If you have to hire mages to cast Light spells constantly, you're NOT going to ever worry about spells replacing oil lamps.  If you have to have a bunch of clerics casting 'create water' instead of using a Decanter of Endless Water, you're not going to have a bunch of ever-expanding oasise in the middle of a desert.  If you keep the 3.5 durations of the Buff spells rather than the longer 3.0 durations, you won't have uber-effective magicked-up mining uperations.  If there's no way to keep a creature magically harnessed for a relatively permanent amount of time, lightning rails become disasters waiting to happen.Similarly, being able to call up a whole host of effects given time seriously changes the way a spellcaster works.  If no character could have more than three spells active at any one time, for instance, it would have a serious effect on things, like lessening that whole "Scry+Teleport=You Die" thing.*Another issue that is more about how magic compares to normal combat is the area of effect.  Fireballs have a great deal more relavance to combat than Shocking Grasp.  If spellcasters had mostly limited-target spells, at least until much higher levels, they wouldn't have nearly the effect on warfare and similar things as they currently do; compare it to having snipers amidst bowmen instead of bazooka-users amidst gunmen.**Mind you, with such a change, spellcasters WOULD deserve some compensation, since they're balanced based on fireball more than shocking grasp.Now, you'll still get things like wizardly arc-welders and miners, but that just means more raw materials for more standard war machines and fortifications, and generally just making the same things with a higher quality and durability.</blockquote>

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