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  1. - Top - End - #61
    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Telok's Avatar

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    Default Re: Magical Protection in a High Magic Setting?

    Quote Originally Posted by KorvinStarmast View Post
    If one gets away from assuming that the default attitude of anyone in that world is 'murderhobo' as soon as they get access to magic, maybe that isn't an issue in day to day life.

    How do you build your worlds and settings?
    Amazingly having guns and avoiding lunatic hit point inflation (or avoiding hp completely) tends to do the trick. In my experience it's not the damage/chaos output that tends to make a murderhobo, but the insulation from consequences.

    Modern D&D defaults to protecting mid level characters from consequences in a number of ways. Hit points, no lasting penalties, acessible immunity to many threats (flying vs ground bound or extreme ac vs npc guards), resource resets overnight, easy fast travel & hiding out (for some characters), requiring all fights to be winnable and mostly trivially so, not having coherent world building & promoting faux dark ages (example - people assuming the 'king' isn't themselves a caster and can't defend themselves), carrying all your real value with you in the from of magic items & spell components, etc., etc. Stuff like that. There's no consequences in the default game for the types of activity that trends into murderhoboism.

    Its not just D&D, but D&D is a sort of shining example of it. Just adding or correcting common ranged weapons to be sufficently lethal makes a big difference. As does characters having useful mechanical ties to the setting in ways that allow for lasting and meaningful social consequences for their actions. Of course in any system the GM can make everything up or go around trying to find 3rd party stuff that they need to implement such things, but it's not native to the D&D system any more (and in my experience not native in many long time primary-D&D gamers any more either).

    Building depth into my DtD40k7e setting I've found that divination magic has to be the most common and frequent type as they're required for navigating spelljammers through the warp and inter-sphere FTL communications. Meaning every government & organization has an interest in identifying and training lots of people in divinations. Then too, it's a setting where tech and magic are frequently mixed as well as being on relatively equal footing. Invisibility and charm spells are less impressive when the response to those are flamethrowers, reliable truth drugs, and "reward: wanted dead not alive" news reports you can't outrun.

  2. - Top - End - #62
    Troll in the Playground
     
    WolfInSheepsClothing

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    Default Re: Magical Protection in a High Magic Setting?

    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
    In a high magic setting you don't even need a succession setup, the high-powered person just keeps ruling, because in a high magic setting mortality is for chumps.
    yes, this is a very real possibility for a setting.
    it depends on how tight is their grip on society, how likely they are to be overturned by another god king or group of adventurers, and how easy it would be to set up contingencies to be resurrected for that time when inevitably someone bests you in combat.
    the resulting setting is very grimdark, though; a bunch of immortal tyrants rule the world, and there isn't ever much hope of doing anything about it. if one is permanently killed, he's just replaced by a different one.
    it is also possible that society, or some societies, managed to avoid that scenario.

    in my campaign setting I put a strong limitation on immortality because I didn't want to have to deal with multiple such people who had millennia to gather power and become a lot stronger than anyone else had a chance to be.
    In memory of Evisceratus: he dreamed of a better world, but he lacked the class levels to make the dream come true.

    Ridiculous monsters you won't take seriously even as they disembowel you

    my take on the highly skilled professional: the specialized expert

  3. - Top - End - #63
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    KorvinStarmast's Avatar

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    Default Re: Magical Protection in a High Magic Setting?

    Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
    Amazingly having guns and avoiding lunatic hit point inflation (or avoiding hp completely) tends to do the trick. In my experience it's not the damage/chaos output that tends to make a murderhobo, but the insulation from consequences
    I remember original Traveller's combat being quite lethal, and our decisions to engage were very conservative and wary.
    Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Works
    a. Malifice (paraphrased):
    Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
    b. greenstone (paraphrased):
    Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
    Gosh, 2D8HP, you are so very correct!
    Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society

  4. - Top - End - #64
    Firbolg in the Playground
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    Default Re: Magical Protection in a High Magic Setting?

    Quote Originally Posted by gbaji View Post
    This should be somewhat self correcting though. If mid level wizards are common enough that one may stroll into a small kingdom and dominate the king to take control, then they should be common enough that the king of a small kingdom already has a handful of them on the payroll to prevent just that from happening (some of which may be significantly more than just "mid level")..
    Plenty of “modern” countries (and corporations) have failed to have adequate anti-hacker security on staff; why would fantasy kingdoms be wiser in this regard?

    Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
    in my campaign setting I put a strong limitation on immortality because I didn't want to have to deal with multiple such people who had millennia to gather power and become a lot stronger than anyone else had a chance to be.
    Why is multiple powerhouse leaders something you don’t want to deal with? I don’t get the anti-appeal.

  5. - Top - End - #65
    Troll in the Playground
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    Default Re: Magical Protection in a High Magic Setting?

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Why is multiple powerhouse leaders something you don’t want to deal with? I don’t get the anti-appeal.
    A world ruled by immortal high-powered god-kings is fundamentally static while stories of epic heroism are about change. Therefore, the sort of world that naturally results from a high-magic scenario (especially is factors like minionomancy and divination allow for wide-range power projection) is one that is antithetical to the sort of storytelling most games want to engage in. The operative example is Dark Sun - the initial campaign setting posited a world ruled by god-kings who could never be challenged and then TSR immediately blew that up.

    Now, static worlds are actually quite useful for stories in forms other than epic heroism. In fact, a largely static world often facilitates tinkering around at the margins dealing with issues on a local or personal scale. For example, the classic wandering samurai or samurai revenge plot takes place during the Edo Period of Japanese history which was incredibly stable because the Tokugawa Shogunate was large, in-charge and not to be messed with.

    The initial focus on D&D was actually quite bent towards the static setting. There were powerful kingdoms, often ruled by nominal god-kings (in Mystara, fairly openly, in Greyhawk, somewhat less so) and characters were just expected to dungeon crawl and solve local problems long enough to get rich and famous, hit level 10 or so, and then probably semi-retire. This changed because of the Dragonlance Chronicles, which was D&D's first big epic quest to save the world and also way, way more popular than anything else associated with D&D to that point. The result was ever more epic world saving quests, Dragonlance and FR kept replaying the hits every few years, and a distinct need to keep worlds dynamic in order to facilitate that.
    Now publishing a webnovel travelogue.

    Resvier: a P6 homebrew setting

  6. - Top - End - #66
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    KorvinStarmast's Avatar

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    Default Re: Magical Protection in a High Magic Setting?

    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
    The initial focus on D&D was actually quite bent towards the static setting. There were powerful kingdoms, often ruled by nominal god-kings (in Mystara, fairly openly, in Greyhawk, somewhat less so) and characters were just expected to dungeon crawl and solve local problems long enough to get rich and famous, hit level 10 or so, and then probably semi-retire. This changed because of the Dragonlance Chronicles, which was D&D's first big epic quest to save the world and also way, way more popular than anything else associated with D&D to that point. The result was ever more epic world saving quests, Dragonlance and FR kept replaying the hits every few years, and a distinct need to keep worlds dynamic in order to facilitate that.
    Not so sure that's right. The original game offered the world as a tabula rasa, and after one had cleaned out the local dungeon the entire map was "unknown" (outdoor survival map) and one would go from hex to hex finding stuff, and maybe dying along the way.
    Both of the original campaigns, though, certainly had a lot of what you allude to with "the world as a back drop" and the adventurers doing stuff in various parts of it. Empire of the Petal Throne (Barker's version of RPG informed by the Twin Cities group) was a bit more organized, but it had a lot of empty space to adventure into.

    Your point on DL and 'save the world' as an arc is on solid ground, though. But that was in some ways a marketing ploy, what with the Module/Book tie in.
    Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2022-11-22 at 09:28 PM.
    Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Works
    a. Malifice (paraphrased):
    Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
    b. greenstone (paraphrased):
    Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
    Gosh, 2D8HP, you are so very correct!
    Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society

  7. - Top - End - #67
    Troll in the Playground
     
    WolfInSheepsClothing

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    Default Re: Magical Protection in a High Magic Setting?

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Why is multiple powerhouse leaders something you don’t want to deal with? I don’t get the anti-appeal.
    Because in my campaign world i already established that getting a resurrection was easy, if you have the money/connections, and that ways to avoid resurrection were heavily frowned upon, like weapons of mass destruction in our world.
    With those premises, if agelessness was also easy to get, then everyone past level 10 would never die, and the world would get cluttered by high level immortals.
    I didn't want to go that way. It's already hard enough to figure out the worldbuilding consequences of having a few superpowered people running around, without them becoming scores.
    In memory of Evisceratus: he dreamed of a better world, but he lacked the class levels to make the dream come true.

    Ridiculous monsters you won't take seriously even as they disembowel you

    my take on the highly skilled professional: the specialized expert

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