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I don't understand. What's wrong with rolling stats? I would much rather roll stats then do point buy. Every time I run something (which I'll admit isn't very often) I use point buy. I also prefer it as a player. It's more fun to let fate decide your stats than to have the option to dump a stat raise another one. It's also less conducive to min-maxing.
Certain parties like to claim that a point build ensures characters aren't overpowered and that high stats are the core to all problems with overpowered games rather than too many magic items or too much money. The Adventure Paths are designed with a 15-point build concept, though Paizo employees have also admitted that GMs know their players best and should allow stats that best work with their players' abilities and knowledge.
Perhaps, just perhaps, some of us like low-magic non-Monty Haul campaigns not because we're control freaks but because we're telling a story and feel that a low-magic world allows us to create the sense of magic and wonder to their world, rather than a cookiecutter world where magic is so common it's mundane.
Sure, there are thousands of ways to be Mounty hauly, not all of them are related to magic items. Giving away templates (ie: let the players play with vampires, noble drows and the like), or giving stats, is mounty hauly too. So playing in low magic campaigns don't even mean the campaign isn't Mounty Haul, to begin with.
You can be in a low magic campaign for roleplaying reasons, and work with your player about what magic items he wants, and build them with a backstory (perhaps as heirloom items for example). But, as the poster I was answering to said, more often than not, what I see in those campaigns are GM who want to control. They want to control what kind of magic items their PC get, and specially which kind of magic items the PC *don't* get. They don't want to give a keen scimitar to the guy with a character that destroy BBEGs with crits. They don't want to give items that let the players fly, if flying wreck their encounters. They don't want to give items that give Protection from Evil or immunity to mind attacks, if the BBEG is a vampire with Dominate. Bassically, they want to *control* the actions of the PC. It's not an absolute, I'm pretty sure there are some GMs over there who do it for other reasons, but that's not my personal experience.
PS: the world being more or less magic doesn't make it cookie cutter or not. Eberron is a world with a big sense of magic and wonder, and have common magic. Conan-like worlds are as cookie cutter as they get (there are like six zillion Conan-clones out there), and they are low magic.
Because I am, after all, Evil, I'm going to go and make everyone on the thread cry by saying I not only used point buy for my PCs, I gave them a 36-point buy, point for point from base 8!
(Yes, that means they could have had, say, three 18s, a 12 and two tens!)
And they are getting maximum hit points!
And there are eight PCs!
And I'm not increasing (for the moment) the amount of treasure!
(Since the last two campaigns I ran were converted AD&D modules to 3.Aotrs and I hadn't bothered to work out the wealth by level, giving the PCs a SERIOUS case of waaaay-too-much gear. Nice job, AD&D...)
And there are maybe two members out of ten from my gaming group that are under 30 and four out of the ten have been playing together for twenty years!
And, worst and most heinously of all, I don't treat the dice as any more sacroscant than the rules, if it really comes down to it and thus, like the rules, are subject to modification if I think the unfeeling laws of probability are being random to the point of being detrimental to the enjoyment of the game which no-one wil ever know about since I roll my dice behind my screen anyway!
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Huh. I didn't expect this to turn into a magic vs. no magic thread.
Anyway, just curious, how do you justify low-magic worlds when the PCs can play one of several classes who are fully reliant upon their own magical prowess?
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Widely available magic items help Fighters to remain useful in a world with Wizards. They're also good for characters with specific requirements, like a magic composite bow with the right strength modifier, or armor for a wild-shaping druid.
How do I justify classes that are reliant upon their magical powers? Easy. While low-level magic isn't difficult to learn, mastering magic is far more difficult. The PCs are special in that they can do just that: master this form of magic.
Besides, there is a difference between Low Magic and low magic. Low Magic is a realm where wizards are rare and often evil and enchanted items are rare. This is the realm of Conan and the like.
This is not low magic, where magic itself exists and is widespread, but most wizards are hedge wizards and crafting a magic item takes a lot of rare materials and months to a year of crafting, and is not just sold to adventurers.
And if you think of it, Runelords is a perfect choice for a low magic game - thousands of years ago a highly magical realm existed. At the height of its power, it was cast down, its heritage lost, and all that remains are legends and myths. Its magic items are scattered, and the secrets of these items is likewise lost.
Humanity has slowly started to reclaim its heritage (and the elves returned to this world barely a hundred years ago but are suspicious of humans and thus not sharing their secrets) but while simpler magic items can be crafted with hard work and much expense... the grand magics of the past are nearly unknown. Items like holy avengers and portable holes and the like are rare and often hidden lest thieves try to steal them for themselves.
You make low magic sound like it's this horrible place that punishes players. But it is instead a setting which allows for the creation of a rich and vibrant world... and one where magic is so rare that rather than shrugging and saying "I don't like this item, I'm going to replace it with something cooler" you learn to use it because you don't know when you'll find a replacement. Or if you ever will.
How do I justify classes that are reliant upon their magical powers? Easy. While low-level magic isn't difficult to learn, mastering magic is far more difficult. The PCs are special in that they can do just that: master this form of magic.
Besides, there is a difference between Low Magic and low magic. Low Magic is a realm where wizards are rare and often evil and enchanted items are rare. This is the realm of Conan and the like.
This is not low magic, where magic itself exists and is widespread, but most wizards are hedge wizards and crafting a magic item takes a lot of rare materials and months to a year of crafting, and is not just sold to adventurers.
And if you think of it, Runelords is a perfect choice for a low magic game - thousands of years ago a highly magical realm existed. At the height of its power, it was cast down, its heritage lost, and all that remains are legends and myths. Its magic items are scattered, and the secrets of these items is likewise lost.
Humanity has slowly started to reclaim its heritage (and the elves returned to this world barely a hundred years ago but are suspicious of humans and thus not sharing their secrets) but while simpler magic items can be crafted with hard work and much expense... the grand magics of the past are nearly unknown. Items like holy avengers and portable holes and the like are rare and often hidden lest thieves try to steal them for themselves.
You make low magic sound like it's this horrible place that punishes players. But it is instead a setting which allows for the creation of a rich and vibrant world... and one where magic is so rare that rather than shrugging and saying "I don't like this item, I'm going to replace it with something cooler" you learn to use it because you don't know when you'll find a replacement. Or if you ever will.
Ah, I see. Well I think the level of magic is left to the GM to decide, but I also think Paizo has done a decent job of supplying rules that DO limit the magic availability in the world. If you follow RAW, crafting a magic item takes quite some time, especially for high level items -- a base time period of one month to craft any major magic item, plus requiring a significantly high level to cast the requisite spell.
Even the largest metropolises of Golarion only have available 3d4 major magic items at any given time following RAW in the GMG, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're all available for sale in a shop, and that's ALL major magic items: weapons, armor, rings, staves, scrolls, wondrous items, potions, etc.
That being said, I think this inflated sense of magic items in the world may stem from some other source, as Pathfinder seems to explicitly limit the availability of magic items. Perhaps the GM is more to blame than the Pathfinder system because it seems to me that magic IS quite limited, as far as item availability goes.
But it is instead a setting which allows for the creation of a rich and vibrant world...
A setting with high magic also allows for the creation of rich and vibrant worlds. Eberron, Forgotten Realms and Golarion come to mind.
In my own campaign setting, I dealt with the problem of low magic (in this instance, "low magic" equating to "rare magic" and "magic items are fracking rare") along with several other problems (like vancian casting) by tossing out the entire 3.x bestiary and starting from scratch, eliminating vancian casting completely and making all casters spontaneous but from a mana pool (two actually, one for any spell level and one for up to 3rd only) with less overall spell "slots" and implementing a system whereby enhancement bonuses are recategorised to be nonmagic (true magic bonuses are untyped) and all creatures gain enhancement bonuses to weapons, armour and natural armour and stats, resistance bonuses to saves and level bonuses to AC which mimic a progression of traditional magical gear (+1 weapons/armour, deflection bonuses, natural armour bonuses, resistance bonuses and stat-boosting items etc).
This is perhaps a somewhat... extreme... solution than most, but as it's engineered from the ground up it works quite well.
It allows magical items to be pushed back to being - more like AD&D - stuff you find and stuff that Does Something, as opposed to something the fighter needs to make his numbers up to contribute. It means the fighters get all their numbers - and so does everyone else (including, say, animals, which I felt should be a much larger threat than they were.) It also means, that, as the progression is essentially approximated from the Wealth-by-Level that casters get disproportionally less benefit from it (because they're still getting the +weapon bonuses they probably wouldn't have spent their wealth on, whether they like it or not). Which also goes a little way to curb off some of the worst potential caster excesses.
(The fact that mana recharge is 50% in any places also means casters have to husband their resources a bit more - but on the other side, the up to 3rd level mana pool starts recharging after an hour of non-strenuous activity (so you start getting mana points back after two hours), so in general, the casters will always have a few spels they can cast. In practise, as we tend to run on the 15-minute advanturing day anyway, it may not affect the caster's abilities at higher levels (highest level party we've currently got is only 9), but what it will mean is after they've reached the point where they would say in normal 3.x "right we need to rest now, we're out of high-level spells" they'll be actually closer to being out of mana period instead of having lots of low-level spells that just aren't useful anymore.)
It also means gold becomes something less than a mandatory resource, again more like in AD&D or my pre-3.0 game of choice, Reolmaster.
(Point worth noting - with my houserules anyway, even in more regular 3.x, the noncasters are still contributing considerably even at top levels, due to most of the opposition being classed enemies in my games anyway.)
Rise of the Runelords has its' own problems. Starting out a party fighting goblins to such an extent that the Ranger is going to take Goblinoid as his or her Favored Enemy....and then goblins are meaningless by the third book out of six. It's all giants after book two, but by that time our Ranger may have picked Undead as his/her second Favored Enemy, and now there's naught but giants.
We rolled up our characters for RotRL. 4D6 drop the lowest, then assign +2 on one score, just like Pathfinder says. No point buy for us. Do the characters have a +32 on Stealth at Level 11 because of Dex, or a +17 on UMD? Yes. Is this unbalancing? No, not if the GM knows how to adjust the battles. I don't care what your Stealth is, if you're running across a dusty sand dune at high noon, you're going to be seen from 100 feet away.
My tabletop players have learned how not to be stupid in battles. Leroy Jenkins gets a Quickened Silence and a Sleep or Hold Person on them while the Rogue uses Sneak Attack on the giant watchman at the outpost. The Fighter uses his Giant Bane weapon that was mysteriously added to the Anniversary edition treasure a few battles back so he can do maximum damage against giant racial types now instead of getting "one shot, one-killed" with a +1 Human Bane Ogre Hook and three attacks in one round. Since our cleric is "a fighter, not a buffer", meaning most battles are done without Bull's Strength or Bear's Endurance, and these guys have to whittle down giants with 105 hp.
Magic items don't make the players uber. Magic items can counterbalance party "holes" or stupidity.
Magic items don't make the players uber. Magic items can counterbalance party "holes" or stupidity.
Oh, they very much can if the quantity gets out of hand. Like I said, in my previous three campaigns, I ran converted AD&D modules and made the mistake of not bothering to spend the additional tens or hours working out wealth by level or even just estimating it.
They did Vecna Lives!/Vecna Reborn/Die Vecna Die! and by the time they'd gotten to the part of the latter with Sigil, they'd got hundreds of thousands of GPs worth of gear. That made Dragon Mountain, which followed, a nasty spiral of having to give the enemies gear to compensate, which lead to more loot... (In fairness, that was the first time we ever got up that high - they finished Dragon Mountain at low Epic - and like many things, you don't appreciate the problems until you actually run them.)
The most recent one - Night Below - had a problem that I idiotically handed out the gold, such as from the dragons as written and before I quite realised it, the PCs had about ten times as much gear as they should have had at that level. Granted, I literally dropped off the amount of gold by 90% for the entire rest of the advanture, but they'd already got over the hump, as it were, early on. (It REALLY didn't help one of the first pieces of loot in the module is Wings of Flying, which of course went to the (eventual) Ninja/Rogue/Inviible Blade/Crusader, giving the character the double-killer of unlimited flight and improved invisibility...)
So, magic items can make things pretty nasty if you aren't careful how the PCs get hold of them. (These campaigns were what inspired me to do the aforementioned revisions, to make it more "it's you, not your gear" while not screwing the noncasters.)
And throughout the remaining Paizo adventure paths I run (RotRL, Shackled City, Legacy of Fire at the moment), I will be keeping a much sharper hold on what magical stuff they are allowed to buy!
I likewise had that problem with Night Below. Ironically enough, the solution ended up with one player, who was the person keeping the "Hut of Holding" that had all their wealth squirreled away. He'd only give out as much money as was needed out of a fear they'd destroy the economy and encourage other local kingdoms to invade out of greed. When he died at the end of the campaign and all his items were lost, all that gold was gone likewise. (Well, it's more complex than that, but needless to say a lot of gold and unused magic items ended up vanishing and not being seen again when that character disappeared.)
In all likelihood I'll never run NB again. I burned out on it, and had run it twice (though only once all the way through). Paizo's products interest me far more than old outdated products like NB. But if I did... I'd significantly curtail the treasure found.
Well back to the original topic at hand versus Monty Haul, low magic etc, etc....again people have their favorites.
I've never done point buy...as a player for 35+ years I always loved the randomness of rolling stats. However, now that I'm about to run a game, I'm leaning to doing point buy for the first time. My reasoning is simple enough...out of 5 players and one GM in our group we always wind up with at least 1 player rolling exceptionally well and at least 1 player rolling quite poorly. Think a character with 3 stats of 16-18 and one character whose high is a 14 and only 2-3 that are bonus stats at that.
Pride becomes a factor...and nobody ever seems to want to reroll and they'll just "work with it". That's fine, especially when it comes to fun roleplaying scenarios etc...but eventually that character can feel radically weak during times of combat and I simply do not want my players to feel locked into someone that they begin to feel is useless by comparison. This becomes doubly an issue if both those characters fill the same rolls...then one starts coming off as nothing more than a cheerleader for the other.
I likewise had that problem with Night Below. Ironically enough, the solution ended up with one player, who was the person keeping the "Hut of Holding" that had all their wealth squirreled away. He'd only give out as much money as was needed out of a fear they'd destroy the economy and encourage other local kingdoms to invade out of greed. When he died at the end of the campaign and all his items were lost, all that gold was gone likewise. (Well, it's more complex than that, but needless to say a lot of gold and unused magic items ended up vanishing and not being seen again when that character disappeared.)
In all likelihood I'll never run NB again. I burned out on it, and had run it twice (though only once all the way through). Paizo's products interest me far more than old outdated products like NB. But if I did... I'd significantly curtail the treasure found.
It took us four years to get all the way to the end...! (Admittedly, there were long breaks for other ganmes in between bits and pieces - at one point, we combined ourt dwindling groups into one and we spent a fair bit of time finishing Dragon Mountain first.)
Once I'd cut down the cash handed out to 10% of what was written down, it wasn't actually too bad. If I'd have twigged before hand and done that from the get-go, it probably wouldn't have been as bad.
Fortunately, my defiant template*, designed for boss monsters (an idea I cribbed off of 4E's solos) can be added and used on the fly and made up the difference for the bad guys.
Needless to say, I've spammed said template in gearing RotRL for eight characters!
*
It works beautifully. Boss fights last - two to three rounds! (if I didn't use it, they'd be over in one typically...) - and it reduces the auto-wins of Save-or-dies while not negating them (and indeed, means there is some argument them being save for finishers.)
It took a couple years for my AD&D group as well. Admittedly, my Night Below campaign also took several trips to Ravenloft using Dungeon Magazine modules, yoinked one of the Realms into the real world (the one with the cat statue that liked pork and went after the werecat vampire), a side trip into the Demonweb, and my own plot concerning a wizard seeking to become a God, but I also wasn't giving out XPs for gold pieces so they ended up around 17th level by the end.
That's an interesting template, btw. I tend to just give every monster max hit points and add to the number of monsters, but that's due to now having four players, a GMPC (originally we had three players), and two Cohorts. It'll be interesting to see how broken the game gets, however, as one of the players is building a Crafting Wizard type. I've ways around it, naturally enough, but by the end my RotRL campaign will be significant modified, including liberal use of Mythic templates for the enemies.
I can link the template in full if anyone's interested in the specifics.
I tend to use the Defiant for the solo monster battles (of which there are fair few in RotRL); for the other fights, I have supplemented the numbers with additional classed enemies, generally. (Barbarians and Aotrs-standard Swashbucklers for the goblins, for example, a few greed priests for the ogres etc etc.)
(Though there's nothing stopping you slapping a level or two one more than one enemy, of course - in Night Below, the PCs ended up in Shaboath fighting the Reavers, that one 16th fighter guy plus both Illithid clerices at once, all with Defiant 1 - that was a fight an a half!)
For the games (and/or encounters) I write myself, a serious fight will consist of combined arms, i.e. the bos, his spellcaster mate, often his divine spellcaster mate, his melee flunkies, his ranged flunkies and often his skirmisher/sneaky flunkies and so on.
(Also, I mandatorially require each and every NPC spellcaster or psion of at least 5th level to pack at least one Dispel; it's an absolutely critical spell for both sides of the table. Why on earth PF nerfed it I will never understand. (That was among the reasons I've not adopted PF, but merely cribbed a lot of the best ideas and retrofitted them back to what is really at this stage 3.aotrs.)
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Surely as a GM you just scale the difficulty level to whatever you feel is appropriate? Using the CR mechanism, or by feel, whatever. Meaning that how hard the players find the adventure is up to you. You can make any style as hard or easy as you like.
Low-magic is a separate issue to me, entirely about the atmosphere and immersion you want to create. If you as a GM want a world rich in magic and magic items then go for it. If you prefer one where magic is rare and remarkable then great. I prefer the latter, but that's personal taste. As a GM yes I inflict my personal taste on the players, but all GMs do that. That's the role.
The point made about fighters scaling at higher levels to match casters is a good one. But one easily solved, since you can have magic items drop that suit the fighters more than the casters. A greatsword with a spell-turning ability of some sort isn't going to be divvied out to the wizard.
I'm going a step further, basically attempting to balance all the characters in my group by giving the weakest more 'luck' when it comes to finding helpful items. Kind of like the draft system in the NFL :) If thats me 'controlling the game' then ok sure. But the aim is not to GM-powergame but to provide the players a balanced and challenging game, and also one where magic still feels (mostly) rare and as a consequence mysterious and deep.
I've never done point buy...as a player for 35+ years I always loved the randomness of rolling stats. However, now that I'm about to run a game, I'm leaning to doing point buy for the first time. My reasoning is simple enough...out of 5 players and one GM in our group we always wind up with at least 1 player rolling exceptionally well and at least 1 player rolling quite poorly. Think a character with 3 stats of 16-18 and one character whose high is a 14 and only 2-3 that are bonus stats at that.
I once saw a method that would let sove this, while still being random, for those who don't like the players choose all their stats.
roll 4d6 drop lower, 36 times, filling a matrix of 6x6. Any player can take any column or any row, in any direction, but has to use it as is.
Variants of this can be used (all characters can swap any 2 given stats, or maybe roll 4d6 drop 1 and roll 4-5 sets of stats, then everybody can use one of those sets, and use them as in whatever order they wish.
That way you still have "organic" characters, but the player have both some degree of choice, and the posibility to be on par with other chars in power level. If player X wants to take the row/column/set of stats that have a 18 and a pair of 8s, it's his decission. Maybe some other would prefer to have the set with 4 14s, or whatever, but at the very least, all of them choose from the same pool, so randomness is less of a factor to screw someone from the begining