Low magic or E6

[liquidformat]

So from everyone's experience what do you enjoy more, customizing standard 3.5/3.x/3.P to be low magic or E6? In the end they have similar goal in reducing the power of tier 1 and 2 classes but go about it in different ways. So share your thoughts and stories!

[EdokTheTwitch]

I'd say, E6 all the way.

Firstly, it resolves the issue of OP T1s and T2s with no extra work, at least at most tables. Level 6 has always felt like a great sweet-spot, as the fighters are just tanky enough, the armor is just useful enough to matter, and the spells are just powerful enough to swing a battle.

Secondly, it provides an interesting shift in gameplay. Extra feats force players to branch out instead of hyper-focusing, which creates characters that feel more like adventurers, who pick up needed skills along the way. Of course, this is not everyone's cup of tea, but I personally love the approach.

Thirdly, most epic monsters remain epic. Manticores, dragons, treants, and even some of the larger animals still pose a threat to the heroes, pushing for that feeling of a dangerous, witcher-like world, instead of a demigod playground (Again, some people enjoy that too).

Fourthly, less bookkeeping. This one is simple, as lower levels restrict the number of options the players will have (even with feats), and allows them to focus more on the game itself.

And finally, no extra work in trying to customize the entirety of 3.P :smallbiggrin:

[TalonOfAnathrax]

E6 is significantly better than "low magic". Not only are the weaker classes especially hurt by a lack of magic items, they are also comparatively better at low levels. Therefore if your goal is to reduce intra-party balance issues, E6 is the better solution.
E6 is also a lot of fun. It rewards creativity and involvement with the setting, and it keeps a lot of "legendary" monsters properly legendary.
I've played E6 and have had lots of fun. 10/10, would recommend.

However, do note that E6 fails to make low-magic happen. "Christmas Tree Effect" is just as real in E6 as in normal games - it's just that the items involved are all significantly weaker.
IMO this is a feature, but some people think it's a bug. To each their own, I suppose, but be aware that E6 won't remove crafting from the game.

[Zancloufer]

E6 by far. Characters are forced to have a widen base of power instead of high ceiling, the disparity between casters and mundanes is at a all time low and you don't really get as much a "christmas tree" effect.

Even if you don't hard cap WBL your probably not giving out more than (effectively) +2 items, or maybe a 1-2 times a day 3rd level spell in item form. Enough magic to help in a pinch but not so much that you can solve all your problems with it.

[Vizzerdrix]

On the subject of E6, what book has the rules for it? I've always wanted to study and try it.

[Gnaeus]

E6 is player written, not from any book as far as I know.

First 6 levels are normal. Then 1 feat/level after that instead of leveling. There are a few custom feats to allow full progression characters to access a level 7 or 8 ability, like get a few level 4 spells or the like.

https://dungeons.fandom.com/wiki/E6_(3.5e_Sourcebook)/Rules#Extra_Feats

Oh, and I also prefer E6. Although you might want to clarify what you mean by “low magic”. It can mean different things. Like:
Hard ban all T1s and 2s. (This is actually ok if you adjust monsters accordingly)
No magic Marts/crafting (usually very bad for low tier characters, not awful for high tier ones)
Few/no high level caster NPCs (not as bad as above but still bad)
Some kind of caster nerf (varies by type. The best ones are OK if it’s something players are ok with. Sometimes this is a ban by a different name. The worst ones force casters to rely on their most broken powers to stay relevant.)

[D+1]

On the subject of E6, what book has the rules for it? I've always wanted to study and try it.
It came out of ENWorld forums: https://www.enworld.org/threads/e6-the-game-inside-d-d.206323/ The first post pretty much covers it but there's interesting discussion to follow in the whole thread.
Link to the PDF: http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=30010&stc=1 Which is really just a PDF of that first post in the thread. Only about 5 pages of actual rules.

Best thing about it is that really, everyone already knows how to play it if they've played 3E at all. A few spells made into feats or the like in order to fix certain conditions. A few "capstone" feats. AND THAT'S IT. Everything else it needs is already in the 3E rules. It's stunningly simple to implement.

[illyahr]

As long as you make sure that any magic item has a caster level requirement of 6 or less, E6 functions as a low-magic campaign (you know, except for monsters). I personally prefer using this over trying to hard change a full system that relies on high magic. Not only does it force players to branch out and diversify, it also forces the players to think of tactics they wouldn't normally consider as any monster with racial Hit Dice becomes more of a problem as they usually come with abilities that normally require stronger abilities to handle.

[Zancloufer]

On the subject of E6, what book has the rules for it? I've always wanted to study and try it.

There is a solid right up on the internet but a good quick rule set would be:
1) No PCs past level/HD 6.
2) Every 5k EXP past level 6 grants an extra feat. You could also include things like 2-3 skill ranks or maybe a +1 bonus (or equivalent) to a class ability (once). (IE : +1d6 sneak attack). Maybe a 1 time +1 to any stat as well. I think there might be some "Capstone" feats to consider as well, like a costly ritual to do out of combat casting of a specific 4th level spell.
3) No monster past CR 10.
4) Magic items are capped at CL 6 and ~10k in market cost. You could include items that fall between the CL7-10 range but treat them explicitly as artifacts.

I would also not hard cap WBL as it kind of breaks when the PCs stop gaining hard levels but still adventure and get "Stronger"

[HouseRules]

There is a solid right up on the internet but a good quick rule set would be:
1) No PCs past level/HD 6.
2) Every 5k EXP past level 6 grants an extra feat. You could also include things like 2-3 skill ranks or maybe a +1 bonus (or equivalent) to a class ability (once). (IE : +1d6 sneak attack). Maybe a 1 time +1 to any stat as well. I think there might be some "Capstone" feats to consider as well, like a costly ritual to do out of combat casting of a specific 4th level spell.
3) No monster past CR 10.
4) Magic items are capped at CL 6 and ~10k in market cost. You could include items that fall between the CL7-10 range but treat them explicitly as artifacts.

I would also not hard cap WBL as it kind of breaks when the PCs stop gaining hard levels but still adventure and get "Stronger"

You forgot: Every 5 feat beyond Level 6 increase your Effective Character Level by 1 until Effective Character Level 10.

[NigelWalmsley]

I'm not a huge fan of either, but in my experience trying to limit magic in full-progression D&D is simply more effort than it's worth. The game simply expects you to have a fairly large amount of magic, particularly at mid and high levels (not unreasonably, as it does factually give you that magic). If you try to excise that, you usually end up causing problems, both for the players and the DM. Generally speaking, the things people want from a "low magic" game are best served by E6 (or some other advancement-capped game variant, there's no reason you have to stop at 6 instead of 4 or 10 or whatever).

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I'm not a fan of either low-magic or E6 in general, but if I were to have to pick...well, there's no single definition of "low magic," as Gnaeus alluded to, so it would depend entirely on how exactly one set up a campaign to be "low magic."

"Low magic" generally implies one or more of "rare magic" (magic is obscure/forgotten/mysterious and most people aren't familiar with it, or it's largely inaccessible for other reasons), "limited/restricted magic" (very few people have the Gift/Talent/etc. necessary to use magic themselves, or there are social/cultural/etc. restrictions on becoming a magic-user), and "weak magic" (things cap out at low-level spells and +1 swords and such, or at least heavily skew towards the low end). Whether a given setting is higher or lower magic depends on how many of those boxes it ticks and how much that factor dominates the others.

If you're talking about the basic terrible-DM method of making a low-magic campaign, along the lines "PCs can't cast spells and have to beg for even a +1 sword at 10th level, but monsters are unchanged and the BBEG is an epic-level wizard," then E6 all the way, obviously.

A rare-magic campaign (where only the PCs, BBEG and their major minions, and perhaps a handful of neutral NPCs have notable magic; magic-using monsters exist, but are rare and tend to be the only living members of their race; magic items are rare and powerful, often are individually named, and often grow in power with their wielders; and everything else basically has no magic), along the lines of LotR or ASoIaF, can be quite fun if you're in the mood for it. It doesn't really require houseruling anything, just careful placement of treasure, because the "real" opposition of the BBEG and legendary monsters have equal levels of magic to the PCs and everything else is supposed to get stomped by the Legendary Heroes or Dastardly Villains.

A restricted-magic campaign (where magic is largely unknown and possibly scary to the common people, assuming they know or believe it exists at all; magic-users tend to be either forced to join a larger organization for survival or self-policing, or hated and hunted down by the authorities, or both; and the use of magic has more of a specific societal role than in generic D&D), along the lines of Dragonlance or various YA fantasy series, is more of an acquired taste. It gives you an opportunity to do the whole Masquerade thing like in Harry Potter, Dresden Files, various White Wolf games, and so on, and doesn't require any houseruling to work (though you can houserule some stuff if desired, like organization-specific PrCs or antimagical materials), but the campaign really has to be about that in some way (PCs are Inquisitors or fugitives hunted by the Inquisition, bad guys or monsters threaten to alert the muggles and break the Masquerade, etc.) or it adds a lot of baggage to the game and can just get in the way.

A weak-magic campaign (where magic is capped, classes are restricted, and items are inaccessible in some way, and often entire categories of magic are removed) requires a lot of work to houserule and even more to balance appropriately, and isn't something I'd trust most DMs to do well. However, if you can pull it off, it can be a refreshing change of pace. A lot of builds or character concepts or even party concepts that are weak or aren't worth playing in a standard game can become viable in this context. I'm currently running a PbP where Tome of Battle material is common and magic progressions are slowed and capped at mid levels, so the PCs and villains can get to be quite high level without breaking the world and can enjoy playing high-level initiators without being outshone by high-level casters, and the different factions can focus on combining ToB with various alternate magic systems for interesting combats when normally arcane/divine/psionics render those too weak to compete. It's not something I'd had an opportunity to play or run before, and it's certainly not the kind of campaign you can just start up in Faerûn and hope it'll work out.

Meanwhile, the main problem with E6 is that characters are fairly mechanically samey at those levels. Not necessarily because only having a few levels in base classes and maybe 1 or 2 of PrCs is limiting (though that's also true, given that most games at least top out at the mid levels) but because it's much more common to play at low levels than high levels for obvious reasons, and getting a bunch of extra feats--even special E6-specific feats--doesn't really compare to the variety of higher-level characters with multiple PrCs, high-LA races, and so on, and if I had to choose between ending the game as yet another low-level character with some extra resources facing the same old low-level challenges vs. a high-level character I hadn't had a chance to play before facing high-level challenges that I rarely see, I'll pick the latter. Having run a campaign recently that continued leveling through the mid levels as normal and allowed access to a bunch of extra feats on the side, it's really no contest; the latter allow for fleshing out fighting styles and enabling particular tricks, but it's the higher-level content that really defines and refines character concepts and playstyles.


So I suppose my preference would be that when playing with a good DM that I trust, I'd prefer whatever version of "low magic" they come up with over E6, while I'd prefer E6 with a bad DM or one I don't trust as a sort of least-bad low-magic attempt.

[Boci]

A weak-magic campaign (where magic is capped, classes are restricted, and items are inaccessible in some way, and often entire categories of magic are removed) requires a lot of work to houserule and even more to balance appropriately, and isn't something I'd trust most DMs to do well. However, if you can pull it off, it can be a refreshing change of pace. A lot of builds or character concepts or even party concepts that are weak or aren't worth playing in a standard game can become viable in this context. I'm currently running a PbP where Tome of Battle material is common and magic progressions are slowed and capped at mid levels, so the PCs and villains can get to be quite high level without breaking the world and can enjoy playing high-level initiators without being outshone by high-level casters, and the different factions can focus on combining ToB with various alternate magic systems for interesting combats when normally arcane/divine/psionics render those too weak to compete. It's not something I'd had an opportunity to play or run before, and it's certainly not the kind of campaign you can just start up in Faerûn and hope it'll work out.

As someone who DM-ed such a game, I found people often overestimated just how much work it took. Yes, you probably can't use established D&D, but I wasn't doing that anyway.

To make sure we're on the same page, my low magic D&D was set in a gothic eastern european inspired setting, and what low magic meant was no classes that could cast 9th level spells (but duskblades and bards were permitted) and I told the players not to count on finding any magical items. I did have some expanded alchemy, mad science and inherited bonus rules to give them some options, though not all of them were good, you could get addicted to potions or overdose on them.

I didn't find it too much effort. Yes I had to check the monsters I used, but I do that anyway as a DM. Though maybe you're thinking of a world were no spell casting classes are allowed, not sure how you'd class no 9th level casters, since "rare-magic" seems to still allow PCs to play as wizard, and just has NPCs of the class be practically unheard of.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

As someone who DM-ed such a game, I found people often overestimated just how much work it took. Yes, you probably can't use established D&D, but I wasn't doing that anyway.

True, the amount of work required does depend heavily on how far you diverge from the standard assumptions mechanically and what the flavor justifications for that are.

In the ToB-heavy game I mentioned, literally the only houserules I've imposed are "characters cannot have a higher effective spellcasting/manifesting/etc. level than their highest initiator level" and "characters cannot take base or prestige classes with maneuver progressions without training under an existing character with levels in that class for a certain amount of time." Every other setting implication--spellcasting-capable priests are rare, squishy robed wizard types are capped at 5th-level spells, the only places magic-users congregate are kung-fu-dojo-like martial Temples, Jade Phoenix Mages and Ruby Knights Vindicator are the pinnacle of arcane and divine casting, etc.--follow logically and inherently from those two rules with no extra effort on my part, and since the vast majority of foes are enemy initiators I don't even need to worry about monster selection too much.

On the other hand, I've run several games before in an "aetherpunk" setting, where the PCs were scions of a noble house and the game centered around exploring and conquering territory for access to its magical resources, because the players wanted a sort of "Age of Wonders meets Diplomacy in the Age of Sail" kind of game. In that setting, I add a whole bunch of houserules around magic: all magic draws on ley lines criss-crossing the land for power, and you need to attune to ley lines before being able to use magic there; the local "magical potential" of a given region dictates what spell levels you can cast, and can vary by school or descriptor in the same region; certain kinds of magic only function in a ley node or ley nexus; magic items wax and wane in power based on whether you're inside, outside, or bordering on the ley web; aether energy can be aspected, redirected, or stored using certain special items and materials, for when you want to adventure outside the ley web or in magic-weak areas; major domain-level spells (like those in the Birthright setting) can be cast that have major impact over massive areas, but require carefully tracking ley resources, and so on and so forth. In that scenario, heavily restricting magic use gave the players exactly the kind of play experience they wanted, but involved hellish amounts of writing, balancing, and tracking on my part.


To make sure we're on the same page, my low magic D&D was set in a gothic eastern european inspired setting, and what low magic meant was no classes that could cast 9th level spells (but duskblades and bards were permitted) and I told the players not to count on finding any magical items. I did have some expanded alchemy, mad science and inherited bonus rules to give them some options, though not all of them were good, you could get addicted to potions or overdose on them.

I didn't find it too much effort. Yes I had to check the monsters I used, but I do that anyway as a DM. Though maybe you're thinking of a world were no spell casting classes are allowed, not sure how you'd class no 9th level casters, since "rare-magic" seems to still allow PCs to play as wizard, and just has NPCs of the class be practically unheard of.

Anything that lops off the top 4 spell levels I'd classify as weak magic, since "weak" in this case basically means "you're taking a bunch of magical stuff out of the game or having it come online later than is normally assumed and need to compensate for it somehow" whether the actual spell level cap is 8th or 6th or 3rd or 0th. And you can obviously combine that with rare magic to make bards the subject of the sagas themselves rather than merely the ones who tell them, or restricted magic where bards and duskblades are members of the Imperial Army and any non-state-sanctioned practitioners are outlawed, or both, for different takes on the same idea.

The alchemy and mad science rules you added in the mentioned campaign may not have seemed like much work (and, having written up similar rules for my abovementioned aetherpunk setting, yeah, it's not too difficult to whip up something functional there), but that's still more mechanical work than you need to do for a rare-magic or restricted-magic game where the changes are mostly in the flavor and plot hooks and such rather than the rules. Different DMs are obviously going to find different kinds of setting and rule alterations more or less difficult, complex, and/or fun, which is why every DM's low-magic setting is going to turn out differently and no single definition of "low magic" can encompass all of them.

[Nifft]

True, the amount of work required does depend heavily on how far you diverge from the standard assumptions mechanically and what the flavor justifications for that are.

Disagree strongly.

Published material is of such poor quality that a competent DM needs to do a significant amount of work under standard assumptions, and the nature of that work doesn't shift all that much under other assumptions if you know what you're doing.

If you don't know what you're doing, you're not going to run any game competently, standard or otherwise.

[NigelWalmsley]

That's just not true. Published monsters are fine. Stock encounters out of the MMs at APL works for the vast majority of campaigns, and even for the ones where it doesn't simply creating slightly above-guidelines encounters out of stock monsters works. Whereas Low Magic causes all kinds of monsters to suddenly become a massively bigger deal than the game expects when people don't have easy access to status removal.

[Boci]

That's just not true. Published monsters are fine. Stock encounters out of the MMs at APL works for the vast majority of campaigns, and even for the ones where it doesn't simply creating slightly above-guidelines encounters out of stock monsters works. Whereas Low Magic causes all kinds of monsters to suddenly become a massively bigger deal than the game expects when people don't have easy access to status removal.

What if its a regular magic game but the players didn't take status removal? It happens. Sorcerors are very starved for spells known, and the cleric might not have prepared any because they know how good they are or it doesn't fit their character concept.

[NigelWalmsley]

What if its a regular magic game but the players didn't take status removal? It happens. Sorcerors are very starved for spells known, and the cleric might not have prepared any because they know how good they are or it doesn't fit their character concept.

The Cleric doesn't need to, and in fact should not, be proactively preparing status removal. You can and should wait until people get statused, then remove them the next day. But even if you don't have access to them at all in your party, the normal game assumes you can hire the services of spellcasters, which you would presumably not be able to do in a low-magic game.

[Nifft]

That's just not true. Published monsters are fine.

You're wrong. Not all published monsters are fine.

You've had good luck if you've never run across a published monster or scenario which was incorrectly CR'd.

[NigelWalmsley]

You're wrong. Not all published monsters are fine.

You've had good luck if you've never run across a published monster or scenario which was incorrectly CR'd.

The rate at which published monsters are incorrectly CR'd is substantially lower than the rate at which the vast majority of DMs will make a comparable mistake in an eyeballed encounter. Even in the famously-broken MM2, the majority of monsters are reasonably CR'd. People remember the Allips and the Giant Crabs, but those things are memorable precisely because they're rare.

[Boci]

The Cleric doesn't need to, and in fact should not, be proactively preparing status removal. You can and should wait until people get statused, then remove them the next day. But even if you don't have access to them at all in your party, the normal game assumes you can hire the services of spellcasters, which you would presumably not be able to do in a low-magic game.

Again, that doesn't take as much effort as people seem to think it does. I'm already checking a monsters state block to see if its a good fit for the party and whether I will enjoy using it as a DM. Also making sure none of the abilities require high level magic the next day, and tweaking them if they do like ability drain to damage, is some extra work, but often seems to be vastly overstated.

[Nifft]

The rate at which published monsters are incorrectly CR'd is substantially lower than the rate at which the vast majority of DMs will make a comparable mistake in an eyeballed encounter. Even in the famously-broken MM2, the majority of monsters are reasonably CR'd. People remember the Allips and the Giant Crabs, but those things are memorable precisely because they're rare.

Egregiously bad monsters like the Allip and That Damn Crab are memorable because they're particularly egregious, not because they're the only things a DM needs to worry about.

They are both extreme, inexcusable examples of what I'm talking about.


Again, that doesn't take as much effort as people seem to think it does. I'm already checking a monsters state block to see if its a good fit for the party and whether I will enjoy using it as a DM. Also making sure none of the abilities require high level magic the next day, and tweaking them if they do like ability drain to damage, is some extra work, but often seems to be vastly overstated.

My method was to transcribe monster stat blocks into a custom format for my own convenience, and while doing that I'd check the numbers against what I'd expect to be reasonable for the PCs.

Mostly the same process as when making up a monster or applying a template.

The checking wasn't much overhead above the transcription / reformat.

[Gnaeus]

Egregiously bad monsters like the Allip and That Damn Crab are memorable because they're particularly egregious, not because they're the only things a DM needs to worry about.

They are both extreme, inexcusable examples of what I'm talking about

There’s also the fact that the rate doesn’t need to be very high. If you have 50 monsters then 1 that is broken and TPKs the party then another 49 you planned to use, that 1% is plenty.

In fact that can make it worse. If your party routinely stomps CR 10 monsters, it’s easy to glance at a monster and say “oh this is a CR 9-10. They’ll be fine”. Then 3 rounds into the fight the fighter, cleric and rogue are dead and the wizard is flying off to open a shop somewhere. Especially if combined with poor initiative or saving throw rolls. I still remember when I accidentally did this.

[Boci]

Another problem is what does "reasonable CR-ed" mean? Given that the system has no inherant way to differentiate between a core only rogue 9 and a Swordsage 1/Swashbuckler 8 with daring outlaw and assassin's stance. Given that, yes you could argue most monsters are resonably CR-ed, but a DM should still probably look a little closer when planning encounters.

[Blackhawk748]

So from everyone's experience what do you enjoy more, customizing standard 3.5/3.x/3.P to be low magic or E6? In the end they have similar goal in reducing the power of tier 1 and 2 classes but go about it in different ways. So share your thoughts and stories!

I've tried to do low magic "normal" DnD and it's just a giant pain in the rear end to get it to work right as you basically gut 3.4s of the system. It's much easier to tailor E6 because if you want everyone to have some more power you can turn various PrC abilities into Feats or something and go from there.

Or you can keep it a hard cap and be happy with that. it's a fairly robust system.

[NigelWalmsley]

They are both extreme, inexcusable examples of what I'm talking about.

Then by all means, show us the other examples. You've made a claim, but you've as yet provided no evidence to back it up.


There’s also the fact that the rate doesn’t need to be very high. If you have 50 monsters then 1 that is broken and TPKs the party then another 49 you planned to use, that 1% is plenty.

That's not a problem with CR, that's a problem with iterative probability and character death. If every encounter has even a 1% chance of a TPK, and you run the standard 13 encounters per level, you'd expect a better than 50/50 shot at a party wipe by 7th level (.99^78 is about a .46 chance to never wipe), and even a .5% chance doesn't get you to 20. What you're complaining about is the difficult of producing meaningful challenge when even small risks dramatically compound, but CR doesn't make that harder. The average difference between printed CRs and hypothetical perfect CRs is much smaller than the error introduced by DM fudging.


Another problem is what does "reasonable CR-ed" mean? Given that the system has no inherant way to differentiate between a core only rogue 9 and a Swordsage 1/Swashbuckler 8 with daring outlaw and assassin's stance. Given that, yes you could argue most monsters are resonably CR-ed, but a DM should still probably look a little closer when planning encounters.

It means that the CRs are consistent. It doesn't really matter if PCs vary, because as long as a CR 10 monster is roughly as difficult as another CR 10 monster, you can just adjust up or down. CR is useful because it is an abstraction, and it is actually a very robust one.

[Boci]

It means that the CRs are consistent. It doesn't really matter if PCs vary, because as long as a CR 10 monster is roughly as difficult as another CR 10 monster, you can just adjust up or down. CR is useful because it is an abstraction, and it is actually a very robust one.

How consistent? Dragons were notoriously under CR-ed, and outsiders also tended to punch above their weight, due to having SR, DR, energy resistance and often spell-like abilities. High CR animals like the t-rex could often be taken out with a single ray of stupidity.

Plus, if we've already established that you need to check a monster is suitable for your group and can't just match average party level to CR, then you're already doing what you need for a low magic game as part of Dming. Its more work, but the extent of it often seem to be overestimated.

[NigelWalmsley]

How consistent? Dragons were notoriously under CR-ed, and outsiders also tended to punch above their weight, due to having SR, DR, energy resistance and often spell-like abilities. High CR animals like the t-rex could often be taken out with a single ray of stupidity.

Open a random MM to a random page. Chances are the creature you find there will be reasonably balanced for its CR. Talking about specific examples obscures the point because people overweight the small number of broken monsters relative to the very large number of fine ones. You can probably remember the Clockwork Horrors and the Elemental Weirds from the MM2. And, yes, those things are under-CRed. But there are all sorts of other things in there you don't remember, because they're completely fine. Is the Boggle or the Mudmaw vastly over or under-CRed? I don't think so.


Plus, if we've already established that you need to check a monster is suitable for your group and can't just match average party level to CR, then you're already doing what you need for a low magic game as part of Dming. Its more work, but the extent of it often seem to be overestimated.

No, we've established that you need to find the CR that is appropriate for your group. You largely don't need to spot check monsters if you've done that.

[Boci]

Open a random MM to a random page. Chances are the creature you find there will be reasonably balanced for its CR.

Are a vrock and triceratops reasonably balanced?

[NigelWalmsley]

Are a vrock and triceratops reasonably balanced?

To give you an answer that's the product of as much effort as your question: yes.

[Boci]

To give you an answer that's the product of as much effort as your question: yes.

You said choose 2 random monsters of the same CR. I did. Not sure why you seem to take issue with that.

[Nifft]

Then by all means, show us the other examples. You've made a claim, but you've as yet provided no evidence to back it up. You actually provided some compelling evidence already, which makes it odd that you're resistant to that evidence.


It means that the CRs are consistent. That's hilariously wrong.

However, this is a great opportunity for you.

Since you want claims to have evidence, let's see you to provide evidence of this claim of yours.

Demonstrate that CRs are consistent across the vast majority of monsters.


You said choose 2 random monsters of the same CR. I did. Not sure why you seem to take issue with that.

I wonder if the issue is that your argument is right.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Disagree strongly.

Published material is of such poor quality that a competent DM needs to do a significant amount of work under standard assumptions, and the nature of that work doesn't shift all that much under other assumptions if you know what you're doing.

If you don't know what you're doing, you're not going to run any game competently, standard or otherwise.

All issues of CR accuracy aside, the work I was talking about was work on top of the normal DM work of creating a setting, building NPCs, eyeballing monster encounters, treasure placement, and so on, which does vary quite a bit between "basically no extra work" (for campaigns where all the low-magic tweaks are flavor- and plot-based and e.g. writing up a magic-hating culture takes the same amount of effort as writing up any other culture in the setting) and "spending two solid weeks writing up a binder of houserules" or the like (for campaigns where all the low-magic tweaks are mechanical and you're going hog wild writing up houserules for needing casting checks to successfully cast a spell, Chaos Magic tables for what happens when you fail your casting check, special material component lists for every school and descriptor of magic that you need to cast magic at all, multiple PrCs for wizard-hunters, yadda yadda yadda), with most campaigns obviously involving a mix of mechanical and flavor tweaks and falling somewhere in the middle.

The amount of work can also vary based on your style of running a low-magic campaign. My personal style of DMing involves a lot of transparency with my players, so I have a campaign wiki for every game I run that describes all the houserules, new material, setting flavor, and so on. If I decide to run a game where, say, magic is inherently corrupting and evil, arcanists gradually become more demon-like as they use more and more magic, and there are special inevitables charged with hunting down powerful wizards before they go full-on demon, I'm going to write up all the houserules on corruption checks, demonic traits, and so forth on the wiki and the anti-wizard inevitable is going to get a full MM-style writeup. Some other DM might decide that treating magic mysteriously out-of-game as well as in-game gives the atmosphere and results he's looking for, so he'd have the same corruption and wizard-hunting inevitable but would never share any DCs or tables with the group to keep them on their toes and would keep the inevitable a scary threat with Schrodinger's stats until the party actually ran into one.

In both cases, the other DM and I could run everything with half a page of note-to-self's and personal shorthand (and I often do things that way to start, only doing a full wiki writeup once the PCs have encountered something relevant), but the amount of work I'd end up doing in such a campaign would be greater than the amount of work the other DM would--and both of us would do more work than a DM who just made stuff up on the fly, setting gut-feeling DCs for corruption checks and reflavoring some other monster as the wizard-hunter with a trademark new ability or two slapped on. So running a low-magic game really would, for me, involve a lot more effort than a normal game (which is one reason why I try to avoid doing so whenever possible), and another DM with a different style or running a different kind of low-magic game wouldn't necessarily have a good handle on the amount of effort involved, and likewise I might mis-estimate the amount of work another DM might spend on such a campaign.

[EdokTheTwitch]

Another fun point about E6: If you want to spice it up, just take prestige classes and play them as base classes. (Ofc, add appropriate spellcaster levels as necessary). I tried that with some more obscure prestige classes, and it was a blast, with players getting a chance to try out new abilities, and severely limited need for bookkeeping.

[Nifft]

All issues of CR accuracy aside, the work I was talking about was work on top of the normal DM work of creating a setting, building NPCs, eyeballing monster encounters, treasure placement, and so on

For me at least, the "eyeballing monster encounters" required as much preparation work as I ended up requiring to create new monsters.

Knowing what's a hittable range for the PCs in terms of AC and saving throws, figuring out what defenses were going to be most challenging, and so forth -- that prep work was based on an identical summary of the party's capabilities in both cases, and for me at least the work of filtering pre-made monsters wasn't much less work than creating monsters myself, either by modifying statblocks, writing new templates, or just makin' stuff up whole-cloth.

So, my experience is that the on top of portion is small compared to what you'd need to do in both cases.

It's not nothing, but compared to the work you have to do anyway as a DM, it's not all that much.

[D+1]

I'm gonna go ahead and vote for E6 again because I can't keep track at this point of where the thread is actually heading and what point it really is that people are trying to make.

E6 is all the same rules as 3.5. All of them - up to 6th level. All problems that 3.5 has are shared fully and equally with E6. Because of the abrupt cutoff of 4th level spells and up with E6 it's recommended that, for example, Stone to Flesh be made specifically available as a feat or obtainable curative or the like because otherwise petrification IS death because it's irreversible. And speaking of death the cutoff would also eliminate Raise Dead so unless you want any and all death to be permanent and irreversible then you need to have some way for PC's to have access to that. There may be one or two other such things to make special exceptions for but that's about it. Capstone feats aren't NEEDED, but are certainly useful to give a few classes some ability to catch up or balance that even 3.5 would be lacking at that point. Feats after 6th level are demonstrably going to provide breadth of ability rather than depth - more options rather than just more raw power.

If E6 is otherwise resulting in "samey" characters then it's because it inherits that flaw directly from 3.5. If you don't have a way to fix that in 3.5 (other than, "just add 10 levels or else PC's will be boring,") E6 doesn't fix that for you. If a given DM can't make fun and interesting adventures for 6th level PC's in the first place then E6 isn't going to fix that either. If you believe that 6th level and lower PC's in 3.5 suck bricks through hoses, then again E6 can't help you in any way, shape, or form.

It doesn't work to point out all the ways in which 6th level and lower characters don't "measure up" to, say, 12th level characters or 18th levels because the very premise of it is that it is heading into the upper levels that IS THE PROBLEM to be avoided. Often, when DM's are undertaking the task of making 3.5 house rules that will result in a "low magic" game they are NOT addressing the lower levels. That isn't where they think the problem is. They're trying to hobble the higher levels... because that's where the problems which "low magic" house rules are attempting to fix actually live. Problem is, those "low magic" rules then tend to make LOWER levels so obnoxious that the game never gets PAST those lower levels to where the "low magic" would have the ACTUALLY desired effect. So, again, cut off the 4th level and higher spells entirely (barring a few noted desirable outlying exceptions) and you don't need to poison the lower-level 3.5 gameplay in an attempt to actually have the higher levels better handle those 4th and higher magical effects. You just don't go there in the first place.

Hey, if you want all those higher level spells and abilities - and all that goes with them - then OBVIOUSLY neither E6 nor ANY attempt at applying "low magic" limitations to the game is your cup of tea in the first place. I see "low magic" house rules as effectively killing the patient in order to control a disease they are doomed to develop. E6 never lets the disease even develop. If the quartiles from 1-20 are Gritty, Heroic, Wuxia and Superheroes then it obviously DOES place certain constraints on things saying, "You'll never be Superman or Li Mu Bai, but you can still do Conan-ish heroic stuff," and that's good enough for what people are actually after from the game.

[Tvtyrant]

E6 is my jam! I usually run it with some additional rules, namely that epic spells can be cast using rituals powered by leylines, nodes or sentient sacrifices. This lets some things that would otherwise not be possible be in the game, such as lesser demon binding, teleport/planeshift and create undead. If you are going for a low magic vibe you can ignore that and just use E6, it is plenty low magic if pretty high in potions and lesser items.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

So, my experience is that the on top of portion is small compared to what you'd need to do in both cases.

It's not nothing, but compared to the work you have to do anyway as a DM, it's not all that much.

Like I said, that'll vary by DM. In a standard game, I probably spend less time and effort writing up new/altered/templated monsters than you do, for instance, since I keep every monster I've ever homebrewed at hand and can pull them out as needed, whereas in a low-magic game my options there are limited (for highly-magical monsters) or removed (with significant houserules) so we'd probably put in similar amounts of effort.

Regardless, my original point was just that the added effort to make a game low-magic isn't constant (per-game or per-DM) or easily determined, since I was reponding to Boci's point that others mis-estimated the amount of effort involved. He and you said that low-magic games are fairly low-effort for you, and that's cool, but my initial reluctance to trust a DM to pull off a houseruled weak-magic game is due to the fact that it's not that easy for everyone and so it takes a DM of your or my or Boci's caliber to do it easily and well, that's all.


If E6 is otherwise resulting in "samey" characters then it's because it inherits that flaw directly from 3.5. If you don't have a way to fix that in 3.5 (other than, "just add 10 levels or else PC's will be boring,") E6 doesn't fix that for you. If a given DM can't make fun and interesting adventures for 6th level PC's in the first place then E6 isn't going to fix that either. If you believe that 6th level and lower PC's in 3.5 suck bricks through hoses, then again E6 can't help you in any way, shape, or form.

The sameyness isn't a 3e-specific issue, it's an inherent limitation of more limited progressions and starting conditions in games compared to more broad or advanced ones. One can say the same about low-point-value characters in Shadowrun and GURPS not being as diverse as high-point-value characters, or low-lifepath characters in Traveler or Burning Wheel, or whatever else.


They're trying to hobble the higher levels... because that's where the problems which "low magic" house rules are attempting to fix actually live. Problem is, those "low magic" rules then tend to make LOWER levels so obnoxious that the game never gets PAST those lower levels to where the "low magic" would have the ACTUALLY desired effect. So, again, cut off the 4th level and higher spells entirely (barring a few noted desirable outlying exceptions) and you don't need to poison the lower-level 3.5 gameplay in an attempt to actually have the higher levels better handle those 4th and higher magical effects. You just don't go there in the first place.

Hey, if you want all those higher level spells and abilities - and all that goes with them - then OBVIOUSLY neither E6 nor ANY attempt at applying "low magic" limitations to the game is your cup of tea in the first place. I see "low magic" house rules as effectively killing the patient in order to control a disease they are doomed to develop. E6 never lets the disease even develop.

Instituting low-magic houserules doesn't mean vivisecting the game to remove all magic and fun. You can have low-impact houserules that don't impact the low levels much at all while reining in magic at high levels--for a trivial example, you could run an E12 where 4th+ level spell slots can only be filled with spells of 3rd level or lower, which functions identically to E6 for the first 6 levels and allows more customization than E6's buy-a-feat setup for the next 6 levels while not introducing any extra magic, not introducing lots of new things to learn, and encouraging normally-neglected builds.

Granted, the kind of DMs you're talking about do exist, and do ruin many games by trying to shove a round D&D peg into a square low-magic hole, but the point I was making in my initial post is that there are many and varied ways to do low-magic games, and while many forumites have gamer PTSD from bad DMs who ran bad low-magic games that's certainly not the only way to do it and E6 isn't necessarily the panacea that it's made out to be.

[D+1]

The sameyness isn't a 3e-specific issue, it's an inherent limitation of more limited progressions and starting conditions in games compared to more broad or advanced ones.Are 6th level PC's "samey" in 3.5? Whether they are or aren't E6 would have the same answer. It IS a 3E specific issue and moreso since 3E is the system under discussion and not any other version of D&D or NON-D&D RPG.


Instituting low-magic houserules doesn't mean vivisecting the game to remove all magic and fun. You can have low-impact houserules that don't impact the low levels much at all while reining in magic at high levels--for a trivial example, you could run an E12 where 4th+ level spell slots can only be filled with spells of 3rd level or lower, which functions identically to E6 for the first 6 levels and allows more customization than E6's buy-a-feat setup for the next 6 levels while not introducing any extra magic, not introducing lots of new things to learn, and encouraging normally-neglected builds.Again, it IS the 4th level and higher spells that are seen to create issues NOT otherwise seen in lower level spells. You're presenting a quite interesting take and no reason it couldn't be a fun game in its own right, but it's also RE-introducing spells that ARE seen as the very problem needing to be addressed.


Granted, the kind of DMs you're talking about do exist, and do ruin many games by trying to shove a round D&D peg into a square low-magic hole, but the point I was making in my initial post is that there are many and varied ways to do low-magic games, and while many forumites have gamer PTSD from bad DMs who ran bad low-magic games that's certainly not the only way to do it and E6 isn't necessarily the panacea that it's made out to be.Haven't seen anyone say it is and neither am I. Just that it's better than all the plentiful "low magic" rule sets you suggest are out there that I DON'T see burning up forums with discussion of how great they work. In the choice given by the OP, "low magic" or E6 - the better choice by far is simply E6... unless there are other factors desired by the OP that have NOT been mentioned.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Just that it's better than all the plentiful "low magic" rule sets you suggest are out there that I DON'T see burning up forums with discussion of how great they work.

I'm narrowing in on this line because it's the crux of the issue. In this post and your previous one you're implicitly assuming that there's one right way to do "low magic" (and by extension that E6 is that way) and that a lack of other specific named low magic rulesets must mean that no such "great" rulesets exist, but low magic rulesets are like fighter fixes: there are dozens to hundreds of possible ways to make the thing work, every DM and homebrewer will have their own very specific ideas about what makes a given take good or bad, and whatever you whip up for your own group is going to fit it better than just grabbing someone else's take from online.

To continue the analogy, E6 is to low magic rulesets as the Pathfinder fighter is to fighter fixes. Both are basically just some dude's houserules wrapped up in a PDF for easy consumption, but have traction largely because they have a veneer of "official-ness" because they've been around awhile and popularity drives popularity. (Yes, obviously PF is published by a company while E6 is purely a forum effort, but the attitude of "Just use PF" has been around since it was still in its alpha playtest and everything was riding on the "These are the Dragon Magazine guys, they must know what they're doing!" reputation.)

They claim to be the easiest and lowest-effort approaches (E6 is "A low magic game that everyone knows how to play!" and Pathfinder is "Completely backwards compatible!") when in fact each requires plenty of tweaking (E6's extra feats, custom incantations, selective list of feats and PrCs, etc. and PF's base system changes), there are lower-effort options out there that achieve similar effects (E8 and Trailblazer being trivial examples) and it's difficult for any later fixes to achieve the same level of memetic officialdom because you keep running into the common refrain of "Don't bother with your own houserules, just use E6/PF, it's obviously the right way to do it."

Not to mention that, as I've said a few times now, people hear "low magic" and automatically assume the worst possible implementation of low magic in a game based on forum stories and any bad experiences they might have had in the past. Not to pick on any particular posters at all, but just looking at this very thread, the OP talks about "customizing standard 3.5/3.x/3.P to be low magic" with no stipulation at all as to what form that might take, and then the very first three posts include these quotes:


And finally, no extra work in trying to customize the entirety of 3.P :smallwink:


Not only are the weaker classes especially hurt by a lack of magic items


Even if you don't hard cap WBL your probably not giving out more than (effectively) +2 items, or maybe a 1-2 times a day 3rd level spell in item form

They automatically assume that "low magic" entails broad sweeping changes to the entire system and/or depriving classes of magic items and/or restricting wealth in general, when (A) none of those are inherent to low magic, you can achieve that with a handful of broad houserules and no changes to wealth whatsoever if you're going for the "broad magic" approach, and (B) even if you do want to do low magic in those particular ways, E6 isn't anywhere near the only or best way to do that.

Obviously if you read "low magic" and mentally substitute "low magic done badly" then a known quantity like E6 is automatically going to look better by comparison.

[Tvtyrant]

D20 Modern/future had some decent low magic rules with incantations and base classes with more options, so that is another alternative. It also has far less status effects so the refrain that low magic is an auto-lose to, say, Shadows disappears.

@PairO'Dice Lost the thread OP specifically asked about E6, it isn't like someone asked about low magic and we all just shouted "use E6." Before 5E came out as effectively E6 stretched over 20 levels E6 was very popular, given the choice offered was between having to rewrite a system or use a popular version I don't think people saying to use the lower effort one is out of place.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

@PairO'Dice Lost the thread OP specifically asked about E6, it isn't like someone asked about low magic and we all just shouted "use E6." Before 5E came out as effectively E6 stretched over 20 levels E6 was very popular, given the choice offered was between having to rewrite a system or use a popular version I don't think people saying to use the lower effort one is out of place.

It's specifically asking for a comparison of "customizing standard 3.5/3.x/3.P to be low magic" with E6, with no mention of "rewriting a whole system" like people keep bringing up.

One would expect that a thread about, say, "Which do you prefer for low-magic games, banning all magic items or using E6?" or "Which do you prefer for low-magic games, rewriting every magic-using class in the game or using E6?" to default to "that's a terrible idea, use E6 instead" (and I'd completely agree with that in both cases), but this thread effectively started off assuming that E6 was superior to any possible way to houserule a low-magic game and framing low-magic games in the least charitable light. I don't fault people for endorsing E6, just for assuming that it's the way to do low-magic and that every other way is more complicated/less balanced/less immersive/whatever.

[Gnaeus]

One would expect that a thread about, say, "Which do you prefer for low-magic games, banning all magic items or using E6?" or "Which do you prefer for low-magic games, rewriting every magic-using class in the game or using E6?" to default to "that's a terrible idea, use E6 instead" (and I'd completely agree with that in both cases), but this thread effectively started off assuming that E6 was superior to any possible way to houserule a low-magic game and framing low-magic games in the least charitable light. I don't fault people for endorsing E6, just for assuming that it's the way to do low-magic and that every other way is more complicated/less balanced/less immersive/whatever.

Bearing in mind that I had the 5th post, and I pointed out that Low magic means different things to different people and some are better than others....

And there MIGHT be skewed samples, given the nature of forum chat, a player is more likely to post about the heinous houserules or how to operate within the heinous houserules, and those posts are more likely to get traffic than “I play in a low magic game and it works fine” because human nature.

Still, most of the low magic rules I see are bad.

Magic item restrictions seem common. And I understand how painful it as DM is to hand out a cool utility/flavor item only to have players junk it as vendor trash for an extra +1. But it has really bad ramifications.

Or some kind of casting check or backlash. Which more or less eliminates the least broken casters, like combat heals or evocations, while not blocking the most broken ones, like minion creation where you make the checks at your leisure. I call this the Raistlin effect. They think about how cool it is for Raistlin to cast one spell then rely on Caramon for backup, without remembering that Raistlin still had plenty of power to bend the campaign over his knee and threaten gods.

It’s kind of like when I’m playing in a mid/high opp game and a new player says they are playing a fighter or a monk. I throw up in my mouth a little 🤢. Then if they explain they are a trip control build with a couple of ToB levels and a cool PRC I relax. It’s not that they aren’t playable. But the traps are real, and the fixes require skill.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Bearing in mind that I had the 5th post, and I pointed out that Low magic means different things to different people and some are better than others....

Oh, I know, but until you pointed that out the immediate assumption was just "low-magic = bad", and even after that you still had things like Illyahr assuming in post #8 and Nigel in #11 that low-magic means houseruling the whole game at great effort. "Low magic means many things" isn't an obscure position or anything, but the skew against it is still pretty strong.


And there MIGHT be skewed samples, given the nature of forum chat, a player is more likely to post about the heinous houserules or how to operate within the heinous houserules, and those posts are more likely to get traffic than “I play in a low magic game and it works fine” because human nature.

Still, most of the low magic rules I see are bad.
[...]
It’s kind of like when I’m playing in a mid/high opp game and a new player says they are playing a fighter or a monk. I throw up in my mouth a little 🤢. Then if they explain they are a trip control build with a couple of ToB levels and a cool PRC I relax. It’s not that they aren’t playable. But the traps are real, and the fixes require skill.

Definitely agreed. I said myself that I wouldn't play in a low-magic campaign under most DMs I know, simply because DMs with the capability to run a campaign to my standards are rare and the subset of those who can run a halfway-decent low-magic game without tripping into a half-dozen pitfalls on the way there are rarer still. I just don't think dismissing the possibility of good low-magic games entirely is a good idea, and E6 presenting itself as the be-all end-all low-magic fix for D&D (when it's more low-power than low-magic and not a "fix" at all) certainly contributes to that view.

[Ozreth]

Meanwhile, the main problem with E6 is that characters are fairly mechanically samey at those levels. Not necessarily because only having a few levels in base classes and maybe 1 or 2 of PrCs is limiting (though that's also true, given that most games at least top out at the mid levels) but because it's much more common to play at low levels than high levels for obvious reasons, and getting a bunch of extra feats--even special E6-specific feats--doesn't really compare to the variety of higher-level characters with multiple PrCs, high-LA races, and so on, and if I had to choose between ending the game as yet another low-level character with some extra resources facing the same old low-level challenges vs. a high-level character I hadn't had a chance to play before facing high-level challenges that I rarely see, I'll pick the latter. Having run a campaign recently that continued leveling through the mid levels as normal and allowed access to a bunch of extra feats on the side, it's really no contest; the latter allow for fleshing out fighting styles and enabling particular tricks, but it's the higher-level content that really defines and refines character concepts and playstyles.


Doing a big time zombie here because I randomly landed on this thread and this response deserves praise. Even as someone who prefers low fantasy in novels and RPGs, this has got to be one of the most well articulated reasons for not attempting this in D&D that I have read.

After 20 years as a being mainly DM I’m finally coming to admit to myself that for people who prefer to be players, zero-hero in a big way, getting big spells, big items, big abilities etc is extremely fun and nobody cares about the niche aesthetic that I want to overlay onto my system through various house rules and new assumptions. And most groups rarely get to the early teens or later in campaigns. It’s that much sweeter when they finally do.

Some people will get it and even prefer it. Those people likely love running D&D just as much as playing. But those people are rare.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

If you're talking about the basic terrible-DM method of making a low-magic campaign, along the lines "PCs can't cast spells and have to beg for even a +1 sword at 10th level, but monsters are unchanged and the BBEG is an epic-level wizard," then E6 all the way, obviously.

Isn't the base terrible-DM method "casters are completely unaffected, but no magic weapons for the martials"? :smallbiggrin:

EDIT: My apologies, I hadn't noticed the necrotic status of the discussion. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea please don't ban me maxima culpa.

[Ozreth]

Isn't the base terrible-DM method "casters are completely unaffected, but no magic weapons for the martials"? :smallbiggrin:

EDIT: My apologies, I hadn't noticed the necrotic status of the discussion. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea please don't ban me maxima culpa.

I haven’t posted here regularly for years. Is a necro that big of an offense? If so I second your plea lol.

EDIT: Went back and read the rules.

[rel]

E6 is a bit mechanically boring for my taste, but low magic can be a lot of fun if you take the time to do it properly.
I've used a few different methods over the years, but it always boils down to:

- nerf / ban the magic users
- nerf / ban any remaining problematic spells
- remove item crafting
- remove the item mart and severely limit the items the PC's can access
- provide scaling bonuses to replace the boring + numbers and really fun magic items
- expand the alchemy, mundane item and incantation systems to provide some extra utility.
- provide the occasional truly powerful and memorable magical item so that real magic feels genuinely rare and special
- nerf monsters and challenges as appropriate to meet the new paradigm
- build your setting so it makes sense given the above.

I've also been meaning to try a level range of 7 to 12 as an alternative to e6; PC's would start at level 7 and scale up to 12 and the whole world would be scaled up along with them so the average peasant or goblin are also CR 7 monsters