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When you sit down at a table for an exciting game of Pathfinder, what do you feel like is a perfect level of magic for your setting? Do you prefer the old school style, where magic is rare and mysterious and peasants fear Wizards when they enter into town? Or do you prefer a world so ingrained with magic that it can almost pass for a modern world? Something inbetween?
Example: Some friends and I were joking around tonight about a hotel inspired by Japanese Coffin Hotels, but instead of tiny coffin sized rooms, each tenant would get a tiny, portable hole attached to a wall to slide into. A single room could have dozens of portable holes on the wall!
If a PC brought that idea up, would it fly in your game? Or would you knock it down for being too ridiculous?
How much or little magic exists in your perfect fantasy world?
I don't limit myself. There are times when I like to play low (or even no) magic fantasy. Other times I prefer over the top, highly magical fantasy realms.
Either extremes tend to require work and modification to the system. I've also noticed that low magic campaigns tend to have low level martial characters, while high magic campaigns tend to center around high level play (and planar travel).
Well, I've only had one campaign that I call a real campaign, the one I use now. And it's definitely high fantasy! Magic is commonplace and regulated, though ordinary people usually don't have more than a few levels in a PC class, and thus the higher level magic is only found in the more powerful, prominent NPCs and of course, caster players.
In addition to magicians and lesser magic items being relatively common, there's also a fair amount of magical infrastucture among the two societies that were skilled enough with magic to implement it. Though simpler societies who don't practice magic in depth don't have such significant amenities.
As for the portable hole hotel, that sounds outrageously expensive compared to just, making rooms. Portable Holes cost 20,000 gold apiece! Far more than a room would cost to build. It would also be very dangerous! all someone has to do is peel a hole off the wall and whoever's in it would suffocate in a few minutes!!
Magitech all the way. We got trains, urbanization, service oriented economy, and all that jazz. It was inspired quite a bit by anime (which I enjoy), but it's not a full on anime setting. I also discovered that you can do high fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror with the same magitech setting. It's all in how dark and gruesome the adventure plots are, how powerful the characters are (the darker the game, the lower the character levels and point buys and the more powerful the enemies), what monsters you choose and how you play your villains, how corrupt or honest and how capable or useless you play the local authorities as being, how you describe the scenery, and how much power the PCs have to fix whatever the problem at hand is. So, I have a high magic setting with abundant magitech, and I play high fantasy, but I can (and plan to) use the exact same setting for dark fantasy and horror.
When you sit down at a table for an exciting game of Pathfinder, what do you feel like is a perfect level of magic for your setting? Do you prefer the old school style, where magic is rare and mysterious and peasants fear Wizards when they enter into town? Or do you prefer a world so ingrained with magic that it can almost pass for a modern world? Something inbetween?
Example: Some friends and I were joking around tonight about a hotel inspired by Japanese Coffin Hotels, but instead of tiny coffin sized rooms, each tenant would get a tiny, portable hole attached to a wall to slide into. A single room could have dozens of portable holes on the wall!
If a PC brought that idea up, would it fly in your game? Or would you knock it down for being too ridiculous?
How much or little magic exists in your perfect fantasy world?
I tend to play with high magic. I really like how Eberron used magic as technology. If I could combine that with all the various things Golarion has I would have an almost perfect campaign world. I have thought about bringing some things over to Golarion, but I have not had time to write it up.
As for magic being rare I have always hoped Iron Heroes would be remade, but with fixed mechanics, and a campaign setting with more depth.
I love high magic like MtG high magic. I also like high tech as well as high magitech. Dragonstar was one of my all time favorite settings followed by Everton.
When magic starts to be magic as technology thats where I draw the line. That destroys any sense of immersion for me. I prefer games that resemble the dark ages and magic is common enough that people know it exists and may have seen a local driud or hedge mage but aren't going to have seen magical weapons, dragons and the like.
In my long-running homebrew world, the ability to use magic is a gift from the gods. No one knows precisely what it is, and it is extremely rare, occurring in approximately 1 per 500,000 live births. Children born with the gift are almost always found and spirited away for training, with wars even being fought on occasion over exceptionally gifted babies. In a world of about 1 billion people, there are approximately 2,000 total users of "true magic" (split between wizards, sorcerers, oracles and alchemists - though mostly wizards), not counting dabblers like paladins and rangers.
This might sound terrible for martials, but the other side of the coin in this world is a long feat group/chain (21 in total) which is an expansion (and power-up) on the Ultimate Scoundrel luck feats from 3.5 and represents divine favor of the type received by many ancient Greek heroes (eg. Odysseus) who had gods looking out for them. These feats are open to all classes, but because they start small and scale up in potency the more one takes, are most useful to feat-rich classes like Fighter and Rogue (who can take them in place of talents).
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Basically, I try to mix the grit and realistic feel of low-fantasy (paying for a raise dead spell? wut? shops where you can buy magic items? charlatanism!) with the wonder of old mythology in which the protagonists are really and truly special, often touched by divinity and not wholly of this world.
RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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I don't know whether it would be called "high-magic", "low-magic" or something else, but I prefer to play with the level of magic that fits with the default mechanical assumptions of the game. This is a result of these two factors:
1) Who has time to re-work the role of magical gear (up or down) in character progression?
2) Having the mechanical realities of gameplay fail to synch up with what I'm told should be my reaction to the environment is hugely immersion-breaking to me.
Basically, for me, it's just "pick a path and commit; keep it consistent". And since I don't have time to make all the accommodations for picking a path other than the CRB's default assumptions, that's where I tend to land.