Why the desire for low magic?

[NigelWalmsley]

You're dancing around and mincing words, talking about excluding concepts, but at the end of the day, while low magic challenges may exclude the ability to face a high magic challenge, high magic challenges exclude players from participating, something that a lower magic challenge does not do.

Playing D&D excludes Shadowrun character concepts like Hacker, Rigger, and Street Samurai. Should we all play Shadowrun instead of D&D? Of course not. Shadowrun's a fine game, but it's doing a different thing from D&D ("cyberpunk fantasy" v "epic fantasy"). While it's trivially true that choosing a particular genre excludes things that aren't in that genre, that's not a problem, because if you want to tell a story that's in that genre, you definitionally don't want your story to include things from outside that genre. Maybe you like the "low magic" genre better than the "high magic" one. That's fine. You can play low magic games, and no one is going to stop you. But this notion that people are "excluded" by the fact that genres contain specific things is nonsense.

I'm not sure the comparison holds up. Magic may indeed be part of the fundamental forces of a fantasy setting but that doesn't mean everyone could or should utilize it. Most people in the real world can't manipulate nuclear reactions without some fairly extensive training, after all.

Sure they can. The things your body does are a result of the fundamental forces. That doesn't mean you can do anything those forces allow automatically, but the fact that everyone in a fantasy setting can do magic doesn't mean they can all individually do every single thing magic does.

Yes, that is one potential solution to the issue, but one that only enforces the paradigm of "magic can do anything" that not all people enjoy (no, not even in a high magic setting).

"Magic can do anything" isn't fundamental to the problem. Magic can have pretty sharp limits while still being necessary to contribute. In fact, I would say that is the case in most high-magic settings. Surgebinding doesn't just do "whatever", but it is nonetheless true that there's a sharp divide between the combat effectiveness of Knights Radiant and people who aren't Knights Radiant. What's fundamental to the problem is insisting that you have a high-magic setting, but allow non-magical characters to be totally co-equal protagonists. That just isn't supported by the source material.

However, any setting based around gated powers inherently divides everyone living into the settings into the has-powers/doesn't-have-powers classes (some settings, like exalted and arguably 3.x D&D, have tiers of progressively better types of powers), and unless the powers are very modest - meaning a low magic setting - only the has-powers people are important enough to matter. Which means the setting becomes a supers setting, with all the complications implied by a superhero setting.

You dramatically overestimate both the degree to which this is true and the degree to which people care enough about world-building to notice when it doesn't work. Eberron is one of the most popular D&D settings, and it was released with the premise "people do magic at the economy" in an edition where that causes the world to explode.

The simplest example is trapsmithing, "only" rogues can do it.

"It's a trap, everyone shut up while the Rogue rolls a bunch of dice" is a pretty classic example of problematic game design. "Don't split the party" is good advice for a reason, and while a challenge that is specifically for one player may leave everybody in the same physical place, it has the same deleterious effect of leaving most of the party unable to do anything for large stretches of time.

I find it very unrealistic that every challenge a DM prepares for the party needs to be politically correct and be somehow solvable by every player of the table. Different players will have the spotlight in different encounters.

Different players having the spotlight in different encounters doesn't mean the rest of the part does nothing in the other encounters. Consider combat encounters. Different fights will highlight different character's abilities. If you fight a bunch of weak enemies, the Warmage has a chance to shine thanks to their AoE direct damage. If you fight undead, the Cleric can use their turning to dominate the encounter. If you strike from ambush, the Rogue's Sneak Attack can allow them to eliminate a key opponent. But while the "MVP" title may move around, everyone is doing something in all those encounters.

it should be a matter of table etiquette that the magic dude don't upstage the martial dude on a martial-themed challenge by summoning a beatstick

What if the Wizard wants to play a summoner? It seems like the better solution is to give the Fighter enough abilities that he can't be upstaged just by the Wizard choosing to use spells that are on his spell list.

using that alone to make sure everyone contributes a roughly equal amount would probably feel quite contrived and railroady.

Which seems to me like an indication that the problem is non-casters not having a wide enough range of abilities. If one group gets shut out accidentally, but the other only gets shut out by rail-roading, it seems like the former is probably the problem we want to start with.