Morning, all.
We've been playing AP's pretty much exclusively over the past couple of years, but that's done nothing to ease my world-building itch and lately I've been pulling together all of my ideas for a campaign world of my own and starting to stitch them together.
One of the themes I prefer to maintain in my games is that of keeping the magical magical, wondrous, fantastic... and as such I tend to play lower magic games, with magic items rarer and almost always unique in nature. Keeping that theme in mind and recognizing the imbalance that magic, especially full-casters, can often inject into mid to high-level games, I've been toying with the idea of eliminating full casters as options for player-characters and having them only make appearances as villainous threats, remote sages, ancient powers and the like. Not quite on the level of rarity you might see in LotR or GoT, but certainly closer to that than your garden variety magic shop/wizards tower on every corner that we tend to see today.
We tend to do most of our home game play in the 2nd - 12th level range, and with a combination of full martials and partial casters available to the group, it seems like balance will come more naturally... but I'm curious to get thoughts from others on this. Assuming no one in the group is so married to full casters that their lack of availability is an issue, what other problems might arise, do you think? Mechanically, are full casters so imbedded in the game that the group will suffer facing traditional CR-appropriate encounters? It occurs to me that without the reality-altering crutch of excess magic, the PC's might be more inclined towards developing and using their skills and towards coming up with more creative ways to deal with challenges than hand-waving and finger-wiggling. The goal is still fun, after all.
Thoughts?
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Why not eliminate them altogether? They aren't strictly necessary; alchemists, Warpriests, paladin mercies etc. can take care of the healing/raising/restoring.
But keep the monsters that do have some full casting abilities; solars that cast as a 20th level cleric are far more impressive if they're the only ones to cast that way at all. At lower levels, nagas casting as sorcerers are pretty impressive as well. It makes those creatures very special.
Why not eliminate them altogether? They aren't strictly necessary; alchemists, Warpriests, paladin mercies etc. can take care of the healing/raising/restoring.
I really like the idea of using them from time to time as villains and plot devices.
In short, I love the idea.
My group has also been playing APs over the past couple of years, and I find that the preponderance of full casters can often be frustrating. Maybe boring is a better word, actually. The availability of divination and teleportation spells can seriously curtail the storytelling options available to a DM. (That or the DM has to escalate the magic of the setting overall to pre-emptively thwart the PCs' use of magic.)
This statement you made perfectly sums up the notion:
"It occurs to me that without the reality-altering crutch of excess magic, the PC's might be more inclined [to] developing and using their skills and [to] coming up with more creative ways to deal with challenges than hand-waving and finger-wiggling. The goal is still fun, after all."
I find the game to be very well balanced in the low levels, regardless of the PC's classes. As a DM, remember the following rules: (1) the goal is for as many people at the table as possible to have fun, and (2) the DM is always right, as long as "being right" doesn't interfere with rule 1. In that vein, set up encounters using your best judgment... and then fudge the numbers "behind the screen" if an encounter turned out more deadly than you intended.
Off the top of my head, the only Pathfinder "trope" that you may run into trouble on is the availability of healing relative to the expected number of encounters in a day of adventuring. Without clerical channeling, or easily-available wands/scrolls of healing (per your statement about magic items being rare), you will likely find that the party can handle fewer encounters per day than the relevant Core Rulebook section says a party should be able to.
At lower levels I often find full-casters less playable and less fun, almost to the same degree as I find them game-breaking down the road. Partial casters on the other hand - like Bards, for instance - are immediately effective and useful.
And yes, one of the rules in our homebrew world is that wands and scrolls of divine magic can only be used by members of that faith - mass-produced magic is rare, bottled divine power available to the highest bidder far moreso. I have addressed this to a degree however, by introduction of an alchemical potion known generically as 'healing draughts'. They are much more expensive and much more powerful than your typical cure wounds spells, (think Heal in a bottle) but they are available fairly readily to those who can afford them.
Why not just eliminate spells above 6th level? Full casters still get their higher spell slots, but can only use them for metamagic or using them for lower level spells. Villains have higher magic, but usually because they used some kind of dangerous artifact or made a pact with an otherworldly being.
Another alternative is using the Cypher System from Numenera. This system encourages GMs to regularly give PCs very powerful consumable items. Each PC can only carry one or two of them at any time or risk some kind of mutation or wild magic effect. Mages do exist, but their spells are limited to standard blasting spells and minor utility. But a mage's greatest asset is being able to carry more consumables than other classes. This system enables spellcasting, but the PCs only have access to plot/world-altering abilities if the GM allows them. And even if they get access to them, the GM is assured it's a one-time thing.