Caster in a world with little magic help

[Belzyk]

So one of my players wants to be a caster. We are in a world where most of the inhabitants have abandoned magic. Arcane is taboo and evil to them. And there are only about 30 clerics in the world. It's a wasteland style world. The player is trying to decide on what type of caster would work best. He dosent want to be a mainline caster like a wizard or cleric. He wants to be something that has weaker magics.

Side thing. Would cutting out all 7+ level spells work for a low magic game? Even from monsters and stuff like just completly removing all spell like abilities and all that that is 7th level or higher?

[Kobold Esq]

You need to decide up front if this is a rule you're establishing or just guidance for the character. There is a difference between saying, "If you play a wizard then everyone will hate you" and saying "there are no 7+ level spells in this game."

I'd recommend either something like a Beguiler or a multiclass combo so that he can appear to be something else and dilute his casting a bit. A fighter/cleric is basically a less casty cleric who can use all martial weapons and has more combat skills. A ranger/druid is a better caster than a ranger, but less than a full druid. You may wish to waive multiclass XP penalties if you encourage him to go this route.

As an aside, I hope you factor in how the lack of powerful magics will change the dynamics of play at higher levels. Many higher CR baddies expect the party to have access to certain powers/gear.

[Belzyk]

You need to decide up front if this is a rule you're establishing or just guidance for the character. There is a difference between saying, "If you play a wizard then everyone will hate you" and saying "there are no 7+ level spells in this game."

I'd recommend either something like a Beguiler or a multiclass combo so that he can appear to be something else and dilute his casting a bit. A fighter/cleric is basically a less casty cleric who can use all martial weapons and has more combat skills. A ranger/druid is a better caster than a ranger, but less than a full druid. You may wish to waive multiclass XP penalties if you encourage him to go this route.

As an aside, I hope you factor in how the lack of powerful magics will change the dynamics of play at higher levels. Many higher CR baddies expect the party to have access to certain powers/gear.

I haven't cut out any magic I'm just thinking how well it would work. Also yes arcane magic is hated that is established lol. And magic items and stuff are still avaliable. Also many of the higher level enemies they will face are nonmagical I think dragons are the most magical thing in my world and the oldest dragon is mabye old age at best. And that's reallly old dragons. There are a few chimera and things like that but they are very very rare.

[Elkad]

I think chopping off all the Tier1&2 casters (anything with access to L7+ spells) from player access is reasonably common. And no, it won't break your game. Mind Blank might be super-rare (maybe just ONE of those clerics has the Protection Domain and is 15th level), but you can duplicate most of it with Protection from Evil plus NonDetection. You just have to be a bit more careful whenever your players get to L15ish.

And as a bonus, when you give out a Ring of (X=number of party members) Wishes, it'll be astoundingly valuable to your players.

There are a bunch of partial caster choices still. Bard, Paladin, Duskblade, Ranger... Pathfinder has scads of partial casters, feel free to steal classes from there as well. Magus, et al.
Obviously with no Arcane tradition, finding spells for your book on a Wizard would be very difficult. But a Warlock or Sorcerer just gets his powers handed to him, so that works fine mechanically.

I'd happily play a standard wizard in your game. Hiding what I am - including hiding my batcave laboratory where I do my secret spell research because I can't just buy scrolls in town - and spinning a web of lies as to what kind of Divine caster I really am.
Even knowing I'd never get spells higher than 6th.

[Belzyk]

I think chopping off all the Tier1&2 casters (anything with access to L7+ spells) from player access is reasonably common. And no, it won't break your game. Mind Blank might be super-rare (maybe just ONE of those clerics has the Protection Domain and is 15th level), but you can duplicate most of it with Protection from Evil plus NonDetection. You just have to be a bit more careful whenever your players get to L15ish.

And as a bonus, when you give out a Ring of (X=number of party members) Wishes, it'll be astoundingly valuable to your players.

There are a bunch of partial caster choices still. Bard, Paladin, Duskblade, Ranger... Pathfinder has scads of partial casters, feel free to steal classes from there as well. Magus, et al.
Obviously with no Arcane tradition, finding spells for your book on a Wizard would be very difficult. But a Warlock or Sorcerer just gets his powers handed to him, so that works fine mechanically.

I'd happily play a standard wizard in your game. Hiding what I am - including hiding my batcave laboratory where I do my secret spell research because I can't just buy scrolls in town - and spinning a web of lies as to what kind of Divine caster I really am.
Even knowing I'd never get spells higher than 6th.

Lol yeah spells for wizards would be unreal rare. Unless they made the spell theirself. I mean I'm sure there are ancient tomes somewheres in the wastelands or desert but it's prolly very very well protected or just very hard to get to

[Crake]

If you want a low magic world, have you thought about E6?

[Elkad]

Lol yeah spells for wizards would be unreal rare. Unless they made the spell theirself. I mean I'm sure there are ancient tomes somewheres in the wastelands or desert but it's prolly very very well protected or just very hard to get to

I've played similar before (1st edition). I started the game with spells right off the random table in the DMG, and did rather poorly. Read Magic of course, rolled Sleep but failed the Knowledge check, got Burning Hands on the reroll, and the Defensive and Misc rolls were completely terrible. Affect Normal Fires and Write, or something similar.

No free spells on levelup, I had to find/research everything. I remember from 5th to midway through 8th level I had Water Breathing as my sole 3rd level spell, and no 4th level spells at all, so I just had to fill slots with lower level stuff.

Doesn't matter. I just spammed Continual Light out of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th level slots until I could do some research. Save or be permanently (until dispelled anyway) blind worked well enough.

[ATHATH]

If you want a low magic world, have you thought about E6?
Seconding this.

Relevant: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?325933-Easy-Bake-Wizard-Handbook&p=16808225

[Sagetim]

So one of my players wants to be a caster. We are in a world where most of the inhabitants have abandoned magic. Arcane is taboo and evil to them. And there are only about 30 clerics in the world. It's a wasteland style world. The player is trying to decide on what type of caster would work best. He dosent want to be a mainline caster like a wizard or cleric. He wants to be something that has weaker magics.

Side thing. Would cutting out all 7+ level spells work for a low magic game? Even from monsters and stuff like just completly removing all spell like abilities and all that that is 7th level or higher?

That sounds a lot like the Darksun campaign setting, which has traditionally been the setting for psionics. Just thought I would point that out.

There are lots of casters and caster types that Can work in a 3.5 game, but their effectiveness will vary based on what kinds of enemies are encountered. Wizards tend to be able to solve most problems if they can prepare in advance and make the most of having a large number of potential spells known (this seems unlikely, given your setting). Sorcerers operate off the same list, but the system rather hates them and gives them a very limited number of spells known, no bonus feats, etc. And for some reason bluff isn't a class skill for them.

The player has already expressed a disinterest in cleric, but a Druid might be interesting to play in a wasteland setting. Possibly with the goal of helping nature to recover, grow, etc.

Favored Soul seems rather out. If there's only 30 clerics left in the setting, the gods are probably too busy trying to hold onto what few followers they have left to risk any of them by making them Favored Souls and sending them on missions.

From the Tome of Magic: Shadow Casters are kind of meh, but could probably use the whole 'can control the shadows around you' thing to make people leave them alone out of fear. Binders are traditionally witch hunted in the fluff anyway, but have such a low bar for entry that you could revolutionize a world with Binder techniques pretty easily. Meanwhile Truenamers might well be sitting pretty in this setting. While they're still going to have to get their hands on magic items to boost their Truespeaking checks at higher levels just to keep up, being able to word of nurture a variety of npcs regularly, among other things, seems like a fairly decent way to engender good will with others.

On that note, spells like Goodberry and Create Food and Water are probably going to be pretty helpful in a wasteland type setting.

Beguilers and Bards have more than just spells going on for them, being able to pose as more mundane problem solvers, knowers of things, and/or entertainers. Bards even get some healing spells, which, given the lack of clerics, would be pretty in demand when people are sick and injured.

Dread Necromancer would probably be asking for trouble. While you would have class abilities to support terrifying people into not messing with you, it still seems like the kind of class that just gets turned away at the gates to a town.

Warlock can be built a few different ways, but the most important part is that they actually have invocations that can help you bluff your way around sticky questions like 'are you an arcanist?' or 'he's a witch!'. As long as the party is cool with the whole eldritch blast thing, then it just becomes a matter of not doing it in front of regular people and maybe posing as a rich person (or some kind of noble). "What? Me? Fight? How Droll." Meanwhile Invocations can be used behind the scenes to get things done. Given the lack of casters in the setting, you could probably even get away with using things like The Dead Walk, as long as you don't make it permanent, then you can potentially bluff people into questioning if they even saw what they thought they saw, or if that was the stress and their imagination running wild.

Shugenja probably sits in the same category as Wu Jen, in that they likely don't fit the setting. That said, Shugenja could be a pretty solid class for casting divine spells, even if you want to avoid the whole 'gods' thing that clerics do. They spells known and per day similar to a sorcerer (more known total), but have to pick an element (which locks out the opposing element from being learned), but still leaves you with 3 elements to work with from Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Heart. Picking Earth or Wind lets you still net things like Fireball from fire, or cure spells from Water (I think they even have Create Food and Water in Water spells).

There's also Psionics, which might just not be in the setting at all. But I feel it's worth an honorable mention, since none of the psionic classes rely on outside sources (read a book, pray to a god, draw power from nature, etc). It's all self sourced mental energy (Except the Divine Mind, but that class sucks for other reasons).




Worth pointing out is that a setting without a lot of clerics or other casters with things like Remove Disease, Lesser Restoration, and Cure spells is likely to be much more at the mercy of mundane issues like a lack of sanitation causing widespread sickness and disease. And the whole 'wounds going septic' thing. In fact, if you can get your eyes on it, the Thieves' World Campaign Setting book has a section for putting emphasis on why it's a bad idea to slog through raw sewage, and worse with open wounds.

Also, depending on if the setting is just crap* (like, it's always been a Wasteland) or if it's Post Apocalyptic (people remember a time before the Wasteland/tell stories of it) could really heavily shift npc attitudes and the impact of player actions. If the setting has always been a wasteland, then there's bound to be people who are staunchly anti-change, and will be upset if the players do things (even helpful things) that change stuff (like reclaiming wasteland by turning it into fertile land). Whereas, if the setting is a Post Apocalypse, then reclaiming wasteland would probably have a positive impact on the npcs, who would probably hold opinions more in line with 'oh, you're changing things Back to how they were when everything didn't suck out loud. Carry on.'

*I don't mean a badly built setting, I mean a place that's always been crap to live in.

7th level and higher spells or not: I've been in a long running game where we had to fight a zombie apocalypse in a setting where 'magic was dying'. This meant that the GM told us outright at level 3 (the starting character level) 'no casters that get 9th level spells', and proceeded to tell us that there are no spells higher than 4th level available as scrolls or anything else, all spells of that level and higher are the purview of individuals that have researched them and they aren't prone to sharing or selling on the open market.

This caused a number of problems, but eventually we did get one full caster in the group, an Archivist (as opposed to a cleric, which the gm said 'turn is too powerful in this campaign, no clerics'). To cut a long story short, the main problem with a low or no magic game tends to be the lack of healing and problem solving ability.

Now, if you have 6th level spells, that means Heal is on the table and that's wonderful. But if you don't have 7th level spells, then it means that the party has to be really on the ball about getting people raised from the dead promptly, or a death becomes character retirement instead of an occupational hazard.

But one of the problems that you're going to run into with locking out higher level spells is that sometimes, you're going to want to use higher level spells as part of the story. With the option existing for players to use their class abilities to circumvent or overcome those spells because they can. For example, in that same game we wound up in a situation where we needed stone to flesh. None of us could cast it. The GM had built the situation in mind with us being able to cast the spell that none of us had, to solve the problem and move on. So, as long as you remain aware that there are spells you might be taking for granted in those higher echelons of power, you should be okay.

If you want to nix 7th+ level spells, I would suggest leaving the spell slots in place on the classes that get them, as they can be used for lower level spells and metamagic and so on. For classes with a limited list of spells known, you might want to let them keep learning more spells of lower level instead. That's assuming that you don't change your mind by the time the party gets to that level.

As opposed to outright banning 7th level and up spells from the game, you could go the same route that my gm in the aforementioned game did (that is, higher level spells are the purview of those individuals, and aren't generally on the open market'). Not the whole 'no full casters for you' part. That was a bad idea for dnd 3.5. This route would make it possible for players to get higher level spells, but would also emphasize that what the players have available to them is special and limited, rather than to be taken for granted.

[AnimeTheCat]

Low/no magic campaign settings work just fine as long as you, as the DM, are willing to put in the work to ensure that anything with a magical property (low magic) or extraordinary property (no magic) doesn't radically outpace anything else. You'll need to meticulously tailor encounters since most cookie cutter things above encounter level 6 are going to have some sort of magical property, be it DR -/Magic, Spell-like abilities, Supernatural Abilities, etc. Magic is an integral part of D&D progression. That being said, if you put in the time and effort to create mundane opposition at varying levels of difficulty with feats, skills, etc. and you don't give or use any magic as the DM, having low/no magic in your game doesn't affect anything.

If you aren't using high level magic and it simply isn't present in your world (in any shape, form, or fashion including monsters) all of the other characters will be fine. If potions are still available, healing isn't even really a big issue either.

I know that many at the playground say that the low/no magic settings are impossible, no fun, or otherwise bad, but if you take the time to build your world from scratch without the presence of magic or with very little magical influence (and in doing so not include magical monsters), you don't need to limit spellcasters in any way, you don't need to rewrite any systems, and you don't have to homebrew anything except the rules at your table (example - no full casters in a no magic world).

You may want to limit what spells are available and approve/disapprove them on a case-by-case basis if you think it will be a problem but if you explain to most people that the world has limited magic they will likely fly the spells by you in the first place.