Has magic become so abundant it's not magical anymore?

[Schwann145]

Been questioning this recently and came upon this blog:
Fanservice BS: Low Magic, No Problem. Oh, Wait, Problem (https://theangrygm.com/fanservice-bs-low-magic/)

And this particular part stuck out to me:

It’s weird because, if you look at the exemplar of the fantasy genre, the Lord of the Rings, you almost never see anyone in the party use magic. Hell, Gandalf uses a sword in most of the fights he’s in. By comparison, D&D is literally bursting at the seams with the fantastic. It’s gone beyond fantasy adventure to magical super fantasy. There is never a moment in D&D when there isn’t something magical happening on screen.

When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

Game designers will tell us that we can play however we wish, whether it's more high fantasy or more sword & sorcery, but that's just not true based on what they actually design and release in final products - all of it is super-high fantasy.

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?

[Grimmnist]

That's a really interesting point, I think I mostly agree with you but I have managed to work around that in the games I DM. A lot of D&D source material likes to pretend it is low magic, which as you pointed out makes no sense, so when I do a homemade world it is of course high magic, cantrips and low level spells are common ways to solve the problems of society. I think there is still room for mysterious magic in higher level spells, as much as we on the forums like planning level 20 characters they are actually incredibly rare in the world so most people would have maybe only heard of such high level magic. In addition spells above the 9th level exist in the lore but at some point were forbidden by celestial intervention, the ruins of an ancient empire with remnants of this magic can capture that idea of really special magic.

[KorvinStarmast]

It’s weird because, if you look at the exemplar of the fantasy genre, the Lord of the Rings, you almost never see anyone in the party use magic. But D&D wasn't written as LoTR
It was written as Swords and Sorcery, which genre LOTR is not it in. LoTR is an attempt at an epic.

Swords and Sorcery? Yeah. Everything Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were in. Any book with Elric of Melnibone or Dorain Hawkmoon. A variety of Edgar Rice Burroughts adventure books, Barsoom foremost. All of RE Howard's Conan Books. Three Hearts/Three Lions. The Tritonian Ring (L Sprague DeCamp). Theseus going after the Minotaur. (Greek Mytholody). Ali Baba and 40 Thieves. The Thief of Baghdad. Sinbad the Sailor. Jack Vance's Dying Earth. HP Lovecraft.


These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works! While I prefer low magic settings, magic when encountered ought to be rare, powerful, and risky. That combination seems to have gone away ever since WoTC took over.

To a certain extent, the mundanization of magic via at-will cantrips (while very convenient from a game play perspective) is for me a bit of a step in the wrong direction.

[elyktsorb]

I'd be more interested if everyones take on making magic limited wasn't to make it so that things are just like gritty harshness (except with added fantastical/magical monsters). I play dnd because magic is a thing that's neat. (even when I don't play characters that don't have magic at their fingertips) and most of the magic-light/magic non-existant things I've played by people seem to always hit that same 1 note.

Besides, I'm infinitely more interested in settings where magic is more fleshed out and stuff. Like how it really effects the world. Dnd likes to have it's adventurer's but I wager a majority of people, who could study to use magic, would probably use it to do their jobs and not waste all that learning on possibly fighting three goblins.

If you ask me, it seems more like people want a d20 system that's less about magic/fantasy, but since dnd is popular they'd rather just mold it to their desires.

[NorthernPhoenix]

I don't think so, you just have to re-calibrate your expectations for modern influences. A good example would be the Marvel movies, which nearly everyone coming in fresh to DnD will have seen. In these, nearly everyone has some kind of fancy super-power, but the Infinity Gauntlet/Gems, which exist on a higher level of super (magic) is still a big, shocking deal.

The same is true for (most of) DnD, certainly 5e. With very few exceptions, magic is low scale and only sometimes high impact. You might instantly kill a single individual, but even Meteor Storm, Firestorm and Earthquake will have trouble destroying more than a city block, lacking true large scale impact. The magic that goes far beyond these effects (plot magic, mostly) is the magic of awe. People shooting firebolts and turning into birds nearly every fight doesn't take away from that.

[firelistener]

5e can do "Low Magic" settings just fine for a more Sword & Sorcery feel. You can still have players use caster classes and do this, but just remember that PCs aren't your average person. The most common complaint I see is that magic is too predictable or comprehenible, but I argue that it is okay for casters to predict and understand magic. In Conan stories, the magical people he encounters usually talk a great deal about much they understand the gods or secrets of magic. However, they don't fall into the pattern of repetitive casting we tend to see in 5e. No one in a Conan story is really saying, "I cast fireball", but you might see something like, "and the wizard furrowed his brow, muttering a dark and wicked incantation he stole ages ago from the cultic sorcerers of Stygia. Out from his hand leapt a fiery explosion that engulfed the assailants". To me, those are effectively the same thing but with massively different flavor. To get the latter, you need players to buy in to role play. And to really drive home what I mean: You can spend all the time in the world prepping a low magic dark fantasy sword and sorcery game and it won't be worth a hill of beans when your player comes in saying he's playing a gnome artificer that wears a chicken-shaped hat and shouts bad puns.

The best and easiest thing you can do to set a specific tone for a game is discuss it with your players and have everyone agree to role play it.

[Warwick]

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?


Well magic isn't real, so it can still be cool and fantastical even if it permeates a work of fantasy. A lot of contemporary fantasy fiction has way more magic (or at least way more magic in the hands of the protagonists) than classic fantasy without losing the sense of the fantastic. It feels less esoteric, but that's not quite the same thing.

[Pixel_Kitsune]

One thing I find funny is the idea that magic has been forced on ever since WotC. 2e required the DM to make sure certain magic items get into the hands of every character or else you're screwed against certain things since those rules allowed critters to be completely immune without magic.

As others have said, D&D isn't based on LotR. It's based on the other things. Want a good example? Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (and Rafe Judkins doing the movie version for Amazon). Of our main characters (I'd argue the 8 from the original plus Elayne, Min, Aviendha) 6 out of 11 are magic users outright. Of the other 5 three have outright superpowers of a different from and one of the others has a magical sword.

#1: That's an imbalanced view of the world since this is our main characters, the rest of the world doesn't have this ready access to magic.

#2: This magic in whichever form it takes is what puts our heroes ahead of everyone else and lets them thrive and succeed in what they face.

As an aside, some D&D settings outright do push magic everywhere. That's where you get something like Eberron.

[NovenFromTheSun]

It’s worth remembering that by the time of LotR magic was already supposed to have left Middle-Earth and is basically being kept on life-support by the elven rings. Also, Gandalf is under command to hold back his full power when acting against Sauron, because the last time the Valar and Maiar went full throttle a large landmass was sunk, and Gandalf’s bosses want to keep things from escalating to that point.



When everything is magical, is nothing magical?

I don’t think so, it still emphasizes that this is a world not like ours.


If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

Are the devises used in bleeding-edge scientific experiments less special because everyone has a toaster?

[Willie the Duck]

One thing I find funny is the idea that magic has been forced on ever since WotC. 2e required the DM to make sure certain magic items get into the hands of every character or else you're screwed against certain things since those rules allowed critters to be completely immune without magic.

And for that matter, in AD&D and basic-classic, there was magic all over the place, just not necessarily in the class features list of fighters and thieves (and... , nope that's about it). At high levels a fighter would have a small bevvy of magic swords that had X/day special powers (and might be riding the dragon he subdued, etc.).


When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

I really do not understand what the existence of Eldritch Knights or Arcane tricksters or whatever means to some people. Yes, they put a 'fighter-wizard' and 'wizard-thief' option right there in the rules (such that even those who play without the actual multiclassing rules can do so). What exactly does that prove*?
*Actually I think I know -- it proves that the designers were catering to the OSR crowd, who would want a 'elf' class to play and a Grey Mouser to play, without the tack-on rules like Multiclassing and Feats.


When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?

I will say that there is some truth to this-- Casters having at-will spells; casters not having a few, hard-to-get-off-successfully spells, and then hiding behind the front line with simple, low-effect weapons; heck, wizards being able to pick which spells they got as they level up (as opposed to having to discover them as treasure)… they all do make magic seem more ubiquitous and commonplace. I remember bitd the local townsfolk fearing wizards greatly, and I don't think I could sell that as well today (they and the whole high level adventuring party? Yeah, they're all dangerous--fighters and rogues too).

The thing is, like Pixel_Kitsune was mentioning, it has always been that way in D&D. The needle has moved from 100 to 110 or something like that. More of it is prescribed. There is more customization. But it isn't that different from how it has always been.

[Evaar]

Yes and no.

First, depends on your setting.

If you're in Forgotten Realms, reality is constantly being rewritten by the gods and there are magical cataclysms every decade or two, big cities have magical features from impossible architecture to mythals. Maybe there are a few places where it's much less common, like rural or tribal lands, but the setting is meant to bleed magic.

In Eberron, low level magic is the lifeblood of the economy. High level magic is rare and represents either the stuff of legend (e.g. the binding of the Overlords) or massive coordinated efforts on the part of the most advanced magical organizations on the continent (e.g. the invention of airships or the use of undead in Karrnath) or something mysterious that no one really even understands that well (e.g. the Warforged). But a Fireball is about as common as a rocket launcher, not a handgun. Once you get past cantrips and 1st level spells, things really do become more rare. So there's a bit of a fuzzy line for when magic goes from mundane to fantastic, but it's around level 5 or 6.

Now if you want to do a low magic setting, it is going to be a bit more challenging in 5th edition and you need buy-in from your players. Yes it is hard to square magical rarity with a party composed of an Eldritch Knight, a Warlock, a Bard, and an Artificer. That can still work - perhaps they get a reputation for having sold their souls for dark powers. But the problem is that magical rarity works best when our perspective characters don't understand the magic. If our characters understand the magic and everyone else doesn't, then everyone else seems ignorant and superstitious. If our characters don't understand magic but someone else does, that someone else seems wise, mysterious, and maybe dangerous. So you need to know what kind of story you're telling, how you want your players to interact with the world they're in, and their buy-in. It is completely reasonable to run a game with Battlemasters, Thieves, Berserkers, and (Revised) Hunters. So long as your players agree first.

[Joe the Rat]

There really are two questions of magic here.

How commonplace is magic in the world?

How pervasive is magic in the party?

One is a question of setting, the other a question of party focus - and yes, you can be a high exception as a group.

Originally I wrote the first is "How pervasive is magic in the world?", but that kind of calls to LotR - while there aren't enchanted button polishers or automated verge trimmers in play, the world as a whole is steeped in magic. Magical creatures, magical races (Elves!), secret doors of magical form, exceptional artefacts of ancient power... and also the enchanted toys the dwarves produce, and the fragments of spells they say over treasures to keep them hidden. But we call it "low magic." Magic exists, magic is known, but there's not a lot of it in every day life. Even what the heroes encounter is limited. A party of all casters in a low magic setting is going to be an exceptional and potentially frightening group. That much magic says you are a significant concentration of power, and will draw notice. It also means that potion vendors, magic libraries, and buying items are not in the books. If you want it, you are going to have to go find it. Welcome to AD&D.

Forgotten Realms keeps selling itself as lowish magic, but then they turn around and have every major city literally glowing with power. Casters are common enough that the cities have wizards on the payroll, and in the city watch to deal with the spellcasting criminal element. Eberron just moves from "sorcerers and streetlights" to "industrial-magical complex" with arcana replacing hydrocarbons. You can buy simple magic items, and Wand of Magic Missiles made all men equal. But you can scale up from there. Higher magics may be more regulated or access controlled, money is the limiting factor for many researches, but Fireball still exists.

The game plays either way. If you don't intend to have a lot of findable magic, make it known (so wizards can accommodate expectations), and watch your creature mix so that you don't create impossible encounters without telegraphing that knowledge. having a creature that can only be defeated by magic in a low magic setting is perfectly fine - they are the unstoppable monsters everyone runs from. If that's what the party is up against, give them the tools: Dusty tomes and old lore, treasure maps and rumors of enchanted weapons, or even build the One Weakness into the combat design. But also remember this means that if the party needs restorative magics, odds are they're the ones who will have it - none of this G1,250 for a raise dead from the local temple, because odds are the temple priests don't have any magic at all.

If instead you want magic everywhere, you can still set the limits - what's the highest level of caster likely to be found? Are clerics more likely to be found than arcanists? Are temple priests always clerics, or is the village priest merely an acolyte, and the most potent priest in the county is a Magic Initiate with some ritual casting? Do wizard schools exist, or are they highly secretive fringe weirdos? How specialized is a library that has the resources to actually research magic spells? Are sorcerers a known and countable population? Are they the X-Men? Are they the Fantastic Four? Are they Olympic Athletes - what anyone can learn to do, but they have the training and capacity to excel? Or is a 5th-level caster party essentially the G7 of magic power?

[Sparky McDibben]

Been questioning this recently and came upon this blog:
Fanservice BS: Low Magic, No Problem. Oh, Wait, Problem (https://theangrygm.com/fanservice-bs-low-magic/)

And this particular part stuck out to me:


When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

Game designers will tell us that we can play however we wish, whether it's more high fantasy or more sword & sorcery, but that's just not true based on what they actually design and release in final products - all of it is super-high fantasy.

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?

My highly unnecessary, strictly personal spicy opinion on the Angry GM is that some of his designs are solid, but most of his fluff is myopic. <<This is not an attack on you for reading the Angry GM; if he's your guy, that's perfectly OK>>

With that out of the way, here's how I do low-magic:

1.) First step 'cuz it's the most important: TALK TO YOUR PLAYERS. Spell out exactly what you mean by low-magic. New players would usually see a really awesome high-fantasy setting, and more experienced players might hear "low-magic" and equate it to "gritty nihilistic setting where the DM can enact revenge fantasies." I actually see that a lot.

2.) With your players on board, gather their information. I don't restrict any classes, but I highlight what might change about the base assumptions. If you're a wizard, for example, you might be the only wizard within a 600-mile radius. Good luck finding scrolls except through adventures. And if you want to gain more spells than the basic 2 per level, we're going to need to build out some basic spell research rules. Maybe 1 month of downtime per spell level up to 5th level, and one year of downtime per spell level for 6th level and up. And of course, that also means spelling out your downtime assumptions. Again, it's not about limiting player choices, it's about defining the consequences.

3.) I prefer a sandbox-style game, so I construct an area, populate with dungeons, monsters, and towns, then seed rumors leading to those dungeons and monsters throughout the setting. I also try to figure out what my players want. One of them is a witch hunter who had a run-in with a hag? I want to create at least three but probably five clues about that hag somewhere in this area. Some of them could be adventures in their own right. But I want to highlight that this world doesn't have a lot of magic running around, so maybe there are no spells known above 3rd level anywhere in this area. No. Zilch. Zippo. Even a scroll of chromatic orb is invaluable. That means the village priest is likely not a spellcaster, and if they are a spellcaster, nothing above first level spells once or twice per day. And those spells shouldn't be combat spells, but stuff like create food and water, etc. That also means these villagers live a lot closer to the poverty line, with highly unstable communities that could crack at the first hint of trouble. Which means that they shouldn't be a friendly sort of bunch, but they honor hospitality (or let the priest honor hospitality).

To answer your question: no. Game worlds are full of people, but that doesn't make playing a human feel generic. It makes it feel awesome when you can freaking fly, dude. Game worlds feel boring when they are too much like ours. The answer to a boring game world isn't "less magic," it's magic that sees a creative use. Check out Avatar: the Last Airbender for examples of this in all the cities.

[Tanarii]

No. But the default speed of advancement and magic item treasure gain has accelerated greatly. From experience I know with multiple times a week play, you can hit level 11 in less than 3 months. I've heard that you can reach level 20 with weekly play in a year. The former is something like 5-8x faster than the original rules intended, as per Gyxgax's rant against power level gamers and the levels of characters in the O.G. Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns.

Remember, "name" level, level 9 or so, was the cumulation of a PC career, when it was time to semi-retire.

Also he apparently never intended level 9 spells to be used.p:

https://dmdavid.com/tag/the-dungeons-dragons-spells-gary-gygax-never-meant-for-players/



*Actually I think I know -- it proves that the designers were catering to the OSR crowd, who would want a 'elf' class to play and a Grey Mouser to play, without the tack-on rules like Multiclassing and Feats.
Agreed, clearly there for elves.

[MaxWilson]

No. But the default speed of advancement and magic item treasure gain has accelerated greatly. From experience I know with multiple times a week play, you can hit level 11 in less than 3 months. I've heard that you can reach level 20 with weekly play in a year.

You can do it much faster than that if you power-level by fighting the right monsters, especially in a sandbox. E.g. a single Iron Golem can boost you from 1st level to 6th level all in one fight, and at that point taking on further Iron Golems is pretty trivial if you're e.g. a Shepherd Druid.

You may or may not survive to reach 20th level if you push the envelope repeatedly, but if you do you'll hit 20th level very rapidly. It's only 355,000 XP after all. In AD&D you'd only be ~9th level at that point but in 5E you're 20th level.

[Tvtyrant]

I think a more Conan style campaign is pretty easy (especially in 4E.) No casting classes, rituals are in the game, make it so magic items can only be made in places of power or make monster parts ingredients for them. Immediately becomes more like early Buffy or other urban fantasy genres where spells aren't easy to find or cast.

[NorthernPhoenix]

You can do it much faster than that if you power-level by fighting the right monsters, especially in a sandbox. E.g. a single Iron Golem can boost you from 1st level to 6th level all in one fight, and at that point taking on further Iron Golems is pretty trivial if you're e.g. a Shepherd Druid.

You may or may not survive to reach 20th level if you push the envelope repeatedly, but if you do you'll hit 20th level very rapidly. It's only 355,000 XP after all. In AD&D you'd only be ~9th level at that point but in 5E you're 20th level.

I'd be impressed if more than 1% of the 5e playerbase actually play that way.

[MaxWilson]

I'd be impressed if more than 1% of the 5e playerbase actually play that way.

I doubt that more than 1% of the player base ever reaches 20th level at all. It's a niche within a niche. From what I gather on the Internet, most people seem to play adventure paths instead of modular adventures, and DMs just don't create enough content to last until 20th level.

[Trask]

In my opinion, yes. I wish magic was restricted to a few classes that were the magical classes, or just one magical class. The wizard. I think the cleric and the druid could both be wizard archetypes. I dont think the bard needs to be magical and could probably have been a rogue archetype. I dont think the ranger needs to be magical and could be a fighter archetype. I'm skeptical that the sorcerer or warlock need to exist. I dont think the barbarian needs ANY magic and shouldnt have ridiculous things like ancestor ghosts or magic rage storms.

Not because these things are inherently bad but they dont gel with my (and many peoples) idea of a fantasy world. Pretty much any fantasy world. Its endemic of D&D becoming so navelgazing and self referential that it locks out players from playing anything else. And that would be ok if D&D actually committed to a setting (or at least one that wasnt the definition of stale, tasteless pablum in the Snoregotten Realms). But as it stands the game doesnt commit itself to anything except its implied setting which ends up in this weird place where the game simultaneously has a lot of genre freedom and yet none at all because whatever you do, the macro level worldbuilding ends up being the exact same because of all the world-breaking spells D&D has. All the old D&D settings just arent a good fit for it anymore because of this. I admire what 4e tried to do in creating a ground up setting for their game and I think that it would be to the benefit of the game to do this again so people can stop making a thousand threads about how to do low magic in D&D. You cant. D&D is a game about gonzo ridiculous anime characters burping magic from every orifice. Thats the facts, get over it already.

So to answer the OP soundly, I think its pretty unarguably true that magic has become less "magical". Because to be "magical" it would have to be something in contrast to mundanity, it would have to be fantastical and special. It isnt. Its more like science, or superpowers now. Were playing a superheroes game, only faux medieval Seattle rather than Metropolis.

[Grod_The_Giant]

D&D, at this point in its evolution, has become its own beast. It's not trying to emulate Lord of the Rings, or Conan, or Jack Vance, or really anything that exists outside its own confines. D&D exists to be D&D-- to have Wizards and Clerics, Fighters and Rogues, Fireballs and Bags of Holding, natural 20s and spell levels and all the rest. Following its rules and logic through to the conclusion isn't going to get you a consistent world because that was never the goal. It exists for dungeon crawling and dragon slaying, not world-building.

(Which, let me emphasize, is not in any way shape or form a bad thing)

[Tanarii]

You can do it much faster than that if you power-level by fighting the right monsters, especially in a sandbox. E.g. a single Iron Golem can boost you from 1st level to 6th level all in one fight, and at that point taking on further Iron Golems is pretty trivial if you're e.g. a Shepherd Druid.
Yes well DMs giving away easy kills and XP have been around since the old days too. Thus Gygax's rant. That's why I specified default.

[MaxWilson]

Yes well DMs giving away easy kills and XP have been around since the old days too. Thus Gygax's rant. That's why I specified default.

I thought you were talking about the default speed of advancement, not the default difficulty. The point is that if you crank the difficulty way up to the point where most combats are life-and-death stakes, you automatically inherit fast level advancement too, and there's no way to change that without actually rewriting 5E's XP tables or abandoning XP-based levelling.

[Spiritchaser]

Been questioning this recently and came upon this blog:
Fanservice BS: Low Magic, No Problem. Oh, Wait, Problem (https://theangrygm.com/fanservice-bs-low-magic/)

And this particular part stuck out to me:


When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

Game designers will tell us that we can play however we wish, whether it's more high fantasy or more sword & sorcery, but that's just not true based on what they actually design and release in final products - all of it is super-high fantasy.

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?


I think there are caveats and provisos, ways in which mundane magic is at least alien, but in general I agree with you.

I would note that the way rest mechanics work in 5e, it is surprisingly viable for a sufficiently pyromaniacle party to run without any magic at all, at least in the low to mid levels (no experience higher than that)

That said, the DM can still make the magic of each campaign strange, interesting, different and unexpected.

It’s just a lot of work to do, and still leap it somewhat balanced

[Sorinth]

Keep in mind that if you want to create a system that can support both high magic worlds and low magic worlds it's a lot easier to create the rules for high magic worlds, and then simply restrict certain things in order to create a low magic setting.

But it's true that they marketed 5e as a low magic by default settings and it really isn't. I find the biggest failing of the DMG is that they didn't provide guidance for how and what to limit to create the type of campaign you want to create. Even beyond just low/high magic worlds, if a DM wanted to create a survivalist game there's no guidance in the DMG when their really should be sections for most of the standard worlds/campaigns.

[Trask]

Anyone who wants to play low magic 5e should just play the "Adventures in Middle Earth" supplement. Its basically perfect for it.

[Akal Saris]

I was thinking about this topic a little while ago, since I'm playing a dwarven barbarian/fighter in a high level 5E game at present, and I felt like I practically had to work not to have any mystic/magic abilities for the character, because I wanted to try and capture a '2E' feel for a frontline dwarven fighter. My DM, meanwhile, has been a friend for ~30 years, and I've never seen him play a character that didn't have some level of magic, typically a fighter/mage, so he was completely mystified that I didn't want to splash in some levels of X spellcaster to be more effective :P

[HPisBS]

If you want a low magic setting, then all it takes is to use the gritty / slow rest rules -- where short rests take 8 hours and long rests take all week. That forces everyone to cast FAR fewer spells. So much so that it discourages players from even playing full casters, or anything else that relies on long-rest-based abilities.

(This doesn't appeal to me, personally. And our group didn't like it when it was tried. But if you feel like magic gets tossed around too often for your tastes, then this would definitely put an end to it.)

[NaughtyTiger]

Yes, magic is so commonplace, that it's meh.

No one should be impressed that the charleton can do card tricks that look like magic, cuz the guy next to him is literally doing magic.

Not to mention, the economy should reflect it.
any worker who doesn't do magic should be unemployed.
a 5th level wizard isn't that special, and she could literally build a 3x 40ft bridges in a day.

[Dr. Cliché]

When everything is magical, is nothing magical?

An interesting thing to note is that whilst magic seems to have become much more prevalent on PCs, it's actually diminished greatly on the monsters. Many creatures that used to be fearsome spellcasters in their own right now have barely any spells to their name, and even the ones that have retained their casting are mere shadows of their former selves.

As an example, a Horned Devil in 3.5 had:
Spell-Like Abilities:
At will—dispel chaos (DC 21), dispel good (DC 21), magic circle against good, greater teleport (self plus 50 pounds of objects only); persistent image (DC 21)
3/day—fireball (DC 19), lightning bolt (DC 19)

In contrast, a Horned Devil in 5e has:
[Error: "spells" not found.]

Even the monsters that have come off better have still generally lost out. Take, for example, the spells of the Death Slaad:
At will: detect magic, detect thoughts, invisibility (self only), mage hand, major image
2/day each: fear, fireball, fly, tongues
1/day each: cloudkill, plane shift

This seems pretty good . . . until you look at the 3.5 version:

Spell-Like Abilities:
At will—animate objects, chaos hammer, deeper darkness, detect magic, dispel law, fear, finger of death, fireball, fly, identify, invisibility, magic circle against law, see invisibility, shatter;
3/day—circle of death, cloak of chaos, word of chaos;
1/day—implosion, power word blind.

Note also the quality of the spells. The 5e Slaad has just 5 at-will spells, compared to 14 for the 3.5 version. But on top of that, 2 of those 5 spells are basic cantrips and the others are all fairly weak, low-level spells. Meanwhile, the 3.5 one can throw out Finger of Death at will.


I suppose the only point I'm making is that there's a weird trend wherein PCs in 5e have become significantly more magical, yet monsters have gone the opposite route. :smallconfused:


As to the original point, at least as far as PCs are concerned, I think this is a logical consequence of having magic that's free of both (meaningful) costs, as well as risk and consequences. There's a dozen different ways for a PC to gain magic, and even magic involving dark pacts and forbidden lore has no significant side-effects or negative consequences.

The obvious answer then is why wouldn't you use magic?

[HPisBS]

I suppose the only point I'm making is that there's a weird trend wherein PCs in 5e have become significantly more magical, yet monsters have gone the opposite route. :smallconfused:


As to the original point, at least as far as PCs are concerned, I think this is a logical consequence of having magic that's free of both (meaningful) costs, as well as risk and consequences. There's a dozen different ways for a PC to gain magic, and even magic involving dark pacts and forbidden lore has no significant side-effects or negative consequences.

The obvious answer then is why wouldn't you use magic?


On the other hand, haven't a lot of PCs' spells gotten weaker? Didn't stuff like Dominate ___ used to last multiple days at a time?

[CapnWildefyr]

An interesting thing to note is that whilst magic seems to have become much more prevalent on PCs, it's actually diminished greatly on the monsters. Many creatures that used to be fearsome spellcasters in their own right now have barely any spells to their name, and even the ones that have retained their casting are mere shadows of their former selves.

...

I suppose the only point I'm making is that there's a weird trend wherein PCs in 5e have become significantly more magical, yet monsters have gone the opposite route. :smallconfused:

As to the original point, at least as far as PCs are concerned, I think this is a logical consequence of having magic that's free of both (meaningful) costs, as well as risk and consequences. There's a dozen different ways for a PC to gain magic, and even magic involving dark pacts and forbidden lore has no significant side-effects or negative consequences.


You bring up a very interesting point. 5e is I think about being playable, and that means darned hard to kill (because you heal every time you sleep 8 hours) and you do a lot of magical stuff. I guess it's why we're playing Dungeons & Dragons, not Lawyers & Accountants -- we want the magic -- for us. The side effect is that you have to deal with odd facts like you can get chewed on by a dragon like bubble gum, spit out and left for dead, and after 8 hours of unconsciousness -- BAM! You're unhurt.

And some of the rules that make it more playable -- like at-will offensive cantrips -- also remove the risks of playing spellcasters. In 2e, when you ran out of spells, well, you know, you RAN because unless you had a wand or staff or something, you would get skewered. (Hiding behind a line of fighters worked too.) Let's face it, if you're dead you end up sitting out half the session, if you just rest a few hours to heal, then you get to keep playing.

For me, I just deal with it. I don't think it makes magic less special that characters all have it, because characters have always had a lot of magic.

The de-fanging of monsters is a bit odd, though. Losing real magic resistance in favor of advantage is a big deal. 50% chance nothing happens, and if it does you still get to save, vs you still take half damage. With MR monsters could literally walk through walls of force. Paradoxically, de-fanging monsters makes for playability short-term, but makes it harder long-term because what do you use to oppose high-level characters?

Maybe an increased realism where you only get to roll your HD pool after a long rest, or only get 1/3 of your hp back might help. Also, you can ratchet up the difficulty very fast with using real magic resistance -- imagine that slaad is now only hurt by spells 1/2 the time. That in itself was always a big equalizer. No advantage, straight immunity.

But that's not diminishing the "magic" of magic or making magic more special, that's all just banter about how difficult you want magic use to be, or encounters to be. The bottom line is that a DM can impose restraints and balance, or open the flood gates of magic for everyone. I don't run particularly magic-laden games, but all the PCs have magic. And you don't need a +5 Holy Avenger, anyway - just a +1 sword can hit anything out there (or bring a monk along).

I will add this, however: the game should at least pay lip service to "practical magic," that thing that every city seems to have, from the underdark to the skies. There's always a city wall/gate "enchanted against harm" and wizards using magic to hold up Menzobarranzan... but where is all that listed? Where is the ability of wizards and sorcerers to permanently enhance the walls of a tower so you can build 30 stories up in stone? Or glass? Where are the spells to hide secret doors, cross chasms, light up a city at nightfall? For the most part this type of thing would not show up in adventures, but is a missing mechanic in the magical world.

[Man_Over_Game]

Been questioning this recently and came upon this blog:
Fanservice BS: Low Magic, No Problem. Oh, Wait, Problem (https://theangrygm.com/fanservice-bs-low-magic/)

And this particular part stuck out to me:


When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

Game designers will tell us that we can play however we wish, whether it's more high fantasy or more sword & sorcery, but that's just not true based on what they actually design and release in final products - all of it is super-high fantasy.

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?

I think that it mostly stems from 5e's consistent weakness of low-fantasy Martials. Many of us use spellcasting because it's interesting and versatile, not because it's magical. If I had faith that the Mastermind's use of a Disguise Kit could rival the Warlock's Mask of Many Faces, I'd take it. But I don't, so I don't.

The game's most complex form of resource management through non-magical means is the Battlemaster, which basically has the same 12 or so powers for 20 levels, which most are a variant of "If you hit, have the target roll a save to avoid a condition and add 1dX to the damage".

That's the pinnacle of strategy that we got with magic.

Hell, many people hated that Rangers used spell slots.

But players want cool things, magic does almost all of the cool things, so what do you do when you wanna make something shiny? Stick some magic on it!

Rangers aren't cool enough? Stick some magic on it!

Barbarians are too boring and can't cast spells? Stick some magic on it!

What's ironic is that the DMG tries to imply the setting is low magic where they tried to justify why magical items don't have pricetags. Magic is too priceless, it said.

Yet we've gotten to the point where nothing can get released without something magical getting in the way. Even the Echo Knight is basically nothing more than letting you do the mundane with more magic, and that's on one of the the least magically-inclined classes in the game.

If you tried to make a campaign that had nothing magical, it'd basically come down to just the core book, 3/12 classes, and only about 50% of the remaining subclasses.


The solution is pretty simple, though. Don't have all of your versatility, control, and resource management in magic. They've already shown you don't need the Spell Slot system to implement magic, so you probably don't need a spell slots system to cast spells.

[Lavaeolus]

Keep in mind that if you want to create a system that can support both high magic worlds and low magic worlds it's a lot easier to create the rules for high magic worlds, and then simply restrict certain things in order to create a low magic setting.

But it's true that they marketed 5e as a low magic by default settings and it really isn't. I find the biggest failing of the DMG is that they didn't provide guidance for how and what to limit to create the type of campaign you want to create. Even beyond just low/high magic worlds, if a DM wanted to create a survivalist game there's no guidance in the DMG when their really should be sections for most of the standard worlds/campaigns.

I remember, when I was thinking up a setting that was on the lower-end of magic, I realised pretty quickly that the party members were probably gonna be outliers unless I forcibly tied their hands. Not necessarily because I was playing with people who loved spellcasting, but because, of the 13 classes, about four weren't casters in some shape or form (Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue, Monk).

A fair balance? Well, Monk is very mystical in nature, and a few of its subclasses outright let you replicate spells. Fighters and Rogues would fit the campaign world a little better, though of course had subclasses to give them magical abilities. Barbarian is a class that locks off spellcasting entirely, so you think it'd work well -- but the majority of its subclasses would make the players semi-magical in nature.

And none of this is necessarily a problem, mind. D&D gives a lot of different magical options, which I generally think is good. (I'd gone into the setting assuming magic wasn't non-existent anyway, just a little rare.) It just struck me that there were a lot more ways to play a spellcaster of some sort than to play a non-caster: half the base classes are full spellcasters, after all (although Warlock is funny; it deliberately eschews the usual 5e caster classifications).

Now, between subclasses and different build options, each class can be pretty varied on its own, but it did make me sort of hanker for more variety in playstyles that aren't tied to spellcasting and spell slots. A Fighter, a Barbarian and a Rogue do all play pretty differently -- but is there a gap where more non-casters could fit? Well, the answer to that question would probably always be technically yes, regardless of how many classes they put in; but it did make me curious if it was a gap worth pursuing.

When I ran the campaign, I ultimately put in a little carrot and said the players could pick two homebrew classes I was interested in experimenting with (a Pugilist and a Scholar). Now, none of them bit and I of course ended up with a full-magical party, but I felt just having them around hypothetically let me broaden and hint at what sort of NPCs they could expect to run into -- although obviously you don't need a class just for that.

...Well, okay, one of them bit and took a Scholar level, but multiclassed it with Warlock. C'est la vie.

[Tanarii]

I thought you were talking about the default speed of advancement, not the default difficulty. The point is that if you crank the difficulty way up to the point where most combats are life-and-death stakes, you automatically inherit fast level advancement too, and there's no way to change that without actually rewriting 5E's XP tables or abandoning XP-based levelling.
Absolutely. It's one of the issues with over-optimized characters. It's either boring or they advance too quickly.

(Edit: or over rewarded characters, ie get too many awesome magic items too early.)

[SociopathFriend]

Remember you can reflavor the magic as not magic at all in some cases.

Fully half the Ranger spells I expect you could think of as raw superhuman prowess or skill.
The Totem Barbarian ability to speak with animals and the like could be thought of as just a greater instinct to understanding Beasts than an actual spell.

Spell slots and Spells are game terms to get certain objective rules going.

[Yakmala]

Remember, the PC's are adventurers.

Magic may be commonplace for them, but that doesn't mean the vast majority of the population has access to it (with maybe Eberron as the exception).

What percentage of the population can cast even a simple cantrip? Not very many. Sure, some races do this inherently, but those races tend to make up a small percentage of the above ground world population.

And of those with a smattering of magic, how many get to 2nd or 3rd level spells, much less 8th or 9th level spells?

Are there magic shops in the world where items can be purchased? Certainly, but for the average citizen, even an uncommon magic item costs more than many of them will earn in a lifetime.

The PC's, and the types of NPCs they interact with, are the exceptions. It may seem like everyone is special when you only interact with special people. It's up to the DM to get across the viewpoint of the common citizen that still finds magic a thing of awe, fear or envy.

[Dork_Forge]

What's ironic is that the DMG tries to imply the setting is low magic where they tried to justify why magical items don't have pricetags. Magic is too priceless, it said.

Where does it say that? In the Magic Item part of the Treasure chapter it literally gives you guidelines on how much each tier should cost and says that people that have and are willing to sell magical items are likely to ask for services rather than coin or host private auctions that are invite only. Most people can't afford magic items and of those that can they usually have more practical things that require their attention.

[LordCdrMilitant]

Been questioning this recently and came upon this blog:
Fanservice BS: Low Magic, No Problem. Oh, Wait, Problem (https://theangrygm.com/fanservice-bs-low-magic/)

And this particular part stuck out to me:


When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

Game designers will tell us that we can play however we wish, whether it's more high fantasy or more sword & sorcery, but that's just not true based on what they actually design and release in final products - all of it is super-high fantasy.

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?


I like the "newer" more abundant magic system. It makes the world special and fantastic with the characters as a living part of it versus the world being mundane with characters who are fantasy.

[Morty]

I think that it mostly stems from 5e's consistent weakness of low-fantasy Martials. Many of us use spellcasting because it's interesting and versatile, not because it's magical. If I had faith that the Mastermind's use of a Disguise Kit could rival the Warlock's Mask of Many Faces, I'd take it. But I don't, so I don't.

The game's most complex form of resource management through non-magical means is the Battlemaster, which basically has the same 12 or so powers for 20 levels, which most are a variant of "If you hit, have the target roll a save to avoid a condition and add 1dX to the damage".

That's the pinnacle of strategy that we got with magic.

Hell, many people hated that Rangers used spell slots.

But players want cool things, magic does almost all of the cool things, so what do you do when you wanna make something shiny? Stick some magic on it!

Rangers aren't cool enough? Stick some magic on it!

Barbarians are too boring and can't cast spells? Stick some magic on it!

What's ironic is that the DMG tries to imply the setting is low magic where they tried to justify why magical items don't have pricetags. Magic is too priceless, it said.

Yet we've gotten to the point where nothing can get released without something magical getting in the way. Even the Echo Knight is basically nothing more than letting you do the mundane with more magic, and that's on one of the the least magically-inclined classes in the game.

If you tried to make a campaign that had nothing magical, it'd basically come down to just the core book, 3/12 classes, and only about 50% of the remaining subclasses.


The solution is pretty simple, though. Don't have all of your versatility, control, and resource management in magic. They've already shown you don't need the Spell Slot system to implement magic, so you probably don't need a spell slots system to cast spells.

Yes, I think that's the root of the problem. Most cool and interesting things about the system are bound up in magic. If you don't use magic, you're facing an uphill battle if you want to do anything impressive. Or just mechanically distinct.

[Waazraath]

I think that it mostly stems from 5e's consistent weakness of low-fantasy Martials. Many of us use spellcasting because it's interesting and versatile, not because it's magical. If I had faith that the Mastermind's use of a Disguise Kit could rival the Warlock's Mask of Many Faces, I'd take it. But I don't, so I don't.

The game's most complex form of resource management through non-magical means is the Battlemaster, which basically has the same 12 or so powers for 20 levels, which most are a variant of "If you hit, have the target roll a save to avoid a condition and add 1dX to the damage".

That's the pinnacle of strategy that we got with magic.

Hell, many people hated that Rangers used spell slots.

But players want cool things, magic does almost all of the cool things, so what do you do when you wanna make something shiny? Stick some magic on it!

Rangers aren't cool enough? Stick some magic on it!

Barbarians are too boring and can't cast spells? Stick some magic on it!

What's ironic is that the DMG tries to imply the setting is low magic where they tried to justify why magical items don't have pricetags. Magic is too priceless, it said.

Yet we've gotten to the point where nothing can get released without something magical getting in the way. Even the Echo Knight is basically nothing more than letting you do the mundane with more magic, and that's on one of the the least magically-inclined classes in the game.

If you tried to make a campaign that had nothing magical, it'd basically come down to just the core book, 3/12 classes, and only about 50% of the remaining subclasses.


The solution is pretty simple, though. Don't have all of your versatility, control, and resource management in magic. They've already shown you don't need the Spell Slot system to implement magic, so you probably don't need a spell slots system to cast spells.

There's a lot in this. I'm not that negative as you about the possibilities and versatitlity martials have I think, but it certainly is remarkable that they choose 'spells' as the solution for every subclass they want to give a bit more versatility than the core. I mean, how difficult would it be to develop a few unique abilities for barbarians instead of giving totem barbarians a few spells (at 10 I think), and why not create 12 unique effects for 4 elements monks. I mean, it's not that there isn't a ton of inspiration for this in older editions. And yeah, having only 3 out of 12 classes without any magical ability is silly if you want to have a system that also supports low magic campaigns.

So in reply to the OP, yeah, they could seriously tune 'magic' and its prevelence down a bit, yes please.

[Sindal]

I wouldn't say so personally.

It depends on how you want to look at it.
We as players know there are all these fancy magic classes and doodads and items and spells and subclasses.

That doesnt mean your characters or the npcs you encounter do. Magic only stops being 'magical' if you want it to be. If you personally feel like theres magic everywhere, that's probably valid. Many classes have some involvement in magic because magic is "a set of things that defy what we are normally able to do" in most situations. Even if something isnt actually magic, it can be seen as magic the same way people though science was magic back in the day before we went and explained how things actually work.

[Yora]

If there was such a point, I would say it was when AD&D added the ranger, paladin, druid, and bard to the spellcasting classes and nothing to the spell-less classes in 1979. And my understanding had always been that fighters and thieves were meant to be customized by the magic items they are using before third edition brought in feats.

I don't really know at which time (mid-level) D&D would ever have been low on magic.

Though it's certainly a matter of how you run the game. Right now my campaign has a fighter, two rogues, and two warlocks at 3rd level, and while I had them go against four priests and three acolytes so far (half of them died in their beds), only one managed to cast command at them twice. And only one monster displayed supernatural powers.

This wasn't even a deliberate choice. I've merely been approaching my preparation for the game as not putting magical creatures as random wildlife.

The question might rather be if WotC (and we also have to include Paizo going back) are overloading their adventures with trivial magic, which are the main reference for most people what a typical D&D adventure should look like.

[Dr. Cliché]

On the other hand, haven't a lot of PCs' spells gotten weaker? Didn't stuff like Dominate ___ used to last multiple days at a time?

You refer to 'PC spells' but the PCs and monsters draw their magic from the same book, so weakening one also weakens the other. :smalltongue:

As to your point, I would say that for players magic has gotten weaker but casting has gotten more flexible. Concentration and the removal of some of the crazier spells means wizards can no longer be gods, but the addition of cantrips and the extension of spontaneous casting to all the non-sorcerer classes means casters no longer need to worry about not having the right spells prepared or preparing too few of a particular spell.

For monsters, though, their magic has been weakened just as much as the PCs, yet their spell selection has generally become less flexible - so they've been hit by two nerfs.



I think that it mostly stems from 5e's consistent weakness of low-fantasy Martials. Many of us use spellcasting because it's interesting and versatile, not because it's magical. If I had faith that the Mastermind's use of a Disguise Kit could rival the Warlock's Mask of Many Faces, I'd take it. But I don't, so I don't.

The game's most complex form of resource management through non-magical means is the Battlemaster, which basically has the same 12 or so powers for 20 levels, which most are a variant of "If you hit, have the target roll a save to avoid a condition and add 1dX to the damage".

That's the pinnacle of strategy that we got with magic.

Hell, many people hated that Rangers used spell slots.

But players want cool things, magic does almost all of the cool things, so what do you do when you wanna make something shiny? Stick some magic on it!

Rangers aren't cool enough? Stick some magic on it!

Barbarians are too boring and can't cast spells? Stick some magic on it!

What's ironic is that the DMG tries to imply the setting is low magic where they tried to justify why magical items don't have pricetags. Magic is too priceless, it said.

Yet we've gotten to the point where nothing can get released without something magical getting in the way. Even the Echo Knight is basically nothing more than letting you do the mundane with more magic, and that's on one of the the least magically-inclined classes in the game.

If you tried to make a campaign that had nothing magical, it'd basically come down to just the core book, 3/12 classes, and only about 50% of the remaining subclasses.


The solution is pretty simple, though. Don't have all of your versatility, control, and resource management in magic. They've already shown you don't need the Spell Slot system to implement magic, so you probably don't need a spell slots system to cast spells.

I would agree with most of this. However, I'd also add a couple of additional factors:

1) All magic in D&D - regardless of source - still works the same way. It doesn't matter if your power comes from innate talent, from the gods, from a dark pact, from nature, from study etc. the result is always the same - a number of spell-slots and a selection of rigid spells, many of which even overlap between classes.

I think it might help mix things up a bit if there were different casting systems. As an example, compare the Chanter in Pillars of Eternity to the Wizard in the same game. They both use magic but the Chanter's works in an entirely different way. If the Bard did something like that, rather than just being another full caster with a slightly different spell selection, it might at least give a different feel to the magic and the class in general.


2) Another point is that D&D does have some decent abilities which, whilst possibly still magic, nevertheless work in different ways. For example, Wild Shape (particularly the Moon Druid version) allows Shapeshifting into different creatures, but in a way that doesn't involve the standard spells or spell-slots.

The problem is that this ability is slapped onto a class that's already a full caster. If it was added to, say, a Rogue, it would still represent a supernatural ability, but one that would again feel very different to the system's existing magic (as opposed to 'a rogue with spells').

[Waazraath]

You refer to 'PC spells' but the PCs and monsters draw their magic from the same book, so weakening one also weakens the other. :smalltongue:

As to your point, I would say that for players magic has gotten weaker but casting has gotten more flexible. Concentration and the removal of some of the crazier spells means wizards can no longer be gods, but the addition of cantrips and the extension of spontaneous casting to all the non-sorcerer classes means casters no longer need to worry about not having the right spells prepared or preparing too few of a particular spell.

For monsters, though, their magic has been weakened just as much as the PCs, yet their spell selection has generally become less flexible - so they've been hit by two nerfs.




I would agree with most of this. However, I'd also add a couple of additional factors:

1) All magic in D&D - regardless of source - still works the same way. It doesn't matter if your power comes from innate talent, from the gods, from a dark pact, from nature, from study etc. the result is always the same - a number of spell-slots and a selection of rigid spells, many of which even overlap between classes.

I think it might help mix things up a bit if there were different casting systems. As an example, compare the Chanter in Pillars of Eternity to the Wizard in the same game. They both use magic but the Chanter's works in an entirely different way. If the Bard did something like that, rather than just being another full caster with a slightly different spell selection, it might at least give a different feel to the magic and the class in general.


2) Another point is that D&D does have some decent abilities which, whilst possibly still magic, nevertheless work in different ways. For example, Wild Shape (particularly the Moon Druid version) allows Shapeshifting into different creatures, but in a way that doesn't involve the standard spells or spell-slots.

The problem is that this ability is slapped onto a class that's already a full caster. If it was added to, say, a Rogue, it would still represent a supernatural ability, but one that would again feel very different to the system's existing magic (as opposed to 'a rogue with spells').

Spot on. Regarding both 1 and 2, this is weird, cause earlier editions already shown how this could be done (e.g. 3.5's Warlock and Master of Many Forms). Especially for the Warlock this is weird, since they kept half of the 3.5 systems (invocations & Eldritch Blast), only added spells on top of that - in a unique spell system though. I mean, I understand the designer aim to keep things simple, but having a warlock chasis that is pure invocation based wouldn't have been more complicated than the current invocation / pact magic hybrid system, if anything it would have been easier.

[Deathtongue]

I'm the other way around. When magic is rare, it doesn't feel magical. It just feels intrusive and fourth-wall breaking when it shows up.

For example, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Game of Thrones has magic in the stories. It greatly influences the plot. However, 95% of the time the stories operate just as if magic didn't exist in the setting, so you forget it's there. But then Sisko makes an appeal to the Prophets or Robert Strong shows up and you're all 'WTF is this doing in my sho--oh, right, it's maaaaaagic, whatever'.

[Dr. Cliché]

Spot on. Regarding both 1 and 2, this is weird, cause earlier editions already shown how this could be done (e.g. 3.5's Warlock and Master of Many Forms). Especially for the Warlock this is weird, since they kept half of the 3.5 systems (invocations & Eldritch Blast), only added spells on top of that - in a unique spell system though. I mean, I understand the designer aim to keep things simple, but having a warlock chasis that is pure invocation based wouldn't have been more complicated than the current invocation / pact magic hybrid system, if anything it would have been easier.

Yeah, I think it's a shame, too, as I would have liked to see Invocations fleshed out more. There are some nice ones currently but it seems like they take a back-seat to spells, so you don't get many of them and they basically peter out at higher levels.



I'm the other way around. When magic is rare, it doesn't feel magical. It just feels intrusive and fourth-wall breaking when it shows up.

For example, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Game of Thrones has magic in the stories. It greatly influences the plot. However, 95% of the time the stories operate just as if magic didn't exist in the setting, so you forget it's there. But then Sisko makes an appeal to the Prophets or Robert Strong shows up and you're all 'WTF is this doing in my sho--oh, right, it's maaaaaagic, whatever'.

I would partially disagree with this. I think that magic *can* feel intrusive or out of place when it shows up in low-magic shows, but I don't think this is inevitable.

I think the issue is more when the magic seems to suddenly become much more prevalent and/or of a completely different type to anything established previously. When a world that has previously been shown to be low-magic suddenly transitions to a high-magic place, it feels very jarring.

For example, the White Walkers in Game of Thrones were shown right from the beginning and were clearly of a magical nature. There were a couple of other instances of magic, such as a conjured shadow-assassin thing and a man who was resurrected from the dead. I don't think any of these felt at odds with the rest of the world.

IMO, the issue was when we suddenly had magic children throwing fireballs at animated skeletons. The fireballs in particular seemed very different to any magic seen thus far in the show (not to mention seemingly being freely usable, whereas magic had previously been shown to typically involve a significant cost).

[Tanarii]

I'm the other way around. When magic is rare, it doesn't feel magical. It just feels intrusive and fourth-wall breaking when it shows up.

For example, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Game of Thrones has magic in the stories. It greatly influences the plot. However, 95% of the time the stories operate just as if magic didn't exist in the setting, so you forget it's there. But then Sisko makes an appeal to the Prophets or Robert Strong shows up and you're all 'WTF is this doing in my sho--oh, right, it's maaaaaagic, whatever'.
Agreed. The white walkers and dragons being supernatural creatures worked okay. But the flame priests and Celtic seers and evil casters of the not-white-people-land were just jarring.

The problem is Howard and Leiber pulled off those tropes okay, so others think they can. But Martin doesn't have that kind of writing chops, and neither did the script writers for the show.

[stoutstien]

I agree they wrapped up to much design space into general spell casting and magic.
I'd love to see more variety in mechanics with the magic between the classes and expanded non magical options as well. The cavaliers a good example of how you can have a martial focus class/subclass that is effective and does what it says it's supposed to do on the tin but even they benefit a lot from dipping into a class with spells because it just offers too much to pass up.

[stoutstien]

I'm the other way around. When magic is rare, it doesn't feel magical. It just feels intrusive and fourth-wall breaking when it shows up.

For example, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Game of Thrones has magic in the stories. It greatly influences the plot. However, 95% of the time the stories operate just as if magic didn't exist in the setting, so you forget it's there. But then Sisko makes an appeal to the Prophets or Robert Strong shows up and you're all 'WTF is this doing in my sho--oh, right, it's maaaaaagic, whatever'.

I think Star trek is a good example of why magic isn't that immersion breaking for d&d. You have a huge range of civilization and technological development sharing the same time and space. Members of Starfleet have access to some of the most powerful resources but they are aware of the existence of species that are relatively omnipotent compared to them. the blacksmith making horseshoes doesn't suddenly become irrelevant just because there's wizard with fabricate.

[KorvinStarmast]

If there was such a point, I would say it was when AD&D added the ranger, paladin, druid, and bard to the spellcasting classes and nothing to the spell-less classes in 1979. Huh?
Paladin and Ranger are sub classes of Fighting Man. AD&D 1e PHB 1978, but Paladin was originally in Greyhawk, 1975 (sub class of Fighting Man) , and Ranger was in Strategic Review 2 in 1975 but that was harder to find and not put into a "core book" until AD&D 1e PHB.
Greyhawk + 3 books was the standard D&D that most people recognized until AD&D came out.
Greyhawkless OD&D is a bit of a different game.
Druid as sub class of cleric was brought into D&D in Eldritch Wizardry, 1976.
Illusionist debut was in Stragegic Review 4 and not seen again until AD&D PHB 1978.

Bard was added as an optional class in AD&D 1e PHB, and was the first Prestige Class The game ever had except nobody called it a prestige class.
Are you perhaps referring to AD&D 2e in 1989? That made bard a rogue subclass.

)Barbarian got added as a Sub Class of Fighting Man in 1985 Unearthed Arcana, and then the Cavalier showed up ... and arrgh things got a little loopy there)

However, I think you made a good point that I'd like to expand upon. If you survived, you were expected to eventually find various magic items in OD&D and AD&D 1e as you adventured and recovered more treasure. It was one of the great appeals of the game: let's go and find magical treasures!!! (This is also how DM's suckered us into using cursed items, eh?)

The "low magic" D&D was low level D&D. The other thing is how incredibly valuable a wand or a staff or a ring of spell storing was in OD&D and AD&D. It really opened up what a magic user could do. (Though explicit recharging mechanics were unclear, and there were some tables where once a wand's charges were used up the wand was rendered inert).

One of the interesting design things for 5e was that "you'll find lots of magical items!" has been somewhat toned down on purpose. But you are still expected to find some. (Discussed in detail in Xanathar's Guide to Everything).

[ezekielraiden]

Been questioning this recently and came upon this blog:
Fanservice BS: Low Magic, No Problem. Oh, Wait, Problem (https://theangrygm.com/fanservice-bs-low-magic/)

And this particular part stuck out to me:


When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

Game designers will tell us that we can play however we wish, whether it's more high fantasy or more sword & sorcery, but that's just not true based on what they actually design and release in final products - all of it is super-high fantasy.

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?

The fundamental problem was, is, and will continue to be that a system cannot create a sense of wonder.

In þe olden dayse, people experienced wonder with the system, because it was baroque, forbidding, poorly-organized. Many groups never realized they weren't using all of the rules, or actively chose to houserule the game until they had literal binders stuffed with alterations. Everything was unknown, mysterious--until it became known and understood with time. Everything was rare and inaccessible--until it had been accessed, and then its limits were perceived, its lack of true rarity revealed.

D&D has been trying to chase this genuinely impossible thing for ages now. It is not possible. It isn't just impossible for the reasons Angry describes; it's impossible because you will never be twelve again, because you will never play your very first RPG again, because you will never not know how D&D works again. As long as we continue to define "feeling magical" as "feeling mysterious," or "unknown," or "inaccessible," or hell, "impossible" then this will be the case. Because the WHOLE POINT of a system is to define what IS possible, to set terms for the valid behaviors.

D&D fans have become like the seventy-year-old trying to relive their glory days as a sexy college kid on some sport team, the eighty-year-old trying to recapture the supple smoothness of the skin and thick luxuriance of hair they had at 25. It is impossible for exactly the same reasons: you can't just *become* what you were decades ago.

Of course, there certainly ARE several other problems, and Angry identifies several of them, like his suggestion that D&D is trying to shoehorn four distinct games into a single game, and thus making each experience shallow. (This, of course, attracts defenders who will promise you that it's categorically better that the game expect each person to try to wrangle it into whichever of those four games they actually want to play--and I absolutely grant that, for SOME people, it is better that way, because it goes just far enough past lip service to satisfy the members of their group that want flavor 3 when the rest of the group wants flavor 2, or whatever.)

I actually said that this would be the dark side of 5e's legacy, long ago on a different forum. 5e, when it is at its most successful, ceases to be "everyone's second favorite" and becomes "everyone can find something to love." But the dark side of that is ceasing to be "everyone's second favorite" and becoming "the one everyone walks away from unsatisfied." As 5e ages, we're starting to see SOME of the latter showing up. I wouldn't call it a major component. Hell, I'm honestly surprised it's grown as slowly as it has. But there is definitely an undercurrent of "man, I really wish the thing *I* wanted was more important," and it's definitely growing, very slowly. Whether it becomes more important or dies away, I have no idea, but I suspect that that will be the seed from which the future not-a-new-edition will grow. (I fully expect the devs to make a "5.5e" several years from now, especially with that Class Feature Variants document we had a while back; after that, assuming D&D hasn't died out as an IP, I suspect that they'll move to an ACTUALLY modular setup super-ultra-vaguely like GURPS splats, where you have the Tuned-Up Balanced Version, the Oodles And Oodles of Options Version, the Incredibly Gritty Low-Magic Version, and the Gonzo Weirdo Version, perhaps among others.)

[Willie the Duck]

If there was such a point, I would say it was when AD&D added the ranger, paladin, druid, and bard to the spellcasting classes and nothing to the spell-less classes in 1979. And my understanding had always been that fighters and thieves were meant to be customized by the magic items they are using before third edition brought in feats.

I don't really know at which time (mid-level) D&D would ever have been low on magic.


I agree they wrapped up to much design space into general spell casting and magic.

I think these two points circle around an important issue. Magic (and, for the most part, spells and magic items) is how D&D has addressed a wide range of things that didn't necessarily have to use magic.

The most obvious, I feel, is ranger magic. The original oD&D ranger* from The Strategic Review's second issue had magical spells as a way to emulate Aragorn's herb lore abilities, as there was no generalized skill system in place, and magic was already in place as an avenue towards exception-based subsystems within the game. When skill systems were put into place in mid 1e, they could have moved ranger abilities out of spells, but by then it had become something of an institution (plus, then they might have had to have made a rigorous skill system). Perhaps even earlier (and so ingrained in the game DNA that I mentally skipped past it in favor of the ranger), the cleric did not need to have healing magic, if instead Gary and Dave had decided to focus more on a nonmagical healing/healers (for that matter, magic users have a lot of trap/obstacle-solving spells specifically because they predate the introduction of the thief class).
*Which was clearly intended as 'a way to play Aragorn.'

That trend has carried on, and through most of the game, a lot of design space that could have been non-magical has instead been magical. And most often in the buckets of 'class that gets spells using something not-unlike clerics/magic users' or 'magic item.' Occasionally something like Druid wildshape would pop up that was its own unique thing (or monk, but much of that too was 'emulate spell X 1/day').

All of which is to say that D&D is pretty magic-full (but again I think that it always has been). What I do think has changed is simply that Fighter (and Barbarian) and Thief/Rogue are now a much smaller proportion of the player options.

[Sorinth]

I remember, when I was thinking up a setting that was on the lower-end of magic, I realised pretty quickly that the party members were probably gonna be outliers unless I forcibly tied their hands. Not necessarily because I was playing with people who loved spellcasting, but because, of the 13 classes, about four weren't casters in some shape or form (Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue, Monk).

A fair balance? Well, Monk is very mystical in nature, and a few of its subclasses outright let you replicate spells. Fighters and Rogues would fit the campaign world a little better, though of course had subclasses to give them magical abilities. Barbarian is a class that locks off spellcasting entirely, so you think it'd work well -- but the majority of its subclasses would make the players semi-magical in nature.

And none of this is necessarily a problem, mind. D&D gives a lot of different magical options, which I generally think is good. (I'd gone into the setting assuming magic wasn't non-existent anyway, just a little rare.) It just struck me that there were a lot more ways to play a spellcaster of some sort than to play a non-caster: half the base classes are full spellcasters, after all (although Warlock is funny; it deliberately eschews the usual 5e caster classifications).

Now, between subclasses and different build options, each class can be pretty varied on its own, but it did make me sort of hanker for more variety in playstyles that aren't tied to spellcasting and spell slots. A Fighter, a Barbarian and a Rogue do all play pretty differently -- but is there a gap where more non-casters could fit? Well, the answer to that question would probably always be technically yes, regardless of how many classes they put in; but it did make me curious if it was a gap worth pursuing.

When I ran the campaign, I ultimately put in a little carrot and said the players could pick two homebrew classes I was interested in experimenting with (a Pugilist and a Scholar). Now, none of them bit and I of course ended up with a full-magical party, but I felt just having them around hypothetically let me broaden and hint at what sort of NPCs they could expect to run into -- although obviously you don't need a class just for that.

...Well, okay, one of them bit and took a Scholar level, but multiclassed it with Warlock. C'est la vie.


You bring up an interesting point, there's a difference between low-magic and low-powered-magic settings. Magic in LOTR isn't just extremely rare, it's also not powerful, even those that have magic can't cast big flashy spells.

So when people talk about a low-magic world they have to differentiate between magic is simply extremely rare but the PCs just happen to be one of those one in a million people with magic, or whether they really want a low-powered setting where magic can't do a lot. As an example, if you wanted an Ancient Greece like setting it would probably be a low-powered-magic settings, there might be clerics who can cast magic but the spells would be limited to divination like Augury. There might be sorcerors who can cast say Polymorph or use Charm spells but they aren't using Evocation magic even for cantrips like Firebolt. In these cases you either have to have magic be the realm of a few NPCs who have a very limited number of spells, or you need to build the magic classes from scratch and limit the spellcasting and instead provide some non-magical abilities to help bring them up to par. For example a bard who gets more Bardic Inspiration related abilities but less spellcasting.

[deljzc]

Been questioning this recently and came upon this blog:
Fanservice BS: Low Magic, No Problem. Oh, Wait, Problem (https://theangrygm.com/fanservice-bs-low-magic/)

And this particular part stuck out to me:


When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

Game designers will tell us that we can play however we wish, whether it's more high fantasy or more sword & sorcery, but that's just not true based on what they actually design and release in final products - all of it is super-high fantasy.

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?

I agree with him 100%.

I started up "getting back into D&D" about a year ago and my son was 12 and interested. I am old school. I played D&D from 1980 to 1988. All AD&D back then. No versions. Gygax and TSR were king. Finding a new module at the game store was awesome.

So I jump in 100% into learning D&D 5e. Buy/access the books. Do tons of research. Start writing ideas down for campaign worlds and adventures. Make characters for fun. Hell - join this message board.

I do admit that the biggest change I notice is magic. The infinite cantrips and short/long rest mechanics increase casting magic a LOT. Characters now use magic every round. It does feel different from what I'm used to.

I also agree with the writer that D&D 5e has let almost every class dip their toes into magic. You don't even have to multi-class into spellcasting now. You have subclasses for that or racial bonuses for that.

It is a very magic-oriented, super-hero system right now. Not bad. Just different.

And it IS difficult to tone it back as a GM without breaking the system. Trying to create even "Medium Magic" takes time and explanation and buy-in from the players.

I think the best line of the article:

"You can’t trust players to decide what will make for a good game."

[KorvinStarmast]

The fundamental problem was, is, and will continue to be that a system cannot create a sense of wonder.

In þe olden dayse, people experienced wonder with the system, because it was baroque, forbidding, poorly-organized. Many groups never realized they weren't using all of the rules, or actively chose to houserule the game until they had literal binders stuffed with alterations. Everything was unknown, mysterious--until it became known and understood with time. Everything was rare and inaccessible--until it had been accessed, and then its limits were perceived, its lack of true rarity revealed.

D&D has been trying to chase this genuinely impossible thing for ages now. It is not possible. It isn't just impossible for the reasons Angry describes; it's impossible because you will never be twelve again, because you will never play your very first RPG again, because you will never not know how D&D works again. As long as we continue to define "feeling magical" as "feeling mysterious," or "unknown," or "inaccessible," or hell, "impossible" then this will be the case. Because the WHOLE POINT of a system is to define what IS possible, to set terms for the valid behaviors. I think that you made some nice points, and that additional Settings is a place to mitigate the lack of wonder; Eberron does a nice job of this IMO.

[Dr. Cliché]

Oh, here's a comment I came across on the AngryGM article:


What seems especially crazy to me is that even as D&D characters become increasingly incidentally magical, that magic becomes increasingly useless outside of a murderous home invasion context. Everyone’s firing laser beams out of their eyes (EXCEPT the fighter) but we STILL can’t make owlbears or cloud castles; everyone EXCEPT the wizard seems to have some form of magical healing, but we still can’t make crops grow better or give a baby a magical blessing (that manifests as more than advantage on combat or skill checks, and lasts for 16 years rather than 16 seconds) at their christening?

I sometimes want low magic because it’s the only way that the complete lack of any sort of cultural impact magic has in D&D makes any sense.

I think this is a good point. As it stands, there's a weird disconnect between a lot of the world magic compared with the magic used not just by PCs, but also by NPCS and monsters.

As in, we have all these monsters and constructs created with magic, plus magic items (and I don't just mean scrolls and potions), plus various other effects . . . yet no rules for how a powerful wizard could possibly accomplish any of these. :smallconfused:

I know 3.5 had issues but at least it actually had rules for creating golems, for crafting magic items, even for stuff like implanting grafts. I'm sure many of these were costly and difficult but it nevertheless showed that the players could do them with enough time and gold and the right resources.

Meanwhile, in 5e you're generally left scratching your head at a lot of magical effects. Because very few spells can last for any significant length of time, Permanency is long gone, and yet somehow wizards are still managing to do all this long-term stuff. Can we see the rules they're using? Because even the NPC Archmage doesn't have any rule or spell that would allow him to accomplish this sort of thing.

Let me show you what I mean. Here's what the 3.5 MM said about building a golem:

CONSTRUCTION
The cost to create given for each golem includes the cost of the physical body and all the materials and spell components that are consumed or become a permanent part of the golem. Creating a golem is essentially similar to creating any sort of magic item (see page 282 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide). However, a golem’s body includes costly material components that may require some extra preparation. The golem’s creator can assemble the body or hire someone else to do the job. The builder must have the appropriate skill, which varies with the golem variety.

Completing the golem’s creation drains the appropriate XP from the creator and requires casting any spells on the final day. The creator must cast the spells personally, but they can come from outside sources, such as scrolls.

The characteristics of a golem that come from its nature as a magic item (caster level, prerequisite feats and spells, market price, cost to create) are given in summary form at the end of each golem’s description, in the same format used in Chapter 7 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Note The market price of an advanced golem (a golem with more Hit Dice than the typical golem described in each entry) is increased by 5,000 gp for each additional Hit Die, and increased by an additional 50,000 gp if the golem’s size increases. The XP cost for creating an advanced golem is equal to 1/25 the advanced golem’s market price minus the cost of the special materials required.


Example: Clay Golem:
A clay golem’s body must be sculpted from a single block of clay weighing at least 1,000 pounds, treated with rare oils and powders worth 1,500 gp. Creating the body requires a DC 15 Craft (sculpting) check or a DC 15 Craft (pottery) check.
CL 11th; Craft Construct (see page 303), animate objects, commune, resurrection, caster must be at least 11th level; Price 40,000 gp; Cost 21,500 gp + 1,540 XP.

So it's complicated and requires an 11+th level caster with some specific spells (not to mention a hefty wallet), but you basically have the entire process here. If a PC dreams of having their own golem, then they know (or can find out) exactly what is required and gradually work on assembling the necessary components.


Now let's see how 5e suggests building a golem:
Elemental Spirit in Material Form.
The construction of a golem begins with the building of its body, requiring great command of the craft of sculpting, stonecutting, ironworking, or surgery. Sometimes a go I em's creator is the master of the art, but often the individual who desires a golem must enlist master artisans to do the work.

After constructing the body from clay, flesh, iron, or stone, the golem's creator infuses it with a spirit from the Elemental Plane of Earth. This tiny spark of life has no memory, personality, or history. It is simply the impetus to move and obey. This process binds the spirit to the artificial body and subjects it to the will of the golem's creator.

The more keen-eyed amongst you might notice a certain lack of details (and to save you checking, no the individual entries don't give any extra information).

We're told that building a golem requires "great command of the craft of sculpting, stonecutting, ironworking, or surgery". Okay. But what does that mean in game? I assume proficiency with a given set of tools but are any checks involved? What's the DC? How much do the materials cost? How long does it take?

Next we're informed that the golem is infused with "a spirit from the Elemental Plane of Earth". How? Does this involve the Conjure Elemental spell? Planar Ally, maybe? Or would the Conjure Minor Elementals spell work? If it needs one of the Conjure Elementals spells, what happens if I lose my concentration; does the golem them become hostile towards me? Do I need to cast any other spells before or after this? Do I need to do anything else to prepare the body? Whichever spell I use to summon the elemental spark, how do I make it permanent, given that it normally has a finite duration?

Finally, we have this gem: "This process binds the spirit to the artificial body and subjects it to the will of the golem's creator". Er . . . I can only assume you missed a step somewhere because you haven't actually told us the process.


Anyway, I'm not saying that someone couldn't necessarily make up hard rules for creating a golem in 5e. The issue is that the designers haven't. Nor have they provided rules for most of the other long-term uses of magic in the world. And this creates a weird disconnect wherein the magic of players, monsters and NPCs is constantly seen to be narrow in scope and rarely ever having significant, long-term effects; yet the world still somehow contains all manner of golems, magic items and other examples of long-term magic with no explanation of how any of it was achieved.

I appreciate that this ramble is somewhat tangential to the topic at hand, I just think it's amusing that the D&D world seems detached from its own magic system. :smalltongue:

[Yora]

When it comes to magic worldbuilding, I don't think the problem are the spellcasting character classes. Things start to look unbelievable when you use these classes for large numbers of NPCs.
Of course, most parties have a cleric and a wizard or two, maybe a druid or a bard. But that's only half a dozen people at the most, out of millions of people in the world. Them having access to high level spells won't overturn the whole economy and society of the entire world. It's when you have tens of thousands of NPCs who also have access to this kind of magic running around in the world that things start to feel fishy.

Forgotten Realms always had lots and lots of regular guys casually being mid-level wizards since the start, but that's a thing about the Forgotten Realms setting. Not an issue of the D&D rules system. That Eberron hopped on the same magically powered train by having the world full with low-level wizards certainly didn't help, though.

In my current campaign, the players have been fighting against one spellcaster and one magical monster so far, and they encountered one wise woman who can cast detect magic and identify (and possibly more, but that was all they ever saw). They have fought and defeated literally dozens of cultists and bandits, and a couple of thugs, though, Those wouldn't be much fun to fight in an empty square room in some random dungeon. In that case you'd really need to mix things up all the time with plenty of interesting and flashy special abilities. But I think if you're playing such a campaign, then worrying about how plausible the society of the fantasy world comes across really shouldn't be one of your problems.

[KorvinStarmast]

Oh, here's a comment I came across on the AngryGM article:
Except that we can make crops grow better.
Plant Growth for six hundred, Alex.

If you cast this spell over 8 hours, you enrich the land. All plants in a half-*‐‑mile radius centered on a point within range become enriched for 1 year. The plants yield twice the normal amount of food when harvested. Level 3 Ranger, Bard, and Druid spell. I can do it at 9th level, or at 5th level, depending on the PC class.


When it comes to magic worldbuilding, I don't think the problem are the spellcasting character classes. Things start to look unbelievable when you use these classes for large numbers of NPCs.

Of course, most parties have a cleric and a wizard or two, maybe a druid or a bard. But that's only half a dozen people at the most, out of millions of people in the world. Them having access to high level spells won't overturn the whole economy and society of the entire world. It's when you have tens of thousands of NPCs who also have access to this kind of magic running around in the world that things start to feel fishy. Bingo.


Forgotten Realms always had
Bloat, Elminster, and Drzzt.
Ed Greenwood went Monty Haul early and often. :smallsmile:

[Telwar]

Part of the problem is that for reasonably fair play across tables, you have to have a defined ruleset for effects, such as spells and abilities.

If you want that "magic is mysterious and special" feeling, you'll need to get away from having pre-defined rules for spells, and instead rely much more on GM adjudication and fiat.

Which suggests taking a look at WoD Mage, or maybe Fate.

[NorthernPhoenix]

Part of the problem is that for reasonably fair play across tables, you have to have a defined ruleset for effects, such as spells and abilities.

If you want that "magic is mysterious and special" feeling, you'll need to get away from having pre-defined rules for spells, and instead rely much more on GM adjudication and fiat.

Which suggests taking a look at WoD Mage, or maybe Fate.

Right. I think it's unreasonable to expect the players magic to be "mysterious and special". You can make it annoying or frustrating, or easy and available, but neither makes it mysterious.

That's why i earlier suggested that DMs who want this kind of magic to be a part of their story should involve "plot magic" on both the player and enemy sides. The players abilities and spells are the "superpowers" they use for challenges, while Magic is the phenomena that changes the plot in big ways.

[KorvinStarmast]

That's why i earlier suggested that DMs who want this kind of magic to be a part of their story should involve "plot magic" on both the player and enemy sides. The players abilities and spells are the "superpowers" they use for challenges, while Magic is the phenomena that changes the plot in big ways. We didn't have this problem in OD&D.
Magic was a hell of a lot less over specified (AD&D started with the over description of magic) and we got along just fine.

[NorthernPhoenix]

We didn't have this problem in OD&D.
Magic was a hell of a lot less over specified (AD&D started with the over description of magic) and we got along just fine.

I'm not sure how that's relevant to a discussion about 5e. My father was a young man back then and the soviet union was still a scary thing. In today's world, the game is played with a different set of expectations and cultural influences. You can't just turn back time.

[KorvinStarmast]

I'm not sure how that's relevant to a discussion about 5e. My father was a young man back then and the soviet union was still a scary thing. In today's world, the game is played with a different set of expectations and cultural influences. You can't just turn back time. Yeah, and I lived behind the Berlin Wall for a few years. ('Twas a great day to see that come down).

The OSR movement was successful for a good and sufficient reason after the rules lawyers got ahold of the game, but calling that "turn back time" seems to be a bit of an overstatement.

If we go back to the era of 5e that was D&D Next, you'll find a number of statements from the devs that go something like this: you can play the game (balance wise) with (in theory) no magical items if you play as a party/team.
Granted, some encounters will be really hard under that concept due to the rampant resistance and even immunity, to mundane melee attacks: Piercing, Bludgeoning, and Slashing. The only 'for sure' way to upgrade a weapon is to have it silvered.

But if we look at the published campaigns, there are magical weapons found as treasure here and there - the key (it seems form the original pre-bloat 5e approach) is to keep their incidence down and drop more consumables than permanently enchanted items.

But if we look at this through a different lens, your point about expectations has merit. I've seen the recursion happen in my life time (or maybe the feedback loop). D&D gave spawn to a variety of MUDS and Books and Movies and Video Games and CRPGs that then became the new base line for the next group of people to encounter D&D, whereas those of us there at the beginning had movies and books and comic books and pulps and board games as our backround to bring with us to swords and sorcery setting.

[deljzc]

I agree also there is a HUGE disconnect between PC creation and NPC/monster creation.

I remember when I started 5e (again after playing in the 1980's) and I wanted to re-do my favorite beginner module: U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (this was before The Ghosts of Saltmarsh was written/released).

I thought converting an old module into 5e rules would help me learn.

First problem I had was making the first "boss", who in the original document was 2nd or 3rd level Illusionist into a 5e monster. I at first wanted to just make a 3rd level illusionist (like a PC) and plop him into the adventure. Of course problems insued (power level being one) and so I venture here to ask questions.

OH NO!!!! That's a BIG NO-NO in 5e. You just don't make PC's as monsters. PC's are PC's and NPC's and Monsters are made completely different.

So there is a big disconnect between magic because the game has made PC creation very singularly for the players and NOT for the DM to use.

[KorvinStarmast]

The design issue there is that a given NPC or Monster is built to make it through, or not, one battle against multiple PCs. The PCs are supposed to make it through an entire adventure day.

I built a couple of NPCs for my brother on a PC template. Guess what? The D&D police didn't show up. :smallcool:

[deljzc]

The design issue there is that a given NPC or Monster is built to make it through, or not, one battle against multiple PCs. The PCs are supposed to make it through an entire adventure day.

I built a couple of NPCs for my brother on a PC template. Guess what? The D&D police didn't show up. :smallcool:

The way many treat rests, most PC's don't adventure through multiple, difficult combats where resource management matters.

Again, it is what it is. I'm nostalgic for sure back to the old ways but even I recognize the popularity of 5e and want the game to succeed. And I'm not going to try and poo poo my son's enthusiasm for the game talking about "back when I was your age..... "

[KorvinStarmast]

The way many treat rests, most PC's don't adventure through multiple, difficult combats where resource management matters. Yeah, there is that.

I'm nostalgic for sure back to the old ways but even I recognize the popularity of 5e and want the game to succeed. Likewise, it brought me back to the hobby. To give WoTC credit, they cleaned up a lot of loose ends and put a certain organization into the whole thing. (With I suspect BECMI as the operating model ....)

And I'm not going to try and poo poo my son's enthusiasm for the game talking about "back when I was your age..... " My son likes 5e (playing with my brother and me and his cousin) more than he did 3.5; it was the people he played with in college who drove him away from D&D.

We had to coax him back.

He grew up with me or my brother, and sometimes my nephew, as the DM.

[Zarrgon]

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?

No, it is impossible to get to the objective point of Too Much Magic. A person might think something is too much, but that is subjective to them.

Tolken is actually very low magic, objectively. Though, sure, to Tolken having a magic door that opened by saying a word was a beyond awesome magical effect. In LotR magic is subtle and only has mostly small effects, plus all magic in the world comes only from the elves and celestials.

The default D&D has always been on the low magic side. While the books are full of things called magic, just about none of it is really magical. D&D, even more so starting with 3E+, is a lot more ''comic book super hero powers" then anything magic. You can easily replace the word ''magic" with anything like "power" or "force" or "ability" and not change the game one bit. All most all the "magic" in D&D is very dull, boring and mechanical. You cast a spell or use and item and it does X.

And on top of that, very few games even have a fantasy like setting...let along a magical setting. Most settings, especially homebrew ones, are little more then whitewashed Europe with ''not magic" standing in for technology.

Just look at this quite from earlier in the thread:


Originally Posted by E Gary Gygax, 1 November 1973, TSR, Forward, Men and Magic, page 3
These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!

D&D is full, even over flowing with such quotes. The game has no limit except your own imagination. This game is the fuel to fire up your own imagination. Anything you can imagine is possible in this game. Those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers.

Now think to your last D&D game: did you feel it was an amazing experience of your groups collective imaginations together knowing no bounds?

When your group came to the door to the wizards tower did it...yawn...have arcane lock cast on it? Did the wizard in your group open that door with...yawn...knock? Were there..yawn..guardian skeletons inside the main room? Did the wizard hide the door to the upstairs with a....yawn...illusion of a wall? When you fought the wizard did he attack with...yawn...fireball?

Now it is NOT just that all of the above D&D things have been around for decades: it is that all of the above ''D&D magic" only does boring, dull, mechanical things. Arcane lock...locks a door, wow. Knock opens a door...wow. There is nothing strange or exciting or even remotely magical.

Though try a pinch of imagination:

The wizards tower is not just 'sitting on the ground': it's up in the air, floating around on a cloud....and not just any cloud: a carnivorous cloud. Right there, that is more imagination then many a D&D game. The door is arcane locked sure, but also has a face and is alive and will bite if you get too close. The wizard makes some phantasmal fire to distract the door and get past it. The wizards guard is a floating mass of broken bones(a bone cloud). The wizards door to the upstairs is hidden in plain sight, but it's very tiny the size of a mouse hole. When you fight the wizard he attacks with a spell that forms four clouds, one each to rain down air, earth, fire and water.

That is the real magic right there: the magic of imagination.

[AgenderArcee]

This is an interesting discussion! It's true that the options that exist for 5e definitely favor high fantasy superheroes. It could be a fun homebrew project to create more subclass options and even non-magical versions of classes like the ranger (focused on exploration and tracking) and paladin (might actually be something closer to a warlord or cavalier? Not sure), and maybe making Maneuvers a more generally-available option while making the Battle Master better at them. Entirely new classes or subclasses like a combat medic could be added, along with feats for special maneuvers. It could definitely work on a 5e chassis I think, and some of the ingredients are already there, but it will take some work. I'd love to see a supplement like that!

[Galaxander]

I think the challenge would be to provide mechanics that are as powerful, engaging, and varied- that is, fun- as magic without it being magic.

I can't imagine a version of D&D where you can't be a wizard (a campaign, sure, maybe even a setting, but not a whole ruleset). So if you can be a wizard, and wizards can do a plethora of incredible things, then it's kind of harsh to deny the other classes some spell lists.

I don't think making wizards less fun is the right move, so is it possible to give Fighters a list of abilities that are as powerful and dramatic without being magic? Or did the authors make the right call by making magic more ubiquitous? It's hard to say.

[ezekielraiden]

I think that you made some nice points, and that additional Settings is a place to mitigate the lack of wonder; Eberron does a nice job of this IMO.

Yes, worlds/settings/cosmologies are a semi-effective way to produce wonder. I say "semi-effective" because they still suffer the same problem of "it's only your first time once," but it's possible to game for years or decades before you've seen all there is to see even in a formal, published setting, to say nothing of homebrew (where it is theoretically possible to always have something new waiting just beyond the horizon).

This may partially explain the popularity of extreme "kitchen-sink" settings like Greyhawk and Faerûn. The more valid settings contained inside it, the more wonder one may potentially have while preserving continuity.

But as before, it is not and cannot be the system that creates wonder. Systems do not have that capacity. The removal of ignorance does, but only for a time. The act of new creation does, but again only for a time. Hence systems like WoD Mage can "continuously" evoke wonder by making the system be "please make up new magic every time." If you were forced to always be consistent with every prior spell or effect, the novelty would slowly but surely wear off as you systematized magic. I mean, it would be YOUR system, so it would be at least dear to you for that reason, but it would lose its wonder with time.

[Lavaeolus]

I don't think making wizards less fun is the right move, so is it possible to give Fighters a list of abilities that are as powerful and dramatic without being magic? Or did the authors make the right call by making magic more ubiquitous? It's hard to say.

Somewhat infamously, before the Battle Master came to be, early playtests had combat maneuvers just as a core Fighter mechanic. As I recall, the initial presentation had your choice of Fighting Style give you a specific set of maneuvers as you levelled up. Eventually, of course, Battle Master became a subclass, and what specific maneuvers you had were left up to you. Later on, some UA revisited making them more widely available with an earlier Cavalier (https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/June5UA_RevisedClassOptv1.pdf), attempting to make another subclass with maneuvers and superiority dice as a feature -- although this implementation ended up being scrapped.

Is it a good enough substitute for magic? I don't know, though I can see why they initially experimented with it as part of the core Fighter (and to an extent I regret they cordoned it off to just a subclass). It does give you a way to play around in combat that a Wizard couldn't do without the limitations brought about spellcasting, like a spell substituting the Attack action, concentration, etc.

Whenever I play a Fighter I tend to be a Battle Master, because I like how the maneuvers can change up the gameplay -- disarming enemies, knocking them prone without a shove, inflicting fright -- but of course it doesn't ever have the same out-of-combat utility as a spell might.

[Schwann145]

This has been a pretty fantastic conversation so far and I wanna thank everyone for it. :)

I do want to clarify something however, based on a few replies: by "magic" I don't necessarily mean "spells." In fact, the rote spells of a wizard are wholly acceptable to me in that, spells are what that class does and it's as it should be. (Maybe the spells themselves could use a fresh pair of eyes and some perspective, but that's an entirely different conversation for another day :smallwink: ).

Consider every subclass of Barbarian in XGtE: Not one of them will ever cast a spell in their entire career, yet they're all dripping with magic. Why would the Monk bother with athletics and nimbly scaling a wall, displaying great agility and prowess, when they can just Shadow Step (Way of Shadow) from street to rooftop? Why should a charming Rogue bother learning or using all that social skill and disguise training when they can literally steal a dead person's shadow and perfectly disguise yourself as them, learning their personal knowledge in the process (College of Whispers)?
And what seems particularly troubling is the utter lack of creative explanation given as the game options release. A wizard has an explanation where their magic comes from, as does a Cleric, a Paladin, a Sorcerer, a Warlock, etc and so on.
But an Ancestral Guardian barbarian? An Echo Knight? These things tap into powerful magic with literally zero explanation. Revering your ancestors doesn't make them literally, physically, come to your aid in spiritual form! Picking up a sword and learning to swing it doesn't explain how you can tap into a rare and powerful style of magic such as Dunamancy!

It's this sort of magic that seems both overwhelmingly produced and troubling to me.

[AntiAuthority]

But an Ancestral Guardian barbarian? An Echo Knight? These things tap into powerful magic with literally zero explanation. Revering your ancestors doesn't make them literally, physically, come to your aid in spiritual form! Picking up a sword and learning to swing it doesn't explain how you can tap into a rare and powerful style of magic such as Dunamancy!

It's this sort of magic that seems both overwhelmingly produced and troubling to me.

Well, D&D characters aren't just regular people and bound to the same rules of reality as you or I. That's pretty much the only explanation I can give, they live in a fantasy world and have fantasy abilities is why they can do those things. It's not really unique to D&D in that "non-magical people" can do amazing things because they, on the surface, look like normal people you'd find in reality (excluding Orcs, Elves, etc.) but the beings in those types of worlds tend to have some sort of fantastic origin (created by the gods, born from stone, for examples) or something along those lines... Or the environment is just over saturated with magic or something along those lines, whatever. These two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive either. Anyway, point of this, revering your ancestors won't let them come to your aid in our world, but D&D isn't set in our world, so doesn't have to follow the same rules. Same with Echo Knights and their abilities.

[Trask]

Well, D&D characters aren't just regular people and bound to the same rules of reality as you or I. That's pretty much the only explanation I can give, they live in a fantasy world and have fantasy abilities is why they can do those things. It's not really unique to D&D in that "non-magical people" can do amazing things because they, on the surface, look like normal people you'd find in reality (excluding Orcs, Elves, etc.) but the beings in those types of worlds tend to have some sort of fantastic origin (created by the gods, born from stone, for examples) or something along those lines... Or the environment is just over saturated with magic or something along those lines, whatever. These two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive either. Anyway, point of this, revering your ancestors won't let them come to your aid in our world, but D&D isn't set in our world, so doesn't have to follow the same rules. Same with Echo Knights and their abilities.


While this is true now, it definitely wasnt true for a lot D&D's history and DEFINITELY isnt true about most of the game's root influences. Its much more inspired by comic books and anime than it is by Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, LotR, Vance, and whatever else the game was first based on. Of course we all know the game changes with the generations that create it and play it but its not something thats to everyone's taste. I'm pretty young and I'm not really of a fan of the style magic that D&D has going on now, where just through being angry fire can leap from thin air around you, or you can slice someone with an "echo" of your sword through space-time (sorry but that sounds REALLY stupid just to describe).

It feels too loosey-goosey and flashy, it doesnt follow any rules about what magic "is" and what it is "not", and more important than rules it doesnt follow in the traditions of folklore and fantasy fiction about what we expect from magic. In the beginning of the game magic spells were something you got by serving a higher force or by discovering magic spells, stealing them from other wizards or exploring old dungeons. In folklore and fantasy fiction its power that stems from knowledge or from pacts with unknowable beings. The most classic fantasy tropes are just completely out of touch with how the game actually plays, PC spellcasters flinging a dozen different flavored "magical energy bolts" at their enemies before snapping their fingers to teleport around dimensions and summon whole castles and banquets out of thin air. Magic didn't always use to be so flashy (although admittedly its something D&D has gotten wrong from the very beginning) and its almost always sinister or ambiguous.

Now it seems that magic just springs into existence through sheer force of will or emotional desperation half the time. It has 100 different arbitrary flavors and it doesnt denote sinister or evil behavior at all. Half the time the PCs are a magical supersquad of high fantasy HEROES fighting mundane creatures with no such abilities of their own. The game has just grown so unrecognizable from the classic fantasy elements and mythemes of old. There are no hidden arcane arts or black magic, it all just feels like comic book or anime superpowers. The "magic" in magic is gone because its just so routine. Everyone has it, everyone uses it. It manifests itself in a dozen different ways just in one adventuring party, and if youre the kind of DM who doesnt like to make the PCs SUPER special heroes then you have to admit that their powers are not unheard of for the world to make sense. That makes for some pretty wonky worldbuilding.

I think the OP, a lot of people in this thread, and myself are just kind of burned out on magic. I'm burned out on the boom and the flash and the glitzy, reliable, and finger snapping effects that answer the call of almost every character class. Its all just tiresome now. It really goes to show that there can be too much of a good thing.

[AntiAuthority]

While this is true now, it definitely wasnt true for a lot D&D's history and DEFINITELY isnt true about most of the game's root influences. Its much more inspired by comic books and anime than it is by Conan, Fafhrd, LotR, Vance, and whatever else the game was first based on. Of course we all know the game changes with the generations that create it and play it but its not something thats to everyone's taste. I'm pretty young and I'm not really of a fan of the "anime" style magic that D&D has going on now, where just through being angry fire can leap from thin air around you, or you can slice someone with an "echo" of your sword through space-time (sorry but that sounds REALLY stupid just to describe).

It feels too loosey-goosey and flashy, it doesnt follow any rules about what magic "is" and what it is "not", and more important than rules it doesnt follow in the traditions of folklore and fantasy fiction about what we expect from magic. In the beginning of the game magic spells were something you got by serving a higher force or by discovering magic spells, stealing them from other wizards or exploring old dungeons. In folklore and fantasy fiction its power that stems from knowledge or from pacts with unknowable beings. The most classic fantasy tropes are just completely out of touch with how the game actually plays, PC spellcasters flinging a dozen different flavored "magical energy bolts" at their enemies before snapping their fingers to teleport around dimensions and summon whole castles and banquets out of thin air. Magic didn't always use to be so flashy (although admittedly its something D&D has gotten wrong from the very beginning) and its almost always sinister or ambiguous.

Now it seems that magic just springs into existence through sheer force of will or emotional desperation half the time. It has 100 different arbitrary flavors and it doesnt denote sinister or evil behavior at all. Half the time the PCs are a magical supersquad of high fantasy HEROES fighting mundane orcs and goblins with no such abilities of their own. The game has just grown so unrecognizable from the classic fantasy elements and mythemes of old. There are no hidden arcane arts or black magic, it all just feels like comic book or anime superpowers. The "magic" in magic is gone because its just so routine. Everyone has it, everyone uses it. It manifests itself in a dozen different ways just in one adventuring party, and if youre the kind of DM who doesnt like to make the PCs SUPER special heroes then you have to admit that their powers are not unheard of for the world to make sense. That makes for some pretty wonky worldbuilding.

I think the OP, a lot of people in this thread, and myself are just kind of burned out on magic. I'm burned out on the boom and the flash and the glitzy, reliable, and finger snapping effects that answer the call of almost every character class. Its all just tiresome now. It really goes to show that there can be too much of a good thing.

I'm of the opposite opinion. D&D is pretty much a fantasy kitchen sink and I sincerely doubt the writers give it that much thought. That said, it depends, I'd rather call something impossible in our world but possible in another fantastic (encompassing magic, but magic is not the sum of the whole type of deal), but if you want to call it magic, go for it.

Anyway, about the games having characters closer to being super heroes and based on anime and such... Technically, that's closer to D&D's roots, or the root of its roots. Comic book superheroes like Superman were inspired by mythological and Biblical characters like Hercules and Samson, while the Green Lantern's ring is inspired by the genie from Aladdin, Thor is self-explanatory and such. A lot of modern Shonen anime characters are based on Son Goku, who was in turn just a reinterpretation of the mythological Sun Wukong, while King Arthur's companions (https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/50703903337/on-legendry) would fit right in with an anime. Fantasy stories of today were inspired by Tolkien, who himself was inspired by mythologies and the Valar from his stories were likely heavily inspired by the Aesir of Norse Mythology. All three basically pull from mythologies in some form or another, and AD&D even states Fighters could pull from Cu Chulainn, Hercules, and such as inspiration. If D&D characters are too much like comic superheroes or anime protagonists, it'd be like arguing that D&D characters are too much like mythological heroes they were inspired by in some way or another (even if indirectly). It's pretty much just going back to the roots of where the fantasy genre (or at least one of the biggest contributors to it) started from in a way.

[Waazraath]

But an Ancestral Guardian barbarian? An Echo Knight? These things tap into powerful magic with literally zero explanation. Revering your ancestors doesn't make them literally, physically, come to your aid in spiritual form! Picking up a sword and learning to swing it doesn't explain how you can tap into a rare and powerful style of magic such as Dunamancy!

It's this sort of magic that seems both overwhelmingly produced and troubling to me.

Yeah. I made a thread about this, on the Ancestral Barbarian, when Xanathar's came out. I thought it quite over the top and video gamy, straight out of Diablo III or something. Unneccesary, and makes it difficult to use if you want to play a low-magic setting - while it's one of the few non-magic classes!

[Trask]

Anyway, about the games having characters closer to being super heroes and based on anime and such... Technically, that's closer to D&D's roots, or the root of its roots... It's pretty much just going back to the roots of where the fantasy genre (or at least one of the biggest contributors to it) started from in a way.

I think thats a stretch. The lineage doesn't continue anywhere close to coherently down that many channels, and what you end up with is worlds apart from what you started with. Samson didnt shoot lasers from his eyes or fly, and Sun Wukong didnt emit qi in the form of energy based attacks or move faster than the eye could see. The root of inspiration is there, but its the unique texture and details of a character or thing that gives it its flavor, not the seed of the concept.

Superman is actually a pretty good example of what this discussion is about actually. He may have originally be inspired by mythical strongmen like Samson or Hercules, but he was loaded with so many additional powers and abilities, and his strength pushed to such empyrean heights that all he really resembles is himself. A guy who can pull the earth on a chain or fly around it so fast that he reverses time doesnt resemble Hercules or Samson even a little bit. Its just SO far diverged from that original path.

D&D is the same way. Its gone down an alien road to what came before, and it resembles absolutely nothing but itself.

[AntiAuthority]

I think thats a stretch. The lineage doesn't continue anywhere close to coherently down that many channels, and what you end up with is worlds apart from what you start with.

How is that a stretch?

[Trask]

Yeah. I made a thread about this, on the Ancestral Barbarian, when Xanathar's came out. I thought it quite over the top and video gamy, straight out of Diablo III or something. Unneccesary, and makes it difficult to use if you want to play a low-magic setting - while it's one of the few non-magic classes!

I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking that subclass is just too silly. Everyone I've talked to on the subject seems to think its the coolest concept ever and I just have no idea why. Just picturing these ancestral guardians popping out and disrupting your enemies (not even damaging them...what do they do exactly? Tickle them?) is almost comical in how over the top it is and also a perfect example in how gonzo D&D has gone with a class that was once the archetypal antithesis of magic-users.

[ezekielraiden]

I think the OP, a lot of people in this thread, and myself are just kind of burned out on magic. I'm burned out on the boom and the flash and the glitzy, reliable, and finger snapping effects that answer the call of almost every character class. Its all just tiresome now. It really goes to show that there can be too much of a good thing.

I snipped out much of the earlier stuff because, quite frankly, I think you're just incorrect about myth and legend and a decent portion of the "modern" fiction (e.g. since the late 19th century), but that's a discussion for a different thread.

My challenge to you remains as it was: how do you create a system which inspires wonder?

If you can answer that question convincingly (which I admit is a tall order even for easy questions), then I will absolutely grant you that the system we have has failed us. Until then, I am quite convinced that people are blaming the wrong things for their issues (the system/rules, as opposed to their now-adult brains, long history of play, and thorough understanding of the system).

D&D, like many things, is subject to that old maxim: "Familiarity breeds contempt."

[AntiAuthority]

I think thats a stretch. The lineage doesn't continue anywhere close to coherently down that many channels, and what you end up with is worlds apart from what you started with. Samson didnt shoot lasers from his eyes or fly, and Sun Wukong didnt emit qi in the form of energy based attacks or move faster than the eye could see. The root of inspiration is there, but its the unique texture and details of a character or thing that gives it its flavor, not the seed of the concept.

Superman is actually a pretty good example of what this discussion is about actually. He may have originally be inspired by mythical strongmen like Samson or Hercules, but he was loaded with so many additional powers and abilities, and his strength pushed to such empyrean heights that all he really resembles is himself. A guy who can pull the earth on a chain or fly around it so fast that he reverses time doesnt resemble Hercules or Samson even a little bit. Its just SO far diverged from that original path.

D&D is the same way. Its gone down an alien road to what came before, and it resembles absolutely nothing but itself.

Being inspired by something and copying it are two different things. Superman was inspired by Samson and Hercules, but can do things they can't. Much like Goku was inspired by Sun Wukong and can do things the Monkey King can't. Even Marvel's Thor can do things the mythological one couldn't, so... They're inspirations, not copies.


I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking that subclass is just too silly. Everyone I've talked to on the subject seems to think its the coolest concept ever and I just have no idea why. Just picturing these ancestral guardians popping out and disrupting your enemies (not even damaging them...what do they do exactly? Tickle them?) is almost comical in how over the top it is and also a perfect example in how gonzo D&D has gone with a class that was once the archetypal antithesis of magic-users.

That said, D&D is a fantasy kitchen sink at this point. It's already pulling from various sources of inspiration, and mythologies were one of those inspirations from the earliest versions of the game. Are you just against high powered characters in your tabletop games? Because they're pretty much mythological characters that have been reinterpreted, and the fantasy genre were already based on them as I've explained...

Anyway, I don't find fantastic characters stupid in any shape or form, as they don't exist and don't have to adhere to the same rules as real human beings. I actually prefer my characters who can go beat up giant monsters mano a mano on a semi-daily basis to do some over the top shenanigans like what you'd see in mythology/anime/comics.

[Trask]

Being inspired by something and copying it are two different things. Superman was inspired by Samson and Hercules, but can do things they can't. Much like Goku was inspired by Sun Wukong and can do things the Monkey King can't. Even Marvel's Thor can do things the mythological one couldn't, so... They're inspirations, not copies.

The things they can do that their inspirations cant are so immense in difference of scope that it overshadows the link between the characters imo.



That said, D&D is a fantasy kitchen sink at this point. It's already pulling from various sources of inspiration, and mythologies were one of those inspirations from the earliest versions of the game. Are you just against high powered characters in your tabletop games? Because they're pretty much mythological characters that have been reinterpreted, and the fantasy genre were already based on them as I've explained...

Anyway, I don't find fantastic characters stupid in any shape or form, as they don't exist and don't have to adhere to the same rules as real human beings. I actually prefer my characters who can go beat up giant monsters mano-a-mano to do some over the top shenanigans like what you'd see in mythology/anime/comics.

I'm not against powerful characters, I just have a personal distaste for flashy magic that doesnt really come from anywhere but just "rule of cool".

I also disagree with your linking of mythology to anime and comics, I really cant think of pretty much anything that a mythological hero can do that's on the same level as a D&D character, high powered comic book characters, or high powered anime character. In fact the powers the PCs have are more akin to.the powers the gods themselves tend to wield. I dont like godly PCs, I like having pcs be adventurers not uber powerful chosen ones or godlings. But the games flavor really resists that, and it didnt use to.

[AntiAuthority]

The things they can do that their inspirations cant are so immense in difference of scope that it overshadows the link between the characters imo.

That doesn't change that it's the truth though? Hercules, Samson, John Carter and Superman all have super strength, but the last one can fly and do all sorts of other stuff. He's inspired by them, not a copy of them.

For an added bonus, take it as you will, OD&D Fighters were called Heroes at Level 4 and Superheroes at Level 8, take it as you will. Maybe it was just thrown in without thinking about the implications or whatever, I don't know what the original designers were thinking with that, but it's in there. What else was thrown into OD&D was also the Easterned styled Monk class, which means that D&D no longer like most Sword & Sorcery stories to my knowledge. These are things that were in the earliest versions of the game.

As an aside, comics and anime aren't genres, they're mediums to tell a story. In the context of what we're talking about, Shonen anime and Super Hero comics are mediums to tell the stories of characters that would have been considered mythological heroes in the past... They've just been adapted to more modern mediums.


I'm not against powerful characters, I just have a personal distaste for flashy magic that doesnt really come from anywhere but just "rule of cool".

I also disagree with your linking of mythology to anime and comics, I really cant think of pretty much anything that a mythological hero can do that's on the same level as a D&D character, high powered comic book characters, or high powered anime character. In fact the powers the PCs have are more akin to.the powers the gods themselves tend to wield. I dont like godly PCs, I like having pcs be adventurers not uber powerful chosen ones or godlings. But the games flavor really resists that, and it didnt use to.

I'm all for Rule of Cool, as the characters don't exist in our reality and aren't limited by the same things as real human beings because they're fiction. Technically, any story can run on Rule of Cool, as the characters are doing blatantly impossible things, everything else is just a justification. Even Beowulf (noted to be a Fighter by AD&D) wasn't given a reason for being able to pull off all the stuff he could, except he's Beowulf. Like how the Greek Gods are awesome because they're Greek Gods, Norse Gods are awesome because they're Norse Gods and Beowulf is awesome because he's Beowulf, it's solely because all these characters were written this way.

Also, you could just play at lower levels to avoid the uber powerful feeling, it's what the E6 playstyle is built around for the most part, where Goblins, Orcs and such are still a serious threat to the player characters. Otherwise you run into the dissonance of low powered, high level characters being able to somehow go through hundreds of battles and not ending up dead, along with them being able to somehow remain relevant against ancient evils like archfiends.

That said, it doesn't change that anime, comic books and fantasy characters are inspired by mythologies in some form or another and are all basically retellings of those mythologies. Of note is Cu Chulainn, with his odd hair colors, having a super special weapon, being able to leap on darts, being incredibly attractive, burning through a sleeping potion very fast and transforming into a powerful monster capable of killing hundreds with a single attack when enraged enough... Dude's pretty much an anime protagonist in terms of tropes, along with some superhero tropes, except he's from Celtic Mythology and is a Fighter by AD&D's standards. Sun Wukong was also capable of shooting lasers out of his eyes... That's a power usually associated with superheroes. Both have powers and things that would let them fit right into an anime/comic despite predating both of those mediums by centuries, because anime and comics are basically modern reinterpretations of mythological heroes in terms of abilities. This isn't even covering literal anime and comic characters that are just mythological deities and heroes themselves like Marvel's Thor or Fate's Hercules. D&D becoming like anime, comics and such is just them getting back to the things that inspired the things that inspired it to begin with. It'd be like arguing "Wizards are too anime/too superheroic" because anime and comics have high powered magic users and those also exist in mythology in some form or another, so... Technically everything's too anime/superhero-y with this logic, and thus the entire argument about what is or isn't too anime/comic book vs mythological has no basis beyond personal feelings dictating what is and isn't mythological, and that's not a way to argue, that's just forcing head canon onto others with no proof beyond, "An anime/comic did it, so it's too anime/superheroic" and ignores that feats you'd see in comics/anime are the same types of nonsense you'd see in mythology and other types of literature. There's nothing to discuss at that point, as it's an endless series of rabbit holes that becomes impossible to distinguish between anime, comics, fantasy and mythology, as the former two (and partially the third) cover such a wide variety of things that they've done pretty much everything, including what's in mythology in some form or another... At that point, there's nothing to talk about beyond, "My thing is slightly less anime/comic bookish than your thing!" or "My mythological hero is much more mythological than your mythological hero!" It's an arbitrary distinction at best with no real method of discernment beyond personal beliefs.

I get you might not like that (I felt the same way at one point myself), but not liking it doesn't make it not true. I'm giving you all this evidence why I'm saying this, but if you can't come up with a reason for why it's not true beyond just not liking it, I don't know what to tell you if just don't want it to be that way. You can disagree, but that doesn't make it true unless you have something to support it beyond you just not liking it.

[Waazraath]

I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking that subclass is just too silly. Everyone I've talked to on the subject seems to think its the coolest concept ever and I just have no idea why. Just picturing these ancestral guardians popping out and disrupting your enemies (not even damaging them...what do they do exactly? Tickle them?) is almost comical in how over the top it is and also a perfect example in how gonzo D&D has gone with a class that was once the archetypal antithesis of magic-users.

Yes, and it really is a shame because a barbarian with some battlefield controll / protection abilities wasn't available yet in the core options. And now we have this option, and, without refluffing, it is ill-fitting in a lot of worlds. I mean, I can imagine it being fun in a over the top campaign, with Scottisch-like ancestors showing up, lifting their kilts and yelling in an unintelligeble manner. And for specific campaignsettings that are very high magic and Diablo-III-like it's cool. But I don't agree with making it an option in a general book that should give options for all campaign settings, cause again, the barbarian really did benefit from more subclasses offering different types of build.

[Yora]

It could be a fun homebrew project to create more subclass options and even non-magical versions of classes like the ranger (focused on exploration and tracking) and paladin (might actually be something closer to a warlord or cavalier? Not sure), and maybe making Maneuvers a more generally-available option while making the Battle Master better at them. Entirely new classes or subclasses like a combat medic could be added, along with feats for special maneuvers. It could definitely work on a 5e chassis I think, and some of the ingredients are already there, but it will take some work. I'd love to see a supplement like that!

The Player's Guide to the World of Xoth (http://xoth.net/publishing/) has a couple of options that might be worth looking into. It has the Conqueror with a Strategist and Tyrant subclass, the Courtier with Magican, Seducer, and Spymaster subclasses, and a Slaver subclass for Rangers.

[Galaxander]

Consider every subclass of Barbarian in XGtE: Not one of them will ever cast a spell in their entire career, yet they're all dripping with magic. Why would the Monk bother with athletics and nimbly scaling a wall, displaying great agility and prowess, when they can just Shadow Step (Way of Shadow) from street to rooftop? Why should a charming Rogue bother learning or using all that social skill and disguise training when they can literally steal a dead person's shadow and perfectly disguise yourself as them, learning their personal knowledge in the process (College of Whispers)?

This is the crux of the issue, to me. Take away these classes magical options and you're still left with a very similar question: Why would any character take a gamble on using skill checks alone when they could have rolled a wizard (or cleric or druid or what-have-you) and use spells to Fly, or Disguise Self/Speak with Dead?

I do feel that funny feeling it gives, for every class including Fighters and Barbarians to be able to invoke sparkling magic powers. It's weird! But how do you design a non-magical ability that can compete with Fireball, Tongues, Spiritual Guardians, Entangle, to say nothing of the non-spell abilities of caster classes?

[Tanarii]

Howling spirits coming to your aid sounds like something right out of Conan to me.

[stoutstien]

This is the crux of the issue, to me. Take away these classes magical options and you're still left with a very similar question: Why would any character take a gamble on using skill checks alone when they could have rolled a wizard (or cleric or druid or what-have-you) and use spells to Fly, or Disguise Self/Speak with Dead?

I do feel that funny feeling it gives, for every class including Fighters and Barbarians to be able to invoke sparkling magic powers. It's weird! But how do you design a non-magical ability that can compete with Fireball, Tongues, Spiritual Guardians, Entangle, to say nothing of the non-spell abilities of caster classes?

It's not that hard really. Look at second story work, cavaliers features, and stunning strike (really wish they made barbarians the martial stunning class).

It would be alot easier if spells and magic didn't do soooo much. Like haste shouldn't be a spell but a Martial ablity instead.

[Willie the Duck]

Howling spirits coming to your aid sounds like something right out of Conan to me.

Tentatively agree. And therein lies an issue -- the source information is pretty all-over-the-map on this as well. In general, Conan of F+GM and the LotR crew spend much of their time fighting with sword, axe, and bow, climbing with fingers on stone (and perhaps elven rope, which is preternatural in some ill-defined way, but still relatively ropelike) and, succeed by their mighty thews rather than magical aid and, you know, 'tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.' On the other hand, yes an adventure where Conan has ghostly ancestors or the like at his back, or Aragorn has a ghost army, or Grey Mouser using that little bit of magic he picked up, etc.

I think the difference in feel is that in each of the pulp stories, the magical thing was a rare, possibly situation-dependent, and definitely special/exceptional event.


While this is true now, it definitely wasnt true for a lot D&D's history and DEFINITELY isnt true about most of the game's root influences. Its much more inspired by comic books and anime than it is by Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, LotR, Vance, and whatever else the game was first based on. Of course we all know the game changes with the generations that create it and play it but its not something thats to everyone's taste. I'm pretty young and I'm not really of a fan of the style magic that D&D has going on now, where just through being angry fire can leap from thin air around you, or you can slice someone with an "echo" of your sword through space-time (sorry but that sounds REALLY stupid just to describe).
…
I think the OP, a lot of people in this thread, and myself are just kind of burned out on magic. I'm burned out on the boom and the flash and the glitzy, reliable, and finger snapping effects that answer the call of almost every character class. Its all just tiresome now. It really goes to show that there can be too much of a good thing.

I think there definitely is a market for games where magic is harder and rarer, or simply rather specific to the spellcaster character roles. OSR games like Beyond the Wall and Other Stories make good use of that aesthetic, as does Forbidden Lands, or the flavor (if not rules) of Symbaroum. D&D can be made to work in that system, but it isn't the default.


Yeah. I made a thread about this, on the Ancestral Barbarian, when Xanathar's came out. I thought it quite over the top and video gamy, straight out of Diablo III or something. Unneccesary, and makes it difficult to use if you want to play a low-magic setting - while it's one of the few non-magic classes!

Yes, but there are berserkers and totem barbarians (who have, what?, one ritual spell). There are Champions and Battlemasters and Caveliers and most Rogue archetypes, and there is even a UA version of a spell-less ranger. I don't think it is unreasonable if you are wanting to play the game with a specific setting conceit that you might have to limit the character options away from the ones that violate said conceit. It would be nice if the game had more of those options, to be sure.

[Tanarii]

I think the difference in feel is that in each of the pulp stories, the magical thing was a rare, possibly situation-dependent, and definitely special/exceptional event.
And often evil. More often than not, for the really powerful stuff.
(Possible exception for LotR, where the elves and Gandalf used the rings as a powerful force for good.)

[Joe the Rat]

It sounds like it's less "the world is steeped in magic" as "magic is formulaic" - magic is reliable and predictable. Something akin to DCC (as a system) or Savage Kingdoms (system and setting) is what you are trying to get to. Both hew closer to Swords and Sorcery style games - where magic has a distinct otherness, unpredictability, and risk.

DCC eschews spell slots in favor of spell checks, where a good roll gets you greater effect options, and low rolls risk failure, losing spell access, or some sort of Bad Thing (corruption for wizards, Progressive Bad Luck for Clerics). Spells also are mercurial - no two casters will necessarily produce the same effects, or have the same costs for casting. Warrior-types get an added feature in the Deed die - in place of a static to-hit modifier, they roll a die (starting at d3). At a 3 or higher, you get to try and add a rider to your attacks - pushing, tripping, pocket sand, kicking off to reach another opponent... pretty much whatever you can come up with, and what fits the roll of the die (higher is better, and higher level Dwarves and Warriors can get into some crazy stuff). Basically you can be a reaver with free chances at awesome, or take the high-risk, high-reward path of spellcasting.
DCC is very much about creating a nostalgic D&D experience - not how the game ran, but the feel of danger and strangeness that we feel like the game had. This also means healing is slower

Savage Kingdoms is a Post-3rd Gearhead system - lots of buildy details, but lighter on the deep strategic stacking of modifiers, with more focus on grit and deeds. It is a classless system, but does have an archetype "packaged traits" system that emulates much of this. Magic is flat-out rare. You can be of an unnatural race, have the blood of demons or whatnot, or even know some magic, but it is a tricky thing. Spells are rolled to cast, and cost stamina. There are also several feat-style maneuvers you can learn - martial, mobility, etc, which also use stamina. The same pool for casting a blinding flash, or impaling and immobilizing, with growing levels of cool tricks in both domains, albeit with fewer risks on the non-magical side.

[Dr. Cliché]

This is the crux of the issue, to me. Take away these classes magical options and you're still left with a very similar question: Why would any character take a gamble on using skill checks alone when they could have rolled a wizard (or cleric or druid or what-have-you) and use spells to Fly, or Disguise Self/Speak with Dead?

I do feel that funny feeling it gives, for every class including Fighters and Barbarians to be able to invoke sparkling magic powers. It's weird! But how do you design a non-magical ability that can compete with Fireball, Tongues, Spiritual Guardians, Entangle, to say nothing of the non-spell abilities of caster classes?

Well, there are a few things to consider here:

1) Magic should have some strengths. That is to say, there should be some legitimate advantages to picking a spellcaster over a mundane class. After all, if Fireball, Tongues, Entangle, Spiritual Guardians etc. can all be replicated via ordinary, non-magical means, what's the point of learning magic at all? This was the issue 4th edition ran into, as its system - whilst more balanced - created a different issue wherein there was no meaningful distinction between magical and non-magical effects or classes.

Now, this isn't to say casting classes should be outright better than non-casting ones. Just that I don't think every spell needs a mundane equivalent.


2) However, I think part of the problem is that most casters are generalists who can be good at almost anything. Take the examples of Fireball, Spiritual Guardians and Entangle. All of these represent AoE effects. This could actually be a good thing for magic to focus on. That way, mages are necessary to handle large groups of enemies, but mundane classes are better at taking down single, strong targets. Of course, it doesn't actually work out that way as mages also have piles of single-target spells to choose from.

Skills are likewise tricky due to the sheer number of spells that can replicate or surpass them in some way, usually without any risk of failure. Though I'm not sure the current method for skills helps much either. The shorter list combined with the trained/untrained nature of them seems detrimental to 'skillmonkey' characters.

I think the wizard is one of the worst examples, due in no small part to the change in specialisation. It used to be that in order to specialise in one type of magic you had to give up two other types (you could choose to be a generalist but then you had fewer spells each day). This forced some difficult choices and meant that most wizards would end up with two schools that they couldn't have spells from. However, the current specialisations don't require any sacrifice whatsoever. Hence, there are no limits on what spells you can take and no disadvantage to just taking all the best spells, flavour be damned.


3) In fact, magic in general has no meaningful costs or risks. I know that a few spells have risks or costs, but these are very much in the minority (and when you've got bugger-all else to spend money on, paying a little extra for a spell component rarely amounts to any significant drawback). If magic had a greater cost or risk associated with its use, then mages might actually think twice about using a spell to auto-succeed a skill check or solve a problem.

I know that people tend to dislike this idea as they feel they're being punished for using their abilities, but I see this as a fundamental choice. It's very hard to see how non-magic characters can be on the same level as magic ones when magic costs nothing (no, I don't count spell slots because they're entirely abstract and the loss doesn't have any negative consequences aside from 'not being able to cast even more magic today') and has no risks.


4) In game terms, the main disadvantage of magic seems to be that it represents a finite resource (albeit one that automatically replenishes each day). However, I think that 5e's Spell Slot casting has completely buggered the equation. It used to be that Wizards, Clerics, Druids etc. all had to prepare their spells beforehand. Hence, a wizard might know Fireball but if he'd prepared several castings of Fly instead, then it didn't matter. If a Druid only had one Entangle prepared, that would help him for the first encounter but what about the encounters after that?

In contrast, so long as a Wizard knows Fly and Fireball, he can cast either as many times as he has spell slots. Run out of 3rd level slots? No problem, just upcast with a 4th level slot instead. This also goes back to the point about flexibility. In prior editions, a caster might have been wary of preparing Tongues as it's a somewhat niche spell that could easily end up 'wasting' one of their spell slots. In contrast, a caster in 5e can have Tongues on their list of known/prepared spells, safe in the knowledge that they can still use all of their spell slots for Fireball or whatever, but will still have it in reserve should they run into a situation that calls for it.


5) The gradual reduction in elemental and magic resistance of monsters. In 2nd edition a lot of monsters, particularly at the higher end of the scale, would be resistant to magic (for those who don't remember, it was represented as a % chance to ignore a spell effect entirely). Hence, spellcasters often had to spend a number of rounds using spells to lower a monster's magic resistance before they could meaningfully attack it. In the meantime, martials were free to go all out on it (naturally, an alternative strategy for casters would entail buffing the martials to make them better in this role).

3.5 had spell resistance, which I think was a more intuitive system. Again, it represented a chance for a monster to negate a spell entirely but instead of a flat %, the caster would have to roll to beat the monster's Spell Resistance, adding their caster level to the roll. It probably represented a weakening overall but felt more involved and gave players some options (such as Spell Penetration feats) to improve their chances.

In 5e though, magic resistance only ever gives a monster Advantage on their saving throw against a spell. So rather than having two separate lines of defence (spell resistance and then the saving throw), the monster now has only one. If the spell does something even on a success, the monster no longer ignores it. If the spell doesn't allow a saving throw then the monster has no protection at all.

Then you've got the change to elemental resistance, which is now represented as Resistant or Immune with nothing in between. In the past, monsters could have Fire Resistance 5 (meaning they ignore the first 5pts of damage from every instance of fire damage), or Fire Resistance 10 or Fire Resistance 30. It allowed for different levels of resistance without making monsters outright immune. This then meant that a lot of monsters could have minor resistance to elements (elements of course being the primary method of damage for casters). Probably not quite as important as the nerfing of spell resistance, but still noteworthy I think.


Bear in mind also that it's not just these individual changes but also their effect when taken together.

[ezekielraiden]

1) Magic should have some strengths. <snip>
I agree, at least as far as your comments regarding actual game design, and not the...other things. (Which are, as so many things touched on in this thread, best addressed in a different thread.) Fortunately, we've had that covered in literally every single edition, bar none, no questions. There has never been an edition of D&D where magic didn't have strengths. Consider: apart from consumable-form healing spells (potions, scrolls, wands) and regular healing spells, it is essentially impossible to restore more than a paltry amount of hit points without magic in (most) prior editions. Likewise, if you suffer from something nasty, like mummy rot, or god forbid you die, literally nothing except magic can save you. Magic has always had its things that ONLY magic can do, while non-magic is forced to live in the closet under the stairs.


2) However, I think part of the problem is that most casters are generalists who can be good at almost anything.
And as soon as you start suggesting anything that might limit them, they cry havoc and let slip the dogs of (flame)war. It is essentially impossible to get D&D caster fans (and especially Wizard fans) to accept anything that will cause them to lose ground. Because, the thing is? D&D doesn't have a problem with "magic" not having strengths. It has a problem with every single thing you could do without magic, magic can always do better. Magic has no limitations. There isn't a single thing you can do without magic, that magic can't do better if you choose to do it with magic--a serious design problem that the community won't let the designers fix, even if they wanted to. Which they don't, as demonstrated by that interview with Rob Heinsoo a while back, where he talked about how many members of the 4e design team kept bumping up the power of the Wizard *just a little* with every design pass, and he had to keep reining it back in.


3) In fact, magic in general has no meaningful costs or risks. <snop> I know that people tend to dislike this idea as they feel they're being punished for using their abilities...
Although this is a real problem (and, uh, D&D has tended to create really really anti-fun and ineffective restrictions of this type, e.g. boring, frustrating, and not-too-difficult to dodge), there are two bigger problems: perverse incentives and "tax-dodging." In brief, perverse incentives are what create things like the fifteen minute workday, the excessive focus on alpha-striking, or avoiding spending "permanent" resources (gp) on "temporary" benefits (consumables & ritual components). (Note the quotes; these are player perspectives, not a more thorough and patient analysis.) "Tax-dodging" is an inaccurate term in this context, but it's got cultural cachet so I'm using it when "regulation-dodging" would be more accurate: if you make magic have a real cost, the playerbase (which mostly DOES like having magic in some form) will not start using and liking non-magic things, but will instead finagle least-punishing, most-usable option and default to that unless some other concern becomes greater.

Making magic that has reasonable-but-not-trivial costs, that don't create perverse incentives or encourage tax-dodging, is extremely difficult. Very few games come to market with it, because few people have figured out any good answers. Ironically, though you poo-pooed it earlier, 4e actually tried to fix these with its power schedule and finite healing resources--and the very fact that you dislike it despite it solving this problem is yet another example of "people get MORE upset when you change things to fix the problems they claim to be upset about."



4) In game terms, the main disadvantage of magic seems to be that it represents a finite resource (albeit one that automatically replenishes each day). However, I think that 5e's Spell Slot casting has completely buggered the equation.
It really wasn't that much of a limitation in prior editions either, because of the "always go for the best spells" perverse incentive.


5) The gradual reduction in elemental and magic resistance of monsters.
Now this is a 100% valid criticism, and one based on a frank historical analysis of D&D. Its monster design (with the exception of 4e, imagine that) has been a long train of making monsters somehow more susceptible to magic, and likewise Fighters. You're completely right that early editions made incautious use of magic...just not very effective against dangerous foes, and that that has slowly ceased to be the case. 5e has tried to reverse the trend, but I completely agree that the ways in which 5e flattened the design depth of creatures (not complexity per se--"reduce incoming fire damage by 5" is not meaningfully more complicated than "takes half damage from fire," but the former allows scaling while the latter does not), spells, and characters has removed many avenues of addressing the power and versatility of magic.

Edit:
But, again, none of this addresses what I think is the real, core, fundamental problem. Things are only "wondrous" and "magical" when they're not yet understood, when your mind is suddenly opened to a world of possibilities you hadn't considered before. Wonder is like fresh snow: beautiful when untouched, but once it becomes well-trodden ground, its beauty is lost. Once the wondrous becomes familiar, becomes rote, there's no charm left, no room for that wonder because you know what the limits are. Yet the nature of formal systems is to define the limits of things, to set values and functions and calculations to something. Unless and until someone can demonstrate something that will be enough of a "system" to satisfy the D&D community, and yet also somehow either create or at least preserve the lack-of-familiarity

Besides, one of the key things 5e was designed for--one of the things the fans clamored for--was "feel." Getting the "feel" of D&D down pat. That literally means making it "feel" familiar, recognizable, identifiable. The designers are boxed in; they can't create a system that doesn't "feel like D&D," because fans will revolt. But if they want to create a new system that can thus evoke wonder, they have to do that very thing--take away the comfort zones, present the strange and unexpected.

It is not possible to create wonder and preserve the D&D "feel" in the same system. A single system can, at best, slow down the process of becoming familiar with it, so that it always feels like there's something left to discover. (One can argue that 3rd Edition, with its incredible breadth of splats and revival via Pathfinder, was banking on exactly that: that it is SO riddled with subsystems and components that no one can ever really experience everything it has to give, and thus always feel at least a little wonder.)

[Chaosmancer]

One thing that I can't help but thinking during this discussion is how I have no idea what other "non-magical" classes people could want.

Fighter, Barbarian, Rogue and Monk pretty well cover it. Now, I only include the monk because there isn't a good unarmed fighter archetype... unless you use the Class Variant Fighting Style, in which case, drop the monk.

So, you have a hero who uses weapons. A hero who is stronger than average and hard to hurt. One who uses their wits and skills, and one who punches people.

You want to play a wilderness warrior, cloaked in the woods and tracking their foes across all lands? Scout Rogue, Outlander Background.

A warrior devoted to the temples of who fights with conviction that can inspire his companions? Well, the Banneret Fighter is poorly made, but some tweaks to get it up to par and the Acolyte background and you are good to go.

A scholar who uses their vast knowledge of ancient lore to aid the team? Inquisitive or Mastermind Rogue with Scholar background.

An alchemist who concocts potions and explosives to use in battle? Thief Rogue, Alchemist kit. Granted, you need to some 3pp rules or homebrew to get actual items worth crafting, but as someone who is playing that exact build, it works. Can even make them a doctor by adding the Healer feat.

A "Battle dancer" dervish style character? Refluff barbarian, maybe let their abilities key off dex attacks.

The more I think about it, trying to figure out what non-magical, non-mystical things people would want to do.... the more I don't see what choices are actually missing that people want.

I'm not saying I don't see what people mean by there being a lot of magical classes, I wanted to make a 6-man team for a one-shot that had no magic, and I couldn't do it without repeating classes, but I also don't see what classes are actually missing if you want zero magic within the class itself.



I think this is a good point. As it stands, there's a weird disconnect between a lot of the world magic compared with the magic used not just by PCs, but also by NPCS and monsters.

As in, we have all these monsters and constructs created with magic, plus magic items (and I don't just mean scrolls and potions), plus various other effects . . . yet no rules for how a powerful wizard could possibly accomplish any of these. :smallconfused:

I know 3.5 had issues but at least it actually had rules for creating golems, for crafting magic items, even for stuff like implanting grafts. I'm sure many of these were costly and difficult but it nevertheless showed that the players could do them with enough time and gold and the right resources.

Meanwhile, in 5e you're generally left scratching your head at a lot of magical effects. Because very few spells can last for any significant length of time, Permanency is long gone, and yet somehow wizards are still managing to do all this long-term stuff. Can we see the rules they're using? Because even the NPC Archmage doesn't have any rule or spell that would allow him to accomplish this sort of thing.

Let me show you what I mean. Here's what the 3.5 MM said about building a golem:

CONSTRUCTION
The cost to create given for each golem includes the cost of the physical body and all the materials and spell components that are consumed or become a permanent part of the golem. Creating a golem is essentially similar to creating any sort of magic item (see page 282 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide). However, a golem’s body includes costly material components that may require some extra preparation. The golem’s creator can assemble the body or hire someone else to do the job. The builder must have the appropriate skill, which varies with the golem variety.

Completing the golem’s creation drains the appropriate XP from the creator and requires casting any spells on the final day. The creator must cast the spells personally, but they can come from outside sources, such as scrolls.

The characteristics of a golem that come from its nature as a magic item (caster level, prerequisite feats and spells, market price, cost to create) are given in summary form at the end of each golem’s description, in the same format used in Chapter 7 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Note The market price of an advanced golem (a golem with more Hit Dice than the typical golem described in each entry) is increased by 5,000 gp for each additional Hit Die, and increased by an additional 50,000 gp if the golem’s size increases. The XP cost for creating an advanced golem is equal to 1/25 the advanced golem’s market price minus the cost of the special materials required.


Example: [I]Clay Golem:
A clay golem’s body must be sculpted from a single block of clay weighing at least 1,000 pounds, treated with rare oils and powders worth 1,500 gp. Creating the body requires a DC 15 Craft (sculpting) check or a DC 15 Craft (pottery) check.
CL 11th; Craft Construct (see page 303), animate objects, commune, resurrection, caster must be at least 11th level; Price 40,000 gp; Cost 21,500 gp + 1,540 XP.

So it's complicated and requires an 11+th level caster with some specific spells (not to mention a hefty wallet), but you basically have the entire process here. If a PC dreams of having their own golem, then they know (or can find out) exactly what is required and gradually work on assembling the necessary components.


Now let's see how 5e suggests building a golem:
Elemental Spirit in Material Form.
The construction of a golem begins with the building of its body, requiring great command of the craft of sculpting, stonecutting, ironworking, or surgery. Sometimes a go I em's creator is the master of the art, but often the individual who desires a golem must enlist master artisans to do the work.

After constructing the body from clay, flesh, iron, or stone, the golem's creator infuses it with a spirit from the Elemental Plane of Earth. This tiny spark of life has no memory, personality, or history. It is simply the impetus to move and obey. This process binds the spirit to the artificial body and subjects it to the will of the golem's creator.

The more keen-eyed amongst you might notice a certain lack of details (and to save you checking, no the individual entries don't give any extra information).

We're told that building a golem requires "great command of the craft of sculpting, stonecutting, ironworking, or surgery". Okay. But what does that mean in game? I assume proficiency with a given set of tools but are any checks involved? What's the DC? How much do the materials cost? How long does it take?

Next we're informed that the golem is infused with "a spirit from the Elemental Plane of Earth". How? Does this involve the Conjure Elemental spell? Planar Ally, maybe? Or would the Conjure Minor Elementals spell work? If it needs one of the Conjure Elementals spells, what happens if I lose my concentration; does the golem them become hostile towards me? Do I need to cast any other spells before or after this? Do I need to do anything else to prepare the body? Whichever spell I use to summon the elemental spark, how do I make it permanent, given that it normally has a finite duration?

Finally, we have this gem: "This process binds the spirit to the artificial body and subjects it to the will of the golem's creator". Er . . . I can only assume you missed a step somewhere because you haven't actually told us the process.


Anyway, I'm not saying that someone couldn't necessarily make up hard rules for creating a golem in 5e. The issue is that the designers haven't. Nor have they provided rules for most of the other long-term uses of magic in the world. And this creates a weird disconnect wherein the magic of players, monsters and NPCs is constantly seen to be narrow in scope and rarely ever having significant, long-term effects; yet the world still somehow contains all manner of golems, magic items and other examples of long-term magic with no explanation of how any of it was achieved.

I appreciate that this ramble is somewhat tangential to the topic at hand, I just think it's amusing that the D&D world seems detached from its own magic system. :smalltongue:

This and another post bring me to a complaint I do actually have, and that is that the "small magics" like blessings and such don't exist or have rules.

I've worked around that by letting people spend their spell slots and roll a casting check (ability mod + prof) to see what happens.

For example, I had a player who was playing a cleric and wanted to bless a child. I asked them to tell me what they wanted the blessing to be, how many spell slots of "energy" they were spending (they could have dumped everything into this) and then to roll. I can't remember what the result.... oh wait, yes I do. They were blessing the son of a Fey Prince with a mortal woman and gave him "the ability to see the true intentions of people" and they crit, so I gave them a future vision of the child as a king, able to see at a glance what those around him intended. That game died due to the virus though, so we didn't expand upon it much)

But, the nature of things like, the farmers who sing "ritual songs" and empower the land because it has been the same song, song on the same land, for a hundred years and that has impact, is something that I don't think the game system will ever be able to emulate to the point I'm happy with it.


Sun Wukong didnt emit qi in the form of energy based attacks or move faster than the eye could see

Actually... he did.

After being born from a rock (twice) Sun Wukong bowed in the four cardinal directions and then shot lasers out of his eyes... for no reason that I can find (I'm sure it was symbolic since it nearly hit the Emperor of Heaven).

Then, later, he was challenged by the Buddha to jump out of his hand. Sun Wukong jumped from where he was to "The pillars of the universe" which was the edge of reality. Then lept back (turns out the pillars were buddha's fingers though, so oops, not out of his hand). So, he had to have moved incredibly quickly.

He could also make hundreds of clones of himself, was thrice immortal (he learned a secret of immortality, ate some fruit that made him immortal, then erased his name from the books of the underworld so they could never take him to the land of the dead) and could shapeshift into pretty much anything (other people, flies, growing to the size of a mountain, ect), was stupidly strong (his "staff" is actually a size-changing pillar that kept the oceans calm and weighs about as much as a mountain, even when shrunk)

So.... yeah. Sun Wukong, stupidly magical and powerful.

[Dr. Cliché]

I agree with basically everything else you said, I just wanted to address a couple of points:



It really wasn't that much of a limitation in prior editions either, because of the "always go for the best spells" perverse incentive.

But choosing the 'best spells' didn't mean you could have all of them prepared at the same time.

If a 3.5 wizard has fireball and fly, he still has to choose how many of each to prepare. If he prepares more instances of Fly then he risks running out of fireballs, and vice versa. Meanwhile, a 5e wizard with the best spells has all of them ready to cast. He doesn't need to allocate his spell slots ahead of time.

I appreciate that it wasn't necessarily the worst drawback in past editions but I do think this increased flexibility makes a difference, as it basically means wizards can always make the best possible use of their spell slots. They'll never be stuck in a battle with a dragon, having wasted several slots on social-interaction or skill-based spells.



Making magic that has reasonable-but-not-trivial costs, that don't create perverse incentives or encourage tax-dodging, is extremely difficult. Very few games come to market with it, because few people have figured out any good answers. Ironically, though you poo-pooed it earlier, 4e actually tried to fix these with its power schedule and finite healing resources--and the very fact that you dislike it despite it solving this problem is yet another example of "people get MORE upset when you change things to fix the problems they claim to be upset about."

I appreciate what 4th edition *tried* to do, I just think the execution was awful. :smallwink:

For example, healing magic was already limited. 4e just needed to put a different limit on it, since spell slots no longer existed.

What's more, there still wasn't any cost to the magic. It was just limited in a way that completely broke verisimilitude. It was also made exceptionally boring, with the vast array of fun spells being reduced to a handful of 'do X damage and something else' effects.

To put it another way, I don't want a magic system wherein mages are outright superior to non-mages because magic can do virtually anything and has no meaningful cost. However, by the same measure, I also don't want a system wherein every caster just feels like someone took a martial class and re-skinned it. :smalltongue:

[ezekielraiden]

Actually... he did.

After being born from a rock (twice) Sun Wukong bowed in the four cardinal directions and then shot lasers out of his eyes... for no reason that I can find (I'm sure it was symbolic since it nearly hit the Emperor of Heaven).

Then, later, he was challenged by the Buddha to jump out of his hand. Sun Wukong jumped from where he was to "The pillars of the universe" which was the edge of reality. Then lept back (turns out the pillars were buddha's fingers though, so oops, not out of his hand). So, he had to have moved incredibly quickly.

He could also make hundreds of clones of himself, was thrice immortal (he learned a secret of immortality, ate some fruit that made him immortal, then erased his name from the books of the underworld so they could never take him to the land of the dead) and could shapeshift into pretty much anything (other people, flies, growing to the size of a mountain, ect), was stupidly strong (his "staff" is actually a size-changing pillar that kept the oceans calm and weighs about as much as a mountain, even when shrunk)

So.... yeah. Sun Wukong, stupidly magical and powerful.

IIRC, five times immortal. In addition to the three you mentioned (his Daoist master teaching him an "illegitimate" form of immortality; erasing his own name, and the names of as many monkeys as he could find, from the ledgers of the Ten Kings of Diyu; and eating the peaches from the grove of heavenly peach trees, which he had been tasked to guard), he also consumed an entire heavenly peach festival banquet's worth of heavenly booze that also makes you immortal, AND ate an entire batch of Lao-Tze's immortality pills, making him quintuply immortal.

But yes, literally the first thing the Monkey King does after hatching from a rock egg is bowing to the cardinal directions, "inadvertently activating his LASER EYES," as OSP's Red puts it. He repeatedly moves so fast he can't be seen (often creating a perfect body-double behind him so no one even notices the switch!), and the only time he's ever actually slowed down is when someone drops AT LEAST a full-on mountain on top of him, often with EXTRA magic power as well (e.g. the Mountain of the Five Phases with its Buddhist "seal" at the top to keep Monkey in place.) He can transform into 72 different creatures ("the Art of the Earthly Multitude") and fly. It literally takes inventing entirely new magical BS in order to stop him (e.g. the wind-ferret creature, Red Boy and his True Fire of Samadhi, certain magic treasures). Journey to the West is MANY things, but low-magic is EMPHATICALLY not among them.

(All of this courtesy of Overly Sarcastic Productions' Journey to the West (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBIdPAGnv7tSe_4Jo-qYrVOfYz2cw8-pN) series. Which is lovely and hilarious and everyone should watch it. Don't bug Red about making new eps though, she has vowed that every time she's asked, she will delay the production of the next episode!)

[Schwann145]

But how do you design a non-magical ability that can compete with Fireball, Tongues, Spiritual Guardians, Entangle, to say nothing of the non-spell abilities of caster classes?

I know a lot of people don't particularly like this answer but... you don't.
The classes aren't meant to be balanced against one another, they're meant to be built to have to tools necessary to fill their roles successfully.
When you balance the classes against one another, you get 4th Edition (a great example of, "the player isn't the best judge for what is good"). :smalltongue:


Howling spirits coming to your aid sounds like something right out of Conan to me.

It sure does! But like... once, at a pivotal moment at the end of the adventure; not every day. :smallcool:

[FilthyLucre]

I think the issue can be solved by just having more classes that are explicitly non-magical or have non-magical options/subclasses. Ranger and Bard both stand out to me as classes that are very viable without resorting to magic. I would greatly like to see more 'mundane' options that make hacking other genres easier, (steampunk, modern, etc. I know people will say 'use another system' but I think many people are absolutely married to d20 - I am).

[FilthyLucre]

Besides, one of the key things 5e was designed for--one of the things the fans clamored for--was "feel." Getting the "feel" of D&D down pat. That literally means making it "feel" familiar, recognizable, identifiable. The designers are boxed in; they can't create a system that doesn't "feel like D&D," because fans will revolt. But if they want to create a new system that can thus evoke wonder, they have to do that very thing--take away the comfort zones, present the strange and unexpected.

It is not possible to create wonder and preserve the D&D "feel" in the same system. A single system can, at best, slow down the process of becoming familiar with it, so that it always feels like there's something left to discover. (One can argue that 3rd Edition, with its incredible breadth of splats and revival via Pathfinder, was banking on exactly that: that it is SO riddled with subsystems and components that no one can ever really experience everything it has to give, and thus always feel at least a little wonder.)

I don't think that "wonderment" is in the system so much as the DM and their story telling. So, while you could have a perfect, unfailing memorization of all the rules it's still possible for the DM to create new experiences.

[Chaosmancer]

IIRC, five times immortal. In addition to the three you mentioned (his Daoist master teaching him an "illegitimate" form of immortality; erasing his own name, and the names of as many monkeys as he could find, from the ledgers of the Ten Kings of Diyu; and eating the peaches from the grove of heavenly peach trees, which he had been tasked to guard), he also consumed an entire heavenly peach festival banquet's worth of heavenly booze that also makes you immortal, AND ate an entire batch of Lao-Tze's immortality pills, making him quintuply immortal.

But yes, literally the first thing the Monkey King does after hatching from a rock egg is bowing to the cardinal directions, "inadvertently activating his LASER EYES," as OSP's Red puts it. He repeatedly moves so fast he can't be seen (often creating a perfect body-double behind him so no one even notices the switch!), and the only time he's ever actually slowed down is when someone drops AT LEAST a full-on mountain on top of him, often with EXTRA magic power as well (e.g. the Mountain of the Five Phases with its Buddhist "seal" at the top to keep Monkey in place.) He can transform into 72 different creatures ("the Art of the Earthly Multitude") and fly. It literally takes inventing entirely new magical BS in order to stop him (e.g. the wind-ferret creature, Red Boy and his True Fire of Samadhi, certain magic treasures). Journey to the West is MANY things, but low-magic is EMPHATICALLY not among them.

(All of this courtesy of Overly Sarcastic Productions' Journey to the West (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBIdPAGnv7tSe_4Jo-qYrVOfYz2cw8-pN) series. Which is lovely and hilarious and everyone should watch it. Don't bug Red about making new eps though, she has vowed that every time she's asked, she will delay the production of the next episode!)

Also a man of culture I see :D

Love OSP


I think the issue can be solved by just having more classes that are explicitly non-magical or have non-magical options/subclasses. Ranger and Bard both stand out to me as classes that are very viable without resorting to magic. I would greatly like to see more 'mundane' options that make hacking other genres easier, (steampunk, modern, etc. I know people will say 'use another system' but I think many people are absolutely married to d20 - I am).


I brought this up already in post... looks like #95 to me, but what exactly do you think this ends up meaning?

A Scout Rogue is very much a Ranger. Or you could build it with a Fighter and the Outlander background if want heavier armors. If you want a non-magical ranger, those two options seem to fit the bill.

Same with Bard, take an Inquisitive or Mastermind rogue and the Performer background. Bam, Non-Magical bard.

The more I think of it, the more I think if you want a game limited by "no magic" then Rogue, Fighter, Barbarian and Monk (maybe) fit the bill of pretty much anything you might want.

[FilthyLucre]

I brought this up already in post... looks like #95 to me, but what exactly do you think this ends up meaning?

A Scout Rogue is very much a Ranger. Or you could build it with a Fighter and the Outlander background if want heavier armors. If you want a non-magical ranger, those two options seem to fit the bill.

Same with Bard, take an Inquisitive or Mastermind rogue and the Performer background. Bam, Non-Magical bard.

The more I think of it, the more I think if you want a game limited by "no magic" then Rogue, Fighter, Barbarian and Monk (maybe) fit the bill of pretty much anything you might want.

I don't disagree with you in premise, but I do disagree that there is sufficient content to make a party of 5 characters, all nonmagical, where there isn't significant class or feel overlap. In a perfect world, (IMHO), there would only be three classes (fighter, rogue, mage) and just many many subclasses/specialization opportunities.

TL;DR I want to be able to have a party of 5 mundane characters that are all thematically quite different.

[Democratus]

TL;DR I want to be able to have a party of 5 mundane characters that are all thematically quite different.

You can do this, but you have to re-think how broad a "theme" should be.

A good example of this is the game Leverage (based on the TV show of the same name).

There are 5 character archetypes in Leverage:

Grifter
Hacker
Hitter
Mastermind
Thief


All of them are non-magical (obvious, sense they exist in a 'real' world). But each has its own theme, powers, and role in the party.

[FilthyLucre]

You can do this, but you have to re-think how broad a "theme" should be.

A good example of this is the game Leverage (based on the TV show of the same name).

There are 5 character archetypes in Leverage:

Grifter
Hacker
Hitter
Mastermind
Thief


All of them are non-magical (obvious, sense they exist in a 'real' world). But each has its own theme, powers, and role in the party.
I'm not disputing that it can be done - I'm disputing that it can be done in D&D as it exists as of this writing.

[Morty]

The fact that non-magical characters' class options boil down to "boring generic beatstick, "thief", "angry beatstick" and arguably "wuxia character" does go a long way towards magic's dominance in the field of actually doing anything interesting.

[Democratus]

I'm not disputing that it can be done - I'm disputing that it can be done in D&D as it exists as of this writing.

Gotcha. That's why I brought up "theme" as something that can be very narrowly defined. You could have 2 fighters and 3 rogues which each have a theme.


The Tank
The Archer
The Second-Story Man
The Con Man
The Assassin


Each of these is a theme. And each has a part to play in the 3 pillars of RPG-ing.

A group like this trying to prove themselves in a world where everyone thinks you need magic - could be an amazing campaign.

[FilthyLucre]

Gotcha. That's why I brought up "theme" as something that can be very narrowly defined. You could have 2 fighters and 3 rogues which each have a theme.


The Tank
The Archer
The Second-Story Man
The Con Man
The Assassin


Each of these is a theme. And each has a part to play in the 3 pillars of RPG-ing.

A group like this trying to prove themselves in a world where everyone thinks you need magic - could be an amazing campaign.
Again, I think you prove your point but I'd still like to see more/expanded mundane options. I'd like to see more options, period, as a matter of fact. For me, there isn't enough content to adequately support those themes within the two classes you specified.

[Democratus]

Again, I think you prove your point but I'd still like to see more/expanded mundane options. I'd like to see more options, period, as a matter of fact. For me, there isn't enough content to adequately support those themes within the two classes you specified.

Totally fair. I wonder what they would look like.

Adventures in Middle Earth has a Scholar class who is good at knowing things and has access to mundane (herbal/medical) healing. There's also a Warden class that is a lot like the Warlord from earlier editions - an inspiring leader who can assist his party through inspiration dice much like a bard.

Have you had any ideas for mundane awesomeness? Would love to hear them. :smallcool:

[8wGremlin]

Back when they were talking about what the new 5e was going to be they made a big announcement that it was going to be MODULAR.

for me that meant that you'd have modular sets of rules, and I naively thought.

Mundane characters (no magic using character)
Feats as a Module (they kind of do this)

Modular rules for low level martial arts/manoeuvres
Modular rules for Low magic; Divine Characters to add on (half casters)
Modular rules for Low magic; Arcane Characters to add on (half casters)
Modular rules for Low magic; Nature Characters to add on (half casters)
Modular rules for Low magic; Binding/Oaths Characters to add on (half casters)

Modular rules for High level martial arts/manoeuvres (Wuxia)
Modular rules for High magic; Divine Characters to add on (casters)
Modular rules for High magic; Arcane Characters to add on (casters)
Modular rules for High magic; Nature Characters to add on (casters)
Modular rules for High magic; Binding/Oaths Characters to add on (casters)

I was so hopeful and naive.

[AntiAuthority]

But, again, none of this addresses what I think is the real, core, fundamental problem. Things are only "wondrous" and "magical" when they're not yet understood, when your mind is suddenly opened to a world of possibilities you hadn't considered before. Wonder is like fresh snow: beautiful when untouched, but once it becomes well-trodden ground, its beauty is lost. Once the wondrous becomes familiar, becomes rote, there's no charm left, no room for that wonder because you know what the limits are. Yet the nature of formal systems is to define the limits of things, to set values and functions and calculations to something. Unless and until someone can demonstrate something that will be enough of a "system" to satisfy the D&D community, and yet also somehow either create or at least preserve the lack-of-familiarity

Besides, one of the key things 5e was designed for--one of the things the fans clamored for--was "feel." Getting the "feel" of D&D down pat. That literally means making it "feel" familiar, recognizable, identifiable. The designers are boxed in; they can't create a system that doesn't "feel like D&D," because fans will revolt. But if they want to create a new system that can thus evoke wonder, they have to do that very thing--take away the comfort zones, present the strange and unexpected.


Pretty much this. Something is going to appear wonderful the first time you see it, but after a while, you sort of just get used to it, and when it becomes understood it's not really mystifying anymore.

This then ties back into what "feels" like D&D. Is it high powered adventures, low magic, Conan the Barbarian style games where mostly villains use magic... What? D&D doesn't exactly have a feel beyond being D&D.





Actually... he did.

After being born from a rock (twice) Sun Wukong bowed in the four cardinal directions and then shot lasers out of his eyes... for no reason that I can find (I'm sure it was symbolic since it nearly hit the Emperor of Heaven).



But yes, literally the first thing the Monkey King does after hatching from a rock egg is bowing to the cardinal directions, "inadvertently activating his LASER EYES," as OSP's Red puts it. He repeatedly moves so fast he can't be seen (often creating a perfect body-double behind him so no one even notices the switch!), and the only time he's ever actually slowed down is when someone drops AT LEAST a full-on mountain on top of him, often with EXTRA magic power as well (e.g. the Mountain of the Five Phases with its Buddhist "seal" at the top to keep Monkey in place.) He can transform into 72 different creatures ("the Art of the Earthly Multitude") and fly. It literally takes inventing entirely new magical BS in order to stop him (e.g. the wind-ferret creature, Red Boy and his True Fire of Samadhi, certain magic treasures). Journey to the West is MANY things, but low-magic is EMPHATICALLY not among them.


Look, the takeaway from this is... Mythological and ancient literary characters ripped off comic books and anime! I knew something was up with Cu Chulainn's great grandfather having basically laser vision! Shiva's third eye being able to incinerate things is a classic comic book trope! Clearly the Banshee of folklore was ripping off DC's Black Canary and Marvel's Banshee (come on, the folklore Banshee even stole Marvel Banshee's name, no originality at all)! The comic and anime fans invented time travel to give mythological and literary characters anime and comic book powers, it all makes sense! And I wasn't invited to help because I'm not cool enough! lol Seriously, I'm tempted to rewatch OSP's Journey to the West now...

Anyway, about the Monkey King and tying into fantasy characters being able to do things that are impossible in our world because they're not limited by the constraints of our world... I read some of the Journey to the West and after Sun Wukong shoots lasers out of his eyes, the Jade Emperor states, "Creatures down below are born of the essence of heaven and earth: there is nothing remarkable about him."

Nothing remarkable about shooting lasers out of your eyes? I think fantasy characters should get a pass because, like Sun Wukong, they can just be that awesome (or they live in a fantasy world). They're not bound to the rules of being normal people like the Monkey King or any of the mythologies (Greek, Celtic, Norse) that directly or indirectly inspired D&D in some form or another.




The fact that non-magical characters' class options boil down to "boring generic beatstick, "thief", "angry beatstick" and arguably "wuxia character" does go a long way towards magic's dominance in the field of actually doing anything interesting.

Unfortunately, yes, this is a problem...

[MaxWilson]

I agree also there is a HUGE disconnect between PC creation and NPC/monster creation.

I remember when I started 5e (again after playing in the 1980's) and I wanted to re-do my favorite beginner module: U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (this was before The Ghosts of Saltmarsh was written/released).

I thought converting an old module into 5e rules would help me learn.

First problem I had was making the first "boss", who in the original document was 2nd or 3rd level Illusionist into a 5e monster. I at first wanted to just make a 3rd level illusionist (like a PC) and plop him into the adventure. Of course problems insued (power level being one) and so I venture here to ask questions.

OH NO!!!! That's a BIG NO-NO in 5e. You just don't make PC's as monsters. PC's are PC's and NPC's and Monsters are made completely different.

The Internet lies a lot. Good thing you learned that sooner than later.

The 5e DMG straight-up tells you in two different sections that building NPCs using PHB rules is a valid option (it even has NPC-only races and subclasses like the Oathbreaker), but for some reason the Internet pretends otherwise.

[GreyBlack]

Been questioning this recently and came upon this blog:
Fanservice BS: Low Magic, No Problem. Oh, Wait, Problem (https://theangrygm.com/fanservice-bs-low-magic/)

And this particular part stuck out to me:


When you consider your class options, literally everything is either 100% magical or has magical options; the Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue are the only ones with non-magical options, and none of them can say exclusively so.

Game designers will tell us that we can play however we wish, whether it's more high fantasy or more sword & sorcery, but that's just not true based on what they actually design and release in final products - all of it is super-high fantasy.

When everything is magical, is nothing magical? If you can expect cantrips or their non-spell equivalent around every corner of every city of every setting... is magic special anymore?

What do you think?

A couple people have brought this up, but LOTR is really not the basis of D&D in any way, shape, or form. D&D's DNA comes more from the Conan short stories, where the characters climb the tower, steal the loot, and come back to town to party hard until they go broke and need to go adventuring again. As such, any such comparisons to LOTR become kinda moot; D&D is not designed to be such an overarching quest. Sure, it can happen, but it isn't what the intention was.

.... That said, even comparing D&D to source materials becomes kinda bizarre. The Jack Vance series (from which Vancian Magic takes its name) was more low magic than modern D&D, the Conan series was more low magic... all of the games DNA is more low magic than modern D&D.

As such, I'd like to posit that modern D&D is less related to its predecessors than to what I would call the "modern fantasy" genres; it's more related to series like Warcraft, Harry Potter, or Warhammer than it is to any of that original DNA. In this, magic is more mundane; it is treated more like a tool to be used in the world than it is a force of the unknown. Magic has been made scientific and systematized in some way, or at least that appears to be the assumption of the baseline setting of D&D post-3rd edition (probably even post-2nd edition, given how magic-heavy 3rd was).

This is probably best typified in something like Avatar: The Last Airbender transitioning to Legend of Korra. In the first, sure, bending is this weird magic system that has rules in place, sure, but otherwise isn't always applied as something that would be useful on a society level. Compare this to Legend of Korra, where lightning-benders are seen generating power for the entire city; where one is awesome and mystical, the second is practical and almost mundane.

This isn't a good or a bad thing, but it does leave people who don't really like that modern fantasy genre a bit cool; some people want magic to be... magical. Mysterious. Unable to be quantified by the mortal realm. That really can't be squared with the assumption that magic is only a tool that can be learned and harnessed by anyone. Personally, I would prefer a lower magic option for my D&D, and am currently working on a module that deals more in that lower magic world, but that's just my preference; I can totally understand some people wanting that more practical magic.

[Galaxander]

I know a lot of people don't particularly like this answer but... you don't.
The classes aren't meant to be balanced against one another, they're meant to be built to have to tools necessary to fill their roles successfully.
When you balance the classes against one another, you get 4th Edition (a great example of, "the player isn't the best judge for what is good"). :smalltongue:

I'm not talking about balancing for power though. I'm talking about balancing for fun. (My bad for not making that clear.)

A magic class gets to do fun varied things in almost any situation. Non-magic classes are typically going to be doing the same thing all the time, over and over. Magic classes might have pages of options that can change a situation in unpredictable ways in and out of combat.

I don't think it's good design to have some classes be inherently more boring than others, regardless of whether or not they can all fill their role.

[Chaosmancer]

The fact that non-magical characters' class options boil down to "boring generic beatstick, "thief", "angry beatstick" and arguably "wuxia character" does go a long way towards magic's dominance in the field of actually doing anything interesting.

Well, a few things here.

1) You seem to be limiting classes right out of the gate. Fighter's can be fairly interesting. Maybe not as interesting, but for example, a friend of mine built an actual combat effective net fighter. I played a Samurai from the UA that was a ton of fun. Saying "boring generic beatstick" seems to predispose you to thinking of them in that way, but there is nuance.

2) What would you add to make them more interesting? That is the forever problem. Between maneuver's and the optional rules in the DMG, there aren't a lot of combat moves left. And aura's are expressly magical, so what can you give them to actually do?



Again, I think you prove your point but I'd still like to see more/expanded mundane options. I'd like to see more options, period, as a matter of fact. For me, there isn't enough content to adequately support those themes within the two classes you specified.

Can you explain what more you would need?



I'm not talking about balancing for power though. I'm talking about balancing for fun. (My bad for not making that clear.)

A magic class gets to do fun varied things in almost any situation. Non-magic classes are typically going to be doing the same thing all the time, over and over. Magic classes might have pages of options that can change a situation in unpredictable ways in and out of combat.

I don't think it's good design to have some classes be inherently more boring than others, regardless of whether or not they can all fill their role.

I get that, but sort of by definition, mundane things are things that can be done over and over again. I don't think you could write pages and pages of mundane options that can change things in unpredictable ways. Not that it isn't a good way to go, I just don't think it is possible without ripping things away from the skill system

[Tanarii]

The Internet lies a lot. Good thing you learned that sooner than later.

The 5e DMG straight-up tells you in two different sections that building NPCs using PHB rules is a valid option (it even has NPC-only races and subclasses like the Oathbreaker), but for some reason the Internet pretends otherwise.
Oh it's a pretty easy to figure out the most common reasons

1) Most people don't want to, or just can't, figure out the CR. But they're still trying to balance around it. And it's a lot of work to do that.

2) they're not very well balanced as combat enemies even when you figure out their CR using the DMG. They break the CR model pretty well.

But, you know, if you don't care about CR and encounter difficulty, for sure do it. Unfortunately that's exactly what the person you were quoted was trying to do. Care and balance around it.

[Galaxander]

I get that, but sort of by definition, mundane things are things that can be done over and over again. I don't think you could write pages and pages of mundane options that can change things in unpredictable ways. Not that it isn't a good way to go, I just don't think it is possible without ripping things away from the skill system

This is what I'm saying.

I agree that it feels weird to have magical options be so prevalent, but at the end of the day we're talking about a game people want to have fun playing. If someone can come up with non-magical options that are as exciting and dramatic as the magical ones, I welcome it, but until that happens, don't begrudge the magic barbarians and whatnot, in my opinion.

[GreyBlack]

This is what I'm saying.

I agree that it feels weird to have magical options be so prevalent, but at the end of the day we're talking about a game people want to have fun playing. If someone can come up with non-magical options that are as exciting and dramatic as the magical ones, I welcome it, but until that happens, don't begrudge the magic barbarians and whatnot, in my opinion.

Personally, I've always felt that high level fighters should be acting more like the Warlord of 4e (don't shoot yet!). Since their inception, fighters have had some form of gaining followers and inspiring others to their cause; I'd love to see that baselined a bit more than the current Battlemaster as an example. Would that be an example of non-magical options that are as exciting and dramatic as magical abilities?

[ezekielraiden]

1) You seem to be limiting classes right out of the gate. Fighter's can be fairly interesting. Maybe not as interesting, but for example, a friend of mine built an actual combat effective net fighter. I played a Samurai from the UA that was a ton of fun. Saying "boring generic beatstick" seems to predispose you to thinking of them in that way, but there is nuance.
I find the "nuance" of the Fighter extremely, painfully, regrettably, infuriatingly flat. The Battlemaster--supposedly the most "interesting" fighter--is incapable of doing even something so simple as "help an ally shrug off a condition," let alone anything really tactical or engaging. Its design falls even MORE prey to the "spam the best option" perverse incentive than caster classes do! As someone who was legit intrigued by some of the directions 4e enabled, like the staff fighter or brawling style, I find 5e Fighters blander than unflavored, overcooked oatmeal. And I'm not alone in this; some time back, Mearls explicitly discussed how one of the team's regrets was how little flavor the Fighter possesses.

It also *really* doesn't help that the vast majority of Fighters get *zero* features that depend on their mental stats, and what they do get is usually crap/super boring (tool proficiency? Persuasion expertise? Try again, WotC.) Choosing to play a high Charisma Fighter effectively means taking a handicap to your proper Fighter stats at early levels. Oh, sure, you'll eventually come out 2 ASIs ahead, but it takes a while to get even one, let alone two.


2) What would you add to make them more interesting? That is the forever problem. Between maneuver's and the optional rules in the DMG, there aren't a lot of combat moves left. And aura's are expressly magical, so what can you give them to actually do?

Why would auras have to be magical? They just represent a radius of effect. You can boost the morale of those near you with your incredible grit, panache, or acumen without it needing to be magical. You're just that awesome, and inspiring/leading others with incredible skill is a documented thing in real history. (Can't give examples because the modhammer hates meaningful discussion of anything in the real world, but I can PM you if you care enough.)

Beyond that: Gambits and Tactics, Training, Prediction of Foes. There's a lovely 3PP supplement for Dungeon World called Grim World, which has a Battlemaster class. It *actually* rewards investing in Intelligence, and sometimes other mental stats (depending on what moves you take). Most DW combat is a little too crunch-avoidant for my taste, but the Battlemaster seems actually interesting. (Didn't get to play one when I was a player, but now that I'm a DM there's one in our group and he's pretty damn effective at leveraging party resources.) Gambit is a resource acquired by taking risks, getting hurt, or otherwise suffering a setback (all part of the plan!), and is spent on various useful benefits that Just Happen. Tactics are a group of benefits, some more passive (Cautious = better saves/avoidance, more or less) and others more active (Reckless = deal more damage but *take* more damage), that one can switch between by spending 1 Gambit or making an INT roll.

"Training" includes things like getting cheaper, better hirelings; preparing the group for an ambush, whether sprung upon or sprung by the enemy; coordinated assaults with an ally; sharing the benefit of one's current Tactic with a specific chosen "student" PC; and outfitting defenders of a location with better equipment and training so they have buffs when the fighting starts.

"Enemy prediction" includes class-specific benefits for observing the world through the lens of a tactician, and reading body language/subtle cues to know what your opponent desires of you (though not, of course, exactly why they desire that).

So no, I don't think the space has been exhausted yet.


I get that, but sort of by definition, mundane things are things that can be done over and over again. I don't think you could write pages and pages of mundane options that can change things in unpredictable ways. Not that it isn't a good way to go, I just don't think it is possible without ripping things away from the skill system

No, they aren't. Ask someone who's just come off the field from a marching band show, or just run a marathon, or any number of dramatic physical feats. "Mundane" does not equate to "infinitely repeatable without rest."

[Knaight]

Going back to the OP: Is D&D pretty high magic? Yes. Is it higher magic than it used to be? On the character side, sure (it's been full of magic creatures from day one). Is it higher magic than the underlying literature though?

No. That argument is made by selecting LotR specifically, and treating LotR as the only fantasy story worth paying attention to is a shallow, obnoxious piece of analysis. It's not even that Tolkien wrote low magic stories, given that the Silmarillion isn't low magic by any stretch of the imagination, it's definitely not that "the literature" as a monolith is low magic. You've got your Guy Gavriel Kay's writing thinly veiled historical fiction, you've got some low magic sword and sorcery (a decent chunk of Howard and C. L. Moore), but you've also got A Wizard of Earthsea, Moorcock's and Anderson's very high magic sword and sorcery, the other chunk of Howard, large amounts of Lieber, some amount of Gene Wolf, etc. That's without getting into how later editions of D&D take post D&D writings into account, where we can also throw Jemison, Sanderson, Jordan, Hobbs, Brust, etc. on the higher fantasy end, keeping clear of the stuff where D&D itself was a heavy influence.

If we don't steer clear of the stuff where D&D itself is a heavy influence it becomes immediately clear that that high magic isn't some weird 5e aberration. The Drizzt stories aren't exactly new.

[ezekielraiden]

Going back to the OP: Is D&D pretty high magic? Yes. Is it higher magic than it used to be? On the character side, sure (it's been full of magic creatures from day one). Is it higher magic than the underlying literature though?

No. That argument is made by selecting LotR specifically, and treating LotR as the only fantasy story worth paying attention to is a shallow, obnoxious piece of analysis. It's not even that Tolkien wrote low magic stories, given that the Silmarillion isn't low magic by any stretch of the imagination, it's definitely not that "the literature" as a monolith is low magic. You've got your Guy Gavriel Kay's writing thinly veiled historical fiction, you've got some low magic sword and sorcery (a decent chunk of Howard and C. L. Moore), but you've also got A Wizard of Earthsea, Moorcock's and Anderson's very high magic sword and sorcery, the other chunk of Howard, large amounts of Lieber, some amount of Gene Wolf, etc. That's without getting into how later editions of D&D take post D&D writings into account, where we can also throw Jemison, Sanderson, Jordan, Hobbs, Brust, etc. on the higher fantasy end, keeping clear of the stuff where D&D itself was a heavy influence.

If we don't steer clear of the stuff where D&D itself is a heavy influence it becomes immediately clear that that high magic isn't some weird 5e aberration. The Drizzt stories aren't exactly new.

This succinctly covers many of the "modern-literature" sides of what I mentioned earlier. There's also the more recent trends (since the 90s at least) to higher-magic settings, like Wheel of Time or Harry Potter.

As noted, Journey to the West is CRAZY high-magic, with explicit sets of magic items, laser eyes, flight, transformation, etc. Irish and Welsh mythology are also full of crazy stuff done by "mortal" heroes. It also doesn't hurt that the "mundane vs magic" divide is entirely a modern invention--up until the Enlightenment, "magic" was as much a natural part of the world as sunlight. Blacksmiths were thought to have secret knowledge of the inner magic of materials, the "riddle of steel." Lü Bu and many other heroes from Chinese myth are supposed to be Regular Dudes who have just...learned how to sword/punch/spear/whatever so good that they can pull off some insane maneuvers. The Mahabharata and Vedic myth generally has several people who are gods, sure, but it also has several people who aren't incarnations of perfect divine beings, like Arjuna or Vrishaketu. Beowulf manages to live for hours after being mortally wounded because it dying when you don't have a huge pile of treasure around you is for chumps and squares--and it's pretty clear that there's plenty of magic equipment just lying around. Near-, Middle-, and Far-Eastern myth has plenty of magic items (rings, carpets, lamps, swords, shoes, turbans...you name it, there's probably a magic something, and it could EASILY have been made by a totally mundane crafter who just Knows The Secrets).

The line between "magical" and "natural" did not exist to the ancients and medievals. Again, I would provide examples, but the modhammer is vicious about even vaguely referring to real history, let alone naming people. "Magic" was as much a part of "mundane" life as sunrise and sunset.

[Dr. Cliché]

In terms of how to make the Fighter more interesting, I would start by throwing the current chassis in the bin and instead taking notes from the classes in Book of Nine Swords.

To put it another way, make Manuvers the core feature of the class and build the rest of the class around them. Don't just make a really boring class and then slap Manuvers onto just one of its subclasses as an afterthought.

[Tendril]

I would be so much more interested in playing a fighter if they worked like the Tome of Swords classes. I think they're some of the best designed classes DnD has ever had, and for sure the best designs that don't have spellcasting, and if you want to fluff them as being magical that works absolutely fine too.

[deljzc]

I'm curious what edition started unlimited cantrips (I really don't know).

In my experience playing 5e, I still can't get my head around spellcasters just being archers that cast eldritch's blast each turn like arrows. That just seems wrong from a person that comes from the 1980's like me.

We used to play you had to protect your spellcasters a bit. Yes, that meant them not being important for the mundane battles, but when things got tricky, they had huge battle-changing abilities.

I know the game wanted to go away from that. I think they always wanted spellcasters to be more involved per round and more equal to the martial classes on a round-by-round basis. But when you give spellcasters good mundane abilities while trying to keep the "wow!" spells and big battle-saving outs (which is in D&D roots), it is hard not to make spellcasters overpowered.

And then the answer to that is to give ALL the classes a dip into the every round bonuses magic can offer.

If I notice anything, that's how the "power creep" of PC's started because PC's today are very powerful as compared to original D&D and AD&D. Just the tool boxes are so much bigger and specialized.

[Tanarii]

I'm curious what edition started unlimited cantrips (I really don't know).4e. They were called "at-will powers" because they weren't just spells. They also included the lowest power maneuvers for martials.

I believe that's also when they got rid of opportunity attacks for casting a spell. But 3e introduced concentration checks to avoid loss in that case, making it very hard to impossible to disrupt a spell at higher levels. And I think 2e introduced he possibility magical spells weren't last in the round, meaning you didn't always get hit mid-casting if you declared a spell but were attacked. And it definitely sped up the memorization process.

Powering up casters by removing limitations has been going on for a long time. The problem was powering down spells to compensate didn't start until after they were effectively broken.

[FilthyLucre]

In terms of how to make the Fighter more interesting, I would start by throwing the current chassis in the bin and instead taking notes from the classes in Book of Nine Swords.

To put it another way, make Manuvers the core feature of the class and build the rest of the class around them. Don't just make a really boring class and then slap Manuvers onto just one of its subclasses as an afterthought.

Agreed - though you'd want to be careful to not fall into the "feeling trap": You want the fighter to not just feel like a caster re-skin. I would think that you'd want fighters to have lots of at-will abilities and maybe a handful of signature once-a-combat-encounter (or pick your duration) abilities.

I don't think WotC would take this following approach, but if I was a game designer I would: You could even rank abilities based on the power level of the campaign: Sword-and-Sorcery being the default, followed by genres with increasing tolerances for what a martial ability can be, (i.e.: wuxia).

[Yora]

In my experience playing 5e, I still can't get my head around spellcasters just being archers that cast eldritch's blast each turn like arrows. That just seems wrong from a person that comes from the 1980's like me.

I can live with wizards throwing fire bolts, but clerics shooting sacred flame instead of using their warhammers, shields, and medium to heavy armor in close combat is what really isn't feeling right.

[Anymage]

In my experience playing 5e, I still can't get my head around spellcasters just being archers that cast eldritch's blast each turn like arrows. That just seems wrong from a person that comes from the 1980's like me.

To be fair, the only caster whose cantrips are significant are warlocks. (Who, granted, work very well as a dip for other Cha casters.) For pretty much everybody else, they're a fallback option roughly on par with the crossbow that older edition casters used. You're still having just one big effect per combat, concentration enforces that now. The main difference nowadays is that you have to be protected to sustain your concentration instead of being protected to keep your spell from getting interrupted.

Although on the topic of older edition casters, I've seen spontaneous casting houseruled in for more games than I haven't. I don't mind WotC developing around the ways that their games will be played at real tables.


Agreed - though you'd want to be careful to not fall into the "feeling trap": You want the fighter to not just feel like a caster re-skin. I would think that you'd want fighters to have lots of at-will abilities and maybe a handful of signature once-a-combat-encounter (or pick your duration) abilities.

Lots of other games go all in on the idea that everybody is magic, and whether you want to express that magic by being able to chuck fireballs or hit things really hard with a sword is up to you.

I don't mind something like the champion fighter existing for new players, which has a power ceiling lower than other options but also a higher power floor, and is pretty easy to autopilot so the ceiling and floor are pretty close to each other. But the idea that fighters should default to "I attack again" with maybe some minor flair seems like an open embrace of the idea that only mages should get cool toys.

[Dr. Cliché]

Agreed - though you'd want to be careful to not fall into the "feeling trap": You want the fighter to not just feel like a caster re-skin. I would think that you'd want fighters to have lots of at-will abilities and maybe a handful of signature once-a-combat-encounter (or pick your duration) abilities.

I quite liked the Book-of-Nine-Swords Manuvers because whilst they were limited-use, there were ways to refresh them even in combat. e.g. the Warblade could get all his spent Manuvers back by using a Swift Action and then following up with a basic attack. And of course they refreshed automatically outside of combat.

To my mind at least, they were sufficiently different from spells.

You could also take additional steps, for example removing some of the actual magical Manuvers (the ones that healed, did fire damage, let you teleport etc.) and limited those to appropriate subclasses.

Incidentally, I think Rogues would also benefit from Manuvers, perhaps taking some inspiration from the Swordsage.



I'm curious what edition started unlimited cantrips (I really don't know).

In my experience playing 5e, I still can't get my head around spellcasters just being archers that cast eldritch's blast each turn like arrows. That just seems wrong from a person that comes from the 1980's like me.


I mean, casting Eldritch Blast was a Warlock's central function in 3.5. The class was literally built around it.

For other cantrips, I think the idea is that playing a wizard and having no basic attack other than normal weapons can be quite depressing. Hence, Cantrips exist so that wizards et al. still have something magical to do even when they've either run out of spell slots or the situation doesn't warrant them spending them.

However, I do think they might have gone a little too far with scaling Cantrip damage. Eldritch Blast notwithstanding (which shouldn't be a Cantrip anyway - it should be a core class feature of the Warlock), I do wonder if Cantrips shouldn't scale as much as they currently do. This would make them more a way to pass a turn (a bit better than firing a crossbow but still significantly weaker than using a spell slot), rather than a credible source of damage.

[Chaosmancer]

I find the "nuance" of the Fighter extremely, painfully, regrettably, infuriatingly flat. The Battlemaster--supposedly the most "interesting" fighter--is incapable of doing even something so simple as "help an ally shrug off a condition," let alone anything really tactical or engaging. Its design falls even MORE prey to the "spam the best option" perverse incentive than caster classes do! As someone who was legit intrigued by some of the directions 4e enabled, like the staff fighter or brawling style, I find 5e Fighters blander than unflavored, overcooked oatmeal. And I'm not alone in this; some time back, Mearls explicitly discussed how one of the team's regrets was how little flavor the Fighter possesses.

It also *really* doesn't help that the vast majority of Fighters get *zero* features that depend on their mental stats, and what they do get is usually crap/super boring (tool proficiency? Persuasion expertise? Try again, WotC.) Choosing to play a high Charisma Fighter effectively means taking a handicap to your proper Fighter stats at early levels. Oh, sure, you'll eventually come out 2 ASIs ahead, but it takes a while to get even one, let alone two.

"help an ally shrug off a condition" could mean flushing poison out of their system. You can't do that in a six second action, and if you could it would be a medicine check or something similar. And actually, if it is a poison that grants saves, you could use your action to give them an antitoxin to grant them advantage.

A lot of other conditions would be harder, like petrification. I guess if you wanted to use your action to grant them advantage on a fear save, by trying to get them to see it is an illusion that could work, but here's the problem. That is something anyone can do. The wizard could also take that exact same action, why should it be a special ability?

Now, in my personal remake of the Banneret, they actually have an ability similar to what you are talking about. It is a high level ability, but they get to use their reaction to let an ally remake a save, and if they are within the "banner aura" (a mechanic I made to represent the banneret wielding a flag of battle, which inspires their allies and makes all of their abilities stronger) then the reroll gets to add the Banneret's charisma to the roll. The Banner also gives bonuses to fear and charm saves equal to the same amount as long as you are holding it to allies within a certain distance (10/20/30 depending on level) and you can make a speech as an action to give your allies a more save bonuses and fear enemies.

However, this is all tied to the idea that the Fighter understands the power of banners in the battlefield. Now, maybe this fixes a bunch of issues for you, but this ties back to my original point. This class is the Banneret Fighter, not some new class, not some spell-less bard. It fits as a fighter

So, we don't need more non-magic classes, the fighter, rogue, barbarian and monk have the conceptual space they need to cover us. Maybe they need to have better designed subclasses, but the concepts are there.



Why would auras have to be magical? They just represent a radius of effect. You can boost the morale of those near you with your incredible grit, panache, or acumen without it needing to be magical. You're just that awesome, and inspiring/leading others with incredible skill is a documented thing in real history. (Can't give examples because the modhammer hates meaningful discussion of anything in the real world, but I can PM you if you care enough.)

I was thinking of Paladin auras, since they are the only auras usually in the game. And they are magical in my mind, the basic aura gives up to a +5 to the ability to dodge lightning, resist poison, rip free of vines, and resist mental attacks, at the same time. I fully agree that the there are incredibly skilled and inspiring leaders in real-life, but no matter how inspiring you are, you can't prevent someone from dying due to rattlesnake venom with your words alone in real life.

Now, this seems at odds with my Banneret, which does exactly this. I never called it out as magical (nothing is enchanted after all) but I run deeply magical worlds, where symbolism matters. The symbol of the banner and what it means to the people draws on something. It could easily be a very subtle magic. I don't make a judgement either way with it, but aura's as presented so far in 5e are all magical, and I think the designers intend to keep that going, because that would explain why being 15 ft away removes the bonus at low levels, when otherwise you can see and hear the source of the aura just fine. I mean, I can see someone 15 feet away pretty easily.




Beyond that: Gambits and Tactics, Training, Prediction of Foes. There's a lovely 3PP supplement for Dungeon World called Grim World, which has a Battlemaster class. It *actually* rewards investing in Intelligence, and sometimes other mental stats (depending on what moves you take). Most DW combat is a little too crunch-avoidant for my taste, but the Battlemaster seems actually interesting. (Didn't get to play one when I was a player, but now that I'm a DM there's one in our group and he's pretty damn effective at leveraging party resources.) Gambit is a resource acquired by taking risks, getting hurt, or otherwise suffering a setback (all part of the plan!), and is spent on various useful benefits that Just Happen. Tactics are a group of benefits, some more passive (Cautious = better saves/avoidance, more or less) and others more active (Reckless = deal more damage but *take* more damage), that one can switch between by spending 1 Gambit or making an INT roll.

"Training" includes things like getting cheaper, better hirelings; preparing the group for an ambush, whether sprung upon or sprung by the enemy; coordinated assaults with an ally; sharing the benefit of one's current Tactic with a specific chosen "student" PC; and outfitting defenders of a location with better equipment and training so they have buffs when the fighting starts.

"Enemy prediction" includes class-specific benefits for observing the world through the lens of a tactician, and reading body language/subtle cues to know what your opponent desires of you (though not, of course, exactly why they desire that).

So no, I don't think the space has been exhausted yet.

That all sounds amazing, but I think I've been unclear.

Does that up above really need a new class? Or just a new system for fighters or a new subclass? I could see that Enemy prediction ability being a feat or a rewrite of the Battlemasters "Know your enemy" feature.

One thing I forgot to mention from the first part of this post is that you scoffing at the Tool Proficiency isn't a problem with the fighter, it is a problem with the crafting system. I'm playing a rogue thief that fairly consistently throws alchemical items in combat, makes them himself, I had to find a 3pp supplement for crafting items though, because the crafting system is busted. But, fix that crafting system, and I don't think you need an "alchemist class" because everything they are doing is something that you should be able to do with the alchemist kit (I am also growing more and more convinced that alchemy and herbalism need to be combined, they overlap too much)

So, it sounds like the solution isn't "we need more non-magical classes" it sounds to me like we need more non-magical systems.





No, they aren't. Ask someone who's just come off the field from a marching band show, or just run a marathon, or any number of dramatic physical feats. "Mundane" does not equate to "infinitely repeatable without rest."

As someone who was in marching band, I get that. But, assuming the weather isn't boiling hot, I'd say that about an hour after the end of a short parade I could have done the parade again. I certainly could keep walking after, since we generally had to walk back from the end of the parade route back to where the pick-up area was.

But, take something like disarming an opponent. One of the big problems people had with 4e, and have with the battlemaster, is that you can't disarm an opponent every single round. Why not? I knocked the weapon out of his hand once, but now I forgot how to do it?

Look how the healer feat or Inspiring Leader feats are limited. You can do them infinitely, but the recipient can only benefit from them once per short rest. A healer doesn't forget how to heal after doing it six times, but the bodies of the people they have healed have already been treated as best as they can for now. An Inspiring Leader can give an hour long speech and inspire 60 individuals, but you can't inspire the same person over and over again without giving them a break to rest and renew that inner resource you are calling up.

So, if you added a bunch of 3/day abilities to the fighter or rogue, people are going to get upset. And, if you do things like give out feats that allow them to use their skills in "new ways" you run into the same problem we had with the Menacing feat, "now that it is a feat, I can't let my players use the intimidation skill to give someone the frightened condition, this should just be something you can do with the skill, not a feat"

But, alternatively, if you just make this type of stuff an artifact of the skill system, then it doesn't help fighters and barbarians who don't have a as much interaction with that system as the rogues and bards.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to make these systems and expand the game, but I am pointing out that it is a tricky needle to thread.





Beowulf manages to live for hours after being mortally wounded because it dying when you don't have a huge pile of treasure around you is for chumps and squares-

ROFLOL, I'm dying over here. That is such a perfect description of that moment.

Reaper: Dude, it has been hours, you literally have no blood left in your body, it is all poison.
Beowulf: Is the gold piled up to the ceiling?
Reaper: .... no
Beowulf: I ain't dying yet then.



4e. They were called "at-will powers" because they weren't just spells. They also included the lowest power maneuvers for martials.

I know it was most common in 4E, but I remember seeing "at-will" abilities and spells in 3.X as well. Was it just monsters who had that or were there a few late edition magic classes that had it too?

[Dr. Cliché]

I know it was most common in 4E, but I remember seeing "at-will" abilities and spells in 3.X as well. Was it just monsters who had that or were there a few late edition magic classes that had it too?

It was commonplace for monsters in 3.5 to have at-will spell-like abilities.

The Warlock class also had mostly at-will powers.

(The use of "at-will" seemed to be limited to spells and spell-like-abilities IIRC, as I don't think that terminology was used for abilities not relating to spells.)

[Doug Lampert]

[Snip]
For an added bonus, take it as you will, OD&D Fighters were called Heroes at Level 4 and Superheroes at Level 8, take it as you will. Maybe it was just thrown in without thinking about the implications or whatever, I don't know what the original designers were thinking with that, but it's in there.[Snip again]

The intent behind OD&D was to let you play individual characters from the Chainmail wargaming ruleset on adventures rather than battlefields.

Chainmail had characters called "Hero" and "Superhero". The level 4 fighter fought as a Hero if you used Chainmail to resolve combat (which was actually supposed to be the standard rule, the D&D combat system was referred to as the alternate combat system), and the level 8 fighter fought as a Superhero.

Chainmail: The hero fought as four "figures" (a figure represented IIRC 20 guys, so that means he had the strength of 80), killing him required that you kill everyone else in the unit, and then add in a hit strong enough to kill four more figures (i.e. 80 more guys). The superhero was twice as strong. There was an alternate combat table for single figure characters (like heroes and wizards and dragons) using a matrix of 2d6 rolls for single shot kills. The Hero was fairly strong, the Superhero was IIRC the single best entry on the table, harder to kill than anything else, and better at killing absolutely everything else in the game one on one (the wizard and dragon and giant were all better at killing hordes of mooks, but the superhero could kill them)

The superhero in chainmail did not fly around with laser eyes, but he was a one man army, and if he had a bow a favorite to win one on one vs. absolutely anything else in the game as he had a fair chance to one shot a dragon or wizard with his bow. And OD&D you were supposed to be playing that same guy if your fighter made it to level 8.

[patchyman]

I don't disagree with you in premise, but I do disagree that there is sufficient content to make a party of 5 characters, all nonmagical, where there isn't significant class or feel overlap. In a perfect world, (IMHO), there would only be three classes (fighter, rogue, mage) and just many many subclasses/specialization opportunities.

TL;DR I want to be able to have a party of 5 mundane characters that are all thematically quite different.

Two Frontline fighters:
- Barbarian (for DPS)
- Fighter ( sword and Board, knight theme)

1 Scout/Rogue
- Scout Rogue, fights with throwing knives, tanks Cha. Expertise in Stealth, Perc, Investigation, Nature, Sur and Arcana (for magical traps)

Backline:
- Archer (Fighter);
- Healer (Thief Rogue with Healer Feat, high Cha, also serves as Faceman)

[Joe the Rat]

I know it was most common in 4E, but I remember seeing "at-will" abilities and spells in 3.X as well. Was it just monsters who had that or were there a few late edition magic classes that had it too?

mid-late 3.5 had the reserve spell feats - if you had a spell of X type of Y level uncast, you could produce an X-related spell-like ability.
Pathfinder made their cantrips and orisons (because they kept the separate names) at-will and crappy - generally worse than using a dart, much less a crossbow.

Warlock was not just Eldritch Blast, it was At-Will Magic, the Class. With a few exceptions, everything they did was repeatable. EB was just an always available, modifiable, Spell-Like resource.
(As an aside, I would love it if they added more of the Shapes and Riders, or if Ray-splitting was the class feature, and XBlast invocations were pasteable onto other attack cantrips - but I find three-way thorn whip a hilarious visual.)

[patchyman]

I can live with wizards throwing fire bolts, but clerics shooting sacred flame instead of using their warhammers, shields, and medium to heavy armor in close combat is what really isn't feeling right.

Counterpoint. If in order to play a character empowered by a god, my character’s main attack is hitting people with a weapon, the game won’t feel right to me.

[Dienekes]

I can live with wizards throwing fire bolts, but clerics shooting sacred flame instead of using their warhammers, shields, and medium to heavy armor in close combat is what really isn't feeling right.

Eh, I kinda think this is a somewhat natural split of class concepts. Holy Man Who Predominantly Uses Weapons and Armor has been covered by both the Cleric and Paladin for awhile. In 3.5 we get a situation where the Cleric was basically just a better Paladin if you ever had even a slight head for optimization. 4e and then 5e creating a stronger thematic differentiation between the two is fine by me. I'd probably go even further to make the Cleric more of a priestly role.

[ZRN]

This is a really long argument whose central premise rests on this set of claims:

"But if you want to avoid magic – or anything that feels like magic – you’ve got three classes to choose from: fighter, barbarian, and rogue. And two of them cover the same basic team position. You literally can’t create a four- or five-person party without any magic unless you’re willing to overlap."

So first of all, he says that if you want low-magic you can play an earlier edition of D&D. Does he mean 4e? Because pretty obviously none of the core classes in any other previous edition were "nonmagical" other than these three (and I'd say monks both then and now).

He also mentions being "willing to overlap," which seems to me like a non-issue. Fighters and rogues (especially fighters) can be built a lot of different ways and shouldn't feel redundant in a carefully-designed party.

But I think the most interesting claim here is that "two of them cover the basic team position." He's clearly talking about the core "roles" here - tank, striker, leader (healer), and controller, in 4e terms. And I'd argue that if your goal is to play a low-magic game, this is a really important part of that! You SHOULDN'T be able to heal easily or pop up your friends a dozen times when they get knocked down in combat - that's clearly magical! You SHOULDN'T be able to "control the battlefield" by nuking a dozen goblins at once! There's no magic, so all those hordes of weak monsters are a lot scarier! That's what you're signing up for in a low-magic campaign, isn't it?

Now, I like the 4e warlord and wish it were better represented in 5e, but frankly I'd imagine most groups who wanted a low-magic campaign wouldn't be too inviting to a class that could "encourage" allies back from the brink of death to full health. It worked in 4e and would work in standard 5e precisely BECAUSE the overall world was so suffused with magic and the supernatural that crazy stuff like that doesn't seem too weird. (Like in Avengers movies when Black Widow is able to survive against monsters that are able to hurt The Hulk because she has, like, karate.)

[jjordan]

These issues can be addressed in a variety of ways. You can limit access to spells by putting in spell lists. Domain/deity-specific for Clerics and Warlocks, schools/colleges for Wizards and Sorcerers. But the moment you talk about reducing access to spells the players start to whine. You can stop using stock monsters but, again, players start to whine. You can create non-magical capabilities that serve as substitutes for magic. Players whine. You can make spell-casting more dangerous in general by requiring a skill check and putting in consequences for failure. Players whine. Reduce the number of magic items available (across the board, not just for players). Players whine. Honestly, it sometimes feels like the 4th leg of D&D is character-building and if you change any of the mechanics related to this people get upset.

My experience is that players don't want magic. They want to win the game and the game is set up to accommodate this desire with the video game pacing and mechanics. And the game is currently more successful than it has ever been so it's arguably a very successful strategy that delivers what players want.

[Morty]

Incidentally, I think Rogues would also benefit from Manuvers, perhaps taking some inspiration from the Swordsage.


Rogues need maneuvers even more desperately than fighters do. Most rogue subclasses pretty much run on autopilot once combat starts. The only tactical choice to be made is to when to use their reactions... if there's more than one opportunity to use them in a given round.

[Dr. Cliché]

Rogues need maneuvers even more desperately than fighters do. Most rogue subclasses pretty much run on autopilot once combat starts. The only tactical choice to be made is to when to use their reactions... if there's more than one opportunity to use them in a given round.

That's very true, actually.

You'd think rogues would a Batman-type class, with a dozen different tricks up their sleeves. But instead they've only really got one trick.

I think Cunning Action is a nice improvement over prior editions, as it at least makes them feel a bit more agile/mobile, but when it comes to actually attacking they've only got the one trick and it's not a particularly interesting one. :smalltongue:

[AntiAuthority]

The intent behind OD&D was to let you play individual characters from the Chainmail wargaming ruleset on adventures rather than battlefields.

Chainmail had characters called "Hero" and "Superhero". The level 4 fighter fought as a Hero if you used Chainmail to resolve combat (which was actually supposed to be the standard rule, the D&D combat system was referred to as the alternate combat system), and the level 8 fighter fought as a Superhero.

Chainmail: The hero fought as four "figures" (a figure represented IIRC 20 guys, so that means he had the strength of 80), killing him required that you kill everyone else in the unit, and then add in a hit strong enough to kill four more figures (i.e. 80 more guys). The superhero was twice as strong. There was an alternate combat table for single figure characters (like heroes and wizards and dragons) using a matrix of 2d6 rolls for single shot kills. The Hero was fairly strong, the Superhero was IIRC the single best entry on the table, harder to kill than anything else, and better at killing absolutely everything else in the game one on one (the wizard and dragon and giant were all better at killing hordes of mooks, but the superhero could kill them)

The superhero in chainmail did not fly around with laser eyes, but he was a one man army, and if he had a bow a favorite to win one on one vs. absolutely anything else in the game as he had a fair chance to one shot a dragon or wizard with his bow. And OD&D you were supposed to be playing that same guy if your fighter made it to level 8.

That's why I said take it as you will and that they might not have thought of the implications, my apologies.

That said, taking out that title they threw in without really considering it... My point to that poster was that D&D wasn't just a swords & sorcery game that lost its way like the poster I was quoting was implying when Psionics, Monks, one of the (if not the very) first D&D BBEGs possibly being an alien, spaceships and robots (these last two come from something published under Gygax's name for example). All this in OD&D. D&D was pretty much always its own thing, as you wouldn't see aliens in folklore, robots in Lord of the Rings or Conan and such... John Carter of Mars is pretty much the first superhero and his books inspired D&D. D&D deviated from what came before from the near beginning (except the aliens bit, that's from John Carter I suppose), unlike the game gradually changed into being a Fantasy Kitchen Sink over several editions/generations like the poster was implying, it was always just going to resemble itself from near the beginning with all these things in it from the first edition. That said, my point was that there's no reason to say something is too anime (like Monks) or superhero comics (which John Carter pretty much is in book form) for D&D beyond personal preference.





Now, I like the 4e warlord and wish it were better represented in 5e, but frankly I'd imagine most groups who wanted a low-magic campaign wouldn't be too inviting to a class that could "encourage" allies back from the brink of death to full health. It worked in 4e and would work in standard 5e precisely BECAUSE the overall world was so suffused with magic and the supernatural that crazy stuff like that doesn't seem too weird. (Like in Avengers movies when Black Widow is able to survive against monsters that are able to hurt The Hulk because she has, like, karate.)

Well, it depends on how literally they're willing to take Hit Points as an abstraction or not. I think they're literally meat points myself, but playing Devil's Advocate here... If HP represents plot armor, luck, deflecting blows, the will to live and such then yes, you can give your allies a motivational speech or something to boost their morale that should, in theory, recover their Hit Points (or will to live) and it could easily be given to martial characters as a class feature without giving them magic.

[Willie the Duck]

I think there was supposed to be a lot more tough decisions between using that bonus action to disengage or fight with two weapons (doubling the chance of at least one attack getting through to deliver the sneak attack damage), hid or use XBE-induced extra shot, thief-aided use items, uncanny dodge or a SA-enhanced OA, etc. On paper, the rogue has a lot of competing uses for their action economy.

[KorvinStarmast]

I can live with wizards throwing fire bolts, but clerics shooting sacred flame instead of using their warhammers, shields, and medium to heavy armor in close combat is what really isn't feeling right. Neither is a game without clerics. :smallbiggrin: (But IIRC you do have druids, so close enough)

Note: my first 5e character was a life cleric. I had not played D&D in some years. It took me a while to deal with the fact that when I turned undead, I couldn't do it again next round. That sucked. Our whole group had no clue how to manage a short rest - that mechanic was more or less ignored by our DM. My undead turning was a non helpful ability until I dug into the rules a bit and began pushing the DM about the short rest recharge for that. (And his dungeons was filled to the brim with zombies and ghouls and skeletons).

Clerics feel different in this edition than than did in the older editions.

[D.U.P.A.]

Developers probably wanted to streamline the game, once class features became spells like summons of Find familiar and Find steed or augmented damage in form of Hunters mark or Hex. A lot of spells could be reflavored as non-magic, at least those low level ones, some would make more sense with higher casting time. Good example is how they presented spellless Ranger where they added even Conjure animals effect.

[Sorinth]

I don't disagree with you in premise, but I do disagree that there is sufficient content to make a party of 5 characters, all nonmagical, where there isn't significant class or feel overlap. In a perfect world, (IMHO), there would only be three classes (fighter, rogue, mage) and just many many subclasses/specialization opportunities.

TL;DR I want to be able to have a party of 5 mundane characters that are all thematically quite different.

I mean I could make a party of 5 Battlemaster Fighters who are all thematically quite different.


A tank who takes Sentinel feat and mostly uses maneuvers for Riposte attacks and/or Maneuvering Attack to help protect the backline.
A leader/tactician who didn't dump Charisma, and uses Inspiring Leader, Commander's Strike, Rally to support teamates
A grappler who uses Disarming/Trip Attack Maneuvers
A GWM/PAM who stays behind the front line
An archer



And you can do similar things with Rogue

The ranged rogue who Cunning Action hides every round
The melee rogue who either uses Mobile or BA Disengage to dance in and out of melee
The strength based rogue with expertise in Athletics who grapples/shoves
The gadget rogue who uses Fast Hands to use Ball Bearings, Caltrops, Poison, Alchemical Fire, Oil, Holy Water, in addition to his normal attacks


And that's just from PHB with no multiclassing.

[KorvinStarmast]

I mean I could make a party of 5 Battlemaster Fighters who are all thematically quite different.

A tank who takes Sentinel feat and mostly uses maneuvers for Riposte attacks and/or Maneuvering Attack to help protect the backline.
A leader/tactician who didn't dump Charisma, and uses Inspiring Leader, Commander's Strike, Rally to support teammates
A grappler who uses Disarming/Trip Attack Maneuvers
A GWM/PAM who stays behind the front line
An archer


And you can do similar things with Rogue

The ranged rogue who Cunning Action hides every round
The melee rogue who either uses Mobile or BA Disengage to dance in and out of melee
The strength based rogue with expertise in Athletics who grapples/shoves
The gadget rogue who uses Fast Hands to use Ball Bearings, Caltrops, Poison, Alchemical Fire, Oil, Holy Water, in addition to his normal attacks


And that's just from PHB with no multiclassing. yeah, the PHB provides a lot of customization options for those willing to put in the effort. Well played. :smallsmile:

[sandmote]

I read this just now and was steaming for a page and a half until ezekielraiden's comment at the end of page 4.

Here's a description of using magic"

You slog out into the wilderness to gather specific components, or take long and dedicated pains to figure out how to produce them in your immediate vicinity. You prepare them in a a very specific manner that has been developed decades ago by trial and error, after which they can be stored for future use without wasting away. Each component has specific functions, which a person must be trained to know about, and they can't simply be replaced with each other. When someone needs help with a specific problem, you expend a particular component in a very specific method that results in the component having a particular effect that helps in the current situation.

That's magic. It's not different from magic. It doesn't start being different from magic when I call it "herbalism." Because that's what I just described; I just wrote out how herbalism works. It only stops being magic when we invent "naturalism," and decide the things it can explain are no longer "magic."

The big thing here is that the real world had magic. Magic is just whatever you can use but have no clue why it works. Herbalism was Magic. Producing one compound from another --then alchemy, now chemistry--was Magic; we didn't know how or why it worked. Oaths were sworn by sacred objects, (https://acoup.blog/2019/06/28/collections-oaths-how-do-they-work/) because they were Magic. Purify Food and Water was no less Magic in our IRL past than a curse was. The only difference is that we've explained how our Purify Food and Water works, and so it stopped being mystical, while we figured out curses don't work and so they aren't mystical.

Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. Any insufficiently understood science is indistinguishable from magic. Compare comic book radiation, which is basically a way of saying "it's not magic," while getting magic powers all the same.

The problem with the feel here is the mundane/magic split that doesn't exist in the old material like Journey to the West, or Beowolf, or old mythology. It's just been slowly reduced as we explain things in the macro world and say "that's just herbalism; that's just chemistry; that's just nonsense." Summoning the spirits of your ancestors wasn't something intrinsically different; it just required specific material, somatic, and verbal components. The only difference for the Path of the Ancestral Guardian is that we agree their method works. Unless you say it doesn't work in your world, in which case you ban the subclass for being based off something that doesn't work.

"Low Magic," vs "High Magic" is how widespread this stuff is to use, and how well understood it is. If magic isn't understood, or only understood by like five people who learned it from studying that one godly text and getting magic is very slow and very painful, it's Low Magic. If organizations of people can explain the methodology to you and there's crafting or looting magic items in a practical manner, then it's High Magic. If the average person could look it up in a library, it just stops being magic altogether; whether the knowledge of the "impossible" is nonexistent or commonplace doesn't change it.

The actual problem D&D has is that "slot magic" (that is, the casting of spells using the mechanism of spell slots) is one of the very few subsystems shared between classes. Wizard, Cleric, now the warlock too. So it's difficult to get remotely robust rules for anything else, because the ones you don't have the make from scratch are all the main magic system.

What's missing are thorough rules for all that other stuff that's Magic but isn't slot magic. So magic items default to working like slot magic, because it's the fastest way to write out an item is to go "it works like [spell]" if the item doesn't outright cast the spell. And a bunch of class features are "you can cast [spell]" by whatever method, because that's the way they avoid having to set up a separate ability governed by separate rules.

One of the reasons I like psionics, actually. There's enough material there to (at least theoretically) introduce at least a full psionic class,a half psionic class, and some subclasses using a system entirely parallel to traditional spellcasting.

The issue isn't so much that there's a lot of magic but that having gameplay rules gives us a very clear picture of what is and isn't possible. A picture that didn't exist in a lot of the ancient stories or even most of human history. So a lot of those character concepts you might want to knock off get dumped in the "high magic" bucket for being useable, even when those "low magic" stories fit it in just fine.

TL;DR: Hulk is someone hit with a permanent spell, change my mind.

[Tanarii]

Magic is just whatever you can use but have no clue why it works.
And here I thought that was the engineers job.

Edit: also,

One of the reasons I like psionics, actually. There's enough material there to (at least theoretically) introduce at least a full psionic class,a half psionic class, and some subclasses using a system entirely parallel to traditional spellcasting.Nah psionics should just be spells, subclasses of existing classes, and maybe some spells as bonus restricted spell lists for those subclasses or features that allow you to cast them however often.

A single magic subsystem is a feature, not a bug.

[LordCdrMilitant]

And here I thought that was the engineers job.


You're not wrong. We use a fair many models that we know aren't completely right, but they're close enough to right to evaluate the situation in the range of conditions it's expected to be in.

Unified theories of everything are scientists. Turning that into something practical is engineering.

[Morty]

That's very true, actually.

You'd think rogues would a Batman-type class, with a dozen different tricks up their sleeves. But instead they've only really got one trick.

I think Cunning Action is a nice improvement over prior editions, as it at least makes them feel a bit more agile/mobile, but when it comes to actually attacking they've only got the one trick and it's not a particularly interesting one. :smalltongue:

I blame Sneak Attack, really. It's such a strong source of single-target damage that it eclipses everything else rogues might do. While I'm certainly glad that 5E lets rogues deal SA without much fuss, especially at range... that is all they will ever do.

Cunning Action is a very good feature, giving rogues superior mobility (well, before casters start teleporting around, anyhow). But that's all it does, so it doesn't help much with diversity of options.

[Yora]

Rogues need maneuvers even more desperately than fighters do. Most rogue subclasses pretty much run on autopilot once combat starts. The only tactical choice to be made is to when to use their reactions... if there's more than one opportunity to use them in a given round.

Earlier editions had thieves and fighters have access to much fewer abilities (and wizards limited to much fewer spells) and that was widely considered enough, and still is by many people.
I think the problem is the approach to put all the options a character has into the class, while a great number of options could be coming from the environment, that can be widely different in every room.
Giving players options in fights can be as much part of encounter design than classes.

[Trask]

Earlier editions had thieves and fighters have access to much fewer abilities (and wizards limited to much fewer spells) and that was widely considered enough, and still is by many people.
I think the problem is the approach to put all the options a character has into the class, while a great number of options could be coming from the environment, that can be widely different in every room.
Giving players options in fights can be as much part of encounter design than classes.

I totally agree, but the difficulty is in the steep power curve. Most things, even minor things like kicking over a brazier, even to pushing someone off a freaking 20 foot ledge arent as good as what you could do with all your class abilities if you just..hit the guy one more time. Its hard to make environmental effects stay relevant ime, although maybe im just not creative enough.

[Yora]

I guess that's to a great part because the classes have already been stuffed full with powerful attacks. That makes everything else seem less attractive.

[ezekielraiden]

"help an ally shrug off a condition" could mean flushing poison out of their system. You can't do that in a six second action <snip>
Who says? You can't survive a direct blast from a flamethrower by "careful dodging," yet that happens on the regular in D&D. We're already talking about people who do what is not possible on Earth, on a daily basis.


So, we don't need more non-magic classes, the fighter, rogue, barbarian and monk have the conceptual space they need to cover us. Maybe they need to have better designed subclasses, but the concepts are there.
With the Fighter shackled to the base class it currently has, I fundamentally disagree. The Fighter chassis has too much "baked into" it to ever be a proper "Cleric replacement," the way the 4e Warlord was. I know that this is a huge can of worms and thus really really don't intend to debate it, but I genuinely think that a Warlord class, one free of the "MUST have heavy armor proficiency and MUST have 4 attacks at max level and MUST have 2 extra ASIs," etc., would be able to explore many avenues as suggested. Essentially, the Fighter becomes the relatively "hardwired" class, that can pick up a smattering of other classes' specialties; the Banneret and Battlemaster being two different "slices" of a Warlord-type non-casting support class (which has some of the aforementioned stuff.)


I was thinking of Paladin auras, since they are the only auras usually in the game.
Sure, if you assume that any aura has to be lifted, without a single change, from the Paladin class, then any such aura would be magical. But "aura" as a general concept is just...a persistent radius effect, more or less.


Now, this seems at odds with my Banneret, which does exactly this. I never called it out as magical (nothing is enchanted after all)
I don't see that as magical, myself. Supernatural, yes, but D&D is heavily "outside of Nature," as we would define it here on Earth. But I've always accepted that characters in D&D are inherently at least a little supernatural: that's why they can heal so fast, why falling a long way is lethal at low levels and a flesh wound at high levels, why poison is neither a near-guaranteed kill nor a slow creeping effect, why PCs never suffer any debilities until they're unconscious and never suffer any lingering wounds besides outright death, etc., etc., etc. If the Supernatural is limited exclusively to potions, spells, outright blessings, and explicit curses, we have impoverished our gaming experience severely, and ignored the real-world psychological value of things like symbols and the benefits of literally anything that can preserve homeostasis long enough to get someone actual medical attention. Staving off shock is one of the most important things for keeping someone alive until real medicine arrives IRL; I see no reason why, in the fundamentally-fantastical world of D&D, this can't extend just that tiny bit further into ACTUALLY making that gut wound survivable, as opposed to simply "not immediately lethal."


Does that up above really need a new class? Or just a new system for fighters or a new subclass? I could see that Enemy prediction ability being a feat or a rewrite of the Battlemasters "Know your enemy" feature.
Because the baseline Fighter is already too full of baseline features. Its design space for subclasses is too limited, and changing the fundamental chassis is completely untenable for any realistic first- or third-party product. WotC won't change it because they're extremely errata-averse, as (at least IMO) demonstrated by the "Class Feature Variants" (emphasis added) document and the discussion from the developers. They're aware that there are some problems baked into the core rules, but even that tiny dipping of a toe into the waters of "replacing" the PHB rankled a bunch of fans. It's just too delicate a matter to tackle head-on, but that's the only way to make it work without adding at least one more new class.


One thing I forgot to mention from the first part of this post is that you scoffing at the Tool Proficiency isn't a problem with the fighter, it is a problem with the crafting system. I'm playing a rogue thief that fairly consistently throws alchemical items in combat, makes them himself, I had to find a 3pp supplement for crafting items though, because the crafting system is busted. But, fix that crafting system, and I don't think you need an "alchemist class" because everything they are doing is something that you should be able to do with the alchemist kit (I am also growing more and more convinced that alchemy and herbalism need to be combined, they overlap too much)

So, it sounds like the solution isn't "we need more non-magical classes" it sounds to me like we need more non-magical systems.
Oh, that would go a long way toward helping, to be sure. That might mean we'd only need the one (Warlord-type) martial class, rather than two or three more--would depend on exactly how those subsystems cash out, methinks. But I'm very much of the opinion that a Warlord-type class is not only good for the game (allowing "martial prowess" the breathing room to really show off what it can do outside of the narrow confines of the Fighter chassis' subclass-space), it's also good as an olive branch to 4e fans, who (speaking at least for myself) felt pretty snubbed by 5e, particularly when Mearls explicitly said that martial healing would be present in the game and DMs who didn't like it could just not use that option....and then it never actually appeared.*


As someone who was in marching band, I get that. But, assuming the weather isn't boiling hot, I'd say that about an hour after the end of a short parade I could have done the parade again. I certainly could keep walking after, since we generally had to walk back from the end of the parade route back to where the pick-up area was.

But, take something like disarming an opponent. One of the big problems people had with 4e, and have with the battlemaster, is that you can't disarm an opponent every single round. Why not? I knocked the weapon out of his hand once, but now I forgot how to do it?
Sigh. Okay, I'm gonna level with you. I legit struggle to believe that you actually see it this way. Because this is the most intentionally obtuse way of presenting the idea imaginable. It is very much equivalent to the "shouting hands back on" crap that Mearls once spouted during an actual podcast. (I honestly don't care that he followed it up with "now I'm being ridiculous"--to have the effective community voice of D&D spout such things at all is unacceptable.)

However, if you need an answer as to why, I can give you two things. First, my proposal of Gambit as a resource one must first earn and then spend justifies it--you have to "build up to" actions, demonstrating the planning required to pull these things off. You can't just disarm someone repeatedly because disarming them requires getting them into the disadvantageous position where that becomes possible to do. Second, Martial maneuvers and tactics are not simply a matter of "oh, just do the thing." They're a gloss--in almost, but not quite, exactly the same way that an attack roll is a gloss, which not only can but does cover a wide variety of approaches and methods in a single abstraction, or that AC glosses an enormous variety of attack avoidance/repulsion/absorption/deflection into a single (mostly) static number. You can't do them indefinitely because, "hiding" behind that gloss, is the "actual facts" of how it was done. Dudes get wise to tricks, hence the old saw "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."


Look how the healer feat or Inspiring Leader feats are limited. You can do them infinitely, but the recipient can only benefit from them once per short rest. A healer doesn't forget how to heal after doing it six times, but the bodies of the people they have healed have already been treated as best as they can for now. An Inspiring Leader can give an hour long speech and inspire 60 individuals, but you can't inspire the same person over and over again without giving them a break to rest and renew that inner resource you are calling up.
I'm...not sure what I'm supposed to draw from this. Are these examples of good limits, or bad ones?


And, if you do things like give out feats that allow them to use their skills in "new ways" you run into the same problem we had with the Menacing feat, "now that it is a feat, I can't let my players use the intimidation skill to give someone the frightened condition, this should just be something you can do with the skill, not a feat"
A foolish line of thinking which not only can be but should be explicitly rejected in the text. "Just because you don't have a feat or feature, does not necessarily mean it is impossible to do something. Always ask your DM what is or isn't possible. Attempting to be intimidating without having a feature that specially enhances intimidation can be both a wonderful roleplay opportunity, and a means by which you demonstrate that you are working toward a future feat or class feature, should you acquire it later on." Or something like that. This has always been a stupid argument and it should be firmly, formally, and summarily dismissed with extreme prejudice.


Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to make these systems and expand the game, but I am pointing out that it is a tricky needle to thread.
Absolutely agreed. Game design--unlike what some of 5e's designers would have you think--is an extremely complicated effort, and flavor really, truly isn't the most difficult part. Managing to get flavor, mathematics, playfeel, and concise structure all in a single place is a major achievement. It's one of the reasons why I love the design of 13A so much. Its Monk, for example, is brilliant and the "opening/flow/finishing attack" structure should be nicked by all future D&D-alikes, while its Druid actually solves the problem of designing a thematic, true-to-its-heritage Druid, which is a feat I didn't think was possible. (This does, admittedly, make the Druid susceptible to "mediocre at three things" type problems, but goodness gracious, to achieve what they did with it is nothing short of incredible.)


ROFLOL, I'm dying over here. That is such a perfect description of that moment.

Reaper: Dude, it has been hours, you literally have no blood left in your body, it is all poison.
Beowulf: Is the gold piled up to the ceiling?
Reaper: .... no
Beowulf: I ain't dying yet then.
Though I have read sections of Beowulf myself, I must admit that my knowledge is mostly vicarious (via OSP) of this specific part. Still, I'm glad it's on point :)


I know it was most common in 4E, but I remember seeing "at-will" abilities and spells in 3.X as well. Was it just monsters who had that or were there a few late edition magic classes that had it too?
It wasn't exclusively late-edition even--depending on how you define "late," anyway. Complete Mage introduced Reserve Feats, which weren't all that good, but gave at-will abilities as long as you had a spell of a particular type still memorized/known-with-a-slot-to-cast-it. And that was mid-2006, meaning the "revised" edition had only been around for between half and two thirds of its life.

Pathfinder made all cantrips at-will, though, which might be what you're thinking of.

*There are a lot of reasons why 4e fans don't have a lot to love about 5e, but the obvious and intentional dangling of future, potential olive branches that never actually materialized? Yeah, that's a pretty big reason many of us aren't super happy about it. Everyone else got their toys, and told 4e fans to wait their turn. And I literally watched those calls go from "just wait for the next playtest" to "just wait for the final playtest" to "just wait for release" to--I kid you not--"just wait for a couple of years after release" and only THEN make a judgment call. And eventually? I was told (with mixed antagonism/friendliness, it was a weird comment) to be happy that I got anything at all. So yeah.

[Chaosmancer]

I don't see that as magical, myself. Supernatural, yes, but D&D is heavily "outside of Nature," as we would define it here on Earth. But I've always accepted that characters in D&D are inherently at least a little supernatural

I see no reason why, in the fundamentally-fantastical world of D&D, this can't extend just that tiny bit further into ACTUALLY making that gut wound survivable, as opposed to simply "not immediately lethal."

Ah, this is a nuance I didn't assume. For most people I have discussed with there is no difference between "magical" and "supernatural" so for them wanting "less magic" means closer to reality. Since it seems you want something different, what exactly are we looking for here?


With the Fighter shackled to the base class it currently has, I fundamentally disagree. *snip* I genuinely think that a Warlord class, one free of the "MUST have heavy armor proficiency and MUST have 4 attacks at max level and MUST have 2 extra ASIs," etc., would be able to explore many avenues as suggested. *snip snip*

Oh, that would go a long way toward helping, to be sure. That might mean we'd only need the one (Warlord-type) martial class, rather than two or three more--would depend on exactly how those subsystems cash out

Hmmm, I sort of see the problem, but I also don't think it is as dire as you present it as. I'm going to post my banneret in a spoiler tag below this, but I also think there is more to the design space than might first meet the eye.

Firstly, I don't think ASI's or Heavy Armor are a problem. In fact, I think a warlord with Heavy armor is perfect. Life Cleric gets heavy armor after all. And, the extra feats can essentially guarantee that feats like Inspiring Leader make it into the class without having to give them a specific ability (one thing I dislike about the Celestial Warlock is that Inspiring Leader is such a great feat for them, but they get a weaker unstacking version at level 10, so you don't actually want to take it)

So, then we have the 4 attacks, but this is where we could end up utilizing the spore druid or shoving trick. Give them an ability that offers an alternative to their attack, something with the phrasing "When you take the attack action, instead of making an attack you can-"

You can already replace an attack with a grapple or shove, why not a "grant one ally temp hp equal to 1d6+cha mod" instead of an attack? It scales automatically since more attacks gives you more chances to use it. Honestly, you could probably get away with 1d8+cha, but people are going to lose their minds at "unlimited temp hp forever".

Then you could add an ability such as "when you use action surge, every ally within 30 ft can make an attack with advantage, these attacks deal extra damage equal to your cha mod."

But hey, maybe you are right and the warlord needs a unique class to truly shine. I still think it can be achieved through the fighter though. For me, this is pretty darn close:



Bannerets are warriors pledged to protect the crown, they take the fight against evil beyond their kingdom's borders.
They are tasked with wandering the land as knights errant, relying on their judgment, bravery, and fidelity to the code of chivalry to guide them in defeating evildoers.

A Banneret inspires greatness in others by committing brave deeds in battle. The mere presence of a Banneret in a hamlet is enough to cause some orcs and bandits to seek easier prey. A lone Banneret is a skilled warrior, but a Banneret leading a band of allies can transform even the most poorly equipped militia into a ferocious war band.

A Banneret prefers to lead through deeds, not words. As a Banneret spearheads an attack, the Banneret's actions can awaken reserves of courage and conviction in allies that they never suspected they had.

Banner
At 3rd level, the next time you take a long rest, you can craft a banner, or use an existing one, to represent your order.

While you are displaying or holding your banner and you are not incapacitated, all allies within 10 feet have a bonus to saving throws against being frightened or charmed equal to your Charisma Modifer (minimum +1), provided they can see your banner. At 7th and 15th level, the bonus increases by +1 and the range increases by 10 feet.

While you are holding the banner you gain a +1 to AC, and you may make a special action to make a speech to inspire your allies and frightened hostile creatures. Each ally within the range of the banner’s aura add your Charisma modifier to Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma saving throws. Each hostile creature within the range of the banner’s aura must make a Wisdom saving throw, or be frightened of you. These effects last for 1 minute, until you die, or until you are not holding your banner. Creatures who failed the save may attempt the saving throw at the end of each of their turns.

You must finish a long rest before using this special action again.

Banner Save DC = 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Charisma modifier

If your banner is lost or destroyed, you can make a new one using 50 gp in raw materials and a skill check using Weaver’s Tools over the course of an hour or a short rest.

Rallying Cry
When you choose this archetype at 3rd level, you learn how to inspire your allies to fight on past their injuries.
When you use your Second Wind feature in combat, you can choose up to three creatures within 60 feet of you that are allied with you. Each one regains hit points equal to your fighter level + your Charisma Modifier.

If you are holding the banner and the healing from this ability would raise a creature over their max hp, any remaining healing becomes temporary hp

You gain a second use of Second Wind at level 10 and a third at level 15.


Royal Envoy
A Banneret serves as an envoy of the crown. Bannerets of high standing are expected to conduct themselves with grace. At 7th level, you gain proficiency in the Persuasion skill and two languages of your choice.

If you are already proficient in persuasion, you gain proficiency in one of the following skills of your choice: Animal Handling, Insight, Intimidation, or Performance.

Your proficiency bonus is doubled for any ability check you make that uses Persuasion. You receive this benefit regardless of the skill proficiency you gain from this feature.

Inspiring Act
Starting at 10th level, whenever you use your Action Surge feature or whenever you score a critical hit on a creature with a weapon attack, you can immediately choose one allied creature within 30 feet of you that can see or hear you. That creature can make one weapon attack with its reaction. If you are holding your banner, the attack gains a bonus to hit and damage equal to your Charisman modifier (minimum +1)

Starting at 18th level, you can choose two allies within 60 feet of you, rather than one.

Bulwark
Beginning at 15th level, you can inspire your allies to push through the darkest hours.

When an ally within 60 ft of you fails a saving throw and you aren't incapacitated, you can spend your reaction to allow them to reroll the failed save, though they must keep the new result. If the ally is within your Banner's aura, they get a bonus to the new roll equal to your charisma modifier.

You can use this feature a number of times equal to your charisma modifier (minimum 1) and regain all uses on a short rest.

Beacon of Battle
At 18th level, you have become synonymous with your banner. As long as you are conscious, you act as though you are holding your banner for every ability below this one, and your speech action recharges on a short rest.

While holding the banner, your AC bonus increases to +2, and you gain a new special action.

You let out a righteous call, every ally within 120 ft of you can move up to half their speed without spending a reaction. This movement does not provoke opportunity attacks. Any ally that ends this movement next to an enemy may use their reaction to make a single melee attack, adding half your fighter level to the damage. If the enemy is frightened, the attack has advantage.



It isn't perfect, but it actually looks fun to me.


Sure, if you assume that any aura has to be lifted, without a single change, from the Paladin class, then any such aura would be magical. But "aura" as a general concept is just...a persistent radius effect, more or less.

I suppose that is fair, we just haven't seen an aura that is not a magical effect to date, oh, except the stench abilities, those aren't called auras, but they do count.

Okay, I retract. I was mentally limiting myself to PC options.



However, if you need an answer as to why, I can give you two things. First, my proposal of Gambit as a resource one must first earn and then spend justifies it--you have to "build up to" actions, demonstrating the planning required to pull these things off. You can't just disarm someone repeatedly because disarming them requires getting them into the disadvantageous position where that becomes possible to do.

*snip* Dudes get wise to tricks, hence the old saw "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

See, but neither of those things prevents the ability from being repeatable. For me, something like what you are presenting on the "dudes get wise" aspect would be that you can only use this ability twice against a single opponent. You can do it every fight, to every opponent in the fight, but no more than twice to the same guy.

The gambit thing is actually really freakin' cool, and I think a system like that could be a ton of fun, but, it is also repeatable. Get the "token" spend the token, do the action. you can always disarm an opponent, as long as they are in a position to be disarmed. That is great, and I almost want to build an inverse battlemaster who have that sort of ability.

But it doesn't change what I mean by being able to do it repeatedly, with no rest limits.




I'm...not sure what I'm supposed to draw from this. Are these examples of good limits, or bad ones?

I like them, make sense within the fiction and they are both really good feats.



A foolish line of thinking which not only can be but should be explicitly rejected in the text. "Just because you don't have a feat or feature, does not necessarily mean it is impossible to do something. Always ask your DM what is or isn't possible. *snip*

Sure, but I think there is a decent argument to be had that if we are redesigning things, why not redesign the entire skill system instead of granting feats that do things that the skill system could potentially do instead?

Honestly, allowing the overlap could be fine, or you could even add into the skill system some synergy stuff "If you have the skill, these options, if you have expertise, those options, if you have this feat, then this as well". Frankly, a person with expertise in medicine and the healer feat should be practically a legendary doctor. Letting them do more cool stuff is fine with me.

[Dr. Cliché]

Ah, this is a nuance I didn't assume. For most people I have discussed with there is no difference between "magical" and "supernatural" so for them wanting "less magic" means closer to reality. Since it seems you want something different, what exactly are we looking for here?

It might relate to how abilities were classified in 3.5:

You had Extraordinary Abilities (Ex), which were based on physical characteristics of some sort or other (e.g. being able to jump higher, a Beholder's natural buoyancy, some fast-healing and Regeneration abilities). They were potentially physics-defying in some cases but were explicitly not magical.

Then you had Spells and Spell-Like Abilities, which were basically the definition of D&D magic. A creature either knew some spells inherently or else was one of the many casting classes. Spell-Like Abilities required no components of any kind but otherwise worked exactly like spells.

However, between Extrordinary Abilities and Spells, you had Supernatural Abilities (Su), which were more unnatural in some way but also weren't spells and didn't (typically) resemble them. A Dragon's breath weapon would be a Supernatural Ability. Same goes for a Lycanthrope's Shapechange ability or a Medusa's petrifying gaze. Supernatural abilities were magic to the extent that they didn't work in an anti-magic field, but unlike spells there was no other way to dispel or counter them and they weren't affected by Spell Resistance.

Now whilst Supernatural Abilities were still magic, I think a lot of people naturally put them on a different level to actual magic in the form of spells or spell-like abilities. I think one of the key differences is in the feel or flavour. It makes sense that a Dragon's breath weapon and a Medusa's are magical, but they nevertheless feel different to a wizard casting Fireball or Flesh to Stone.

Supernatural Abilities tend to feel much more like a natural part of a magical or supernatural creature, if that makes sense.

[Hypersmith]

I fully agree, I don't think D&D does low magic settings well at all, with magic being too pervasive in character options, as a system too formulaic and with little weight behind it because it's so readily available all the time. If you want to run a game where magic is something wondrous and rare and most people don't have it, D&D ain't the system to do that in because you'll inevitably end up with people blasting fireballs out the wazoo and bringing the dead back to life willy-nilly. Purely martial options are too few and would honestly get kinda boring the way the system is built, basically just attacking over and over again.

There are changes you can make to alleviate some of these feelings, but they don't change the core of the system. But you'd have to change so much in order to get a game where the vast majority are martial without it being redundant and kinda boring that it's probably easier and smoother to just play a different system.

[sandmote]

And here I thought that was the engineers job. Basically, yeah. The lower the magic, the less science of casting there is, leaving you with the practical methods engineers use for what remains. Same for all the "real world magics" that got subsumed into "mundane" matters from being thoroughly studied. Compare the volume of medicine today vs. back when it was mostly herbalism; basically becomes High Medicine vs Low Medicine in the same vein as magics are.


Edit: also,
Nah psionics should just be spells, subclasses of existing classes, and maybe some spells as bonus restricted spell lists for those subclasses or features that allow you to cast them however often.

A single magic subsystem is a feature, not a bug. This is person dependent. For me the lack of a greater martial system is a bug, as is the lack of a second system for magical effects. For me subclasses are more interesting when they combine two subsystems in varying ways.

I don't need that second system in the Player's handbook by any stretch, but the complete exclusion of an alternative method leaves the game shallow for me. Mind, I love that 5e character's grow by class features (I want shoving off the cliff to be done for tactical purposes), but it is shallow. The warlock having spell slots is a similar problem for me.


You're not wrong. We use a fair many models that we know aren't completely right, but they're close enough to right to evaluate the situation in the range of conditions it's expected to be in.

Unified theories of everything are scientists. Turning that into something practical is engineering. The internet tells me the comparison I want is to Mark's Handbook. I think the big missing step from Angry and some other people is to treat getting the spells as being from an approximate listing instead of understand what they actually do. Replace "I cast fireball" with "I invoke the explosive magics of the ProperName-GibberishOrder I discovered in DuskyDungeon." Suddenly every spell feels more mysterious, even if the effects are the same.

Even with high magic I do this for spell descriptions. Fireball feels more different when its a conjured dying phoenix vs. a bout of hellfire vs. an exploding dragon's head depending on the character's origin and spellcasting method. Helps reduce the sameness of a dozen characters with fireball.


Now whilst Supernatural Abilities were still magic, I think a lot of people naturally put them on a different level to actual magic in the form of spells or spell-like abilities. I think one of the key differences is in the feel or flavour. It makes sense that a Dragon's breath weapon and a Medusa's are magical, but they nevertheless feel different to a wizard casting Fireball or Flesh to Stone. One of the simplifications I don't like for 5e. Hoping 5.5e or 6e (whatever they go with) filters some of these distinctions back in.

[Willie the Duck]

Unified theories of everything are scientists. Turning that into something practical is engineering.

And keeping the engineers from competently solving problems no one required, is where we managers come in. :smalltongue:

Seriously though, this model leaves out applied science, which I feel deserves more credit.


Earlier editions had thieves and fighters have access to much fewer abilities (and wizards limited to much fewer spells) and that was widely considered enough, and still is by many people.
I think the problem is the approach to put all the options a character has into the class, while a great number of options could be coming from the environment, that can be widely different in every room.
Giving players options in fights can be as much part of encounter design than classes.

2e tried to do this during the red/brown-backed expansion books ('Complete Guide to Fighters' and the like). While there was beginning to be some character build customization, mostly in terms of non-weapon proficiencies (and kits which mostly granted different non-weapon proficiencies), much of the actual rules changes which would have a large effect in combat were non-build-granted things like disarms, trips, called shots, and the like. I think that there's a strong impulse to gate such things either behind build-based gates or make them everyone-can-use, and the former clearly won.

[Yora]

And the RPG world has been a lesser place for it ever since.

[Dr. Cliché]

One of the simplifications I don't like for 5e. Hoping 5.5e or 6e (whatever they go with) filters some of these distinctions back in.

Likewise.

I liked the flavour these distinctions brought but I also appreciated the mechanical benefits.

As it stands, whether a given ability counts as being magical for the purposes of spells/abilities that interact with such is yet another problem that's been dumped on the DM with absolutely no guidance.

[Waazraath]

Likewise.

I liked the flavour these distinctions brought but I also appreciated the mechanical benefits.

As it stands, whether a given ability counts as being magical for the purposes of spells/abilities that interact with such is yet another problem that's been dumped on the DM with absolutely no guidance.

Agree. It aslo codified how martial ("mundane" if you like but I dislike the tone of the word) characters could still do supernatural or extraordinary stuff without needing to cast spells. Martials benefited a lot from that.

[LordCdrMilitant]

And keeping the engineers from competently solving problems no one required, is where we managers come in. :smalltongue:

Seriously though, this model leaves out applied science, which I feel deserves more credit.


This is why the clearly best possible future is that of Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds, where there seems to be a limitless budget for engineering projects with no real concern for "Is this actually a good idea?" beyond "but hear me out: a nuclear powered logging machine that turns trees into gasoline and lays a 4 lane highway behind it would be awesome!"

But yeah, the model of "scientists discover things, engineers make discoveries into awesome things" is very simplified, and mostly one of the easily digestible phrases I use to sell kids thinking of a career path on joining me in engineering ;P



Back to magic though, I think the more everyday and common magic enriches the world by making the whole world more special and magical and fantastic and not just a generic dark ages setting with mostly pointy sticks and that one guy who can level a town. I'm usually disappointed that there's not greater exploration of the possibilities granted by magic, and how so much of the magic that players can learn amounts to "I CAST DIE!"
Not including magic into your world outside your party is also how you end up with "smart" [and by "smart", I mean the moment you let your players get crazy] starting major societal revolutions with magic like setting up teleportation-based transit & communication networks for remote shopping and overnight delivery or something.

[ZeshinX]

That was actually my reaction to 5e on first read, "Holy crap...EVERY class can cast spells now, or has a specific option to cast spells." 5e (mostly) nerfed magic and gave it to everyone (or painted it up with words like totems and spirits and ki, but a rose by any other name...). Even their continued approach with psionics is still just magic with a different flowery label. It was an odd choice, but one that doesn't bother me too much, aside from having the PHB Ranger leaning so ridiculously heavy on its spellcasting....give the Ranger a slower progressed Sneak Attack and be done with it already...it's a class built around the concept of ambush, guerilla-style fighting for its combat aspect...not bloody spellcasting. But no no, mustn't step on the Rogue's toes...just the traditional spellcaster classes' toes, right?

Now I do like the changes, for the most part, and enjoy the hell out of 5e. I especially like the new concentration rules, but giving magic to all felt a little over-compensatory to be honest.

[Tanarii]

, aside from having the PHB Ranger leaning so ridiculously heavy on its spellcasting....give the Ranger a slower progressed Sneak Attack and be done with it already...it's a class built around the concept of ambush, guerilla-style fighting for its combat aspect...not bloody spellcasting. But no no, mustn't step on the Rogue's toes...just the traditional spellcaster classes' toes, right?
Rangers have have had spell casting since 1e, and at relatively low levels in 3e. Spell-less Rangers were a conceit of 4e. It worked fine in that edition, but Martials in general were awesome in 4e.

Regardless, D&D Rangers are casters. It's the norm. So it always surprises me when people think they shouldn't be.

[Dienekes]

Rangers have have had spell casting since 1e, and at relatively low levels in 3e. Spell-less Rangers were a conceit of 4e. It worked fine in that edition, but Martials in general were awesome in 4e.

Regardless, D&D Rangers are casters. It's the norm. So it always surprises me when people think they shouldn't be.

Probably because the term comes from Tolkien where the Rangers were not magical. And Tolkien took the inspiration from of rangers from Yeoman Foresters a very real medieval position that never had ties to magic either.

That and the sort of characters one might think would be best representing of the Ranger class: Robin Hood, Will, Katniss, most of the Wildlings of ASOIAF all don't have magic to them either.

That all said. If you want to make a character that does all the sort of things a Ranger is supposed to do, like moving through the forests without leaving a trace, just seeming to know things about nature that to an outside they have no reason of knowing, and calming animals and all that stuff. You would either have to greatly expand the rules on how skills work while giving a bunch of custom made tailored abilities for said Ranger to use.

Or you can just give them a partial spell list cribbed off the Druid. Which already does all that stuff anyway.

The second seems much easier to me.

[Gildamir]

Interesting concept, if I want a low magic campaign setting I restrict my players to choose mostly melee oriented classes, possibly a caster or two at most. It's all about how the DM chooses to run the campaign, though I do agree, magic is far too common in most campaigns to still be considered mysterious by your average joe.

[Telok]

I totally agree, but the difficulty is in the steep power curve. Most things, even minor things like kicking over a brazier, even to pushing someone off a freaking 20 foot ledge arent as good as what you could do with all your class abilities if you just..hit the guy one more time. Its hard to make environmental effects stay relevant ime, although maybe im just not creative enough.

I can speak to this one. It's sort of a left over from 4e, the no-auto win/lose abilities ethos, the continuing hit point inflation, and the advent of lair actions.

4e codified the "use the environment not your class ability" attacks as a basic attack without any bonuses that should be about as damaging as your at will powers. 4e also continued the 3e practice of adding skill checks before you could try the attacks at times. So there's lots of recent history behind rolling a d20 over 10 to make an attack that's like your basic attacks in effect. They're also usually strength based checks and/or attacks so non-str classes basically need not apply.

4e & 5e fights are all about hit points. Sure, a DM can create situations where you can solve things without TPKing the other side, but those often involve house rules, special one-off circumstances the DM prepared aheaf, or morale which is a largely unsupported optional/house rule. Because you aren't supposed to bypass hit points and fights are supposed to be exciting for a certain number of rounds you aren't supposed to have things that can just bypass of speed things up. Some of the bigger complaints in 5e come from the few remaining save-or-lose effects. Plus if pcs csn use the environment then npcs can use it against pcs, and if the effect is strong it comes too close to save-or-lose against the pcs which can't be allowed because it bypassed hp.

Hit point inflation has been constant for the last three editions too. An ad&d 5th level wizard would have been thrilled to have 25 hp and the equal if 16 ac, a 3e wizard could be pushing 35 hp and 18 ac by then, later it stays at least that high or gets a bit higher. This is supposed to be the most fragile and least armored character. This has all been done to increase survivability of first level characters but the knock on effect has been that pcs and monsters are less affected by environmental effects that largely do the same damage they did in ad&d. A 40 foot fall for 4d6 matters when you have 25 hp and 6 spells a day but less so if you have 40 hp, 9+ spells, infinite cantrips, and free access to healing that isn't a serious drain on the cleric.

Lair actions have mostly replaced useful environmental effects in 5e. They matter because they're damage scales by level or they substitute for debuff and control spells. But pcs can't be allowed to access them because of balance theory. So it puts a paradigm of not allowing pcs to use the environment in front of dms and adventure designers.

[Dork_Forge]

Probably because the term comes from Tolkien where the Rangers were not magical. And Tolkien took the inspiration from of rangers from Yeoman Foresters a very real medieval position that never had ties to magic either.

That and the sort of characters one might think would be best representing of the Ranger class: Robin Hood, Will, Katniss, most of the Wildlings of ASOIAF all don't have magic to them either.

That all said. If you want to make a character that does all the sort of things a Ranger is supposed to do, like moving through the forests without leaving a trace, just seeming to know things about nature that to an outside they have no reason of knowing, and calming animals and all that stuff. You would either have to greatly expand the rules on how skills work while giving a bunch of custom made tailored abilities for said Ranger to use.

Or you can just give them a partial spell list cribbed off the Druid. Which already does all that stuff anyway.

The second seems much easier to me.

Tolkien didn't invent the word Ranger and there's a few sources that he could have taken inspiration from that aren't medieval (like the rangers that the British used to protect frontier settlements). Perhaps a big consideration is the difference of setting: despite the fantasy trappings of LotR it isn't really a high fantasy world as depicted during the trilogy (even then a lot of what is presented as magical is more things left over from past generations/ages) whereas most D&D settings are much more high/current magic. If Tolkien wrote a story in a more magical world (or before magic mostly left Middle Earth) then Rangers could have looked very different than Aragorn (who himself wasn't even a normal human, you can afford to pass things off onto skills/knowledge when you have his lifespan as an explanation).

[Morty]

Rangers have have had spell casting since 1e, and at relatively low levels in 3e. Spell-less Rangers were a conceit of 4e. It worked fine in that edition, but Martials in general were awesome in 4e.

Regardless, D&D Rangers are casters. It's the norm. So it always surprises me when people think they shouldn't be.

People want to play a wilderness specialist and explorer without necessarily also being a spellcaster. They don't need to be a ranger to do it, but the game sells the class as doing just that, so why shouldn't they believe what the book says? It's counter-intuitive. Besides, the Scout rogue subclass isn't core - and the core rogue subclasses carry its thief and trickster baggage heavily, so using a rogue to play a "ranger" is likewise counter-intuitive. People who pick up 5E aren't exactly obliged to care about what the "norm" has been in editions they've never played, either. Now, rangers are of course not a good class, never have been and wouldn't be even if we took their spells away, but that's another thing.

[Tanarii]

People who pick up 5E aren't exactly obliged to care about what the "norm" has been in editions they've never played, either.
D&D isn't exactly obligated to care about folks preconceived notions that run to its sacred cows either.

I mean, if enough of them do that it's not a success yeah maybe the next edition will tweak it a bit. But for an edition that is back-to-old-school, as so many design elements of 5e are, they definitely weren't going to go with folks misconceptions.

[ezekielraiden]

Ah, this is a nuance I didn't assume. For most people I have discussed with there is no difference between "magical" and "supernatural" so for them wanting "less magic" means closer to reality. Since it seems you want something different, what exactly are we looking for here?
The supernatural is...well, anything that isn't natural. This can be viewed from either Watsonian (internal) or Doylist (external) perspectives. Most people refer to naturalness WRT the real world, and are thus in a Doylist stance, so I'll start there, and then give the Watsonian stance. In the real world, jumping more than about 8 feet (2.5 meters) straight up, without ANY load whatsoever, would be a demonstration of supernatural ability, which a Strength 20 character can achieve pretty easily (especially in prior editions; both running ). Falling 50 feet is almost always lethal IRL, unless mitigating circumstances apply; falling 50 feet in most editions of D&D is something even a frail Wizard can shrug off after about level 6 or 7 (average of 5d6 = 3.5*5 = 17.2 damage); with Con 10, a 7th level 4e Wizard has 44 HP, while her 5e counterpart has 30 HP. The latter will be hurting more than the former, to be sure, but you'd have to roll very badly to kill them (all five dice would have to come up 6, an extremely unlikely event). Hence, from a real-world standpoint, all D&D classes are inherently supernatural, and taking very modest steps to include further supernatural behavior (such as supernaturally powerful inspirations, or a refusal to be beholden to other rules that would hold in our world, e.g. Drill Sergeant Shouting that can actually stave off death rather than simply prolong the period of "dying but saveable") does not seem like a step too far.

From a Watsonian perspective, the "line" that divides the explicitly supernatural is very different from the line of our world. In-universe, people regularly survive even very high falls; they shrug off burns and wounds easily; they can stay within 5 feet of their original position while still "avoiding" a blast equivalent to a grenade (taking very little damage in the process); etc. Stuff that would be supernatural in our world is...just the way things physically work in D&D-land. Therefore, we should try to be comfortable with slightly less stringent standards about what is "supernatural," as long as it doesn't truly break into the realm of "magic" proper.

When I say "'magic' proper," I mean a granted boon (e.g. most Divine magic, Warlocks), a specialized formal discipline (Wizard magic, Monks, arguably Druids), or a supernatural power drawn from one's bloodline (Sorcerers, many magical creatures like fey or dragons), which may take the form of "spells," or may be a little more nebulous/variable like metamagics, ki powers, etc., but whatever their form, they are unnatural consequences of seemingly unrelated behaviors. That is: you wave your hands around, speak a specific set of obscure words, and/or pull out a handful of bat guano/wave a wand/etc., and spontaneously a fireball appears or someone turns invisible. Note the vital element here is that you do something generally NOT associated with the appearance of a bolt of lightning or a person becoming invisible, but then that effect happens. You have, in some sense, activated a "shortcut" in reality (by whatever means--divine power, l33t ub3r h4xx, being one-sixty-fourth dragon, meditating SUPER hard) that immediately instantiates your will. Now, because it's a designed game, this power is not plenary, but it is still "do a thing that SHOULDN'T cause Strange Effect X to happen, but Because <Magic Source> Reason, it does."

The difference between "'magic' proper" and what I like to call the "transmundane" is that there MUST be some connection between what you're doing, and the outcome you achieve. You can't just flick your wrist and a guy gets disarmed; you have to be up in his face, attacking, trading blows, but your skill with arms is sufficiently beyond-mortal that yes, you really can just decide that, this one time, the guy gets disarmed. You can't do it infinitely often. Why not? Because it's an ability beyond the ken of mortals. It's subject to its own rules and regs, because it has stepped outside what is normally permitted. Anyone can try the mundane act of separating a warrior and her weapon. Only a truly transmundane Fighter--a class we are explicitly told is NOT just equivalent to even a well-trained, battle-experienced soldier, but which steps beyond mere combat excellence--can will for her fighting skill to manifest an effect just that little step beyond. Only a truly transmundane Warlord can step just that little bit beyond the limits, some of the time. Why can't they do it all the time? Maybe they're not strong enough yet. Maybe reality doesn't appreciate being pushed around like that, and refuses to bend too much for those who don't have a "free pass" (="magic" proper).

Transmundane power isn't just limited to Fighters, or even to PCs, for that matter. It's bound up in the Riddle of Steel that lets so-called "mundane" smiths produce artifacts of legend, because their skill has exceeded the bounds of what "should" be possible. It's bound up in the weaver who defeats Athena rather than failing, whose skill can produce a bag of holding or a cloak of invisibility because the universe recognizes such skill. Or the mad scientist who can cobble together a thing of gears and lightning that somehow achieves the desired effect despite lacking parts that really should be present to do that. Etc. These things live by a different set of limits than those of the totally mundane, but they also aren't off in the realm of hardcore "I just declare that reality works that way, and it does" either. They sit in that liminal space, the threshold between what a mere Earth human could achieve with time and training, and what a true Wizard hacking reality can achieve.


Hmmm, I sort of see the problem, but I also don't think it is as dire as you present it as. I'm going to post my banneret in a spoiler tag below this, but I also think there is more to the design space than might first meet the eye.
<much snippage>
It isn't perfect, but it actually looks fun to me.
Well, I think anyone you show this to will (rightly) argue that this is way out of line compared to all other Fighter subclasses--and that is what I meant by all those things to which you responded. That is, rightly or wrongly, the designers AND the community at large have decided that the baseline Fighter chassis is "very powerful." Perhaps even "ridiculously powerful." Obviously, you don't think that, and I generally agree with you. But because of this perception from the designers and the community, you'll almost certainly never get people sold on that beyond your own table.


But it doesn't change what I mean by being able to do it repeatedly, with no rest limits.
Eh. I see these things as justifying rest limits myself. Different strokes, I guess. Glad you like the Gambit stuff (heavily stolen from the aforementioned Grim World stuff--check it out (https://boldlygames.com/), it's super good, albeit thematically too dark for my tastes. I've ignored/modified the grimmer parts out of it for my home Dungeon World game.)


I like them, make sense within the fiction and they are both really good feats.
Aren't there some rest limits in there though? Short rest, but still...like, just turn the Inspiring Leader feat the *tiniest* bit. "Performing such a feat of vaunting oratory is not trivial. You can, of course, continue to exhort your allies if you wish, but you are not able to grant the benefits of this feat more than once, as repeating the same statements over and over robs their effectiveness. By taking a short or long rest, however, you can reflect on how your situation has changed and come up with new sources of inspiration for yourself and your allies."

Perfectly explained, in-character. Limited by short rests on the giver.


Sure, but I think there is a decent argument to be had that if we are redesigning things, why not redesign the entire skill system instead of granting feats that do things that the skill system could potentially do instead?
Well, (a) I see the things I'm calling for less as "redesign" and more as supplement and extension, and (b) because I don't really have an interest in overhauling the entire edition, just enough of it to smooth out the parts that especially bug me. For the former, "redesign" to me means "you're ripping out entire sections and totally replacing them," which I find to be both a lot harder than it sounds, and rarely worth the effort because few people will want to use it. For the latter, I just value parsimony and (though you wouldn't know it from my posting style) concise changes. Don't go to unnecessary effort.

Creating a single new class is less effort than re-designing a class that already exists so that it will both satisfy the people who already like it, and yet also satisfy those who want it different. A single new class also has the advantage of real design freedom: we can explore what directions we like, without being beholden to prior commitments. For example, believe it or not, my preferred structure for building a Warlord-like character is actually the Warlock, but tweaked in a few ways. The Patron/Pact/Invocations model is just delightful for having a class with highly modular, choice-dependent structure: the Warlord chooses a Battlefield Presence at first level that determines their Leadership Modifier (Bravura = Cha, Tactical = Int, Resourceful = Wis) and some fundamental features; at third level, you truly come into your own as a leader and select a Leadership Style (ideas I've had here include Battlefront = frontline melee, Skirmishing = light-footed archer, Heraldry = lazylord, Spellweaver = specialized in boosting magic, etc.); and then Invocations map to Tactics, which can vary from passive always-on effects, to things that gain Gambit from some particular action taken by the Warlord or a teammate, or which spend built-up Gambit for some benefit. And since the Warlock already features ideas like expanding armor or weapon access, it would be perfectly cromulent to include such things in this Warlord. (Obviously, something must replace the higher Arcana, but I'd prefer something different--not sure what precisely, I haven't thought THAT deeply about this.)


Hit point inflation has been constant for the last three editions too.
It's worth noting that, unless a character has Con 10, they tend to get larger HP pools over time in 5e than in 4e. That is, 4e starts off higher but scales much more slowly because there's no scaling Con benefit. A 4e Wizard starts with 10+Constitution score HP at first level, but never gains more than 4 per level thereafter. (They will gain a measly 1 HP at Epic purely from natural stat growth. That doesn't really count.) Since Con is a good thing to invest in for Wizards in any edition, assuming a modest 12 Con at character creation isn't that big an ask, but it essentially adds the character's level to their max HP. The comparison looks something like this, assuming 12 Con:


4e Wizard HP
5e Wizard HP


22
7


26
12


30
17


34
22


38
27


42
32


46
37


50
42


54
47


58
52


62
57


66
62


70
67


74
72


78
77


82
82


86
87


90
92


94
97


98
102



So...yeah. With even modest Con, the early gap evaporates by high level. With a Constitution modifier of +2? You'd be looking at an initial gap of (10+14)-(6+2) = 16, so it's gone by 16/2 = 8th level (because the 4e growth rate is a fixed 4, while the 5e growth rate is 4+Con mod = 4+2 = 6). And because Constitution increases are retroactive, on top of Con saves being how you maintain Concentration in 5e, it's really quite likely that a 5e Wizard will end up with significantly more HP than a 4e Wizard would have. (The argument generalizes to all classes available in both games, it just changes the level at which the flip occurs.) Of course, if a character never invests in Constitution, the 4e character will always be slightly ahead.

[Chaosmancer]

The supernatural is...well, anything that isn't natural. This can be viewed from either Watsonian (internal) or Doylist (external) perspectives.

*Big Snip*

I see where your perception is, but like I said, I'm not used to people making that distinction. Mostly when people say they want a "spell-less" ranger for example, they will bring up Aragorn and Bear Grylls. They aren't talking about Transmudane considerations, but with solid "I want to do what can be done on Earth by Humans" Which as you pointed out, isn't exactly accurate to how DnD ends up working.



Well, I think anyone you show this to will (rightly) argue that this is way out of line compared to all other Fighter subclasses--and that is what I meant by all those things to which you responded. That is, rightly or wrongly, the designers AND the community at large have decided that the baseline Fighter chassis is "very powerful." Perhaps even "ridiculously powerful." Obviously, you don't think that, and I generally agree with you. But because of this perception from the designers and the community, you'll almost certainly never get people sold on that beyond your own table.

I'm not sure if it is way out of line, but I was tweaking all the fighters at the same time, and this one was an overhaul that I got inspired with. Haven't even had a chance to playtest it or show it to many people.

But, I think also, it is a mistake to really worry too much about the Designers or the community at large. Everyone has different tastes and different goals, and trying to get a consensus from them is a mountain I don't feel like pushing boulders up.

And either way, the point remains. Whether you rebuild the fighter or take it as is, it covers a vast swath of concepts that you don't need to make classes for, just subclasses, so more "martial" or "mundane" classes aren't really needed. Maybe one if you really feel the warlord cannot possibly fit onto the fighter or the rogue, but the majority are buildable now.




Perfectly explained, in-character. Limited by short rests on the giver.

Yes, which is why I said I liked it and the limits made sense.

Limits on a disarming strike, or precise strike, are harder to make sense of.



Creating a single new class is less effort than re-designing a class that already exists so that it will both satisfy the people who already like it, and yet also satisfy those who want it different. A single new class also has the advantage of real design freedom: we can explore what directions we like, without being beholden to prior commitments.

Hmm, disagree there. By working from an already existing chasis I don't have to worry about balance nearly as much as I would in designing a new chasis




For example, believe it or not, my preferred structure for building a Warlord-like character is actually the Warlock, but tweaked in a few ways. The Patron/Pact/Invocations model is just delightful for having a class with highly modular, choice-dependent structure:

True, the warlock structure is incredibly good for basing classes and ideas off of.

[Waazraath]

In terms of how to make the Fighter more interesting, I would start by throwing the current chassis in the bin and instead taking notes from the classes in Book of Nine Swords.

To put it another way, make Manuvers the core feature of the class and build the rest of the class around them. Don't just make a really boring class and then slap Manuvers onto just one of its subclasses as an afterthought.

I've seen comments like this quite often, and though I agree up to a point, I think it fails to adress how much 5e did incorporate of ToB already. Just finished a thread on this topic, join the discussion if you like: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?612915-Probably-unpopular-take-%96-we-have-large-portions-of-Bo9S-ToB-in-5e-already

[Dr. Cliché]

Oh, something else to consider.

I know that Concentration (along with various other nerfs) was aimed at weakening casters, but I find myself wondering whether it actually had a knock-on effect on Martials.

For example, in 3.5 casters would often put reasonably long-lansting buffs not on themselves but on the martial characters in the party. e.g. using Bull's Strength on a melee fighter (which now doesn't even help much even if it wasn't concentration). Or using Haste at the start of an encounter to speed up every martial character in the party (and everyone else in range, though spellcasters rarely got as much out of it).

In theory, these types of spells made casters stronger. But in the game they actually helped the martials shine by increasing their attack rolls, boosting their damage, letting them attack more etc..

Now, though, mages are much more limited in their ability to boost martial characters. They can usually only provide a single buff at any one time, often only to a single character, and at the expense of many other useful spells.


...


I've forgotten how this tied into the actual topic of the thread. I'm sure I had a point when I started writing it. :smallconfused:




I've seen comments like this quite often, and though I agree up to a point, I think it fails to adress how much 5e did incorporate of ToB already. Just finished a thread on this topic, join the discussion if you like: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?612915-Probably-unpopular-take-%96-we-have-large-portions-of-Bo9S-ToB-in-5e-already

Not sure I agree but I'll certainly take a look. :smallsmile:

[Chaosmancer]

Oh, something else to consider.

I know that Concentration (along with various other nerfs) was aimed at weakening casters, but I find myself wondering whether it actually had a knock-on effect on Martials.

For example, in 3.5 casters would often put reasonably long-lansting buffs not on themselves but on the martial characters in the party. e.g. using Bull's Strength on a melee fighter (which now doesn't even help much even if it wasn't concentration). Or using Haste at the start of an encounter to speed up every martial character in the party (and everyone else in range, though spellcasters rarely got as much out of it).

In theory, these types of spells made casters stronger. But in the game they actually helped the martials shine by increasing their attack rolls, boosting their damage, letting them attack more etc..

Now, though, mages are much more limited in their ability to boost martial characters. They can usually only provide a single buff at any one time, often only to a single character, and at the expense of many other useful spells.


...


I've forgotten how this tied into the actual topic of the thread. I'm sure I had a point when I started writing it. :smallconfused:


There might have been a small knock-on effect, but that is probably a good thing. If the game is balanced around martials needing casters to be at peak performance, or casters being able to reach peak performance if they are not uplifting martials, then it leaves martials as left out in the cold if big brother magic doesn't decide to help them out.

[FabulousFizban]

we are having this conversation in an ethereal plane contacted using magic tablets powered by atomic lightning. I would say magic has become somewhat ubiquitous in our world yes.

[ezekielraiden]

There might have been a small knock-on effect, but that is probably a good thing. If the game is balanced around martials needing casters to be at peak performance, or casters being able to reach peak performance if they are not uplifting martials, then it leaves martials as left out in the cold if big brother magic doesn't decide to help them out.

Agreed. Also, countervailing effect: no Concentration checks when the buffed Fighter takes a hit but the caster does not. A real reason to buff others instead of yourself. (Likewise, Twin Spell's power: buff two allies, avoid engagement. Not just double effect, double avoidance too.)

[Alucard89]

It's a concept I have been struggling with when it comes to DnD. Because on one hand you want to play "low magic" setting but on the other hand when you get party of "magic users" (even Paladin who is half caster) you suddenly have low-magic setting where everyone are summoning creatures, magic weapons, cast fireballs, make illusions etc. Hexbaldes summon weapons from out of nowhere, Paladins ride magical mounts and so on. There is no consequence apart from resources or wild magic table when it comes to using magic in DnD.

Hence why I always play DnD as high magic setting with magic items, scrolls etc. because it suits it more. I like to play "low magic" in settings where magic is very rare (usually only one/two professions/class have access to it), magic items are ONLY very powerful artifacts (so very very rare) and using magic is always risky (mischaps, botches, chaos etc.). Then the magic itself is explained as powerful but dangerous to wield.

DnD is hard for me to play as low magic. It just doesn't make sense for me personally.

[Sorinth]

It's a concept I have been struggling with when it comes to DnD. Because on one hand you want to play "low magic" setting but on the other hand when you get party of "magic users" (even Paladin who is half caster) you suddenly have low-magic setting where everyone are summoning creatures, magic weapons, cast fireballs, make illusions etc. Hexbaldes summon weapons from out of nowhere, Paladins ride magical mounts and so on. There is no consequence apart from resources or wild magic table when it comes to using magic in DnD.

Hence why I always play DnD as high magic setting with magic items, scrolls etc. because it suits it more. I like to play "low magic" in settings where magic is very rare (usually only one/two professions/class have access to it), magic items are ONLY very powerful artifacts (so very very rare) and using magic is always risky (mischaps, botches, chaos etc.). Then the magic itself is explained as powerful but dangerous to wield.

DnD is hard for me to play as low magic. It just doesn't make sense for me personally.

This strikes me as more of a player buy in/session 0 problem. You're right that it doesn't make a lot of sense for a low-magic world have a team of adventurers all of whom are magical and a number of them high magic users. But why are the players choosing those classes if the idea is to play in a low magic setting?

[Alucard89]

This strikes me as more of a player buy in/session 0 problem. You're right that it doesn't make a lot of sense for a low-magic world have a team of adventurers all of whom are magical and a number of them high magic users. But why are the players choosing those classes if the idea is to play in a low magic setting?

Because in my opinion- if someone wants to play DnD- mostly he wants to play with what DnD has most to offer - and that is magic. I don't think many people chose to play DnD if they seek "low magic setting". There are better systems for that.

Because what would they play as in "low magic setting" in DnD? Only Fighter, Rogue and Barbarian (also without all Magic-subclasses that each of those classes have)? That's like cutting 70% of what DnD is.

As I said- you can play low magic in DnD but it doesn't make much sense for me. The whole class system is bascially high magic setting.

[Waazraath]

Because in my opinion- if someone wants to play DnD- mostly he wants to play with what DnD has most to offer - and that is magic. I don't think many people chose to play DnD if they seek "low magic setting". There are better systems for that.

Because what would they play as in "low magic setting" in DnD? Only Fighter, Rogue and Barbarian (also without all Magic-subclasses that each of those classes have)? That's like cutting 70% of what DnD is.

As I said- you can play low magic in DnD but it doesn't make much sense for me. The whole class system is bascially high magic setting.

Makes sense, but then again - you are always selecting anyway. In a party of 4, 8 classes are probably not played anyway. And also a party of a champion, thief, open hand monk and berserker barbarian can be quite compentent to overcome obstacles and succesfully adventure. It might make less sense but low magic is definitely an option, if all players are willing.

[Sorinth]

Because in my opinion- if someone wants to play DnD- mostly he wants to play with what DnD has most to offer - and that is magic. I don't think many people chose to play DnD if they seek "low magic setting". There are better systems for that.

Because what would they play as in "low magic setting" in DnD? Only Fighter, Rogue and Barbarian (also without all Magic-subclasses that each of those classes have)? That's like cutting 70% of what DnD is.

As I said- you can play low magic in DnD but it doesn't make much sense for me. The whole class system is bascially high magic setting.

The answer to why play D&D over another system is simple, a lot of people won't want to learn a whole new system when the DM pitches them a low magic campaign. Right or wrong they'd prefer to stick to the game they know.

And it's pretty clear that was behind a lot of WoTC's decisions when they made 5e. They wanted 5e to be able to support a wide variety of settings/styles, and at the end of the day a low magic settings works out quite well in 5e as long as everyone is on the same page.


I do find your response is a bit strange though, you say you want to play a low magic settings, which 5e supports, but then you say if you play 5e you choose to go with a high magic character. Sounds like FOMO more then anything. Have you actually played 5e with a low magic?

[Tanarii]

we are having this conversation in an ethereal plane contacted using magic tablets powered by atomic lightning. I would say magic has become somewhat ubiquitous in our world yes.😂😂😂 thanks for that!


Because what would they play as in "low magic setting" in DnD? Only Fighter, Rogue and Barbarian (also without all Magic-subclasses that each of those classes have)? That's like cutting 70% of what DnD is.
Just start tacking on penalties to spell casting. Don't worry about inter-class balance, in this case you're specifically trying to discourage spell casting.

Things like:
- provokes an Oa
- automatically countered if the OA does damage
- limited cantrips per day (maybe double level 1 slots?)
- If you really want to be nasty, and make it primarily a BBEG/NPC thing, just make each spell cast cost XP.

That way players are free to choose to be spellcasters in a low magic world, if they're willing to deal with the problems. But you've got systematic modifications that make it clear why it's not common in general.

[Alucard89]

Just start tacking on penalties to spell casting. Don't worry about inter-class balance, in this case you're specifically trying to discourage spell casting.

Things like:
- provokes an Oa
- automatically countered if the OA does damage
- limited cantrips per day (maybe double level 1 slots?)
- If you really want to be nasty, and make it primarily a BBEG/NPC thing, just make each spell cast cost XP.

That way players are free to choose to be spellcasters in a low magic world, if they're willing to deal with the problems. But you've got systematic modifications that make it clear why it's not common in general.

At this poit if I am to start revamping 5e mechanic to suit low-magic-setting - I will just take simpler and better mechanic from another system, preferable one that is already low-magic one. Faster and easier.

[Schadenfreuda]

After reading through this whole high magic vs. low magic debate and about the desire to make magic feel more magical and less mechanical, I found that there's a distinction worth putting into words: this debate isn't exactly about high magic vs. low magic. There's actually two different arguments going on.

The first is about common/high magic vs. low/rare magic. For campaigns where magic is something that only a few people can do and where everyone in a party is a martial or maybe a half caster, the rules of 5e are more than capable of supporting the world believably and keeping magic mystical and special, and is more than capable of also supporting campaigns where wizards are running around like rats and magic items are a copper a dozen.

However, the second axis of the argument is more about soft magic vs. hard magic.

Soft magic systems, notably those of the works of Tolkein, Martin, and Rowling, are kept opaque to both the readers and characters in the story as to what magic can do and how it works, regardless of how common it is. LotR and the Song of Ice and Fire books are set it uncommon/low magic times and places in what are more properly high-magic settings. Magic is powerful, though generally in poorly defined and unpredictable ways. Even in the common or high magic setting of Harry Potter, a world where all the wizards can cast every spell as a cantrip, magic is still a fairly mysterious force that behaves in ways wizards often can't predict or don't understand the reasons behind. Why do potions sometimes need to be brewed under a full moon? Who knows. Sometimes the power of love and self-sacrifice defeats mighty wizards. Things happens, no one knows exactly why, and it's better for the story that way.

Hard magic systems, on the other hand, like those of Avatar: the Last Airbender or Eragon, are much more understandable and scientific in their outlooks, and the exact mechanics of most powers are well-understood to characters and readers alike. Casting a Fireball spell never produces something that isn't a fireball, nor does earthbending spontaneously and unexpectedly turn one into a newt.

While more than capable of supporting a hard magic setting with magic of any commonality, 5e cannot well approximate soft magic well at all without a great deal of imagination from the GM, and provides relatively little guidance as to what soft magic would look like within the context of the game. This isn't really the fault of 5e in particular; certainly, it could have done better, but really there's only so much a game that by necessity comes with hard rules that are consistent table to table, common between groups of strangers. Soft magic is by definition poorly defined and very difficult to write rules for, perhaps impossible. The DMG could still easily have had suggestions such as "use real-world myths and stories of ancient heroes and gods and witchcraft as inspiration for soft magic" or similar, but it doesn't, and this leaves interested tables and players without a satisfying mechanism for exploring those particular fantasies.

[Deathtongue]

This isn't really the fault of 5e in particular; certainly, it could have done better, but really there's only so much a game that by necessity comes with hard rules that are consistent table to table, common between groups of strangers. Soft magic is by definition poorly defined and very difficult to write rules for, perhaps impossible. The DMG could still easily have had suggestions such as "use real-world myths and stories of ancient heroes and gods and witchcraft as inspiration for soft magic" or similar, but it doesn't, and this leaves interested tables and players without a satisfying mechanism for exploring those particular fantasies.There are two metafictional reasons to want to use soft magic.

1.) Law of conservation of detail. If you're writing a 30-page short story soft magic is all that you, the writer, have time for.
2.) They want to write a broad comedy like Family Guy or the Tex Avery cartoons.
3.) Wanting the ability to take the story in a direction not constrained by their previous writing. I am much less sympathetic to this motivation. A writer who wants to write an ongoing story but sees internal consistency as an obstacle is a writer that is insecure about what they're doing and disrespectful of their audience's attention.

3 is especially contemptible in a cooperative storytelling game.

[Dr. Cliché]

There are two metafictional reasons to want to use soft magic.

1.) Law of conservation of detail. If you're writing a 30-page short story soft magic is all that you, the writer, have time for.
2.) They want to write a broad comedy like Family Guy or the Tex Avery cartoons.
3.) Wanting the ability to take the story in a direction not constrained by their previous writing. I am much less sympathetic to this motivation. A writer who wants to write an ongoing story but sees internal consistency as an obstacle is a writer that is insecure about what they're doing and disrespectful of their audience's attention.

3 is especially contemptible in a cooperative storytelling game.

I would add an additional reason:
4) To try and create a sense of wonder, mystery and/or uncertainty. This is especially true for cases when the protagonists (or at least the viewpoint characters) don't have access to magic. Basically, it allows for magic to be incredible or awe-inspiring, at least partially because the veiwpoint character(s) and, by extension, the audience, don't understand how or why it works. If the magic is instead used by dark sorcerers or the like, then it can create a similar effect, but this time one emphasising dread.

Of course, this is based on a narrative perspective and assumes that magic is both rare and (especially in the case of 'good' magic) is used very infrequently and not as a constant problem-solver.



However, I don't think this approach can really work in a game where the magic system needs to have rules.

To be perfectly honest, I see D&D's magic as being a messy combination of hard and soft magic. It was described above as being "hard" because it has strict rules, but I'd actually disagree. Hard magic systems generally have rules that can not only be understood but extrapolated. Take the always-popular Avatar the Last Airbender. Earth Benders can use their ability to move small rocks. it stands to reason that with sufficient training, they can move larger and larger rocks.

Now try to apply that to 5e's spell system. One might think that - particularly when it comes to natural casters like sorcerers - having knowledge of, say, fire magic would be something they could develop over time. So they could go from single bolts to cones and then maybe to precise shapes like detonating spheres or walls. Nope. If a Sorcerer learns fireball then they can cast fireball. They can't use a smaller amount of fire magic to reduce the radius, create a cone or bolt instead, or even just create a tiny flame to light a pipe or such. It's Fireball or go home. 5e is further complicated by generally failing to answer *why* magic works. I appreciate that this is something you'll never get a completely concrete answer for, but it's really not helped by D&D having about 12 supposedly different forms of magic which all somehow work in exactly the same way. One might think that different types of magic might require different components. e.g. one might naturally expect Bardic and Clerical spells to lean towards verbal components, with the former being words, songs or music, and the latter being chants or prayers. Likewise, one might reasonably expect innate, sorcerous magic to require only somatic components, maybe verbal at a push but certainly not material components. But no, all mages, regardless of type, have spells with verbal, somatic and material/focus components.

I suppose my point is that the rules for a given hard magic system can generally be deduced and extrapolated simply by seeing the system in action. Imagine for a moment that you have a new player who isn't allowed to look at the rulebook. Instead, he has to try and guess the rules of magic simply by watching a lot of spells being cast. Do you think he'd be able see patterns, to work out why some spells require components and some don't? Or even what the difference is between supposedly different casting classes? Because I'm highly doubtful.

[Tanarii]

I'm pretty sure an observing character (in universe) can quickly work out "each spell is a specific invocation that has its own rules that must be obeyed to trigger a specific effect".

[Chaosmancer]

However, I don't think this approach can really work in a game where the magic system needs to have rules.

I agree, soft magic ends up being a little too malleable to work in a system like DnD. It can work in things like Fate maybe (I'd have to check how Fate handles levels of success) or in the Sentinels GYRO system (coming soon but they've been promoting it for years so people can check Greater Than Games youtube channel to see the system in action) where you can do pretty much anything and almost anything can happen as a result


To be perfectly honest, I see D&D's magic as being a messy combination of hard and soft magic. It was described above as being "hard" because it has strict rules, but I'd actually disagree. Hard magic systems generally have rules that can not only be understood but extrapolated. Take the always-popular Avatar the Last Airbender. Earth Benders can use their ability to move small rocks. it stands to reason that with sufficient training, they can move larger and larger rocks.

One of my favorite examples of Avatar being a hard magic system is actually Blood Bending.

You have people that can control water, well, if they are powerful enough they can control the water inside people. Or rip the water out of plants to use that. This makes perfect sense, and being done during a full moon even makes sense, because they already connected water bending's strength to the phases of the moon, because of the connection between the moon and tides.

It all just falls together elegantly.

[Dr. Cliché]

I'm pretty sure an observing character (in universe) can quickly work out "each spell is a specific invocation that has its own rules that must be obeyed to trigger a specific effect".

But that's not hard magic. What you're talking about there seems, if anything, far more akin to soft magic.

The rules for why some spells require this and other spells require that are entirely arbitrary and it's impossible to extrapolate in any meaningful way.

[Tanarii]

But that's not hard magic.
You're using a very different definition of hard magic from me then. Detailed specific rules for each spell are about the hardest magic there is.

A system that allows you to create your own spells on the fly by following some guideline rules and extending them would be medium magic.

[Chaosmancer]

You're using a very different definition of hard magic from me then. Detailed specific rules for each spell are about the hardest magic there is.

A system that allows you to create your own spells on the fly by following some guideline rules and extending them would be medium magic.

If you go back up to his post, you can read his definition of hard magic and compare it to your own

[5eNeedsDarksun]

Our last session (playing CoS) after our DM described the cracks in the stained glass windows of a temple, one of the players decided to use his mending cantrip to fix the problem, which led to a discussion of how lazy the local spellcasters must be to allow for such a situation to exist... kind of killed the mood.
I think the OP raises an excellent point. Low level casters could remove many mundane obstacles, and creating a believable world is challenging.
As another example 5e was created based on the party having limited access to magic items, yet almost all characters are casters and items are relatively cheap and easy to make or buy RAW. How do these things coexist?

[Dr. Cliché]

You're using a very different definition of hard magic from me then. Detailed specific rules for each spell are about the hardest magic there is.

A system that allows you to create your own spells on the fly by following some guideline rules and extending them would be medium magic.

Yeah, I think we're just using different definitions here.

Amusingly, the second type you describe would actually be much closer to my definition of hard magic. :smallbiggrin:

For me, hard magic needs to have rules, but it's equally important that there's an internal logic and consistency to those rules that can be reasonably extrapolated. But with the magic in D&D, even when you see the rules in their entirety you'd still be hard-pressed to make any logical deductions or extrapolations. e.g. I think you'd likely struggle to explain why some fire spells require no material components whatsoever, one requires phosphorous, another requires a red dragon scale, and yet another requires sulphur and bat-poop. I'm sure you could make reasonable cases for each of these individually (with the possible exception of the bat guano :smallwink:), but when taken together there's no real pattern with regard to which spells require which ingredients.

In contrast, if every fire spell required, say, a red dragon scale in addition to any other components, then you'd at least be able to make some sort of deduction. Not only that, but (just as importantly) people observing spellcasters without prior knowledge of the magic system would also be able to make logical deductions. They'd likely not understand all the rules, but they'd at least learn that anyone wanting to use fire magic needed the scale of a red dragon.

Does that make sense?


Either way, I appreciate that this is just my definition of 'hard magic'. Clearly it's not a universal definition, so I can perfectly understand if you choose to stick with your own that any system with complete rules for spells is hard magic. I just thought I'd have another go at trying to explain what I mean when I say 'hard magic'. :smallsmile:

[Telok]

Our last session (playing CoS) after our DM described the cracks in the stained glass windows of a temple, one of the players decided to use his mending cantrip to fix the problem, which led to a discussion of how lazy the local spellcasters must be to allow for such a situation to exist... kind of killed the mood.
I think the OP raises an excellent point. Low level casters could remove many mundane obstacles, and creating a believable world is challenging.
As another example 5e was created based on the party having limited access to magic items, yet almost all characters are casters and items are relatively cheap and easy to make or buy RAW. How do these things coexist?

Many d&d settings/adventures are written like the old sword & sorcery novels. The protagonist may have some magic, the bbeg usually is/has major magic that the protagonist can't have/use, and there may or may not be an old sage/mysterious stranger with magic to start the protagonist into the story. And that's it. In sword & sorcery the unnamed masses don't get nice things.

Of course d&d doesn't match up well with the old sword & sorcery any more. So it's a bit jarring when your 3rd level pcs run across something like a run down church with a 7 hd priest in charge (because the pcs may need to be bailed out) who "needs adventurers to help with five skeletons" or something similar.

[LankyOgre]

I'm sure you could

Guano was historically collected to extract saltpeter from, which is the mixed with sulfur to make blackpowder. Essentially, the fireball components are rudimentary explosives.

[Zarrgon]

I don't think any fiction has Hard Magic: it's all Soft Magic. For Hard Magic, you would need magic rules, and few fictional settings have them....and even when they do they are just as often ignored, circumvented or changed on a whim. Worse, magic always bends to the story and plot.

You don't get Hard Magic unless you have a fairly detailed magic rule system: what you get from most RPGs. Though this is straightforward Roll Playing.

I would note that D&D can also be a good Soft Magic game, all it needs is for players to just back away from the hard rule obsession. So many players get so obsessed with the rules and demand that the game only does what is written on the official rule page. And it makes for a fine roll playing game: you cast spell A and it always has effect A, all hail the rules.

But it does not have to be that way, Soft Magic rules work fine. a spell might mostly do what it should...or might be effected by other local magic or maybe something else. The effect might make the spell more powerful, weaker, or have a neutral effect. In any case what might happen specifically is unknown, but most spellcasters can make good guesses.

For Example: one of my DMs had a rule something like active powerful conjuration magic will cause any conjuration spell cast nearby to maybe get effects of a connected plane. So if there was a large gate to the Plane of Fire, and you cast a summoning spell, you'd most likely get some fire type creature.

And this type of thing adds spice to the game, much more then just reading the rules and rolling dice.

[Chaosmancer]

I don't think any fiction has Hard Magic: it's all Soft Magic. For Hard Magic, you would need magic rules, and few fictional settings have them....and even when they do they are just as often ignored, circumvented or changed on a whim. Worse, magic always bends to the story and plot.

You don't get Hard Magic unless you have a fairly detailed magic rule system: what you get from most RPGs. Though this is straightforward Roll Playing.

Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss both do fairly hard magic. Avatar the Last Airbender is often used as a Hard Magic system example.

I wouldn't disagree that most systems are softer than not, but there are Hard Magic stories out there.

[Dr. Cliché]

I don't think any fiction has Hard Magic: it's all Soft Magic. For Hard Magic, you would need magic rules, and few fictional settings have them....and even when they do they are just as often ignored, circumvented or changed on a whim.

I'm reminded of Brandon Sanderson's First Law of Magic:


An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.


In any case, I disagree that hard magic doesn't exist at all in fiction, though I'd certainly agree that most systems (even the ones with supposed rules) nevertheless lean far more towards soft magic.

I should probably mention that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Hard magic systems aren't inherently better than soft magic ones. However, it can be bad when magic is repeatedly used for Deus Ex Machinas to get the protagonists out of tricky situations.



Worse, magic always bends to the story and plot.

Out of interest, are there any specific examples that come to mind? Asking out of simple curiosity.

[Dienekes]

Out of interest, are there any specific examples that come to mind? Asking out of simple curiosity.

Not Zarrgon but The Sword of Truth comes to mind. Where the effects of magic that are possible changes book to book.

Harry Potter as well. New magic tends to be consistent in the book it’s introduced but gets ignored in later books with maybe a handwave if we’re lucky.

Discworld’s magic runs however Pratchett wants the magic to run. As long as the effects are funny.

Even Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. What Gandalf can and can’t do has few rules. Well actually it has very specific rules that you only really learn about if you read bonus material. But in practice it looks like he just shows up and does whatever. Tolkien gets away with it because every time it happens it really just gives the heroes a means of dealing with issues themselves or at great cost.

[Deathtongue]

But it does not have to be that way, Soft Magic rules work fine. a spell might mostly do what it should...or might be effected by other local magic or maybe something else. The effect might make the spell more powerful, weaker, or have a neutral effect. In any case what might happen specifically is unknown, but most spellcasters can make good guesses.See, and that's exactly why I don't like soft magic outside of simpler systems like FATE. Even with a theoretically fair-minded, impartial DM using magic repeatedly turns into a debate and negotiation. I don't mind having to do that now and again, but having that standard procedure sounds frustrating and exhausting. I don't want to spend 5 minutes discussing whether Mold Earth allows my wizard to set up simple 2-square tall breastworks spanning 50' in the next hour, especially since I play with multiple DMs and they have different opinions. I don't want to spend another 10 minutes explaining to a DM (who might still decide to say 'no' anyway) that with sufficient time and Shape Water cantrips I can use the magic of enthalpy to freeze over a pond.

[Sorinth]

It's actually not that hard to support soft magic in 5e with only minor alterations. There are quite a number of vaguely defined spells like Prestidigitation, Thaumaturgy, Druidcraft, etc... not to mention pretty much every illusion spell where you can get creative with the use of magic and attempt to do almost anything. Simply add a spellcasting check against a DC determined by the DM when trying to push beyond the limits of the spell or modify a spell. So when you want to use mending on something big that normally wouldn't work well now you roll a d20 add your spellcasting mod and see if you can beat the DC. When you want to make a half-sized fireball make a check, if you fail that check the DM decides what happens. Maybe it's the right size but weak so only deals half normal damage or maybe it ends up a quarter of the size causing you to miss some of the targets you wanted, etc...

5e was designed to be easily modifiable so that it can support whatever world you want to create. Homebrewing is highly encouraged throughout the game.

[Optimator]

D&D has always been on the higher end of the spectrum in terms of magic prevalence. I don't see this as a problem.