Following last month’s Fanservice BS article about Dwarven Bear Cavalry, the Patrons who participate in my Discord were much more focused on picking an actual, useful, good topic for Fanservice BS. They offered me several good choices, up-voted a few of the best ones, and here we are. Longtime fan and Patron – really long time, actually, he’s been supporting me pretty much from the day I’ve joined Patreon – longtime fan Chris B. wants me to write about running a low-magic game in a game like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder. And the topic intrigued me because I haven’t really given it a lot of thought. Seriously, the best way to get me to write about something is to put a topic in front of me that has a bubbling undercurrent of interest but that I haven’t personally gone after yet. And this topic qualifies.
Oh, and if you somehow don’t know, Fanservice BS is a once monthly Feature article in which I have to write between three and five thousand words addressing a topic chosen by the Patrons who support me and participate in my Discord chat server. Which is another great way to make me write about something. Pay me.
Anyway, the low-magic thing. See, there’s always been this murmuring of the holy grail of the “low magic game” amongst D&D fans. It isn’t a loud thing. But it’s been there for a while. And it’s loud enough that the creators talk about it from time to time. It gets mentioned as an option in the DMG. It was even mentioned as a possibility for 5E back when 5E was D&D Next, and the creators had no f$&%ing clue what D&D was actually going to look like.
See, if you’re old-school, you know there’s really two different genres of fantasy. There’s the epic high fantasy, and there’s gritty swords-and-sorcery. High fantasy takes place in magical worlds. There’s lots of wizards and magical races and fantastic elements. It’s the world that you see in most modern D&D products and in most fantasy video games. The swords-and-sorcery is much harsher. The world is closer to medieval feudalism with peasants toiling away under their lords and kings. There’s bandits and savages. And what magic there is, is usually restricted to strange hermits, evil sorcerer-kings, and terrible monsters. The average person has never seen a wizard and would s$&% themselves if they saw one. And most people fear magic.
The point is, there’s a low-level push amongst a small group of GMs for a low-magic option for D&D. And I’m very aware of that push because people keep asking me about it. Seriously, I get a lot of e-mails about how to do a low-magic D&D game. But I know it’s a one-off, quiet sort of thing. It’s not something everyone wants. I’m not even sure it’s something a lot of people want. But there’s a definite pattern here. Apparently, a bunch of people want to go back to the Robert E. Howard Conan days where the only magic in the world was evil. And I get that. Heck, I actually worked on a product for a real company that was based, at least partly, on that sort of idea. It was basically Conan meets Cthulhu. Primeval Thule by Sasquatch Games. Check it out. It’s pretty neat. Almost nothing I did ended up in the final product. But my name is in the credits. On the same line as Ed F$&%ing Greenwood.
Sorry. I know that plug was blatant, but I’ve been waiting for literal YEARS for a place where I could casually mention that. And it’s NEVER F$&%ING COME UP.
Meanwhile, though, let’s look at the topic of the low-magic D&D game. How would you pull it off?
The problem is that my usual answer is: you can’t. It’s like soy milk. You can CALL IT milk all you want, but it’s juice. Because soybeans don’t have nipples. You can try to run a low-magic D&D game, but you probably have to break D&D to do it. And it wouldn’t be D&D. And if you’re willing to break D&D that bad, just grab a copy of Modiphius Entertainment’s Conan RPG. I haven’t played it, but it’s probably good. Assuming Modiphius is better at making RPGs than at making websites. Because, holy f$&%, it took me too damned long to even determine if the Conan RPG EXISTED yet. Apparently, the trick is to go to the DOT NET one, not the DOT COM one. Seriously, what the f$&%?
The problem is that now I am technically being paid to write an article about low-magic D&D games. And I really can’t figure out a way to stretch “don’t” into 3,000 words. So, I guess I have to think deeper about the question. And because of that, this is going to be one those weird, stream-of-consciousness things. Which is just fine because I plan to just cut it off once I have a good enough word count anyway. Why bother leading into that kind of sucky ending with any sort of quality, right?
The thing is, I get hung up on the question itself. “How do I run a low-magic D&D game?” Because the answer should be easy. Low magic doesn’t mean no magic after all. So, if there are magical PCs in the group, just assume they are among the only ones in the world and react accordingly. After all, you can argue that the Lord of the Rings was pretty low magic, but they still had Gandalf in the main party. Just because the PCs have a wizard doesn’t mean the rest of the world is crawling with the buggers, right? I mean, I was prepared to assume the whole thing was a trick question. Focus on mundane threats, don’t give out magical items, and when the party casts a spell in front of anyone, have those people freak out. And if the party does anything remotely bad, send a torch-and-pitchfork mob to invite them to a cookout in the village square. If you know what I mean.
On top of that, I’m not really sure I believe that anyone these days is looking for the gritty swords-and-sorcery-type of Conan stuff. I mean, I know some people are. But I don’t think those people are the people looking seriously at D&D these days. People who play RPGs and who know enough about fantasy to KNOW about the swords-and-sorcery stuff are pretty steeped in geekdom. They are smart enough to just play a different RPG. Or to pull out an older edition of D&D.
And because of those thoughts swirling in my head, I started to suspect there was something I was missing in all of this. And Chris confirmed that when he asked me, specifically, what to do about limiting player options in a low-magic world. And that’s when it all came into focus.
See, there’s two ways to do a low-magic game. The first way is the way I alluded to. It’s to assume that magic is very rare in the world, but any magical player-characters are just special. Rare doesn’t mean impossible. And if the party includes one wizard, all that means is that there is at least one wizard in the world. It doesn’t mean there are hundreds or thousands or whatever. In some ways, the Angryverse is slightly low magic in that respect. One of the features of most of my D&D games is that no one remembers how to make magic items anymore. Any magic items in the world were manufactured in ancient times. That way, I can put whatever magical items in the game I want to and the PCs can have all the magic they want, but there are no magic item shops, and I don’t have to bother with inventing actually useful rules for magic item creation. The only exceptions are – generally – potions and scrolls. Beyond that, magic is just rare. It used to be more common, but it isn’t anymore. Arcane colleges were once a thing, but they aren’t these days. There’s just not enough people with the gift of magic in the population to support f$&%ing Hogwarts. The same is true of clerics. Priests and clerics are distinct. Priests speak to the gods and for the gods. They are the intermediaries between people and the gods. But they don’t have any magical power of their own. Not any that they can exercise with agency. The best they can do is pray and burn goats and hope the gods do what they ask. But clerics are unique individuals – they don’t even have to be priests – who have been chosen by a specific god for a specific purpose and been entrusted with a little bit of divine agency. That’s why clerics don’t even need training in Religion. Not every cleric went to seminary.
Because of all that, the average person just has very little understanding of magic. They never see it. It isn’t readily available. Some lucky rulers and nobles can keep a wizard on staff, but even those wizards are pretty low in power level. People know magic exists though. They believe in it. And they don’t automatically fear all magic. But they sure as hell respect it. People respect a wizard the same way they respect someone who wanders around in expensive armor with well-honed weapons on their backs. Which makes sense. Because the PCs are big damn heroes and everyone knows it. Right?
You can take that to any extreme you want. You don’t even need fancy rules or systems. All you have to do is role-play the world. Which is something GMs always forget they can – AND MUST – do. I mean, you don’t NEED a morale system, do you? You just need to role-play the f$&%ing monster. You just need to say “okay, this monster has taken too much of a pummeling and he doesn’t think this is worth dying for, so what would he do?” But you just can’t stop GMs from making up systems. That’s why I actually have a simple morale system I use these days. But it’s mostly just because I like excuses to roll dice. Dice are fun. I don’t need it. And it isn’t very well codified as a result. It’s more of a guideline than a system.
Anyway…
The point is, if, in your world, magic is a terrifying thing only used by vengeful gods and terrible demons and evil sorcerer-kings, role-play that s$&%. When the PCs throw a spell, make sure anyone that sees them s$&%s their pants. And weigh everything else as a role-playing decision. As the king, just decide whether the fact that you need these heroes and they’ve never done anything evil against the fact that magic is literally powered by Satan and, at any given moment, the person using it might snap and go on a killing spree. That’s how your world ended up in a dark age.
In short, decide what the world KNOWS about magic – whether it’s true or not – and decide how people will react when used. Then play that. And then warn the players that if they use magic, no matter how good their intentions, the world is going to assume they are evil and they are going to have trouble. It’s only fair that people know that their character choices are going to make them pariahs.
Of course, if your players don’t agree to play that game, you might have to compromise. But I assume I don’t have to explain that s$&% anymore.
But I have the feeling that that answer isn’t sufficient for the “low-magic” folks. And that’s specifically because they seem to be – especially if Chris B is an indicator – concerned with getting the magic out of the party. But I’ve had a few other folks raise the same concern. What do I do about all the magic in the party? You don’t worry about it. You can run a low magic world and still have wizards and warlocks and sorcerers and bards and clerics and druids and rangers and paladins and… okay, holy s$&%, there’s a lot of magic in D&D. There’s a f$&%-ton of magic in D&D. In fact, there’s very few ways to create a character that isn’t touched by magic in some way. And I’m not even talking about implicit magic. I’ll happily agree that things like barbarian rage and darkvision and even halfling luck can be considered nonmagical. I’m only talking about things that involve manifesting your will in the world in impossible ways. Elves and drow can literally cast spells just because of their nature. That’s explicit magic. Dragonborn breathe fire and stuff. Magic. Tieflings can also naturally cast spells. Magic. Beyond that, bards can cast spells. The inspiration stuff is questionably magic. Clerics have spells. And they can channel divinity. And they get other magical abilities based on their god. Druids can cast spells. And change shape. And they get a few extra abilities too. The monk has that ki stuff. Even if we ignore all the Avatar the Airbender crap, monks are still magical. They use a reserve of internal, nonphysical energy to manifest their will in impossible ways. It feels like magic. Paladins can cast spells, heal, remove disease, and they get all that smiting s$&%. Rangers can cast spells, and they can detect all sorts of magical creatures with magical senses. Sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards can’t even take a crap without channeling mana in some way. On top of that, totem barbarians can cast certain spells. And fighters and rogues have spellcasting options.
In short, if you want to have some sort of magic in D&D, you can literally choose any class. But if you want to avoid magic – or anything that feels like magic – you’ve got three classes to choose from: fighter, barbarian, and rogue. And two of them cover the same basic team position. You literally can’t create a four- or five-person party without any magic unless you’re willing to overlap.
And that’s actually the main reason why I say that if you want to run low-magic D&D, you can’t do it without breaking D&D. If you told your players they couldn’t use anything that had an explicit magical feel, even if you charitably allow Ki to be “not magical at all,” you don’t have much of a game.
It’s weird because, if you look at the exemplar of the fantasy genre, the Lord of the Rings, you almost never see anyone in the party use magic. Hell, Gandalf uses a sword in most of the fights he’s in. By comparison, D&D is literally bursting at the seams with the fantastic. It’s gone beyond fantasy adventure to magical super fantasy. There is never a moment in D&D when there isn’t something magical happening on screen.
Now, I know – I F$&%ING KNOW – that there are a bunch of people reading this who are saying things like, “well, yeah, but then if you take the magic away, all anyone can do is hit things with a sword or a bow. The game would be boring.” The thing is, that’s only because D&D hasn’t spent any time building up the non-magic. I mean, just look at the things a Battle Master fighter can do. Look back at the Warlord in 4E. They CAN build variety into the game without it coming from magic. You actually could make a pretty interesting party of fighters, rogues, and barbarians just by taking advantage of the different ways to build a Battle Master fighter. And if D&D wasn’t so half-a$&ed about its non-magical options, you could do even better.
See, I’m becoming increasingly of the opinion that characters in D&D just have too many different options and too many different games to play and all of those options are shallow. Wizards can do lots and lots and lots of things, right? But each thing – each spell – has one and precisely one effect that is rigidly defined. And the players can’t keep that s$&% in their heads. That’s why spell cards exist. And then, every magical class also has a pile of magical abilities that aren’t spells for no good reason. Why the motherloving f$&% is “lay on hands” not a spell? Why is “turn undead” not a spell? I mean, they are specific chunks of rules with a specific effect that can be used a limited number of times a day. Mechanically, that’s a spell. Why wasn’t that s$&% folded into spells? And why wasn’t it all streamlined a bit, so I don’t need rules for “lay on hands” and cure wounds and healing word and whatever other healing effects in the game?
Frankly, it’s all feeling very “kitchen sink.” The only way they can create variety is by piling on magical effects, one isolated effect at a time. Should rangers cast spells? Sure. Throw it in. Do paladins need healing spells? Sure. Throw it in. What if there’s a kind of fighter that’s also a wizard? Sure. If we do a fighter that’s a wizard, how about a rogue that’s a wizard? Throw it in.
If it feels like I’ve lost the topic, well, I did warn you that this was going to be stream of consciousness. But, truth be told, I think I found the real topic. I think I found the real reason that people – GMs – are looking for the low-magic option in D&D. It’s because D&D has gone World of Warcraft on us. It’s so bursting with magic that it feels like it’s gone beyond fantasy adventure into a parody of itself. Magic doesn’t feel special or wonderful or impossible. It’s just something people can do. And everyone can do it. There’s nothing miraculous about healing magic. Nothing terrifying about fire magic. It’s just this thing that pretty much everyone can do.
Magic doesn’t feel fantastic anymore. It just feels rote and mechanical. There’s just too much of it. And as empowering as it might be for players, for GMs, it makes it really hard to create any sense of wonder in the world. Especially because it’s the PCs, who can mostly do all the really cool stuff. And the players are jaded by all the cool stuff they can do. Frankly, I don’t think most players see the things they can do as special or impossible. There’s nothing they view as “the big gun” or the “desperate gambit.” Warlocks don’t worry that each spell might lead them to corruption. Wizards don’t have to worry about not being able to use this particular spell later. They don’t forget their spells. The only cost is the spell slot. And while that is a resource to worry about, it’s not nearly as worrying as the idea that if you cast burning hands now, you won’t have it available to cast again if you need it later. I know a lot of players say “good, that’s a stupid thing to worry about,” but players are the worst judges of what will feel emotionally satisfying in the long run. Ask a player, and he’ll happily tell you his fighter would be cooler with laser-beam eyes and the ability to fly. You can’t trust players to decide what will make for a good game.
I think this is the real motivation behind the “low magic” game. I think there are some GMs out there – and I’m actually starting to fall into that camp – that want their fantasy to feel fantastic, their magic to feel magical, and their impossible to feel impossible. Moreover, they – and again, I’m almost at this point too – are maybe just a little overwhelmed by the grab-bag-o’-awesome that PCs have become. Where they have a thousand tricks to pull out and not one of them feels special. Not one of them feels defining. There’s too much magic to go around, and it’s all over the map, and every bit of it follows different rules and maybe it’s time to calm all of that the f$&% down and simplify.
Or maybe that’s not the reason. Maybe there really are just a bunch of old-school swords-and-sorcery fans out there who want to capture that spirit in their games. Frankly, it doesn’t really matter. Because the solution is the same. You really do need to rip the magic out of the hands of the players. Get rid of most of it and leave behind a few really special, really defining things that have just enough versatility to give the players some options. And then let them grow into more. Maybe level out the basic options so that everyone can be good with a basic weapon or two of their choice and give those some versatility. And then give the fighters and rogues and rangers and monks extra options with those weapons as their big gun gimmicks and then give the clerics and wizards a couple of big gun spell gimmicks. Then, let the martial characters pick from a broad array of skills and let the clerics and wizards pick from a broad array of minor spells that do basically the same thing. At least, that’s a starting point.
But how the f$&% can you do that in D&D? How can you get a low-magic game going in D&D now?
You can’t. You just f$&%ing can’t. I’m sorry. D&D isn’t going to support it. And I don’t care what the creators say. Because it’s going to come down to how the game FEELS. And the game is never going to FEEL like magic is rare and special and fantastic and impossible when literally every character is sneezing, farting, burping, and pooping magic out of every goddamned orifice. You would have to rip so much out of the game, it’s not D&D anymore. And you’re better off just starting with another system. One with more nonmagical versatility to give everyone interesting stuff to do, some minor magic to make it feel like the world is magic, and then a few very special, rare, powerful, magical things that feel awesome in the very rare occasions when they can actually be used. One in which most of the characters aren’t magical, but are still fun, and the magical characters aren’t gods. And if you find that system, let me know. Because I think I want to play it too.
And, checking the word count, I can see that I’ve hit my target.
Bye.
So, in a weird sort of way, would 4E probably work the best for a low-magic setting? The martial classes all have interesting options, the big spells are limited to once-per-day things, magic is generally speaking only as good as the mundane equivelant by level. All you’d need to do is encourage the party to not all be magic classes, which I think is somewhat done by the roles. In essence, emphasise Martial and probably Primal characters and keep Arcane, Divine and Psionic characters mysterious?
In a similar vein, have more martial classes that operate like Gunslinger in Pathfinder. Yes, the concept behind it being a whole separate class is stupid, but the mechanics are okay. Firing a gun? Anyone can do that. Reloading quicker? It’s a class ability, but you can do it all day. Firing your gun in the air to scare everyone in a room? Now you’ve got into the big powers. It’s just a pity the ones as written don’t emphasise using a gun to, you know, shoot things dead. Similarly, make a Barbarian’s Rage Powers be actual one-use powers and not conditions riding on the thing he is almost certainly always doing. And there’s that whole “defining feature available all the time” thing again with how much Barbarians get to Rage.
Man, this article highlights a lot of what feels bad about D&D nowadays.
4e does okay, but even there most of the classes are magic in some way. You’re basically restricted to Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Warlord, and maybe if you are feeling permissive, some builds of Barbarian or Monk. And 4e doesn’t have as much variety between characters of the same class. 3.5e or Pathfinder would probably work better.
Personally, for a game like this, I think I’d just pull out one of the old Basic editions from the 80’s, or some retroclone. Less character build options in general, but they do a better job of keeping the magic contained in just a few classes.
Dig deeper. Characters of the same class can play very differently even if you go with the stock options for a particular build. You can build a fighter as a striker, or a rogue or ranger as a controller, quite easily.
And then there are the Essentials variant classes, which makes the martial lineup: Fighter, Knight, Slayer, Rogue, Thief, Ranger, Hunter, Scout and Warlord. Or you could just use Essentials classes and get rid of the “martial daily” issue.
Possible additions include Monks (other than Desert Wind), Barbarians and Berserkers. And I think it is possible to make an Executioner Assassin with only martial options. Plus, Runepriest is thematically consistent with old Saxon low magic stories.
That is potentially 14 classes to choose from, with at least 2 variant builds for each. Throw in the Dark Sun options which were explicitly designed to reduce the number of magic items in the game, and you are golden.
Pathfinder does seem to have some extra options. Gunslingers and Cavaliers are a quick example. Alchemists are a weird bag that falls in the middle.
Fighters are weirdly underrated. They are tbe embodiment of low magic and full martial, and yet they sound lacking. At least the archetypes help bring shape and flavor, and the fighter is the king of archetyping.
Pathfinder plus the D&D3.5 book Complete Warrior’s spell-less alternate builds for the Ranger and Paladin plus the Swashbuckler class could provide a starting point for a low-magic campaign that probably wouldn’t need too much polishing.
4E did start with the idea that you could build an interesting character (and party) around different concepts (i.e. the Power Source). And interestingly enough, there was a class in each power source that covered each role. Except for one. There was no Controller role in the Martial power source. The closest they came was with one of the Ranger classes (I don’t have my books in front of me, so I don’t remember it specifically) that was a Martial and Primal power source Controller role.
I liked 4E a lot, and this was one reason. But even so, there was still a LOT of magical-ness just all wrapped up in the system.
The Hunter (Ranger) is expressly a martial controller. Just not a very good one outside of heroic. However, a standard ranged Ranger can pick up Hunter options and be a decent off-controller in higher levels.
Its worth noting that you can run a perfectly good party without a controller if you need to. Or pretty much any other role – although you will probably need a warlord if you do away with healing potions.
We did a pretty kick-ass “Martial Classes only” 4e game for a while. You can actually cover all the bases pretty thoroughly with those classes, since there’s a lot of diversity for builds inside them. It helps that all of them are “old” classes that came out in the very early stages of the game so they have TONS of options available to them, but boy, we had a good time with this.
The way you describe the evolution of D&D, starting with low level magic and becoming hyper-magical somewhat mirrors the way I view our own human plight. We were once simple grunts fearful of the mysteries of earth and, after millennia, we gained enough insight and knowledge that we feel like masters of everything. I find myself reminiscing about the days before cell phones, computers and TV and I wonder if it is possible to scale back to simpler times. Probably not.
We all want to be more powerful. Wizards used to be seen as powerful, rare, mystical persons with fantastic powers. And of course, everyone wanted to be one.
If we were back in those days, this site wouldn’t exist and Angry would be an accountant. I’ll take this world. Nostalgia can make old days seem better, but it’s not always the case.
Warhammer 2e rpg seems like what you asked for. Mages are rare and risky, (the more risk the more power), and nonmagical options are numerous.
I think you might like Dungeon Crawl Classics. It runs more or less like 3.5, but with those Big Gun options you mentioned. It let’s you take attribute damage to boost spells and abilities. It just feels very visceral and gritty to drop your constitution down to 1 to kill a boss
What seems especially crazy to me is that even as D&D characters become increasingly incidentally magical, that magic becomes increasingly useless outside of a murderous home invasion context. Everyone’s firing laser beams out of their eyes (EXCEPT the fighter) but we STILL can’t make owlbears or cloud castles; everyone EXCEPT the wizard seems to have some form of magical healing, but we still can’t make crops grow better or give a baby a magical blessing (that manifests as more than advantage on combat or skill checks, and lasts for 16 years rather than 16 seconds) at their christening?
I sometimes want low magic because it’s the only way that the complete lack of any sort of cultural impact magic has in D&D makes any sense.
yeah it’s the edge case magic items like the horseshoes of speed that might just be useful to any horseman but in general D&D is a combat game and items act in accordance.
This touches on what I’d like from a sideways perspective. It’s not so much that I want a low-magic game; it’s that I wish D&D had more focus on noncombat things, including noncombat applications of fantastical elements. I’m one of those nuts who loves that Pathfinder established that you can use mithril to make nonstick cookware, and that 5e has a living expenses table. My most recent usage of a D&D system (I wouldn’t exactly call it a “game” per se) was due to being fed up with people in a freeform community only seeming able to conceive of powers as being for combat, and D&D 3.5 at least having a few noncombat spells.
Really, I get the sense some of the underlying issue is a cultural shift. D&D influenced the birth of video games, the parts that were easiest to turn into a good video game were the combat parts, people grew up with video games like that, and now we have a generation that tends to think of magic as combat powers specifically. Even some of D&D’s own spells have suffered from this, hence why Fly has been treated for fifteen years now as an overpowered general-purpose combat mobility buff instead of a utility spell. In 5e, they even seem to want to nerf its use as an Admit One Melee Fighter to Aerial Battle ticket.
To clarify my last sentence there, BTW: I get the impression that the design thought behind 5e’s Fly is the idea that Fly is too overpowered when used for just *any* combat for it to be a good idea to make it practical for combat use at all… but at the same time, they didn’t refocus it into a utility spell, instead maintaining prior nerfs focused on weakening its combat utility and even cutting out the parachute clause while they were at it.
One other thought on the “fantasy superheroes” issue, incidentally: I think the hit point inflation that’s occurred over the editions, especially the removal of the breakpoint after which PCs start gaining less HP per level, feeds into this. Being able to survive a sword hit makes for a playable game; being able to survive a dozen sword hits is amazing; being able to survive two dozen sword hits feels too close to invulnerability.
Dude. D&D is an action RPG. 90% of the rules are about combat. You want to play a nice guys rpg, use a different system (Me & my friends have a 2-year ongoing peaceful RPG rules-free!)
Rules are part of what makes a game a game. Sounds more like a really free-form RP.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course.
It’s just different from an RPG, which might include a system to see if your character succeeds at an action, or what kind of shenanigans ensue if they fail. Maybe the game takes place in Australia and your lawnmower got destroyed by a cane toad. Roll to grab it put on gloves and grab it before it hops away to reproduce. Roll too low and you forget the gloves and get poisoned and have to go to the ER.
Something like that.
If you’re interested in a full-on RPG about non-violence, I’ve heard of one called Golden Sky Stories. You play a bunch of magical animals (yokai, not furries) helping out a small Japanese town. No over-arching quest. No evil overlord or wicked dragon. The goal of the game is to weave together feel-good stories with your friends solving mundane problems.
It’s been described as “My Neighbor Totoro: the RPG.” I’m reminded of those “kid’s shows” about friends trying to solve social problems and learn about friendship, like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Dora the Explorer without the degrading puzzles (hopefully), or the episodes of My Little Pony that don’t center around epic battles, like Dragonshy or Lesson Zero.
If that strikes your fancy, maybe check it out.
Yeah, you hit that nail on the head for me. It’s the “fantastic” feeling that is missing.
5e isn’t doing D&D any favors with first time players who are coming to the hobby from something like Game of Thrones.
They’re lucky shows like “Stranger Things” are cashing in on nostalgia along with 5e’s marketing.
Interestingly, WotC’s novel solicitation page specifically asks for “Sword & Sorcery” solicitations. No idea how long its been since that was updated.
Drizzt did his part to bring me into D&D via Baldur’s Gate, to picking up one of Salvatore’s novels, to then realizing what D&D is, and then getting into the hobby.
Who the fuck can get into D&D through Drizzt now? What were to happen if they picked up some “spell-plague” novel? They would have no idea where to begin.
Cross product marketing is a winning strategy for D&D. TRPG is likely the last product most people will pick up after video games and books. This adherence to Marvel and DC level continuity is not good.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman. The first thing in your mind was Heath Ledger’s joker. Or “I’m CIA” if you don’t talk to flesh and blood people in person. The point is: the best modern Batman movie doesn’t need continuity with any other movie. It doesn’t need Batman’s origin story with Ras Nsi. Black Alfred covered everything we needed to know with one or two lines.
And that is as long as a backstory needs to be. I don’t need five pages of why your rogue is ninja trained. None of that is as good as Heath Ledger adventure. You get five sentences for you backstory. Thanks for reading my blog.
Oh. And don’t hit your kids just because Angry made a joke about Millennials.
Thank you so much Angry for this inspiring article. This idea of the quest for the lost sense of wonder is very interesting.
I’ll join the chorus that says “Pathfinder”. Even without touching the 3.5 splats or the solid OGL 3PP suppliments, off the top of my head you have:
Fighter
Brawler
Swashbuckler
Gunslinger
Barbarian
Cavalier
Rogue
Archetyped Ranger
Plus Alchemist if you want to flavor it. And countless other archetype packages. Whine what you will about splat profusion but players and GMs can benefit from the options. And OGL free.
I’d pile on skills like unchained healing and rules like stamina…
I fundamentally disagree with you that the 5e issue is too many meaningless options, it’s rather not nearly enough meaningful options. I got very sad playing in a friend’s 5e game and hitting level 3 on my barbarian. Literally my last meaningful choice of the character’s career. WoW.
This is why I’m really hoping 2e PF is going to be good. I think pathfinder is pretty good at this, but the system burned me out as a GM, it’s just too much and too unwieldy.
I played in a game back in the final days of D&D 3.5. It was pitched to me as a “low-magic/high-money” game. I guess a couple of our regulars in the group wanted to play a game where everyone didn’t have a +bazillion sword of magical-ness at level 3. And they also wanted to have the game focus on the acquisition of wealth for purposes of building and owning businesses and strongholds. Spell-casting classes were to be rare and permanent magic items were even more rare.
So the DM sent us on our merry way into this world. I think we were around 2nd level when we first found a potion of Cure Minor Wounds. You know, the one that healed 1 hit point. Then we would find a scroll or wand from time to time. It seemed to be working.
One of the things about the DM’s setting was that the only magic items that could be purchased were single-use or low-charge items (like wands with 10 charges, and such). And those could only ever be found in the biggest of big cities. So they were rare. But a couple of the players decided that since we had so much money (seriously, my character alone had amassed literally hundreds of thousands of gold pieces), we should go to one of these cities and buy some magic items.
And so they bought more or less one of everything on the list. If it was there, they bought it. My character didn’t care for material wealth and also didn’t want to deal with “trinkets”, so I just kept amassing cash and sending it to be stored in my vaults back home.
The point is that after about 6th level (right around the time people got into range of a prestige class), the “low-magic” campaign had become a we-have-a-ton-of-little-magic-items campaign.
So yeah, I don’t think that “low-magic” in that sense works in any version of D&D.
I think your real problem is that ‘low-magic’ doesn’t work in any game that has a magic item shop.
Especially a game with high wealth.
If people are suggesting sword and sorcery systems, then I’d throw Blade of the Iron Throne in there. It’s very different from any version of D&D or it’s various emulators, but it hones in on that low magic, S&S feel with laser focus.
If you’re willing to embrace the Arthurian fantasy, Pendragon, now in its 5th edition, is a great low-magic RPG. But you really do have to be willing to run a game strictly about knights in Arthurian England. This is an RPG that recommends that all your players’ first characters are male, christian knights from the same town in Southern England.
Great article. Keen observations about potential ‘real reason’ lost of people seeking low-magic options if only for contrast. Probably the best route is your initial idea of the world treating the magic the PCs use as extraordinary and terrifying. That means you have to build your game premise around PCs being special, chosen, or supernatural from day one.
I was going to second the 4e suggestions, except that super-magical gear quickly becomes a mathematical necessity (unless you just use the innate bonuses variant).
Meanwhile, World of Dungeons and Torchbearer do a good job of capturing low magic, and Burning Wheel in general if you stick to humans, and don’t dally in spells. There’s plenty else to do anyway. Meanwhile Dungeon World does well at offering classes with interesting non-magic options and plenty to do besides spells, while also easily making big magic and especially rituals feel big and impossible. Upcoming Forbidden Lands (based on Mutant Year Zero engine) shows good low-magic promise, especially if magic-wielding is anything like mutation powers, which always risk degrading you in MYZ.
Sticking to 5e, I wonder if something like an E6 adjustment would cap some of the ridiculousness of higher-level magic, at least. Though I’m not sure there’s any good cut-off at which ‘not leveling anymore’ is satisfying. Feats grant less magicality than most class features, but there would need to be lots more.
Yeah, the innate bonuses system takes care of any mathematical issues, and presumably if you’re playing 4e, you’re playing a game about characters who are eventually going to be Great Heroes so giving them a couple of +1’s doesn’t exactly contradict the premise much.
Another big thing that makes low-magic unfeasible in 5e at higher levels is that practically every monster over CR5 has resistance or even immunity to damage from non-magical weapons.
Easy enough to fix. Just remove those resistances/immunities.
Personally (for unrelated reasons, because I’m not at all part of the low-magic crowd) I’ve been considering the opposite: having magic weapons no longer bypass such resistances/immunities.
However, I would likely make the number of such creatures proportional to the number of spellcasters in the party, so for example the martial characters get to fight the zombies while the spellcasters fight the ghosts.
I’m also considering making more things resistant/vulnerable to specific weapon types, instead of bludgeoning/piercing/slashing always getting lumped together.
Originally I considered making all magic weapons require attunement so not everyone would have one, but then I realised everyone would probably still get one anyway and that the resistances themselves were the problem.
Related, in my campaign Werewolves/Devils are vulnerable to silver, so that silver weapons actually serve a purpose instead of being made redundant by magic weapons.
Angry has hit the nail on the head, I think. I would add to his thesis and say that, as one of the “low-magic” folks, for me it is largely about the player characters’ perception of the threats they go up against. The version of D&D is like to see is not so much one where magic is assumed to be rare in the setting, but one where the player characters feel less fantastical than the threats they go up against. A dragon is the most iconic monster in the fantasy genre, let alone in D&D, but put it next to a party containing a draconic bloodline sorcerer, a Dragonborn and a wizard with a miniature dragon as a familiar, and suddenly an actual dragon is basically just some annoying guy who goes around bullying villagers.
The impulse behind low-magic is the desire for characters who feel like scrappy underdogs in a world that is bigger and stranger than them, instead of feeling like superheroes and demigods. I absolutely agree that the smorgasbord of mechanical options are the problem here.
Welcome to the Dark Sid…er, the OSR. It’s the morphing of D&D into a fantasy superheroes game that has me hanging onto the old editions of D&D and designing for an OSR feel with new takes on the subsystems. You’ve touched on much of what drives a lot of folks in the OSR.
I think that there is something like playing too much fantasy. If the players have already seen and met every creature or god in d&d and saved worlds from apocalypses in addition to what they see and do in video games, you can’t expect them to be marvelled at yet again another monsters or big spell that you’ve made up. Maybe it’s time to switch the genre to sci-fi for example for a while…
I buy a lot of RPG books and I can’t think of a single one of the fantasy that really fits the bill here. 7th Sea has a really cool world and system that is probably the easiest to tweak to any of the styles mentioned.
But one of the big things I think people write fantasy RPGs want is to replace D&D’s magic with something else. I don’t think anyone has been brave enough to publish a magic free world. Or I haven’t been interested in buying it.
Yes totally agree that DnD magic is badly broken, for the reasons listed plus a few others. I had to invent my own magic system, then a whole new core system to wrap it in.
Like angry’s world it’s sorta low magic. Well there’s maybe more magic, but you can’t just cast any old spell you choose. It uses a more heirarchical and incremental building.
See http://Goldensword.dimensionfold.com
(Free downloads)
Soy milk is more of a broth than a juice, but also still more of a juice than a milk
A system that I feel really nails the “Low-Magic” feel that certain players want is Dungeon Crawl Classics. Magic is terrifying in that system. Every time you cast a spell there’s a chance that it could go terribly wrong. The spell could simply misfire, or it could be directed back at the caster, or it could permanently mutate them as the magical energies desperately try to correct themselves after being tampered with. But the trade off is that if the spell goes off, it goes off spectacularly and does serious damage. The Rulebook even states that there are no “mundane” spells because you are quite literally unstitching the fabric of reality in order to get a desired effect (“Light? Why would you need a Light spell? USE A TORCH, FOOL!”) Every time a wizard casts, they have to weigh the consequences of what would happen if it backfires, and it makes for really interesting decision making on the PCs.
Which is really cool! But exactly like you said, that’s simply not something that’s going to happen in D&D without breaking the system to the point where it’s another game entirely. The amount of magic options for charcters is so vast (and indeed shallow) that trying to apply those rules to 5e would create far more problems than benefits.
With regards to Lay on Hands etc not being spells, one of my players has a Dragonborn Cleric, and she kept forgetting that her Breath Weapon exists because it wasn’t listed with the rest of her spells, and whenever someone reminded her about it, she would search through her spell cards looking for it.
So eventually I bought some card stock and printed out a custom spell card for “Fire Breath”, and wondered why on earth most racial/class features don’t have cards.
I bought the “Martial Powers & Races” card set and was woefully disappointed at the vast number of abilities they didn’t put on cards just because they weren’t considered “Spells”.
I also printed out cards for magic items, which my players seem to enjoy. 🙂
I find it very odd, being from the other end of the spectrum, on the one aspect you have folks caling for low magic all over the forums, reddit etc but how does anyone actually go about trying to do it. they go in and cut chunks of D&D out, they play a system like DCC where everything is stupid dangerous, or they play burning wheel a system that cutting magic out of it is as impactful as puting anew hole in some swiss cheese.
see the pattern I’m trying to show here.
people seem to want magic to be fantastic and wacky and wierd, but it’s almost always done to limit the players options, as though they want to discourage, certain solution.
I won’t deny that 5e is a Grab bag of toys, rather than a Coherent design. (it’s easy to see once you really start multiclassing alot in that system). However, having played in low magic campaigns (well and magicless campaigns) I can firmly say – I don’t get it. yeah magic is now fantastical but you’ve removed the players pentant to do crazy things.
and Ultimatley – as angry said – the “low magic DMs” are in the minority, look at the LFG for Roll20 and reddit, count F******* count the number of games touted as low magic, then count the number of fantasy games (don’t count things like shadowrun or starfinder etc)
. there really isnt the number that the comments here would have you think.
Seventh Sea is a good lowish-magic fantasy game, although the first edition core rules are more usable than second edition. (Second edition sorcery and backgrounds are better.)
When I read a DM wants a low magic game what he really wants is full control. Players can have illusions (heh) they have agency in saving the day from the bad guys, but they’re really only doing it the way the DM wants them to. PCs shouldn’t be powerful. The DM can do whatever he wants, but any player who does more than “I attack” for 1d8 + 3 damage is a power gaming rollplaying munchkin. Perhaps I exaggerate but only a little. When the DM places an obstacle in the party’s path it is supposed to take at least half the game session to solve it. The game is a sequence of frustrations for the players who are not permitted to feel comfortable or confident.
Wow, someone was bitten by a GM as a kid.
This is the pathological viewpoint of a damaged player. And it’s sad. Get over yourself.
Zweihander is a relatively new game system that really captures a lot of the “feel” you are describing. You should check it out. Its one book only that covers everything you need including monster stat blocks. It gives players a lot of things to do and versatility that doesn’t come from magic.
I mean, there is always just playing gurps. Very interesting ways to make unique, diverse, nonmagical characters in it.
Remember True20? It tried to address some of these issues, it really did, particularly “why is this not a spell”. I admire it for its elegance of approach. Pick an archetype (warrior, adept, expert), then build your own class around it with feats and broad magic abilities. Running a low- or no-magic game was basically as simple as restricting the number of adept levels anyone could take – the rules, what few there were, didn’t rely on magical bloat. The core system was okay; community mods made it better, like point-buy mods that allowed for more granular class customization, and most especially the various mods that got rid of the horrifying damage track system that ran completely counter to the True20 ideal of streamlining and simplification.
I don’t use True20 for fantasy anymore. It’s too generic for its own good, and by necessity of its slim ruleset it asks for a lot of ad hoc rulings. Still, I’ve stolen mercilessly from its ideals to modify my own Pathfinder games, and it makes a very nice basis for shooty-shooty and horror games.