Can it be fun without much magic? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

pwykersotz

2011-06-12, 02:04 PM

Veyr

2011-06-12, 02:08 PM

3.5 assumes extremely high magic. It is entirely designed around the ubiquity of magic, mages, and magic items. It assumes that players will be able to gain various magical effects at particular levels, either from class levels or items.

Changing the level of magic requires changing everything else that is based on those assumptions. This is an enormous amount of work, and generally does not work well. Level 1 characters are already super-human. By level 6-ish, the real-world laws of physics should not be a significant concern. Playing at level 4, you are already entering the realm in which anything purely mundane and ordinary ceases to be relevant. By 7th, you've no chance.

In short: 3.5 is not designed for low-magic, and can only be forced to do it poorly with a lot of effort. A lot of other systems are designed for low magic, and do so well without changing anything. You are very much recommended to try one of those systems than to try to force 3.5 to be something it is not.

In another way of looking this issue:

Low magic campaign sounds like a great idea, in theory.
Why do people always say and think that? :smallconfused: It doesn't seem to fit with the system of 3.5 at all & just leads to headaches when people try to work out a solution every time I've seen it other than E6ing it which has its own issues.
They say it because they love this idea, dearly, and love this game, dearly, and they think that if they bang the two together hard enough, rainbows will come out.

Shadowknight12

2011-06-12, 02:12 PM

What Veyr said.

Alternatively, handle D&D normally (that is, give players access to magic items and all forms of magical treasure) and just refluff all that as mundane occurrences (grit and determination, spooky curses, ominous blessings from a church, gadgets, special training, alchemy, etc).

Loki_42

2011-06-12, 02:25 PM

Well, one of the players is a Wizard. I can't see it going too badly. Sure it's an illusionist, and might suffer from it's banned schools, but the player's do have magic. If they can find some way of consistently getting magic items, they'll do fine with the games standard assumptions. Of course, then, it's not exactly low magic, but you can keep the aesthetics.

pwykersotz

2011-06-12, 02:26 PM

Possible miscommunication here...

The party has the WBL and magic items. There is heavy magic in the universe, just that a lot of the population doesn't have it innately.

I'm just looking for tips on individual adventures that don't require magic in them to be fun.

Edit:
Similar (though cliched) would be something like this:

A bridge that spans a chasm between two towns is out. The only other way is the dangerous mountain pass where wild beasts attack and eat travelers. The party is hired to rectify the situation either by fixing the bridge or taking care of the beasts.

Veyr

2011-06-12, 02:35 PM

If the PCs are among the few people who have magic items, how are mundane troubles likely to entertain them? I mean, they're special, they're elite, they are one of the few, the proud, the magical. Seems like they ought to have adventures to match...

pwykersotz

2011-06-12, 02:37 PM

That is exactly the problem that I am posting. I'm wondering if anyone has come up with fun, yet mundane troubles for PC's to apply their skills/magic against.

JKTrickster

2011-06-12, 02:43 PM

Does Tucker's Kobolds count?

Veyr

2011-06-12, 02:44 PM

PCs still need a reason to care about going into the Kobold den.

Still, I think this depends way too much on what your particular group enjoys. I probably wouldn't find it fun, but your group seems on board for the concept, at least.

Pika...

2011-06-12, 03:16 PM

I recently started up a new campaign with my players that takes place in a pretty low magic world. That is to say, there are still epic spellcasters and thousands of them, but in terms of the population of the planet, there are only about 1 caster for every 1000 people, and only 1% the casters are even above level 10.

I still have plenty of magic users to do/justify anything I want done and there are lots of epic peoples running around too, but both I and my players want to try for some mundane adventures. Unfortunately, a lot of past adventures have proven to be a bit of a flop without magic.

The party consists of four level 4's, A Gnome Illusionist Wizard, a Shifter Warlock, a Warforged Fighter, and a Human Crusader.

They are more or less special forces in a war between the Gnomes and the Orcs (who conquered the neighboring kingdom of humans a long time ago) and so far most adventures fall squarely into the magic category. The closest thing I've had so far to mundane is sabotaging supply lines.

Has anyone here had great success on an extraordinary party doing relatively ordinary things?

To answer your questions:

Can it be fun without much magic?

Yes, I actually specialize in Low-Magic.

Has anyone here had great success on an extraordinary party doing relatively ordinary things?

No. Not at all.

Hence why in my games the only available magic class at start-up is a buffed up Adept.

If you need some inspiration, watch/read lord of the rings. Yes there are five Wizards on the planet, but hey are basically epic and former godlings (such as the BBEG was). Think in terms of making a world where encounters are akin to military tactics, and you will need to think way outside the standard Dungeon Crawl encounters methods you have seen a 1000 times.

I highly recommend researching D20 E6 (link below), as it works onderfully with low-magic.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?352719-necro-goodness-E6-The-Game-Inside-D-amp-D

Hope this is of use. You can ask me other questions I may not have covered here if wanted. :smallsmile:

ShneekeyTheLost

2011-06-12, 03:27 PM

darksolitaire

2011-06-12, 04:12 PM

I was in an aborted game which was doing fairly well as low-magic. Basically, any spell over 6th level flat out does not exist. While he doesn't out and state 'you cannot play full caster', it takes out most of the reason for playing one.

It turned out fairly well, actually. Incarnum, invocations, and secondary casters (like Bard) actually do a fairly good job.

I'm actually working on similar setting. Bit different that all classes that gain access to spell levels over 6th would be banned. Warlocks are obviously arcane overlords here, while Bards and Duskblades coming to close second. All the classes with Paladin/Ranger casting would rather have bonus feats at each level when access to new spell level would be gained, and Mystic Rangers and homebrewed "Mystic Paladins" would replace Druids and Clerics. Strongest PrC casters would be Suel Arcanamachs, Disciples of Thyrm and Chameleons, each with their own backround, organisation and agenda.

Mostly I'm wondering which level would such campaign require (10-15?). Raise Dead and Reincarnation would be the best raising spells available, and very much attention needed to tailor the encounters as many high-level problem solvers do not exist.

Veyr

2011-06-12, 04:15 PM

Warlocks are obviously arcane overlords here, while Bards and Duskblades coming to close second.
Ehh... I'd take Bardic spellcasting over Warlock invocations, unless you're implying heavy use of UMD (and the ability to use Imbue Item to create items of spells that are otherwise inaccessible due to the low-magic thing).

All the classes with Paladin/Ranger casting would rather have bonus feats at each level when access to new spell level would be gained
Ouch, sucks to be them...

Mostly I'm wondering which level would such campaign require (10-15?). Raise Dead and Reincarnation would be the best raising spells available, and very much attention needed to tailor the encounters as many high-level problem solvers do not exist.
I would strongly advise against attempting this. Again, 3.5 does not do this well. There are a ton of assumptions that the game makes about access to magic that you will have to tailor to meet these changes. It's really a fundamental change deep within the system that you're making here.

Seriously, there are systems designed from the ground up with this in mind. Trying to force 3.5 to be something it's not is unlikely to end well...

Pika...

2011-06-12, 07:05 PM

All the classes with Paladin/Ranger casting would rather have bonus feats at each level when access to new spell level would be gained.

My solution to those:
1. The non-magic ranger variants from the Complete books.
2. The Prestige Class Paladin from Unearhed Arcana. Make them work for that prestige!

Big Fau

2011-06-12, 07:12 PM

My solution to those:
1. The non-magic ranger variants from the Complete books.
2. The Prestige Class Paladin from Unearhed Arcana. Make them work for that prestige!

Complete Champion only. The CW version is just terrible. Seriously.

Veyr

2011-06-12, 07:14 PM

The CChamp version's terrible too. Less so, but still terrible.

fryplink

2011-06-12, 07:33 PM

I played in a low magic game once (10-kingdoms, the only magic came from fairy tale sources [snow white and the like]) went extremely well, though we were given some refluffed classes to make the lack of magic hurt (a gypsy class that made CMW potions per day and had auras, a soldier class that got fighter class feats and class features of its own, and upgraded swashbuckler) less.

Anyway, the key is to keep it low level, the low magic games don't work at high levels.... no not even then. at low levels the mundane sources can emulate magic, my soldier PC had a semi high INT [16 str, 14 con 12 dex 16 int 10 wis 12 cha] (It was a low-op game, I was the highest op there because I rolled lots of very medium grade stats) but always had a tool or a skill check for the situation. That and he went the charger route with a barbarian dip and that leap feat for charging. Unfortunately he was the only mortality in the party, dieing painfully of a bad case of poor luck. I rolled 15 consecutive rolls between 1 and 3 the 16th was a 9 and then 17-20 were below 5. I ended up on the dragons back after 2 rolls. Then my party members killed me with friendly fire because of their bad rolls.

crazyhedgewizrd

2011-06-12, 09:05 PM

Leon

2011-06-13, 08:06 AM

Yes, magic is often far overrated beyond what is actually needed.

3.5 assumes extremely high magic. It is entirely designed around the ubiquity of magic, mages, and magic items.

It assumes some magic, but does not state any levels of, indeed mages can be totally lacking and D&D will still work just fine - its the lack of healing options that can make a low magic game problematic sometimes.
Magic items while nice are not absolutely needed.

Ceaon

2011-06-13, 08:19 AM

Reading the original post. 1 in 1000 people are spellcasters, seams more like a mid-high level world for magic. On a world of 200 million that is 200,000 casters and 2000 of them are high level casters.

a low level magic world can be done, mostly remove monsters above a CR 8. adventures can be locate a missing caravan, find a lost person, help protect a town, all can be done with magic or not. it just depend on the party you play with.

I second this. A world with 1 in 1000 spellcasters is not low-magic. IMO, low-magic would be 8-20 magicians total.

And a world without magic can be very fun, but in DnD, it may not be very functional...

Tanngrisnir

2011-06-13, 08:32 AM

Someone up there (can't remember who) said that there are systems designed with low magic fantasy in mind. Other than Game of Thrones, what are they and which ones do people recommend?

I really like low magic stuff but, as has been said, D&D doesn't work too well for it.

Veyr

2011-06-13, 08:49 AM

Yes, magic is often far overrated beyond what is actually needed.

It assumes some magic, but does not state any levels of, indeed mages can be totally lacking and D&D will still work just fine - its the lack of healing options that can make a low magic game problematic sometimes.
Magic items while nice are not absolutely needed.
You are wrong. If you do not have ubiquitous magic items, you're not playing 3.5 as it was written, designed, or intended. For better or worse, they intended the Christmas tree effect. And changing that is very hard; again, it makes far more sense to use a system designed for that sort of thing.

only1doug

2011-06-13, 09:56 AM

Leon

2011-06-13, 09:56 AM

You are wrong. If you do not have ubiquitous magic items, you're not playing 3.5 as it was written, designed, or intended. For better or worse, they intended the Christmas tree effect. And changing that is very hard; again, it makes far more sense to use a system designed for that sort of thing.

Oh no I'm Right.

And you how do you know exactly how the edition was designed to be played?

Fantasy is heavy on magic in general so having it in D&D is a given, However it is not the be all end of definition of what D&D (3.5 or not) is.

3.5 Can easily be played with minimal or no magic items or magic and with little adjustment to how thing flow normally.

Ceaon

2011-06-13, 10:01 AM

But without magic, your attacks and defenses suffer, greatly.
Plus, you can't fly, raise the dead, scry, teleport, heal... all those things that the system assumes you can do. I agree that 3.5 can be played without magic, but you do need to make a lot of adjustments.

Veyr

2011-06-13, 10:25 AM

Oh no I'm Right.

And you how do you know exactly how the edition was designed to be played?

Fantasy is heavy on magic in general so having it in D&D is a given, However it is not the be all end of definition of what D&D (3.5 or not) is.

3.5 Can easily be played with minimal or no magic items or magic and with little adjustment to how thing flow normally.
I'm not going to argue low-magic/high-magic/etc. with you. I'm not going to do this because your posts indicate a very serious divergence between us in terms of what "D&D" is.

You keep using "D&D", as if each of the editions of D&D are the same game. They are not. I use "3.5" and not "D&D" because 3.5 is a different game from AD&D and from 1e, as well as from 4e. You cannot make a blanket statement about all four-and-a-half editions; it just doesn't work. You keep attempting to do so, which is exactly why I'm not going to argue the low-magic point. If that's your mindset, I'm sure I won't convince you; that doesn't make you less wrong.

Also, for the record, the 4e DMG explicitly states that the players are supposed to get magic items in certain quantities at certain levels in order to maintain the stability and balance of the game, and strongly warns against attempting to change that. This was equally true in 3.5, though IIRC they didn't admit it until later — the DMG pretends that something like this would work. IIRC, the DMG2 admits that it does not work, but I'm not going to bother to check. The point remains: "D&D", fourth edition at least, does not work as low-magic by the admission of its authors. So your claims about "D&D" are explicitly incorrect. And that's fine, because D&D 4e was never intended to support low-magic. Nor was 3.5, and for more-or-less the same reasons. 3.5 is not as well-designed as 4e (note: I prefer 3.5, but it's basically impossible to argue that WotC had a better grasp on what they were doing with 3.5 than they did with 4e), but a very quick way to make 3.5 even worse is to ignore the fundamental assumptions made when designing the game, even if that design was done poorly.

Design aiming for a target and tending to miss is better than design that was aiming for a different target altogether.

JamesonCourage

2011-06-13, 11:43 AM

I recently started up a new campaign with my players that takes place in a pretty low magic world. That is to say, there are still epic spellcasters and thousands of them, but in terms of the population of the planet, there are only about 1 caster for every 1000 people, and only 1% the casters are even above level 10.

I still have plenty of magic users to do/justify anything I want done and there are lots of epic peoples running around too, but both I and my players want to try for some mundane adventures. Unfortunately, a lot of past adventures have proven to be a bit of a flop without magic.

The party consists of four level 4's, A Gnome Illusionist Wizard, a Shifter Warlock, a Warforged Fighter, and a Human Crusader.

They are more or less special forces in a war between the Gnomes and the Orcs (who conquered the neighboring kingdom of humans a long time ago) and so far most adventures fall squarely into the magic category. The closest thing I've had so far to mundane is sabotaging supply lines.

Has anyone here had great success on an extraordinary party doing relatively ordinary things?

Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't say this is exactly low magic.

First off, if you have thousands of epic spellcasters, that's pretty high magic, in my book.

At any rate, let's take a look at the population size of the world. There are "thousands" of epic casters. So, let's say that's about 5,000 epic spellcasters. Now, let's say that only 1% of those who reach significant power (level 10+) reach epic. That means that there is about 500,000 spellcasters of level 10 or higher. And, as you've stated, only about 1% of casters are even above level 10, so that means you have about 50,500,000 casters total in your world. And, if spellcasters make up only about 1 in 1,000 people in your world, that means the world population is about 50,500,000,000 people (50 billion people in the world, when we're shy of 7 billion on Earth).

Now, since you have 50 billion inhabitants (or closer to 5 billion if 1 in 10 casters above level 10 reach epic), I'd say that most medieval-based wars, even in a mundane sense, would look much, much different. Just moving an army capable of taking on a neighboring country alone would be so difficult on medieval-based technology.

This is all just food for thought, anyways. You may want to bring the cast of epic spellcasters down to the hundreds if you want a more manageable world. As it stands the world would be so different to what we've experienced that I wouldn't know where to begin on a geopolitical scale.

Individually... I'd say keep away from doing missions against other armies, as I cannot imagine a legitimate mundane war taking place. Maybe have them work on clearing out mines infested with pests, or the like. Standard stuff.

Talya

2011-06-13, 12:00 PM

Gnaeus

2011-06-13, 12:12 PM

Magic items were certainly intended to be common in 3.5.

The "Ye Olde Magic Emporium" style of customizing exactly what you have was obviously not intended, and not available by RAW (although it's also not explicitly disallowed by RAW - as a DM you can oberoni it up and give a merchant whatever you want him to have). You cannot simply walk into a city and buy the magic things you want. Magic item availability is random, and determined by many many charts and percentile rolls.

Although there is nothing in the rules that makes it difficult to teleport from major city to major city until you find your toy, or to use spells like Commune to find them.
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states east of the Mississippi river?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states east of the Mississippi river north of the Mason Dixon Line?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in New York City? Woot!

JonestheSpy

2011-06-13, 02:51 PM

Changing the level of magic requires changing everything else that is based on those assumptions. This is an enormous amount of work, and generally does not work well. Level 1 characters are already super-human. By level 6-ish, the real-world laws of physics should not be a significant concern. Playing at level 4, you are already entering the realm in which anything purely mundane and ordinary ceases to be relevant. By 7th, you've no chance.

In short: 3.5 is not designed for low-magic, and can only be forced to do it poorly with a lot of effort.

All of this is, of course, completely untrue. Quite a lot of the rules were writtien with a low-magic, old school campaign in mind - why do you think they created the Arcane Archer if everyone would duplicate their class features for a small cash outlay? How many published adventures do you think were written under the assumption "The adventurers will of course teleport away as soon as they feel vulnerable, and come back completely rested"?

The only real adjustment a DM needs to make in a campaign the OP is describing is to the difficulty to creatures being encountered, which isn't that big a change anyway since it's pretty common knowledge that the CR rating system is twacked and a good DM should pretty much ignore it anyway.

There's a number of us who consider a low magic world MORE fun because in such a setting magic is, y'know, magical, instead of being just another consumer item.

Veyr

2011-06-13, 02:59 PM

All of this is, of course, completely untrue.
It is not. I can continue asserting the opposite of your assertions.

Quite a lot of the rules were writtien with a low-magic, old school campaign in mind - why do you think they created the Arcane Archer if everyone would duplicate their class features for a small cash outlay?
Because they did not understand what they were doing, and were taking the Arcane Archer from the perspective of a Fighter with a one-level Wizard dip, not the other way around. Like most classes in the PHB, the Arcane Archer absurdly over-valued the potency of full-BAB.

Also, the Arcane Archer is obsolesced far more by Greater Magic Weapon than by just buying enhancements.

How many published adventures do you think were written under the assumption "The adventurers will of course teleport away as soon as they feel vulnerable, and come back completely rested"?
I can think of at least one that accounts for that reality.

The only real adjustment a DM needs to make in a campaign the OP is describing is to the difficulty to creatures being encountered, which isn't that big a change anyway since it's pretty common knowledge that the CR rating system is twacked and a good DM should pretty much ignore it anyway.
You're pretty much wrong if you think that is the only thing that needs changing. Not much else to say, you're just wrong.

There's a number of us who consider a low magic world MORE fun because in such a setting magic is, y'know, magical, instead of being just another consumer item.
I never questioned that. I stated that 3.5 is not a system designed for that, and there are systems that are. Both of these statements are objective facts. You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

Big Fau

2011-06-13, 03:16 PM

All of this is, of course, completely untrue. Quite a lot of the rules were writtien with a low-magic, old school campaign in mind - why do you think they created the Arcane Archer if everyone would duplicate their class features for a small cash outlay? How many published adventures do you think were written under the assumption "The adventurers will of course teleport away as soon as they feel vulnerable, and come back completely rested"?

Have you ever read the premade modules? Any of them? Or the FRCS? Or the ECS?

Magic was so invasive that a group of people got together to create a campaign setting where it is viable to play low magic (Iron Kingdoms).

JonestheSpy

2011-06-13, 03:34 PM

You're pretty much wrong if you think that is the only thing that needs changing. Not much else to say, you're just wrong.

Blind assertions aren't very convincing to me. Sure, minor things aside from CR of encounters may need tweaking, but nothing near as difficult as the impossible challenge you insist a low-magic game has to be.

And yes, I've seen premade modules. Some of them are more magic heavy than others, but I don't think I've seen any that are designed for the kind way magic heavy optimization that many folks in this little discussion group seem to think is the norm.

Big Fau

2011-06-13, 03:38 PM

Blind assertions aren't very convincing to me. Sure, minor things aside from CR of encounters may need tweaking, but nothing near as difficult as the impossible challenge you insist a low-magic game has to be.

Fly speeds. Incorporeal. Invisibility. Ability Drain. Energy Drain. Paralysis.

There are problems that noncasters simply cannot solve in a Low Magic campaign. And removing those problems is not the same as addressing them.

And yes, I've seen premade modules. Some of them are more magic heavy than others, but I don't think I've seen any that are designed for the kind way magic heavy optimization that many folks in this little discussion group seem to think is the norm.

Out of all of the modules I've read, only the Tomb of Horrors has low treasure, and it's clearly not Low Magic. Every single other module I have read has higher than average treasure.

Veyr

2011-06-13, 03:39 PM

Why should I bother with more than an assertion when you have not done more yourself?

JonestheSpy

2011-06-13, 04:10 PM

Fly speeds. Incorporeal. Invisibility. Ability Drain. Energy Drain. Paralysis.

There are problems that noncasters simply cannot solve in a Low Magic campaign. And removing those problems is not the same as addressing them.

Low magic does not mean 'no magic'. The OP posited a world with casters consisting of 1% of the population, and high level only 1% of that. And clearly, a DM who presents their players with challenges they have no way of overcoming - e.g. Incoporeal enemies when the PC's have no way od affecting them - is a bad GM.

Out of all of the modules I've read, only the Tomb of Horrors has low treasure, and it's clearly not Low Magic. Every single other module I have read has higher than average treasure.

That of course has nothing to do with the point I made. Shall I repeat it for you?

Some of them are more magic heavy than others, but I don't think I've seen any that are designed for the kind way magic heavy optimization that many folks in this little discussion group seem to think is the norm.

That's not the same as saying "Published modules are low magic". Anyway, treasure hoards are easy to modify, certainly easier than adjusting encounter difficulty, which i mentioned is the main hurdle.

Why should I bother with more than an assertion when you have not done more yourself?

It's called debate. I made the point that adjusting encounters to make up for lack of easy access to magic (which is not the same as NO access, btw) is the main hurdle for running a low magic game. What else do you expect - for me to list all the other possible problems and then explain why they're not actually problems? Instead of asking me to prove a negative, how about you try actually making your argument. If you think there are other insurmountable difficulties, clue us in to what they are.

Big Fau

2011-06-13, 04:30 PM

It's called debate. I made the point that adjusting encounters to make up for lack of easy access to magic (which is not the same as NO access, btw) is the main hurdle for running a low magic game.

A debate consists of people stating an opinion (which has been taken care of) and then using facts to support those opinions.

Fact: The Developers intended player characters to follow a mold (Fighter, Thief, Mage, Healer, evidenced by the playtesting), and intended them to have 760,000gp in magic items and other goods (evidenced by the Challenge Rating system scaling based on expected equipment, such as Gloves of Dexterity).

Fact: 3.5 was not designed with low magic in mind, and is ill-suited to that style. Other games are more appropriate for a low magic setting.

JonestheSpy

2011-06-13, 04:52 PM

Fact: WBL is one small element of the overall gamesystem, not the center which the entire game revolves around, as many people seem to think.

Fact: Some elements (especially classes) of the game were designed with a lower magic world in mind than others, and that is one of the design flaws of the game.

And one last Fact: Nothing you've said contradicts my initial premise.

Seerow

2011-06-13, 05:07 PM

To answer the OP's actual question about adventure hooks for a low magic setting:

1) As someone else pointed out, even with the numbers you gave, there will be high level magicians. And with high level mages out there with relatively few peers, there's not a lot of incentive for them to be upstanding citizens. Not saying all mages will be evil, but I'd be inclined to think a majority of them will have leanings in that direction, ranging from low end shenanigans to "I'm plotting to take over the world" shenanigans, simply because they are so unique. This makes them still a prime adventure hook.

2) You stated that your adventures are low magic, but you still have WBL and plenty of magic items, it's just outside the reach of normal populace. Once again, this presents adventure hooks. If players want a specific piece of gear, they could hear rumors about where such a thing exists and have to go find it. Or crafting magic items may take rare special components requiring adventuring to some weird places. When you take out the magic-mart, questing for gear becomes viable. And of course there's always the random plot macguffins if you'd rather go that route.

3) Planar/Interdimensional travel. You could just admit at some point, your PCs have outgrown the world they grew up in. Past a certain threshold, they are the defenders of their homeworld, and any major threats are theirs to deal with... but those don't happen every other week, or it would get old. But that doesn't mean the players need to stop their adventuring careers. Indeed, there are all sorts of other worlds and planes that they should have access to travel to by this point, and these other places contain limitless high level adventuring opportunities that aren't constrained by the default world being low magic.

Big Fau

2011-06-13, 05:17 PM

Fact: WBL is one small element of the overall gamesystem, not the center which the entire game revolves around, as many people seem to think.

The WBL is a tool for power, the same as class features. The Challenge Rating system (supposedly) takes this into account. Altering it has consequences, and Low Magic alters the WBL far more than the CR system accounts for.

While YMMV on if a Low Magic game is fun or not, the fact remains that Low Magic campaigns are not appropriate for 3.5 D&D.

JonestheSpy

2011-06-13, 05:32 PM

The WBL is a tool for power, the same as class features. The Challenge Rating system (supposedly) takes this into account. Altering it has consequences, and Low Magic alters the WBL far more than the CR system accounts for.

Wow, have you been paying attention to what I've been writing, like, at all? You know, that part where I repeatedly said the main change you'd have make in a low magic game is the difficulty of encounters?

While YMMV on if a Low Magic game is fun or not, the fact remains that Low Magic campaigns are not appropriate for 3.5 D&D.

You're doing that thing where people imagine their opinion is a fact. Having played low magic 3.5 and having it work out just fine, I can assert with confidence that it's not the impossibility some folks would like to paint it to be. And it's hard to imagine a more subjective measure than whether or not something is "appropriate".

MeeposFire

2011-06-13, 05:49 PM

I'm not going to argue low-magic/high-magic/etc. with you. I'm not going to do this because your posts indicate a very serious divergence between us in terms of what "D&D" is.

You keep using "D&D", as if each of the editions of D&D are the same game. They are not. I use "3.5" and not "D&D" because 3.5 is a different game from AD&D and from 1e, as well as from 4e. You cannot make a blanket statement about all four-and-a-half editions; it just doesn't work. You keep attempting to do so, which is exactly why I'm not going to argue the low-magic point. If that's your mindset, I'm sure I won't convince you; that doesn't make you less wrong.

Also, for the record, the 4e DMG explicitly states that the players are supposed to get magic items in certain quantities at certain levels in order to maintain the stability and balance of the game, and strongly warns against attempting to change that. This was equally true in 3.5, though IIRC they didn't admit it until later — the DMG pretends that something like this would work. IIRC, the DMG2 admits that it does not work, but I'm not going to bother to check. The point remains: "D&D", fourth edition at least, does not work as low-magic by the admission of its authors. So your claims about "D&D" are explicitly incorrect. And that's fine, because D&D 4e was never intended to support low-magic. Nor was 3.5, and for more-or-less the same reasons. 3.5 is not as well-designed as 4e (note: I prefer 3.5, but it's basically impossible to argue that WotC had a better grasp on what they were doing with 3.5 than they did with 4e), but a very quick way to make 3.5 even worse is to ignore the fundamental assumptions made when designing the game, even if that design was done poorly.

Design aiming for a target and tending to miss is better than design that was aiming for a different target altogether.

Actually 4e handles low to no magic very well. The rules are found in the DMG2 and the Dark Sun campaign setting. They are called inherent bonuses and you get these bonuses as you level which cover the only thing in the math required to play the game-enhancement bonuses from magical weapons, armor, and neck items. So 4e can handle low magic very well (in fact it handles it better than any other edition since there is nothing that requires magic items or classes outside of the enhancement bonuses). Heck you even have non-magical healing classes and an all martial party is really good in 4e (a party of a fighter, warlord, hunter, and a ranger is vicious).

Now you could try to do it with 3e but as you know (but some others are ignoring) it involves a lot more than just mimicking enhancement bonuses. That is why VoP is looked at as not being as good (as in not even close) as its bonuses don't cover all that you need to do in a game. Also if you don't want to be overtly supernatural then you need to modify monsters and/or adjust CRs (not easy as they are not accurate to begin with).

Veyr

2011-06-13, 07:25 PM

Fact: The disparity in power between various classes is already a major design problem in 3.5.

Fact: The weakest classes rely on magic items far more so than the most powerful.

Fact: Fixing the disparity in power between the classes is astoundingly difficult, even before you start taking things away from the weakest of classes.

These are facts. They are true. There's really no counter-argument to be made; this is not a matter of opinion. That changing the level of magic within 3.5, especially in the form of magic items, causes serious design problems when compared to 3.5 played by WBL, is again, a fact.

{snip: 4e, Dark Sun, optional rules}
Sure, but those are additional rules added to specifically deal with the situation. Those additional rules took work to create. I never said it was impossible to run 3.5 with low-magic without problems, I said that it required changing a great many things to get it to work right, and there's little-to-no point in doing so when there are systems designed for that.

Doc Roc

2011-06-13, 07:31 PM

Although there is nothing in the rules that makes it difficult to teleport from major city to major city until you find your toy, or to use spells like Commune to find them.
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states east of the Mississippi river?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states east of the Mississippi river north of the Mason Dixon Line?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in New York City? Woot!

Succinctly argued. The take-away is that if goodies are hard to get, only the people equipped to trivialized hard problems will have goodies.

crazyhedgewizrd

2011-06-13, 09:43 PM

Although there is nothing in the rules that makes it difficult to teleport from major city to major city until you find your toy, or to use spells like Commune to find them.
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states east of the Mississippi river?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in the united states east of the Mississippi river north of the Mason Dixon Line?
Is there a staff of X available for sale in New York City? Woot!

after spending many thousands of gp to find a store selling item X and teleporting there. you walk into the store, the clerk says "sorry i just sold that item".

crazyhedgewizrd

2011-06-13, 10:01 PM

Seerow

2011-06-13, 10:04 PM

tyckspoon

2011-06-13, 10:19 PM

after spending many thousands of gp to find a store selling item X and teleporting there. you walk into the store, the clerk says "sorry i just sold that item".

A: if you spent any actual gold going through that process, you're doing it wrong.
B: if you really don't want your players to have an item, just tell them so from the start. Don't Be A Jerk is the absolute founding rule of making D&D work, and it binds the DM just as much as the players.

Big Fau

2011-06-13, 11:06 PM

The WBL is just a guideline, its totally up to the DM if they want to use it or not. It up to the DM if the encounter is appropriate for the group.

Guideline or no, the system takes the WBL into account, and assumes SOME form of compensation is given to replace what's not given.

WBL is not a house rule or a variant. It is built into the system, and removing it is not recommended.

Doc Roc

2011-06-13, 11:39 PM

Seriously guys, why are we still arguing WBL? The OP posted a full page ago telling everyone that despite the low magic setting, the party still has their full WBL. There's plenty of other topics out there about bad DMs doing it wrong, why does this thread need to be cluttered up with more of the same argument?

More directly on topic, I think there's something interesting here. OP:
Do you allow magical beasts? If the players are some of the rare-few, then you have a chance to run some really interesting stories about some really larger-than-life heroes.

crazyhedgewizrd

2011-06-14, 12:41 AM

Guideline or no, the system takes the WBL into account, and assumes SOME form of compensation is given to replace what's not given.

WBL is not a house rule or a variant. It is built into the system, and removing it is not recommended.

bangs head against wall.... in the first few pages of the DMG, it tells DM to alter the game to suit the story.

Doc Roc

2011-06-14, 12:42 AM

bangs head against wall.... in the first few pages of the DMG, it tells DM to alter the game to suit the story.

When you alter the operation of a delicate thing, it is wise to understand it fully beforehand. Concomitant with your disdain for our arguments is a failure to understand or value their foundational tenets, which might be summarized as don't break a thing because you couldn't be arsed to grok it.

crazyhedgewizrd

2011-06-14, 01:41 AM

When you alter the operation of a delicate thing, it is wise to understand it fully beforehand. Concomitant with your disdain for our arguments is a failure to understand or value their foundational tenets, which might be summarized as don't break a thing because you couldn't be arsed to grok it.

I understand the arguments, Understanding is the point of this. rules can have more than one meaning depending on how its writen, that is where a DM has to come in and make judgement. Or the rule is just stupid and should be ignored.

Divide by Zero

2011-06-14, 02:54 AM

bangs head against wall.... in the first few pages of the DMG, it tells DM to alter the game to suit the story.

The fact that you can change the rules does not change the fact that the rules were designed with the assumption of standard or near-standard WBL. And as others have repeatedly said, to change those rules and maintain a semblance of balance requires so much work that you may as well just play another system.

Leon

2011-06-14, 03:23 AM

I never questioned that. I stated that 3.5 is not a system designed for that, and there are systems that are..

Please give us the source of where this is printed.

I'm not going to argue low-magic/high-magic/etc. with you. I'm not going to do this because your posts indicate a very serious divergence between us in terms of what "D&D" is.

You keep using "D&D", as if each of the editions of D&D are the same game. They are not. I use "3.5" and not "D&D" because 3.5 is a different game from AD&D and from 1e, as well as from 4e. You cannot make a blanket statement about all four-and-a-half editions; it just doesn't work. You keep attempting to do so, which is exactly why I'm not going to argue the low-magic point. If that's your mindset, I'm sure I won't convince you; that doesn't make you less wrong.

I keeping using D&D to refer to the game that bulk of most likely play - what edition it is is not relevant as i have played all except 1st and magic while nice to have is not essential and any edition of the Game works fine at any level of magic from none to high (none is of course more of a challenge a magic saturated game)

This edition more than any encourages you to be dripping with items and spell effects but its not required to play and have fun (which is what you should be doing with a game)

The WBL is just a guideline, its totally up to the DM if they want to use it or not. It up to the DM if the encounter is appropriate for the group.

Wealth, Experience and Challenges are better done at the decision of the GM than relying on the provided tables.
They are good for giving you some idea of what would be good over using them exactingly

Tanngrisnir

2011-06-14, 06:41 AM

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (Version 2 if you can get it, version 1 otherwise, avoid version 3).

Thanks for that.

Talya

2011-06-14, 08:13 AM

The WBL is a tool for power, the same as class features. The Challenge Rating system (supposedly) takes this into account. Altering it has consequences, and Low Magic alters the WBL far more than the CR system accounts for.

While YMMV on if a Low Magic game is fun or not, the fact remains that Low Magic campaigns are not appropriate for 3.5 D&D.

Let's face it, the challenge rating system is already borked. You cannot make it worse by making the players a bit weaker.

Cutting back on treasure seriously screws over melee types, but does very little to lower the effectiveness of Cleric/Druid/Wizard. Where you hurt balance the most by not giving standard treasure rules is between PC classes (not that they were particularly balanced to start with, anyway, either.)

I maintain, however, that the admittedly common magic-item default setting still does not have, nor was it intended to have, a "Ye Olde Magick Item Emporium" level of customization for it, unless you ate up the opportunity cost and became a crafter yourself. The treasure tables are random.

Veyr

2011-06-14, 08:49 AM

Please give us the source of where this is printed.
Pages 51-56 and 135 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
Pages 3 and 265 of the Magic Item Compendium.

There are more, but those are the most direct and explicit.

There are rules for handing out treasure. Those are the levels of wealth that the game was designed to expect. You can change them, but again, the rest of the game will not have been designed with your changed levels of treasure in mind.

And again, quite likely the biggest problem in 3.5 is the power disparity between classes, most notably between mundanes and magicals, and lowering treasure makes that worse.

Gnaeus

2011-06-14, 09:24 AM

I maintain, however, that the admittedly common magic-item default setting still does not have, nor was it intended to have, a "Ye Olde Magick Item Emporium" level of customization for it, unless you ate up the opportunity cost and became a crafter yourself. The treasure tables are random.

Only if by "opportunity cost" you mean the opportunity cost for the time out of game that you spend figuring out what items you can create at which levels and what spells you need to get the goodies. Giving crafters the chance to double their effective WBL makes the stronger item creation feats brutally optimized. And of course, there is nothing preventing a PC from paying an NPC to contribute a common crafting feat, supplying the spell and XP himself, and thereby crafting almost any item.

And again, who cares if the table is random, if you have the options of teleporting from city to city, with a different set of rolls in each one, until you find what you want, or of using divination magics to find where what you want is for sale.

Unless there are specific house rules in place to nerf travel spells and divination spells, almost any T1 caster (and many T2s, and some T3s) can get any item they want in a couple days time with trivial effort after level 9-10.

Making PCs roll to see which random items are available has only 2 effects.
1. As previously mentioned, it hurts low-tier muggles who do not have the options above at their disposal, while doing nothing to limit the power of the strongest PCs.
2. It turns a shopping trip in a city from:
"Can I find an X? Yes? OK, I buy it!"
into a 90 minute exercise of spell use and NPC interaction which winds up at exactly the same place. Now, if your players enjoy role-playing their shopping, I suppose this could be fun to someone. But it sounds pretty boring to me.

Talya

2011-06-14, 09:31 AM

Only if by "opportunity cost" you mean the opportunity cost for the time out of game that you spend figuring out what items you can create at which levels and what spells you need to get the goodies.

And dedicating experience, feat selections, and sometimes skill points (craft skills are not strictly needed, though) to the task as well. If you're planning to go into a PrC (who doesn't?) feats can often be at a premium.

Gnaeus

2011-06-14, 09:44 AM

And dedicating experience, feat selections, and sometimes skill points (craft skills are not strictly needed, though) to the task as well. If you're planning to go into a PrC (who doesn't?) feats can often be at a premium.

The only feat that I would take over "Double your WBL, and the WBL of anyone in your party that you like" is Leadership. And part of the reason I would take Leadership is that my cohort could have a crafting feat and then proceed to double my WBL.

Experience is pretty much irrelevant. It is really hard to craft yourself down an entire level, and given the way XP works by RAW, it is almost impossible to craft yourself down more than one, because you are suddenly gaining more xp per fight than everyone else.

There might be a specific build going into a top level PRC like Incantrix that would be so good that it makes Craft Wondrous Item a bad choice at level 3. Personally, I don't know of any of the top level PRCs that eat all your feats before entry. And even if they do, you can still take a crafting feat at 9 after you have entered.

Hecuba

2011-06-14, 10:19 AM

And again, who cares if the table is random, if you have the options of teleporting from city to city, with a different set of rolls in each one, until you find what you want, or of using divination magics to find where what you want is for sale.

I've rarely heard a better argument for nerfing teleport.

And again, quite likely the biggest problem in 3.5 is the power disparity between classes, most notably between mundanes and magicals, and lowering treasure makes that worse.

This is only true if there is both a reasonable minimum level of both system mastery and interest in system mastery. I know plenty of players who want to know how little of the PHB they have to read. Low magic will probably work fine for them: in my experience, they want a more heavy-handed, led-by-the-nose experience anyways, so just fiating your way through low magic works fine in such situations (at least for me).

On the flip side, heavily optimized groups can work fine for low magic as well: most heavily optimized groups I know tend to be concerned enough with balance that they self-select a small power range on character creation. If everyone is more or less the same tier, you can deal with low magic simply by adjusting CR for specific abilities (flight, DR), wealth, and the availability of a few key elements like restoration. (The rare material components option works well for such adjustments in my experience). Depending on how low magic you want the PCs, you might need to bump the level requirements for item creation feats up too: my default is 3 levels.

KoboldCleric

2011-06-14, 11:46 AM

Replying to the OP here, ignored most of the argument in the rest of the thread, so sorry if this was covered:

I find skill challenges are great for this. Anything from a burning building to a chase scene can work wonders with regard to making mundane situations fun.

As far as combat goes, your best options here are going to be terrain features, mundane traps, and intelligent foes. Mechanics like cover and concealment can see play without magic, as can tripping, grapple, disarms, and so forth. A combination of creature sizes, ranged and melee enemies, and opponents using highly mobile tactics (spring attack, shot on the run, bull rushing) to force pcs into unfavorable terrain can be very entertaining, especially if you make good use of readied actions in their execution; a well timed ranged pin can be extremely frustrating to a charger, for example.

Doc Roc

2011-06-14, 12:10 PM

The only feat that I would take over "Double your WBL, and the WBL of anyone in your party that you like" is Leadership. And part of the reason I would take Leadership is that my cohort could have a crafting feat and then proceed to double my WBL.

Experience is pretty much irrelevant. It is really hard to craft yourself down an entire level, and given the way XP works by RAW, it is almost impossible to craft yourself down more than one, because you are suddenly gaining more xp per fight than everyone else.

There might be a specific build going into a top level PRC like Incantrix that would be so good that it makes Craft Wondrous Item a bad choice at level 3. Personally, I don't know of any of the top level PRCs that eat all your feats before entry. And even if they do, you can still take a crafting feat at 9 after you have entered.

Certain spelldancer builds, and some of the more exotic swiftblade builds.

Gnaeus

2011-06-14, 12:18 PM

I've rarely heard a better argument for nerfing teleport.

1. You can do that, but you are firmly in the realm of houserules now. Talya was saying that there is no Magic Mart by RAW. The truth is that there is Magic Mart by RAW, it just requires the application of magical travel. Its your game, make whatever houserules you want.

2. While you are doing it, make sure to nerf the other travel spells as well. If Teleport is banned, I will get to within a few miles via Plane Shift, or Gate to the exact point desired. If Plane Shift is banned, I can go from one Major city to another in under a day with flying Phantom Steeds going 54.5 MPH, or Shadow Walk there at 50 MPH, and nothing short of a dragon or another caster is fast enough to stop me. I could Shapechange or PAO into something fast. Many Planar Allies can take me there, or can zip there, make the purchase, and bring back my toy. A Druid (or even a Ranger) can use Tree Stride, or Transport via Plants. Lots more ways outside of core.

Certain spelldancer builds, and some of the more exotic swiftblade builds.

Fair enough. There is a tiny subset of casters for whom crafting is not in their best interests.

Veyr

2011-06-14, 12:24 PM

This is only true if there is both a reasonable minimum level of both system mastery and interest in system mastery.
False; low-op players may not notice the problem, but on a design level, it still exists.

And plenty of low-op players do notice. Especially when you start exacerbating the issue by reducing access to magical items.

On the flip side, heavily optimized groups can work fine for low magic as well: most heavily optimized groups I know tend to be concerned enough with balance that they self-select a small power range on character creation.
I'm extremely dubious of this claim. Moreover, most high-op players I know tend to not appreciate it when the DM massively restricts their choices; while normally a Tier-1 might be able to play-down, and a Tier-4 might be able to play-up, if there's no magical items with which to do that, the two classes simply cannot have a good game together, at least in my opinion and that of many of my friends. Class parity, or at least as close as we can reasonably get within 3.5, is important to me and to those I play with.

Moreover, it is still important to the design of the game. Which has been my contention for the entire thread.

Big Fau

2011-06-14, 03:03 PM

I'm extremely dubious of this claim. Moreover, most high-op players I know tend to not appreciate it when the DM massively restricts their choices; while normally a Tier-1 might be able to play-down, and a Tier-4 might be able to play-up, if there's no magical items with which to do that, the two classes simply cannot have a good game together, at least in my opinion and that of many of my friends. Class parity, or at least as close as we can reasonably get within 3.5, is important to me and to those I play with.

Moreover, it is still important to the design of the game. Which has been my contention for the entire thread.

Most of the CO guys on the boards I lurk at would find a different DM.

Doc Roc

2011-06-14, 03:06 PM

Most of the CO guys on the boards I lurk at would find a different DM.

I'd be more likely to sit down and talk to you about it, and try to explain that itemization is a part of my character concept as well as the mechanics underpinning it. Why can't I play what I'd like to? If I'm questing around for delicious loot, I'm probably going to attempt to have some control over which tomb we delve and for what.

Calimehter

2011-06-14, 03:43 PM

I never said it was impossible to run 3.5 with low-magic without problems, I said that it required changing a great many things to get it to work right, and there's little-to-no point in doing so when there are systems designed for that.

D&D is very popular and easy to find games and players for. It could very well be the "only game in town" for a lot of folks. Or, you could be a group (like mine) that just simply does not have a lot of spare time on its hands and does not want to be bothered learning new game systems to run fantasy games. At its heart (or at least, its skeleton) D&D is just a way to make a bunch of d20 rolls to resolve conflicts in a fantasy setting, and we prefer to keep that mechanic if at all possible when running low-magic.

If you are in a situation like that (I haven't run any surveys or anything, but I can't imagine its *that* uncommon) and still want to run a low-magic campaign, then simply saying/realizing that other systems like WHFRP and the like are maybe better suited to your vision doesn't really help much. And it is quite doable - my own opinion on the matter (reenforced with personal experience) is that a lot of people either overestimate or underestimate the amount of work needed.

I think what would be really nice is something like a "Low magic handbook", put together in a similar fashion to the various 'class handbooks' floating around out there, to help show folks some methods for how to do it quickly and easily *and* how to avoid some of the common pitfalls that have come up in this thread. I wouldn't even mind starting one if I could find the time, as I've experienced both success and failure. The problem, as indicated above, would be finding time. Even this short post got interrupted quite a bit by virtue of having to referee the anklebiters (good thing they're lovable :smallbiggrin: )

Veyr

2011-06-14, 04:11 PM

Or, you could be a group (like mine) that just simply does not have a lot of spare time on its hands and does not want to be bothered learning new game systems to run fantasy games.
It is literally impossible to have enough time to homebrew rules for low-magic, but not have time to learn a new system. The former takes more time than the latter, if you're doing it well.

Calimehter

2011-06-14, 04:17 PM

It is literally impossible to have enough time to homebrew rules for low-magic, but not have time to learn a new system. The former takes more time than the latter, if you're doing it well.

Well, I don't want to get too bogged down in details here, but just as an example E6 is a fairly short document that is easy to read and implement and almost does the whole deal by itself.

Veyr

2011-06-14, 04:19 PM

E6... avoids some of the issue because it's definitely an issue that is exacerbated the more levels you have. That doesn't mean that it eliminates it. Also, E6 still expects normal WBL the same way 3.5 does, for the most part. You just stop scaling things.

Also, point of interest, E6 in a lot of ways isn't 3.5. This is kind of what I mean about taking a new system. E6 isn't exactly designed for low-magic but it's better.

There are plenty of D20-system games out there that are quite similar to 3.5. Some of them are designed for low-magic, and wouldn't likely take that much effort to learn, the same way E6 doesn't.

And I can guarantee you that learning E6 takes very much less time than designing E6.

Hecuba

2011-06-14, 04:28 PM

False; low-op players may not notice the problem, but on a design level, it still exists.

And plenty of low-op players do notice. Especially when you start exacerbating the issue by reducing access to magical items.

I never said it didn't exist, I said that a low magic game could work for such a group. The primary element of a low-magic setting that is problematic is that is exasperates the power gap between casters and non-casters: if the power gap isn't something that bothers you, then a low-magic setting can be plenty fun.

Essentially, I'm disputing that the issue that presents the largest issue when going to low-magic is not necessarily the biggest issue for everyone

while normally a Tier-1 might be able to play-down, and a Tier-4 might be able to play-up, if there's no magical items with which to do that, the two classes simply cannot have a good game together, at least in my opinion and that of many of my friends. Class parity, or at least as close as we can reasonably get within 3.5, is important to me and to those I play with.

That's why I premised it with "self-selecting as small power range:" it would be nearly impossible to get it to work well with a slate running from 1 to 4, but all 3s or even 3s and 4s is, in my experience, doable.

Moreover, most high-op players I know tend to not appreciate it when the DM massively restricts their choices.

Then I'll simply have to posit that we play with different groups. I know you're not Mark, because he's standing next to me, so as long as you're not Susan or Adiran, this supposition is likely correct.

The high-op group that I play with most often tends to like experimentation: when we play a low-magic setting, we do it by collective agreement to see what we can tweak to make it more fun. The premise is set out ahead of time, any house rules we agree on to make it work are agreed on ahead of time.

Yes, we could just use Iron Heroes, but tinkering with the system is half the fun. And 3.5 has lots to tinker with.

Moreover, it is still important to the design of the game. Which has been my contention for the entire thread.

I'm not saying it isn't. I'm saying that that portion of the design to which altering it is most detrimental is:

Not quite as universally important to all players as this board (which focuses heavily on CharOp) would lead you to believe. (Though it's probably getting more so with 4e getting all the new beer and pretzel players coming into the hobby).
Reasonably isolatable if your desire to pursue the alteration is greater than your desire to have a range of power levels available.

It is literally impossible to have enough time to homebrew rules for low-magic, but not have time to learn a new system. The former takes more time than the latter, if you're doing it well.

I'll agree with this wholeheartedly: at very least, it adds several steps in encounter design. If you really get into it, you have to start dealing with modifying class design and dealing in alternate rules for magic.

And I can guarantee you that learning E6 takes very much less time than designing E6.

Designing a single decent feat tree to replace a 10 level PRC probably takes more time than learning E6.

Veyr

2011-06-14, 04:37 PM

I am none of the people you mentioned, no. Yes, I was stating that we play in different groups. I would conjecture that the number of people I was thinking of is larger than the number you were referring to, however, since you named only three others besides yourself, and I was referring to around two dozen friends of mine (we don't, obviously, all play in the same games at once).

Not quite as universally important to all players as this board (which focuses heavily on CharOp) would lead you to believe. (Though it's probably getting more so with 4e getting all the new beer and pretzel players coming into the hobby).
While this statement may be true, it's not true of anyone I know personally.

Also, the parenthetical is exceedingly inaccurate. This board may have more emphasis on charOp than the average game table, but it is still extremely non-op or even anti-op when compared to 339 or Wizards.

Reasonably isolatable if your desire to pursue the alteration is greater than your desire to have a range of power levels available.
It's not so much "range of power levels" so much as "range of character concepts". A mundane warrior and a mage can play in the same game because normally the Warblade is a decent option and items can help bridge the gap between them and a Bard, Beguiler, or Dread Necromancer, for example, while a Cleric or Wizard can probably "play down" to that level.

But without magic items, a Warblade can no longer keep up even with a Bard or similar, much less a Cleric or Wizard. If everyone agrees to try to keep things balanced, it basically means "everyone's playing a mundane (or a Warlock), or everyone's playing a magical character", because the gap between the two is too wide.

Now, obviously, some profess not to care about intra-party balance. I find this bewildering, but I can't exactly dispute the claim. That's all well and good, but ultimately has little impact on the existence of the design problem. Again, ignoring the problem or not caring about the problem don't actually make it go away.

Doc Roc

2011-06-14, 04:40 PM

Also, the parenthetical is exceedingly inaccurate. This board may have more emphasis on charOp than the average game table, but it is still extremely non-op or even anti-op when compared to 339 or Wizards.

True story...

Calimehter

2011-06-14, 04:45 PM

E6... avoids some of the issue because it's definitely an issue that is exacerbated the more levels you have. That doesn't mean that it eliminates it. Also, E6 still expects normal WBL the same way 3.5 does, for the most part. You just stop scaling things.

Quite true. However, even an (a?) E6 world with no other modifications will still 'look and feel' quite a bit more like a low magic world than a standard 3.5 world such as Forgotten Realms, even if potions/scrolls/+1 items and other low level gear is still easily available. It is also a far simpler chassis to tweak if you want to go further down the low magic road.

There are plenty of D20-system games out there that are quite similar to 3.5. Some of them are designed for low-magic, and wouldn't likely take that much effort to learn, the same way E6 doesn't.

I've heard of some, and I wouldn't doubt that they would work for some folks. E6 and other 3.5 mods do have the advantage of using the *exact* same mechanics, spells, rulebooks, and so on, so they do have their place.

And I can guarantee you that learning E6 takes very much less time than designing E6.

I'm not sure I understand what exactly you meant by this. Do you mean that designing E6 as a whole system mod from the ground up is harder than learning it? If so, then it is true but largely irrelevant, since all the work has already been done. If you are talking about designing a campaign using the E6 rules, one of the whole points of even doing E6 was to make world design easier than standard 3.5, and in this the designers have (in my experience) largely succeded.

Hecuba

2011-06-14, 04:56 PM

I am none of the people you mentioned, no. Yes, I was stating that we play in different groups. I would conjecture that the number of people I was thinking of is larger than the number you were referring to, however, since you named only three others besides yourself, and I was referring to around two dozen friends of mine (we don't, obviously, all play in the same games at once).

I run a comic shop, so I have many nebulous "groups", but only 3 that I have a regularly scheduled weekly or bi-weekly game for. The names in question are for the one of the 3 I would consider Hi-Op.

While this statement may be true, it's not true of anyone I know personally.

It's my general attitude when I'm asked to run or play in a beer and pretzels game. I find that strategy and rules precision become less important as the table consumes more beer as a whole.

Also, the parenthetical is exceedingly inaccurate. This board may have more emphasis on charOp than the average game table, but it is still extremely non-op or even anti-op when compared to 339 or Wizards.

That's a fair assessment. The fact that the board has more emphasis than an average game table (or more specifically, that there are plentiful D&D players on the other side of the mean) was what I was aiming at.

It's not so much "range of power levels" so much as "range of character concepts". A mundane warrior and a mage can play in the same game because normally the Warblade is a decent option and items can help bridge the gap between them and a Bard, Beguiler, or Dread Necromancer, for example, while a Cleric or Wizard can probably "play down" to that level.

But without magic items, a Warblade can no longer keep up even with a Bard or similar, much less a Cleric or Wizard. If everyone agrees to try to keep things balanced, it basically means "everyone's playing a mundane (or a Warlock), or everyone's playing a magical character", because the gap between the two is too wide.

Humm. We seem to have a fundamental disconnect. I'm not saying no magic items, I'm saying less (or more specifically, slower and more limited). No magic items would be far harder to adjust for, by magnitudes (which might be part of your point).

If there are some magic items available, it's merely choosing the right mage class to meet a Warblade for that level of magical items. For normal WBL/magic, that would probably be one of the T3/T4 restricted list casters. For lower WBL/magic, that might be a Shadowcaster. For extremely low WBL/magic, that might be a Magewright (with a smidge of restraint in spell selection).

Veyr

2011-06-14, 05:29 PM

I'm not sure I understand what exactly you meant by this. Do you mean that designing E6 as a whole system mod from the ground up is harder than learning it? If so, then it is true but largely irrelevant, since all the work has already been done. If you are talking about designing a campaign using the E6 rules, one of the whole points of even doing E6 was to make world design easier than standard 3.5, and in this the designers have (in my experience) largely succeded.
That was exactly what I was saying. My argument this entire thread has been "don't reinvent the wheel; 3.5 is not the system you want for this."

As you say, E6 as a system (system mod, whatever) is closer to "low-magic" than is 3.5 itself. Taking 3.5 and making it "low-magic" and work is more work than taking E6, learning it, and doing whatever adaptation you want to do from there to make it "low-magic" (depending on your definition of the term, it may already be what you want, though I find that somewhat dubious). This is because designing E6 to begin with was harder/more time-consuming than learning E6 is now.

Assuming that E6 as-is isn't the "low-magic" that you want (because, after all, magic characters, magic creatures, and magic items are still fairly common, they're just lower-power magics), I'd wager that there is a system out there that does what you want better than E6, and will be easier to learn than it will be to adapt E6 to your needs. Either will be far easier than 3.5 straight.

I run a comic shop, so I have many nebulous "groups", but only 3 that I have a regularly scheduled weekly or bi-weekly game for. The names in question are for the one of the 3 I would consider Hi-Op.
Well, fair enough; my group is almost exclusively op-oriented. We talk about the game more than we play it (we're mostly players; we never have enough DMs), so that leads to a fairly high degree of system mastery. I'm not talking, you know, TO-masters, but people who understand what the Tiers are and what they mean, and could probably give a cogent opinion on why any given class is in its tier.

It's my general attitude when I'm asked to run or play in a beer and pretzels game. I find that strategy and rules precision become less important as the table consumes more beer as a whole.
It's also worth noting that the group I mention is online, mostly IRC (we use MapTool for games); there's little, if any, alcohol consumption since most of us are at home.

That's a fair assessment. The fact that the board has more emphasis than an average game table (or more specifically, that there are plentiful D&D players on the other side of the mean) was what I was aiming at.
Mm-hmm, so I expected, but I also felt the need to correct that since there are people on this board who claim it seriously.

Humm. We seem to have a fundamental disconnect. I'm not saying no magic items, I'm saying less (or more specifically, slower and more limited). No magic items would be far harder to adjust for, by magnitudes (which might be part of your point).

If there are some magic items available, it's merely choosing the right mage class to meet a Warblade for that level of magical items. For normal WBL/magic, that would probably be one of the T3/T4 restricted list casters. For lower WBL/magic, that might be a Shadowcaster. For extremely low WBL/magic, that might be a Magewright.
I'll admit I hadn't considered using an NPC class for this, but I'll agree with this statement in general. My complaint, though, still stands: if someone wants to play a mundane warrior, and I want to play an arcanist, the only option for him is the Warblade, and the only options for me are likely Adept, Magewright, Shadowcaster, or Warlock. The Tier system states that heavy optimization may be able to shift a class by as much as a tier, but doing that, especially for the lower-tier classes, requires magic items. Meanwhile, "playing down" is limited, and at least personally I find it frustrating, which means... despite 3.5's huge array of classes (its one significant pro, to my mind), our options are exceedingly limited by this rules-change.

I mean, from another perspective: if your houserules aren't going to maximize the number of classes that are viable in your campaign, what's the point of 3.5? The system does very little well — an enormous array of classes is one of those few things.

Hecuba

2011-06-14, 05:49 PM

I mean, from another perspective: if your houserules aren't going to maximize the number of classes that are viable in your campaign, what's the point of 3.5? The system does very little well — an enormous array of classes is one of those few things.

Because 3.5 also has an enormous variety of rules and alternate rules to experiment with. For low magic, simply consider what you can tinker with regarding the spells like restoration and raise dead that you probably don't want to leave out entirely:

Power Components
Increased XP conversion
Cooperative Casting (City Casting or similar)
Planar Binding
Location Limitation (ala planar touchstones, rune circles)
Spell Rolls
Artifact Use

That's a short list, from 5 minutes, for one aspect of altering the system for a single purpose. Sure, these ideas have analogs in some other systems, but 3.5 tends to have lots of such things, and fiddling with them can be fun.

Veyr

2011-06-14, 06:38 PM

That I could see, but again, there would be a lot of work involved: for something like that to work, it seems to me, you'd really need what amounts to pretty close to an entire campaign setting designed around a series of fairly significant houserules to that end. I mean, what you describe for raising the dead works nicely, but you'd also have to tailor other spells, I think.

Now, I would not say that all that effort is without effort; that sounds reasonably cool to me. And yes, there are probably some things that 3.5 would add to this equation that you wouldn't get if you 'simply' switched systems. But it is important that that kind of work actually get done, or it won't work well, I think.

Hecuba

2011-06-14, 07:32 PM

Talakeal

2011-06-14, 08:02 PM

Hiro Protagonest

2011-06-14, 08:05 PM

olentu

2011-06-14, 08:12 PM

Hecuba

2011-06-14, 08:32 PM

I'm noticing an odd contradiction in this thread. People are talking about how WOTC did such horrible playtesting and how out of whack the tiers are. At the same time people are talking about how well thought out the WBL tables are and how if you tweak them you are destroying WOTC's intended balance.
How is it that they balanced WBL so well for classes which they balanced so poorly?

WBL runs counter to the direction of the most glaring imbalances of inter-class design. It probably wasn't intended as a fix per se (presumably if they had realized at that early a juncture that something was broken, they would have fixed it), and the power creep over the game probably means that it became more powerful over the life of the game than initially planned.

But it is a big element of power, and it "moves" in such a way that it offsets the over valuation of full attack/full-BAB and the under valuation of spells.

NichG

2011-06-14, 08:48 PM

Addressing the OP:

There are a couple things you can do when the party is full powered but the world is lower magic. This makes the party the vehicle by which magic enters the world of the mundanes - play this up, make them sources of wonder, able to change situations that are otherwise locked in place. It basically lets you say 'things suck here and aren't Tippyverse-optimal because you haven't been here yet - what do you do with this unmolded clay?'

If that style of adventure doesn't appeal, then there are various things you can do to highlight the PC's power and still challenge them mundanely. Scale is a pretty good tool for a few levels at least: the PCs can defeat any one person in the empire themselves, but defeating an army takes a bit more effort. Similarly, they can feed 20 people with Create Food and Water, but helping 3000 refugees find a new home is still hard. Avoid things with single points of failure - if a nation is ruled by an evil king, they'll assassinate the king rather than lead a rebellion. If on the other hand, a nation is ruled by an evil council, each of whom has lieutenants etc waiting to step in if their master dies, then at least its a bit more legwork before the issue can be trivialized. Better yet if the people of that nation are nationalistically driven to do whatever, so even if you were to cut off the head things would still keep momentum.

Other lower-magic adventures: solving mysteries (until your party decides to start using divinations), following treasure maps (similar caveat), etc are traditional and need not be extremely magical.

Veyr

2011-06-14, 08:50 PM

Basically, magic items were, if anything, underestimated more than magic itself was. This is a very powerful equalizing force, since it allows you, no matter how weak or poorly designed your class, access to powerful effects.

The result is that the ubiquity of magic goes ... a fair distance, we'll say, though not exactly a "long way", towards bringing the classes together in power. Decreasing the amount of wealth in the game increases the disparity; increasing it actually reduces the disparity (but has its own issues that I've ignored largely because it hasn't come up yet).

In fact, there was a thread around here at one point that converted the Fighter's and Wizard's class features to wealth — tried to find price-equivalent for a fairly-optimized Fighter's feats, and compared it to the cost of hiring someone to cast the spells that the Wizard gets for free every day. As you might not be surprised to hear, the Wizard was faaar ahead in that. But it also goes to show that enough wealth can obviate even a Wizard's features.

I'm not saying WBL in 3.5 is perfect. In fact, like I said, you could probably give out significantly more wealth than is indicated, and improve class parity. The problem with that is while increasing wealth doesn't have the same class-balance issues that decreasing it has, that still entails a lot of work and careful planning on the DM's part, to know how to handle that. More wealth also means more options, which can lead to headaches for the DM even if he scales encounters appropriately. And at some point, even a Commoner with enough wealth is more powerful than a Wizard, so all classes become Tier 1, and legitimately challenging Tier 1 characters is very difficult to do.

And considering how poorly WotC hit most marks it aimed at, it's entirely possible that there is some level of WBL that matches what they actually hit more closely than their target — unlikely, but the possibility is conceivable. The problem, however, is that finding that sweet spot is going extremely difficult (and it's almost certainly not going to be by giving less wealth). I mean, we're talking some real, serious statistical analysis of a ton of playtest data to confidently find it, and even then it'll only be valid for the assumptions and judgments you made at the beginning (i.e. the preferences of your group).

Which is why I didn't say it was impossible, I said it was overly difficult and probably not worth it when you could skip all that and start fresh with something designed from the ground up around the desired level of magic.

huttj509

2011-06-15, 12:33 AM

I think, as with many things campaign-wise, communication is key.

Is the world low magic? What does that mean? Are magic items makable/buyable/randomly found only (don't plan on using a kukri)?

Is the campaign serious? Silly? Room to room kick in the door combat? Political intrigue?

What is the expected power level? Are wizards respected or feared? Are traps common?

I can have plenty of fun playing a wizard, a druid, a warblade (I'm hooked on ToB), Cleric, rogue, Barbarian, duskblade, etc, heck, even a monk, but I'd be more interested in different classes and builds for different campaign styles.

Can low, or even no magic be fun? Absolutely. Is it fun when it's sprung on you while you had different expectations? Not really. Is it the sort of thing you need to think about carefully, and determine how limits will affect the feel/gameplay/difficulty of the campaign? YES!

Dusk Eclipse

2011-06-15, 12:41 AM

I
[LIST=1]
Not quite as universally important to all players as this board (which focuses heavily on CharOp) would lead you to believe. (Though it's probably getting more so with 4e getting all the new beer and pretzel players coming into the hobby).

Late for this; but really if you think GiantitP is heavy on CharOP; I guess your "high op group*" is not really as high op as you think; I invite you to check Brilliant Gemologist to see what real** CharOP is.

*This is not intended in a condescendent or derogatory manner; just trying to express a point

** Not to dismiss the efforts and achievements of the great minds that post here, it is just that optimizers tend to gather in other forums IME.

Leon

2011-06-15, 01:16 AM

Pages 51-56 and 135 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
There are more, but those are the most direct and explicit.

That is a section regarding treasure - not anything that says what should be or not be in a 3.5 game in regard to magic items or level.

Pages 3 and 265 of the Magic Item Compendium.

Cant comment on that as i don't have the book - not that its a core rule book in anycase.

To play a Low magic game of 3.5 is no more difficult than to play a High magic one - all it really needs is the DM to remember that the world is not a loot pinata with magic marts cheaply selling items and spells by the dozen and challenge the group accordingly and for that group to acknowledge that its a grittier more challenging game without all the magics that routinely making things easy in a game with higher magic and act accordingly.

High magic is a crutch that a lot of players seem to be unwilling to let go of or acknowledge that the game works fine without.

I'm noticing an odd contradiction in this thread. People are talking about how WOTC did such horrible playtesting and how out of whack the tiers are.

WOTC play testing and Spell checking has always been hit and miss - the god awful ratnest that is the Tiers is player created, thus will always be out of whack as they nothing official so each perspective on them and their usefulness is varied.

Talakeal

2011-06-15, 01:28 AM

Cant comment on that as i don't have the book - not that its a core rule book in anycase.

Page 3 is an introduction to the book that talks about how magic items are a core part of the game and an important part of every character. Mostly just a sales pitch to get you hyped on the books subject matter, not really a rule.

265 is the start of a revision of the random treasure tables from the DMG.

Calimehter

2011-06-15, 10:33 AM

Assuming that E6 as-is isn't the "low-magic" that you want (because, after all, magic characters, magic creatures, and magic items are still fairly common, they're just lower-power magics), I'd wager that there is a system out there that does what you want better than E6, and will be easier to learn than it will be to adapt E6 to your needs. Either will be far easier than 3.5 straight.

Thank you for the clarification on what you meant.

Its a fair wager, but one of the reasons that I don't know of such a system was that I did not find it hard at all to adapt E6 to my needs, and so felt no need to go out looking for anything else. *shrug*

Hecuba

2011-06-15, 12:10 PM

Late for this; but really if you think GiantitP is heavy on CharOP; I guess your "high op group*" is not really as high op as you think; I invite you to check Brilliant Gemologist to see what real** CharOP is.

*This is not intended in a condescendent or derogatory manner; just trying to express a point

** Not to dismiss the efforts and achievements of the great minds that post here, it is just that optimizers tend to gather in other forums IME.

I assume you mean Brilliant Gameologist, and I do read it. I make no claim to being an astoundingly creative optimizer myself, which is why I read and crib from such boards for Hi-Op games.

And I do think, relative to the total bulk of D&D players, this board does focus heavily on CharOp. There are sources that focus more heavily (and certainly boards that have an expressed bias thereto), but if TO is right and no Op is left, I would certainly call this board right of center.*

*despite borrowing the terminology, I'm not making any judgement as to the political leanings of this or any other forum.

MeeposFire

2011-06-15, 12:59 PM

In my experience the bulk of players are heavy into optimization. The key difference is that they are overall bad at it since they do not have the resources and "peer review" that message boards get.

Veyr

2011-06-15, 01:00 PM

That is a section regarding treasure - not anything that says what should be or not be in a 3.5 game in regard to magic items or level.
And yet, if you follow those rules, guess what? You get large numbers of fairly powerful magic items, coming quite close to approximating WBL on page 135.

Cant comment on that as i don't have the book - not that its a core rule book in anycase.
Its core status doesn't matter, I was more interested in its discussion of 3.5 itself, especially balance issues as they relate to items.

High magic is a crutch that a lot of players seem to be unwilling to let go of or acknowledge that the game works fine without.
I'll thank you not to insult me and everyone else who disagrees with you, thank you very much.

Page 3 is an introduction to the book that talks about how magic items are a core part of the game and an important part of every character. Mostly just a sales pitch to get you hyped on the books subject matter, not really a rule.
He was asking me to give evidence for my statement that 3.5 was designed for high-magic, which it was, and that introduction says so explicitly: the magic items that a character can expect to have is an important part of the system's design.

It was not a new thing, either, just a convenient stating of the fact.

265 is the start of a revision of the random treasure tables from the DMG.
Yes, and it details why it is doing so: it talks about the importance of items and the need to improve the odds of players receiving level-appropriate items. It stated that the tables in the DMG had problems of sometimes giving lower-level players too-powerful items, and at other times starving higher-level players, giving them not enough items to continue as they were intended to. It is a direct confirmation of my original claim, which Leon questioned.

Leon

2011-06-15, 01:27 PM

And yet, if you follow those rules, guess what? You get large numbers of fairly powerful magic items, coming quite close to approximating WBL on page 135.

And yet its nothing to do with whether the game requires it or not - yes you can have a large number if you follow those rules but there is not requirement to do so - WBL once more should ultimately be up the DMs discretion on what is suitable for their game and setting. Its not a Ground State that 3.5 must exist in.

I'll thank you not to insult me and everyone else who disagrees with you, thank you very much.

And thus its true, given your reaction {{scrubbed}}

He was asking me to give evidence for my statement that 3.5 was designed for high-magic, which it was, and that introduction says so explicitly: the magic items that a character can expect to have is an important part of the system's design.

It is a System designed for Magic - what exacting levels are not inherent in the system. It provides you with the option of having High, Medium, Low - doesn't force you to use any level.
Hence the Crutch that you dislike so yet cling to. Power corrupts and magic power is no different.

Of course a book that is entirely about items is going to make it sound important, but given that its just that - a Glorified Catalog of things to buy with a dash of light rules it doesn't have a Say in what 3.5 must be like.

Particularly since it came out fairly late in the proceedings of the game - it may have changed how things work (much like ToB) but it still does not shape the version as a whole

Big Fau

2011-06-15, 01:33 PM

Reducing the WBL is like reducing Skill Points: Yes, you can make it work, but you really need a strong grasp of system mastery to do so, and it is not recommended for people with a weak understanding of optimization.

Veyr

2011-06-15, 01:37 PM

And yet its nothing to do with whether the game requires it or not - yes you can have a large number if you follow those rules but there is not requirement to do so - WBL once more should ultimately be up the DMs discretion on what is suitable for their game and setting. Its not a Ground State that 3.5 must exist in.
How is it not? The default rules would put you in exactly that state. Sure, you can change them, but that's a houserule. The WBL is a "guideline" but it's more of a tabulation of what you should have if you were following the earlier rules and had played from level 1 by those rules.

Frankly, I don't even understand your argument here. You acknowledge that they are the default rules, but then you claim that they don't create a default?

And thus its true, given your reaction - you optimizers are a touchy bunch.
I'll ask once more for you to stop insulting everyone who disagrees with you. It's unseemly.

It is a System designed for Magic - what exacting levels are not inherent in the system. It provides you with the option of having High, Medium, Low - doesn't force you to use any level.
It does give a default, as already noted. And everything that comes after that default assumes that default.

Hence the Crutch that you dislike so yet cling to. Power corrupts and magic power is no different.
Using a cliche really doesn't make your argument all that impressive. What exactly is it supposed to be a crutch for? I've already described, at length, why magic items are important to the game. Are you claiming that I am dependent on magic items to make a powerful character? That's a laughable claim, but also wouldn't make sense since you disdain optimization so; why would my ability or lack thereof to create a powerful character matter to you?

Or are you suggesting (as I suspect you are) that someone who wants to play a game in which the character is capable of handling challenges appropriate for their level is having badwrongfun?

Of course a book that is entirely about items is going to make it sound important, but given that its just that - a Glorified Catalog of things to buy with a dash of light rules it doesn't have a Say in what 3.5 must be like.

Particularly since it came out fairly late in the proceedings of the game - it may have changed how things work (much like ToB) but it still does not shape the version as a whole
The sections I pointed you are actually discussions of the game as a whole, a review of what had come before, and a bit of criticism of how the rules in the DMG turned out. It's a remarkably frank book for a WotC publication.

Moreover, it's only an extension of what was already there in the DMG. The DMG says the same things, through its treasure rules.

Divide by Zero

2011-06-15, 01:45 PM

And thus its true, given your reaction - you optimizers are a touchy bunch.

If your points are really valid, this ad hominem should be unnecessary. Moreover, you're trying to paint "optimizers" as a single homogeneous group, which is yet another fallacy. This is only hurting your overall argument.

Veyr

2011-06-15, 01:51 PM

Thank you; that was, more-or-less, what I meant by unseemly. That statement also applies equally well to the "power corrupts" cliche.

Gnaeus

2011-06-15, 02:04 PM

To play a Low magic game of 3.5 is no more difficult than to play a High magic one - all it really needs is the DM to remember that the world is not a loot pinata with magic marts cheaply selling items and spells by the dozen and challenge the group accordingly and for that group to acknowledge that its a grittier more challenging game without all the magics that routinely making things easy in a game with higher magic and act accordingly

Oh is that all???

What does challenge the group accordingly even mean??? To check every monster against every PC to make sure that every player can contribute to encounters (As opposed to a normal WBL game where even the muggles can be assumed to be able to fly, hit incorporeal, beat most DR etc after a certain level)? Or to find encounters where the muggles can contribute equally to the wizard (more difficult than in normal 3.5 because of wider disparity in power/versatility)? Or maybe to redesign the world completely to reflect the fact that a mid level wizard can easily overwhelm a small country if there are no casters to oppose his abilities?

What does "act accordingly" mean? That PCs will recognize a higher danger level and pick less fights? Well that one is easy enough. Or that casters will voluntarily not use their stronger powers to reflect the setting? That one SOUNDS easy enough, but given that even among high-op players the line between powerful and overpowered is very difficult to define, it is going to take a lot of work to decide what casters shouldn't or can't do. How do you enforce it? Do you use nerfs to casters, spells, and caster feats? If so, that is a lot of rewriting. Or is a gentlemans agreement kind of thing which requires constant monitoring lest the wizard be too wizardy? Should the group take into account that their casters are special snowflakes in the setting, able to demand huge premiums for their rare skills, while the fighters are not?

Maybe that seems easy to you, but it sounds like a huge headache to me.

Doc Roc

2011-06-15, 02:50 PM

It is a System designed for Magic - what exacting levels are not inherent in the system. It provides you with the option of having High, Medium, Low - doesn't force you to use any level.
Hence the Crutch that you dislike so yet cling to. Power corrupts and magic power is no different.

Never mind the bit where CR's not really a very granular measure in the first place, nor very well metered. I just... look, I'm sure it works great for you, in your particular case, but building a general solution is important. It's the job of anyone building a game to make sure it works for the people who want to use it, for the tasks advertised.

Your game is harder to play and harder to run. Enjoy it, but don't tell me I'm a fool for disliking it.

JonestheSpy

2011-06-15, 03:01 PM

So what this seems to boil down to is that some people think the game revolves around having Tons of Stuff, and if you don't have Tons of Stuff, you can't play it right.

Needless to say, I disagree. And I think the insistence that non-spellcasters are the ones who suffer if everyone isn't guarunteed the exact same amount of treasure per level and they can easily cash whatever they find in and buy exactly what they want at the local walmart is not very well thought out.

For instance, it's been pointed out before that if a wizard can't simply buy whatever spell they want for their book, that goes a long way toward eliminating the worst excesses of the class. Likewise, if a party can't go the cliched "Buy some cheap healing item for out of combat recovery" route, then clerics will actually have to, you know, play the class kinda like it was intended instead of blowing all their spells on being Clericzilla. Hell, even a monk's ability to fall without taking damage actually becomes worthwhile when it's not assumed that everyone and his brother has a Ring o' Feather Fall.

Those are just a few examples. But hey, some people really like their Stuff and don't want to play the game without it. Fine for them, but the insistence that you shouldn't play unless the campaign is dependent on everyone being decorated like a christmas tree is rather tiresome.

Edit:

What does challenge the group accordingly even mean??? To check every monster against every PC to make sure that every player can contribute to encounters (As opposed to a normal WBL game where even the muggles can be assumed to be able to fly, hit incorporeal, beat most DR etc after a certain level)? Or to find encounters where the muggles can contribute equally to the wizard (more difficult than in normal 3.5 because of wider disparity in power/versatility)? Or maybe to redesign the world completely to reflect the fact that a mid level wizard can easily overwhelm a small country if there are no casters to oppose his abilities?
...

Maybe that seems easy to you, but it sounds like a huge headache to me.

Well, I suppose one could just make the assumption that every creature with a CR that matches the party's average level is an appropriate and interesting encounter. Is that what you do?

averagejoe

2011-06-15, 03:32 PM

Never mind the bit where CR's not really a very granular measure in the first place, nor very well metered. I just... look, I'm sure it works great for you, in your particular case, but building a general solution is important. It's the job of anyone building a game to make sure it works for the people who want to use it, for the tasks advertised.

Your game is harder to play and harder to run. Enjoy it, but don't tell me I'm a fool for disliking it.

I'm somewhat confused on this point. I mean, for the games I run, I have to evaluate challenges by looking at what the challenge does and comparing it to what the characters can do anyways. CR is notoriously broken, the classes are notoriously broken, why is having less magic the straw that suddenly makes it so difficult as to be not worth it? It seems to me that unless your group does the 1 tank (probably with greater weapon specialization)/1 skill/1 healbot/1 blaster thing, (and, arguably, not even then), then you shouldn't be able to just plonk down in-theory level appropriate monsters anyways. I mean, I can see people not liking low magic, but I'm not sure I get how it's harder.

JonestheSpy

2011-06-15, 03:35 PM

Smart observations

What he said.

olentu

2011-06-15, 03:42 PM

I'm somewhat confused on this point. I mean, for the games I run, I have to evaluate challenges by looking at what the challenge does and comparing it to what the characters can do anyways. CR is notoriously broken, the classes are notoriously broken, why is having less magic the straw that suddenly makes it so difficult as to be not worth it? It seems to me that unless your group does the 1 tank (probably with greater weapon specialization)/1 skill/1 healbot/1 blaster thing, (and, arguably, not even then), then you shouldn't be able to just plonk down in-theory level appropriate monsters anyways. I mean, I can see people not liking low magic, but I'm not sure I get how it's harder.

Probably because it is hard to make an encounter that is equally challenging when there is a wide disparity in combat ability which professed to be made worse without magic times bridging the gap.

Veyr

2011-06-15, 03:59 PM

For instance, it's been pointed out before that if a wizard can't simply buy whatever spell they want for their book, that goes a long way toward eliminating the worst excesses of the class.
Two spells per level, or four spells per level with Collegiate, are more than enough to break the game in half. This example fails utterly. A Wizard can still target any defense (mundanes can still only attack AC and HP), can still fly (mundanes now have no ability to do so), can still turn invisible and stack silly number of miss chances (I guess the Ranger can do this once he gets HiPS — at 17th. No other mundane can, plus Rangers are half-casters anyway), can still raise an enormous army of constructs, undead, or summoned outsiders (admittedly, Leadership is broken-good and also can do similar), can still determine any information they could ever need (no Gather Info check can do what Commune does), can still stop time, etc. etc. Mundanes can do none of these things (aside from abuse Leadership, I suppose), several of which they could do if they got magic items.

Likewise, if a party can't go the cliched "Buy some cheap healing item for out of combat recovery" route, then clerics will actually have to, you know, play the class kinda like it was intended instead of blowing all their spells on being Clericzilla.
This is similarly false. The lack of healing items still does not make healing in-combat worthwhile. A Cleric cannot heal more damage than is dealt to the party on a round-per-round basis until he gets Heal. Meanwhile, with his spells he can simply end the threat, saving far more HP than he ever could have healed, plus largely eliminating the risk of death if you can't keep up with the healing. So again, false.

Hell, even a monk's ability to fall without taking damage actually becomes worthwhile when it's not assumed that everyone and his brother has a Ring o' Feather Fall.
No, no it doesn't. The restrictions on Slow Fall are laughable. The odds of it being useful — no matter what alternatives do or do not exist — are slim to none. I'd be shocked if it saw use more than once or twice in an entire campaign.

Not to mention that until higher levels it won't even protect him from particularly much damage.

JonesTheSpy, you are wrong on every count. You have not in any way, shape, or form countered any of my arguments with anything but assertion or these failed examples. You have not made any argument countering the reality of the treasure rules, you have not shown to anyone's satisfaction that class imbalance is not widened by lowered magic, and in fact have made absolutely no statement other than complain about how you don't like how others are critical of your arguments.

3.5 was designed around a Christmas tree. It doesn't matter if you don't like it, because that is a fact. The DMG says so, the MIC says so, and so does the experience of just almost every member of this forum arguing in this thread. It further is the experience of just about everyone who has compared the mechanical abilities and weaknesses of the various classes with a critical eye.

So really, if you don't like the Christmas tree, you have a few options:
Pretend 3.5 doesn't need it, and play a game that has even greater design issues than 3.5 would normally. You may enjoy the game, may either ignore, not notice, or not care about the design problems, but they will not go away.
Change 3.5 to something more your liking. This will take enormous amounts of effort if you don't want to end up with the same problems as #1.
Play a different system that was designed for lower magic.

Those are the only realistic options. You don't have to care about the problems with #1, but the problems are there. So far, nothing you have said has convinced me otherwise, because you have said nothing but assert otherwise, and provide the above failed examples.

Lycar

2011-06-15, 04:03 PM

Only if by "opportunity cost" you mean the opportunity cost for the time out of game that you spend figuring out what items you can create at which levels and what spells you need to get the goodies. Giving crafters the chance to double their effective WBL makes the stronger item creation feats brutally optimized. And of course, there is nothing preventing a PC from paying an NPC to contribute a common crafting feat, supplying the spell and XP himself, and thereby crafting almost any item.
Ugh no! Crafting does NOT allow people to double their WBL! :smallsigh:

Every item the PCs possess counts against their assumed WBL with the full value obviously. Otherwise, the GP values of items would be completely useless for measuring the approximate power of the PCS bling.

If method of acquisition suddenly somehow matters, how could you justify loot being part of WBL? They didn't pay a dime for that stuff apart from any consumables they may have used up during the fight where they got it.

Having Crafting feats means that you are no longer dependent on random loot rolls/Ye Olde Magic Shoppe.

You can, for example, trade in that Battleaxe +1 (for half price) and craft a Longsword +1 instead (costing half price up front in material) or customize your gear load out.

But you can NOT double your WBL!

averagejoe

2011-06-15, 04:10 PM

Probably because it is hard to make an encounter that is equally challenging when there is a wide disparity in combat ability which professed to be made worse without magic times bridging the gap.

:smallconfused: But there's still a fairly significant power disparity between the item-festooned no-ACF fighter 13 and wizard 13, isn't there? It seems more likely that this is a metagame issue that will pop up at any magic level if it pops up at all. I mean, I've seen 13 wizards outdo 20 fighters, both WBL appropriate. If seven levels and 650,000 gp don't make up the difference, I'm not sure why WBL is such an essential balance point.

Veyr

2011-06-15, 04:13 PM

:smallconfused: But there's still a fairly significant power disparity between the item-festooned no-ACF fighter 13 and wizard 13, isn't there? It seems more likely that this is a metagame issue that will pop up at any magic level if it pops up at all. I mean, I've seen 13 wizards outdo 20 fighters, both WBL appropriate. If seven levels and 650,000 gp don't make up the difference, I'm not sure why WBL is such an essential balance point.
Just because WBL as-is is not enough does not mean that it's safe to reduce it even more.

olentu

2011-06-15, 04:22 PM

Ugh no! Crafting does NOT allow people to double their WBL! :smallsigh:

Every item the PCs possess counts against their assumed WBL with the full value obviously. Otherwise, the GP values of items would be completely useless for measuring the approximate power of the PCS bling.

If method of acquisition suddenly somehow matters, how could you justify loot being part of WBL? They didn't pay a dime for that stuff apart from any consumables they may have used up during the fight where they got it.

Having Crafting feats means that you are no longer dependent on random loot rolls/Ye Olde Magic Shoppe.

You can, for example, trade in that Battleaxe +1 (for half price) and craft a Longsword +1 instead (costing half price up front in material) or customize your gear load out.

But you can NOT double your WBL!

Hmm why would someone enforce wealth by level above and not below.

:smallconfused: But there's still a fairly significant power disparity between the item-festooned no-ACF fighter 13 and wizard 13, isn't there? It seems more likely that this is a metagame issue that will pop up at any magic level if it pops up at all. I mean, I've seen 13 wizards outdo 20 fighters, both WBL appropriate. If seven levels and 650,000 gp don't make up the difference, I'm not sure why WBL is such an essential balance point.

Oh there is a power disparity but presumably it gets worse without the additional customization provided by magic items.

averagejoe

2011-06-15, 04:29 PM

Just because WBL as-is is not enough does not mean that it's safe to reduce it even more.

Why? Somewhat less inadequate is still inadequate. Balance is, in 3.5, reputed to be horrible, so horrible that balance is a serious metagame concern at any magic level of the game. It's something you talk to your players about, helping some be more optimal, asking others to be less optimal, having your players agree upon an optimization level, or outright restricting certain options. Such things are endlessly talked about in the standard game of D&D. Why are such things suddenly unviable if you give out fewer magic items?

Doug Lampert

2011-06-15, 04:40 PM

Hmm why would someone enforce wealth by level above and not below.

Why would someone enforce WBL period? As has been pointed out, it's roughly what you get on average if you FOLLOW THE RULES on random treasure distribution and make the expected level of consumables usage. WBL is self enforcing unless the dice are particularly kind or cruel. You need to watch slightly for a really good set of rolls putting the party way ahead or a really bad set of rolls putting them way behind, but broadly it works out with no work by the DM.

If you sell items and use the money to buy items you fall behind on WBL since you only get half price on sold items. Crafting lets you customize your items and stay more or less even with expected WBL. It doesn't double your WBL, but it can approximately double the value of your usable level appropriate gear and doubling WBL is a reasonable shorthand for that.

DougL

Dusk Eclipse

2011-06-15, 04:45 PM

Ugh no! Crafting does NOT allow people to double their WBL! :smallsigh:

Every item the PCs possess counts against their assumed WBL with the full value obviously. Otherwise, the GP values of items would be completely useless for measuring the approximate power of the PCS bling.

If method of acquisition suddenly somehow matters, how could you justify loot being part of WBL? They didn't pay a dime for that stuff apart from any consumables they may have used up during the fight where they got it.

Having Crafting feats means that you are no longer dependent on random loot rolls/Ye Olde Magic Shoppe.

You can, for example, trade in that Battleaxe +1 (for half price) and craft a Longsword +1 instead (costing half price up front in material) or customize your gear load out.

But you can NOT double your WBL!

Perhaps doubling WBL is a misnomer; with a little bit of crafting optimization (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=7274.0) you can reduce the price of crafting items, that your WBL will effectively be worth double or even triple.

olentu

2011-06-15, 04:56 PM

Why would someone enforce WBL period? As has been pointed out, it's roughly what you get on average if you FOLLOW THE RULES on random treasure distribution and make the expected level of consumables usage. WBL is self enforcing unless the dice are particularly kind or cruel. You need to watch slightly for a really good set of rolls putting the party way ahead or a really bad set of rolls putting them way behind, but broadly it works out with no work by the DM.

If you sell items and use the money to buy items you fall behind on WBL since you only get half price on sold items. Crafting lets you customize your items and stay more or less even with expected WBL. It doesn't double your WBL, but it can approximately double the value of your usable level appropriate gear and doubling WBL is a reasonable shorthand for that.

DougL

Eh I suppose it would vary from person to person but still the explanation of above and not below is of interest.

JonestheSpy

2011-06-15, 05:10 PM

Veyr, you are obviously unbreakably attached to the idea that the game must revolve around Tons of Stuff and that Wizards Always Win No Matter What. At this point I don't imagine that any amount of reasoned argument could ever change your mind, but I can't help responding for the sake of the wider discussion and anyone else bothering to read this topic.

Two spells per level, or four spells per level with Collegiate, are more than enough to break the game in half.

Well gee, maybe in a low magic campaign the DM might have half the brain required to not allow splatbook cheese like Collegiate. Otherwise, yes, there is in fact a vast difference between "2 spells per level" vs "All the spells you feel like buying according to the ridiculously underpriced guidelines in the SRD". More is, in fact, more.

Spells can do everything!

Sure, wizards can do quite a lot. But they can't do everything, all the time, every encounter - especially if they're not loaded up with wands and scrolls to compensate for spells they didn't memorize. Anyway, lots of the things you mention aren't the Win Buttons you seem to think they are. Dungeons have ceilings, there's lots of tricks to use against invisibility, and a good Gather Information skill can garner tons more data than a few questions where the answers are limited to one word within the deity's likely knowledge - who do you think knows more about what's happening in The City of Greyhawk's underworld, the Thieves' Guild or Pelor?

The lack of healing items still does not make healing in-combat worthwhile. Etc, etc

Wow, that so misses the point I can't help but think you're trying to change the subject. Whether in combat or not, if there's no magic items doing the healing, someone better be or it's going to be a very short campaign.

The restrictions on Slow Fall are laughable. The odds of it being useful — no matter what alternatives do or do not exist — are slim to none. I'd be shocked if it saw use more than once or twice in an entire campaign.

Well golly gee wilikers, I guess you've never played in a campaign involving pit traps, cliffs, or jumping off of roofs and other assorted high places. Clearly, that must mean no one else does either, right?

Edit: Oh, and as I've said, low magic doesn't mean no magic. Players can still get goodies, but the DM has control over what can be given out while still keeping the game in balance. The party can find, for instance, a +3 Sword and a +3 Ring of Protection (same gp value, btw). The fighter gets the sword, the wizard gets the ring - the difference is the wizard doesn't get to say "I don't care about the AC bonus, I'm going to trade this in for 18k worth of scrolls of whatever spells I want instead".

Change 3.5 to something more your liking. This will take enormous amounts of effort some work but not significantly more than building any other campaign setting from the ground up

Fixed that for you.

a_humble_lich

2011-06-15, 05:34 PM

Fixed that for you.

To refer to your "quote", I strongly agree. I ran a successful low magic game with Oriental Adventures back in 3.0 without much problems and little additional work. All I did was tell the players, "there's not much magic, so don't play Wu-jen or Shugenja." Then I made sure that nearly all of the encounters they had were with Samurai and Ninja who also had little spell casting abilities.

I think one of the great things about D&D is that is a fairly generic fantasy system, and it can be used and adapted in all sorts of settings. I think it would be a horrible shame if that flexibility were taken away.

Edit: has anyone else ever noticed how hard it is to spell Shugenja?

Frozen_Feet

2011-06-15, 05:36 PM

Hoookay. One thing that isn't given enough weight here:

D&D 3.5 is an amazingly broad system. It has more non-magical content than several other, complete game system. Several times more.

Any game of 3.5 will only use a tiny fraction of all content made for the system. It's not just possible, but easy to cherry-pick elements to suit your own campaign setting or adventure. You'd be doing it anyway in a perfectly "normal", high-magic game, now you're just picking slightly different elements.

Also, the argument that reducing access to magical items makes PCs incapable to deal with magical threats is ridiculous. That "problem" is adressed right there at the premise. Low magic doesn't just mean the players have less magic, it means the whole setting has less magic. So those flying, incorporeal, invisible creatures? They're not going to be there.

And guess what? That single shadow or single dragon being a near-insurmountable threat keeping whole towns in terror? Perfectly setting-appropriate. Indeed, that feel is what many low magic games are after in the first place.

D&D is not a complete game - it's a system. As such, it relies on DM judgement calls to make a working adventure. These judgement calls can, and more often than not, do over-write or overrule parts of RAW or original design intent. If this causes some flaws of the system as a whole (since only part of it is in use) not to emerge, then those flaws are irrelevant for that particular game.

(Finally, Divination and Teleportation magic does not automatically lead to a magic mart. Just because a nuke might exist somewhere, doesn't mean it necessarily does or is for sale. And if the players have to spend days or weeks hunting down a particular artefact they need, then it's no longer magic mart, it's an adventure.)

KoboldCleric

2011-06-15, 05:39 PM

Probably because it is hard to make an encounter that is equally challenging when there is a wide disparity in combat ability which professed to be made worse without magic times bridging the gap.

Is your group willing to prevent this "power gap", but not able? Then you have not recognized such a gap exists. Is your group able, but not willing? Then the power gap is merely a symptom of your real problem. Are you both able and willing? Then whence cometh the "gap"? Are you neither able nor willing? Then why complain?

Seriously though, this seems more a problem to do with the people playing than the game itself. No game is perfect; to expect such is folly. It's up to the players to recognize the game is designed as a medium for collective storytelling, not as a contest, magic or lack thereof notwithstanding.

JonestheSpy

2011-06-15, 05:50 PM

Any game of 3.5 will only use a tiny fraction of all content made for the system. It's not just possible, but easy to cherry-pick elements to suit your own campaign setting or adventure. You'd be doing it anyway in a perfectly "normal", high-magic game, now you're just picking slightly different elements.

...

And guess what? That single shadow or single dragon being a near-insurmountable threat keeping whole towns in terror? Perfectly setting-appropriate. Indeed, that feel is what many low magic games are after in the first place.

Very well said sir. The whole post, but those two points especially.

pwykersotz

2011-06-15, 06:03 PM

So...

This turned into a very different thread than I intended, but a very informative one. Thanks to all of you who have been posting, or who will continue to post.

Some further clarifications from my original post and its followup:

1) The Epic NPC's have a series of organizations set up that prevent too much "interference" in the 1-20 portions of the world. They have their own continent to themselves and also tend to colonize the various planes. The other seven continents I have are pretty much 1-20. Not to say the epics don't wander, but they have their own kind of Prime Directive.

2) There is no Magic-Mart. Most magical items that people create are with their own xp and they keep them, thank you very much. There is some opportunity to loot the shinies though, and since the characters are also part of an organization, they sometimes get rewards for great deeds. Hence, I keep the WBL.

3) In a few levels, the group will start getting to some of the heavy hitting magic foes. Until then, I'd like them to investigate disappearances or tangle with Orc Barbarians, or deliver resources. I'm not referring to anything that becomes the basis of a campaign, or even something that lasts multiple sessions. I was fishing for ideas for quick adventures that don't rely on magic, that are still tough for characters with some power to them, and that still let them feel like heroes.

JonestheSpy

2011-06-15, 06:18 PM

Oh, wait, the original topic? Wow, there's a concept. Some comments:

1) Sounds like most of the serious conflicts in the world will occur in the unclaimed areas, with the various powers trying to be the one to claim the best lands for colonization.

2) Lack of Magic Marts gives a great opportunity to control the power level of the players vis-vis other players, since they're likely to keep and use everything they find. Weighting the items towards the less powerful characters goes a long way toward balancing the party.

3) Thieves' Guilds make great non-magical opponents. They're as powerful as you want them to be, and the sneakiness and trickery tends to annoy players tremendously, so that it's that much more satisfying to finally take them down.

SuperFerret

2011-06-15, 06:28 PM

Just a question: How much of WBL is assumed to be magical items to the folks here?

pwykersotz

2011-06-15, 06:30 PM

I likey the Thieves Guild idea. Also, a long overdue shoutout to JKTrickster. Tucker's Kobolds definitely count.

olentu

2011-06-15, 06:42 PM

Is your group willing to prevent this "power gap", but not able? Then you have not recognized such a gap exists. Is your group able, but not willing? Then the power gap is merely a symptom of your real problem. Are you both able and willing? Then whence cometh the "gap"? Are you neither able nor willing? Then why complain?

Seriously though, this seems more a problem to do with the people playing than the game itself. No game is perfect; to expect such is folly. It's up to the players to recognize the game is designed as a medium for collective storytelling, not as a contest, magic or lack thereof notwithstanding.

Ok so if we look at the post to which I was responding the person says they are confused by the sentiment since one already needs to account for the power gap to some degree already.

Now look at the post to which they are responding which seems to be saying that making the game low wealth exacerbates the power gap making the game "harder to play and harder to run".

So the question in the post to which I am responding seems to be why is the game harder to play and harder to run. My answer is that the probable reason for saying that the game is harder to play and harder to run is that while there is already a power gap that needs to be addressed making that gap bigger makes it harder to deal with because it is bigger.

Leon

2011-06-16, 08:08 AM

I'll ask once more for you to stop insulting everyone who disagrees with you. It's unseemly.

Well Unless more show up to join in a chorus - its only you who has issue with it and i really don't care.
Yes i disagree with you and i disagree with the often used methods of the rest of the boards inhabitants hence why i oft have these pointless arguments - you are steadfastly adamant that your correct and wont back down to any less a point than that what you believe is correct (whether is is or not).

The other points i can't be bothered with now - you are way way to stuck in your spot to ever accept anything else as possibly valid.

To the OP - yes, Low/No magic works, is not really as hard as people try and make it out to be. Just give some though to how your game is going to work (advice that works for any game no matter the system or is magic content) and what your expectations of it will be.

In fact it's probably easier with less magical options to run a game than it is is to have to balance High magic and the possibilities that can be done with it.

Shadowknight12

2011-06-16, 08:24 AM

Well Unless more show up to join in a chorus - its only you who has issue with it and i really don't care.

I have no more to say on the conversation itself, but I do agree with Veyr's point. Instead of swaying me to your point of view with your argument, you present yourself in such a way that I'm inclined to disregard everything you say due to the ad hominem attacks.

thompur

2011-06-16, 09:15 AM

To answer the OP, YES, I can say from personal experience as a player and DM, that, on a scale of 1 to 10, one being impossible, and ten being absolute metephysical certitude, the possibility of a low magic game can be fun is...9.99873. That it will be fun is entirely up to the group. Obviously, for some on this thread, apparently no matter how good the DM is, no matter how good the other players are in adjusting to the setting, low magic will ruin their enjoyment. As my Aunt Petunia used to say: De gustubus non disputandem est...or something like that, I don't speak draconic. ;-)

Ceaon

2011-06-16, 09:25 AM

you are way way to stuck in your spot to ever accept anything else as possibly valid.

I feel this also might apply to you, then. I too disagree with you. I think low-magic is certainly possible and quite fun in 3.5. But I also feel the system's default setting is high-magic, and changing from the default brings certain problems, that you will need to identify and work with either before or after they come up.

That being said, if a DM is flexible and knows what he's doing and what the system is capable of, a low-magic 3.5 game is possible.

KoboldCleric

2011-06-16, 09:30 AM

olentu

2011-06-16, 05:00 PM

Sorry Olentu, when I posted that I hadn't realised it would seem like an attack on you (singular). I was using you in the plural, general sense there; your (personal) post merely happened to be the most recent in a long line of posts to reference such a "power gap". That is, the point was to point out that I don't really understand all of the (in general) fuss about this "power gap" and the difficulties it presents for the reasons I exponded above, not that you or any other person in particular was complaining or doing something wrong. So, sorry once again :(

Oh it is no problem I don't really take things personally. I only responded in the way I did because well your post did not really seem to be a direct reply to mine (which it apparently was not) and I felt the need to clarify in case I had unintentionally caused a misunderstanding.

Big Fau

2011-06-16, 05:23 PM

Just a question: How much of WBL is assumed to be magical items to the folks here?

Depends on the class. I've built Wizards that spend about 300k on magic items, then blows the rest on his spellbook (this was without Geometer or a BBB), but some of the noncasters I've built can burn through 600k like oil in a furnace.

Basically, it breaks down to this:

100,000 for Armor (+1 with +9 in special abilities, not counting miscellaneous add ons that don't have a + value or the price of special materials/base armor).
200,000 on the Weapon (+1/+9 again, not counting add ons without a + value or special materials).
137,500 for a Tome or Manual for +5 to one score (or multiple +4s if you are MAD, which is somewhat cheaper).
36,000 per Stat Booster (absolutely required), or 200,000 for a Belt of Magnificence +6 (cheaper than all 6 items put together).
10,000-50,000 on Flight if not all ready available or if Dragonborn/Raptorian isn't a option.
8,500 on Healing
50,000 on random trinkets (I like being prepared, so I usually end up spending the rest of my WBL on both Mundane and Magical trinkets like Feather Tokens and Marbles).

Some of this can be obviated if there's a dedicated buffer in the party (a War Weaver or Artificer makes for one hell of a coupon).

a_humble_lich

2011-06-16, 06:01 PM

Depends on the class. I've built Wizards that spend about 300k on magic items, then blows the rest on his spellbook (this was without Geometer or a BBB), but some of the noncasters I've built can burn through 600k like oil in a furnace.

Basically, it breaks down to this:

100,000 for Armor (+1 with +9 in special abilities, not counting miscellaneous add ons that don't have a + value or the price of special materials/base armor).
200,000 on the Weapon (+1/+9 again, not counting add ons without a + value or special materials).
137,500 for a Tome or Manual for +5 to one score (or multiple +4s if you are MAD, which is somewhat cheaper).
36,000 per Stat Booster (absolutely required), or 200,000 for a Belt of Magnificence +6 (cheaper than all 6 items put together).
10,000-50,000 on Flight if not all ready available or if Dragonborn/Raptorian isn't a option.
8,500 on Healing
50,000 on random trinkets (I like being prepared, so I usually end up spending the rest of my WBL on both Mundane and Magical trinkets like Feather Tokens and Marbles).

Some of this can be obviated if there's a dedicated buffer in the party (a War Weaver or Artificer makes for one hell of a coupon).

What I dislike about this is that out of 760,000 gp, only about 50,000 gp are spent on interesting items (i.e. the "random" trinkets) the rest of the wealth is spent on just making numbers bigger. This is not a criticism of you, I would spend about the same, but of the 3.5 system. A Belt of Giant Strength is no longer a powerful item that sets you apart from other warriors, but it is now necessary gear, an item tax if you will. This means interesting magic items that let you do something interesting (Cloak of Arachnid, Orb of Storms, Apparatus of Kawalish (sp?)) don't get used because you need the tome +5 instead.

SuperFerret

2011-06-16, 06:05 PM

Depends on the class. I've built Wizards that spend about 300k on magic items, then blows the rest on his spellbook (this was without Geometer or a BBB), but some of the noncasters I've built can burn through 600k like oil in a furnace.

Basically, it breaks down to this:

100,000 for Armor (+1 with +9 in special abilities, not counting miscellaneous add ons that don't have a + value or the price of special materials/base armor).
200,000 on the Weapon (+1/+9 again, not counting add ons without a + value or special materials).
137,500 for a Tome or Manual for +5 to one score (or multiple +4s if you are MAD, which is somewhat cheaper).
36,000 per Stat Booster (absolutely required), or 200,000 for a Belt of Magnificence +6 (cheaper than all 6 items put together).
10,000-50,000 on Flight if not all ready available or if Dragonborn/Raptorian isn't a option.
8,500 on Healing
50,000 on random trinkets (I like being prepared, so I usually end up spending the rest of my WBL on both Mundane and Magical trinkets like Feather Tokens and Marbles).

Some of this can be obviated if there's a dedicated buffer in the party (a War Weaver or Artificer makes for one hell of a coupon).

I was thinking percentage wise, but I can figure this out. I ask because I'm starting a new campaign and I've never been a fan of the magic shop idea, so I was wondering what the expected treasure handouts were.

Big Fau

2011-06-16, 06:11 PM

What I dislike about this is that out of 760,000 gp, only about 50,000 gp are spent on interesting items (i.e. the "random" trinkets) the rest of the wealth is spent on just making numbers bigger. This is not a criticism of you, I would spend about the same, but of the 3.5 system. A Belt of Giant Strength is no longer a powerful item that sets you apart from other warriors, but it is now necessary gear, an item tax if you will. This means interesting magic items that let you do something interesting (Cloak of Arachnid, Orb of Storms, Apparatus of Kawalish (sp?)) don't get used because you need the tome +5 instead.

Stat pumping is a huge flaw in the system, I agree. If they did things other than provide higher numbers, I wouldn't have much of a problem with it (a Headband of Intellect providing some Psionic Powers, ala Mental Pinnacle, for example).