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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 8481694" data-attributes="member: 12377">In the actual Middle Ages, everyone* was convinced that magic was real, monsters were real and lurked around every corner, etc. BUT, they didn't know precisely how these things worked. Magic was incredibly mysterious because the people didn't have easy access to it -- they couldn't figure out its rules because they lacked test subjects. E.g., if the ordinarily rational and trustworthy Uncle Wyfrich swears up and down that he saw the goblins marching through the graveyard, maybe he did, but nobody's able to reproduce this scenario to experimentally verify the properties of such goblins. Instead, people came up with all kinds of superstitions and weird stories about supernatural creatures. Often these stories conflicted. E.g., should you hang the horseshoe toe-up or toe-down? (google it)To me, this "half-undstanding" is the essense of soft magic. For magic to be soft, you have to kinda know how it works, and but not quite all the way. If it's totally predictable, it's not magic, it's science; but if it's totally random, it's also not magic, it just a thing that happened.Now, in the real Middle Ages, the reason people didn't have easy access to magic to study it and understand its rules, is because it didn't actually exist.** So if you want soft magic in D&D, you need an in-setting reason for people to not have easy access to magic. But the PCs do have easy access to magic; every single class is either a spellcaster or has at least one subclass in the PHB that does explicitly magical things. Furthermore, the players need to study it and understand its rules, in order to play the game. This leads me to a couple of ideas for implementing soft magic.1) The ordinary people don't have easy access to magic, so the setting is full of superstition and misinformation. But the PCs are "in the know" and understand how things actually work. This is one of the reasons village innkeepers are always offering adventurers 50 gp each to go route some goblins: the PCs are much more likely to know what sort of strange powers the goblins have, and know how to counter them. Of course goblins don't have very many strange powers but the villagers don't know that.A low-magic setting would satisfy this criteria but I also think you could do it in a medium- or high-magic setting if the magic were mostly hidden from the public at large. For example in a "Points of Light" setting most of the magic might exist in the wilderness between the points.2) The players and PCs understand the rules of magic as laid out in the PHB, but that's not the whole picture: magic has very subtle and/or long-term side effects. Think about how much you, personally, understand about modern technology, and then think about all the problems that using technology has caused you. The use of spells, magic items, etc. could affect the PCs in ways far beyond the game-mechanics. Maybe supernatural forces grow angry with the PCs, or covet their items. Maybe a particular spell becomes addictive, or slowly alters the caster's personality or outlook with each casting, so that by mid-levels the evoker wizard has become a straight-up pyromaniac. Maybe a feature that seems helpful eventually becomes a curse; like a ring of warmth that makes you feel uncomfortable while in hot environments, or using Wild Shape too much makes you forget how to interact with people.This approach sort of mixes hard-magic at the scene/encounter/obstacle level, with soft-magic at the story/plot level. The players and PCs can't scientifically study the plot-level side-effects of magic because these effects emerge so slowly over time, but they can make some good educated guesses, especially after they've been hit with a side-effect or two.3) The players and PCs understand the rules of magic as laid out in the PHB, but that's not the whole picture: There's "big magic" that is very flexible, but also risky, but also requires considerable effort to pull off. All of the "rituals" that villains are always conducting in D&D are big magic. When you explore a dungeon full of strange magical effects created by a mad wizard, he used big magic to do it.The big magic is soft magic. The PCs can't analyze it thoroughly because it's too big: performing such rituals requires a lot of time and money, so nobody does it twice just to see if it turns out the same way a second time.* Disclaimer: Actually, there were lots of skeptics back then who didn't believe in the supernatural, or who at least believed it was rare and distant (e.g. the work of the gods). And, attitudes about this stuff varied wildly between different times and places. I'm presenting here a sort of pop-culture caricature of the Middle Ages instead of something super accurate because a) it makes my point more easily and b) this <s>inaccurate</s> romanticized view informs the pseudo-Medieval cultures portrayed in D&D settings.** Disclaimer 2: Let us assume for the sake of argument a purely scientific reality since that's the world-view that most D&D players bring to the table.</blockquote>

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