lemeres |
Don't let people play spellcasters.
True...
I mean...I can understand wanting to limit spellcasters, but most spells are measured in minutes, if not rounds. You would find many a high level wizard loading a crossbow with the week method.
How about remove full casters, and only allow 4 and 6 level casters? Less magic to throw around, and the lists are often specialized for a purpose, which means less spamming of encounter wrecking spells.
hiiamtom |
I would only allow full BAB classes. I would also make rogue full BAB to match.
Then I would make magic items available without changing any of the rules, and force a lot of wealth to be from scrolls or single use magic. Then I would play the game like Numenara; they find a lot of single use or limited use magic items, and permanent magic items are extremely rare.
I would also turn DR/magic to special materials (bone, obsidian, etc), and make BBEG monster types have specific weapons to harm them with. That type stuff.
LazarX |
There are various ways of limiting magic... you can make it more limited casting, you can make it more lengthy casting.... and you can make casting downright dangerous.
In Masque of the Red Death Setting... all spells took one or more rounds to cast, and risked bringing the Taint of the Red Death on the caster, and there was a whole list of spells that simply were not available.
And there were specific alterations... On the Reincarnate Table, any result that gave a nonhuman result meant that the recipient came back as an undead horror that had to be put down. If you did come back succesfully, you came back in the nationality the spell was cast in. When my spouse's English butler was reincarnated at the site of the first modern Olympics... he came back as a Greek athelete. After we put him down three times first.
The Ghost Knight |
The Midnight d20 setting had a feat based magic system. If you left out any specific class (in Midnight it was Channeler) then acquiring spells would be very slow. Also, the setting changes the schools of magic to much more reflect a "Lord of the Rings" style spells instead of lobbing fireballs.
This site has all the Open Content
http://darknessfalls.leaderdesslok.com/
LazarX |
The thing is "limiting spellcasting" can go any of a myriad of directions, as well s combinations of some of them.
The key strategy of setting and rule design is to work backwards... decide what you want as the end result. And define that result in much more specific terms than "limited spellcasting."
For Masque that desired result was that spells would be limited... be lengthy to cast, and magic would have the danger of corruption, no matter how "white" or good-intentioned the caster, because Earth's magic field had been poisoned thousands of years before by Inhotep. The more powerful or more "black" the spell, the greater the chance of corruption.
Magic items by definition, were corruption landmines. Wands were simply too dangerous to make with all the castings required.
Atarlost |
For campaign worlds where magic is real but rare, hidden, and known only to a handful, what tips do you have for limiting spellcasting in game?
I was thinking of making the "spells per day" a "spells per week" restriction instead.
Any other ideas for low-magic flavor?
None of this says casters are weak. If magic is rare, hidden, and known only to a handful it could be because magic is so powerful no one dares teach very many students.
What hidden and known only to a handful actually means is that there will be no magic items or as near to none as makes no difference. You need to offset that with an inherent bonus system or choose another game system.
Wolin |
You could probably do something where it's just really expensive to cast spells, and so only the very rich have the cash to cast spells. Tack on, say, a 10 x spell level squared gp in rare magical material components for every spell and you could quite easily limit common use. Apply that liberally to anything and everything magical.
However, you'll also need to consider how this interacts with supernatural abilities as well, since those are defined as magical. If you're knocking out supernatural abilities as well that's killed most classes, even some of the martials like Monk and Paladin.
Would these low magic restrictions affect monsters as well? Or will you just enjoy your monsters being unchanged and laugh?
A final thing to consider is how you might deal with characters getting master craftsman to make magical items, since that may be the only way they can get ready access to magical items.
darth_borehd |
"Monsters" will be mostly animals and humans.
Occasionally, a vampire or something might turn up, but there will plenty of wooden furniture to make stakes out of and easily opened shutters on the windows. That sort of thing. In general, I'm thinking about +1 cr for every five points of DR. I'm not sure on that part.
Magic items are planned to be found or spontaneously become magical due to events (ever since he used it defend those orphans from that vampire, his sword acts as a +1 undead bane weapon).
The Dragon |
As someone who is currently doing this, and discuss it a lot with another game group who's also doing it, here's some notes:
-Don't allow spellcasting, period. Have a magic system in place which the players must discover at great cost to their characters' sanity, and then the casting itself is costly in terms of damage to statistics. Even with all that, there should be nowhere near the amount of power that spellcasters currently wield.
This has a good idea on how to make it work.
-Expect the power level to be much lower.
-Make mission based games, each session or maybe every two sessions has 1 mission. Missions have maybe 3 combats a piece, and take place over a day, or maybe a couple of days.
When characters are done with a mission, they're heavily beat up, and will need a long time to recuperate. Allow them this time. If you don't, the characters will die, simply because they can't heal hit points and stat damage fast enough.
We use 1 month between missions, which also give people enough time that taking feats start to make sense, which is a nice niche benefit.
That's probably the biggest change, gameplay-wise: the lack of ready healing. A fight 2 with 20 hit points needs a good week to get back to full health after a fight.
The Doomkitten |
Here are my tips:
1. Magic ain't quick. In order to "cast" a spell, somebody with ranks in any of the more esoteric knowledge skills (planes, arcana, etc.) must spend a number of hours equal to the level of the spell preparing the ritual and spend gold pieces equal to 50 x the level of the spell in advance. This way, it gives magic a more esoteric, mysterious feel, rather than just "I cast fireball, things explode." If you still want your players to have access to combat spells, rituals for spells that deal damage instead only cost 5 gold x the level, and once you finish the spell, it is "Bound" to you, and you can cast it once.
2. Magic is dangerous. At the end of a ritual, the one who is casting it must make a Spellcraft check (only Spellcraft, I'll explain why later) with a DC equal to 20+5 x the level of the spell. If they fail it, something bad happens. It may be as simple as the spell literally blowing up in their faces, or something as devious as a streak of extraordinarily bad luck that only some significant sacrifice can end, or it may even summon some sort of evil outsider whose power the player used to attempt to cast the spell. In addition, you may damage or drain a stat in addition to the normal effects of magic.
3. Magic is mysterious. Learning to cast a spell should be worthy of a quest in of itself, even a first level one. Play up the spookiness of what's happening, make the player's question if a bit of knowledge to aid them in their quest is worth the horrors that they go through the get it.
---Addendum: Spellcraft. Spellcraft skill points can only be gained through experience in casting. The rate of gain is up to you, but because you only need Knowledge: Arcana or Planes as a prerequisite to casting the spell, this can lead to interesting situations where an arrogant, knowledgeable professor seeks to cast something, but fails disastrously due to inexperience with actual casting.
3. Make everything magical terrifying. When something magical shows up, make it dangerous, unknown, and terrifying, rather than mundane. Instead of saying, "the zombies walk towards you," say "a horde of broken corpses, putrid with the odor of death and barely recognizable as humans, shamble towards you, emitting a low keening that sends shivers up your spine." In addition, giving descriptions instead of saying the monster type adds to the air of the unknown and mysterious.
Goblin_Priest |
For campaign worlds where magic is real but rare, hidden, and known only to a handful, what tips do you have for limiting spellcasting in game?
I was thinking of making the "spells per day" a "spells per week" restriction instead.
Any other ideas for low-magic flavor?
I'm building a world which is precisely this: a gritty low-magic setting where magic is very rare and feared. Some of the details are still under reflexion, but the main lines are this:
1) E6: Characters cap at level 6. The most awesome warriors and casters of the land? level 6. Anything past lvl 3 is very rare.
2) The material plane has the wild magic planar trait. I actually homebrewed it, though, because I don't like the idea of people spamming low-level spells and randomly provoking high-level effects. New table is about 1/3 chance of doing nothing, 1/3 chance of working in some way or another, and 1/3 chance of doing something bad.
3) Class restriction: In this campaign, characters start as slaves with an NPC class. They need to retrain to adopt a PC class once freed, and thus there's no way for them to find a wizard mentor, for example, as only gnomes have wizards and gnomes aren't on the playable list.
4) Alternative boons: Any class who would gain a new spell level can opt to gain a feat instead. That way, classes like bards are compensated, to avoid having everyone just pick fighter and barbarian.
5) Quest-related artifacts that facilitate the use of spellcasting.
6) Downtime between sessions to allow PCs to heal, craft, earn income, etc. The PCs can start with stuff like broken bronze axes and no armor, and try to earn income to buy better stuff, even if it isn't magical.
7) Point buy system that scales with level, requires "training" to boost stats (up to max allowed by level's point buy). Essentially a hybrid of innate and bought stat upgrades (instead of thousands of gp into a belt of str, dozens of gold and a few days' training per point, as per Ultimate Campaign rules)
My campaign is planned to go from super gritty to having the fate of the world in their hands. Without the artifacts to help with (or bypass) the caster level check to cast magic, that wild magic planar trait is likely to dissuade anyone from picking up spellcasting. My measures are meant to explain and illustrate a low-magic world, while still keeping the premise that the PCs are special and that they could be among the very few in the world who can use magic.
The Wyrm Ouroboros |
Understand that yeah, I have a prepared answer for this - because my own homebrew starts out as a 'magic-poor' system. PCs are 3rd level characters, but they only have half (1500) gold to spend, and all magic items outside alchemical items and healing potions are off the table. BUT ... there are spellcasters - it's just that real, actual magic doesn't exist until you get to 4th level spells.
That might not make sense to you, but all the way back in 1st Edition AD&D, anyone worshipping any god at all, even a made-up one, could become a cleric and 'receive' and cast up to 3rd level spells; anyone who could afford the time off could study and learn to cast spells. Low-level spells become less 'maaaaagic!!' and more 'knooooowledge!!' Spells were a high-density infodump that helped you do something perfectly (once, or for a limited time), get just the right tone of voice to spook somebody, shake someone's self-assurance, give them a pep talk, etc. (For a number of reasons, this works best with the whole 'everyone only really has a handful of HP; above that, and it's your luck, skill, and energy keeping you alive and relatively unharmed.)
Some people have a hard time with the idea, and I can understand why; letting the entire thing be 'nothin' but magic' is an easy fall-back. But most people forget that in both the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Gandalf used real, actual magic less than a handful of times; all the rest of the time it was trickery, hypnotism, flash paper, fireworks, or a quick subtle jab in the ribs ...
Goblin_Priest |
Understand that yeah, I have a prepared answer for this - because my own homebrew starts out as a 'magic-poor' system. PCs are 3rd level characters, but they only have half (1500) gold to spend, and all magic items outside alchemical items and healing potions are off the table. BUT ... there are spellcasters - it's just that real, actual magic doesn't exist until you get to 4th level spells.
That might not make sense to you, but all the way back in 1st Edition AD&D, anyone worshipping any god at all, even a made-up one, could become a cleric and 'receive' and cast up to 3rd level spells; anyone who could afford the time off could study and learn to cast spells. Low-level spells become less 'maaaaagic!!' and more 'knooooowledge!!' Spells were a high-density infodump that helped you do something perfectly (once, or for a limited time), get just the right tone of voice to spook somebody, shake someone's self-assurance, give them a pep talk, etc. (For a number of reasons, this works best with the whole 'everyone only really has a handful of HP; above that, and it's your luck, skill, and energy keeping you alive and relatively unharmed.)
Some people have a hard time with the idea, and I can understand why; letting the entire thing be 'nothin' but magic' is an easy fall-back. But most people forget that in both the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Gandalf used real, actual magic less than a handful of times; all the rest of the time it was trickery, hypnotism, flash paper, fireworks, or a quick subtle jab in the ribs ...
I, personally, don't like this. I find it's way too much of a strech. Many of the stuff in the books lend themselves to this (I remember an old rant for 3.x where, citing the material components, someone was arguing that hardly any of it was magic at all, and that casters were essentially mad scientists).
Some of the effects might be dismissed as "not-magic", but some spells are simply not replicable by non-magical means, even at low levels. Create water? Air Bubble? Dancing Lantern? Those are just outright impossible to achieve through normal means. If you look at the rest of the spell list, most of the spells have no un-magical ways to acheive as per the spell description (and the closest mundane imitation is far off).
"It ain't really magic!" doesn't sit well with me. As for LotR, it's a completely different system, and if you look at various forum or reddit posts, you'll see people who can imitate Gandalf with a lvl 5 cleric, or even with an outright fighter. Everything Gandalf does, a fighter can.
darth_borehd |
"It ain't really magic!" doesn't sit well with me. As for LotR, it's a completely different system, and if you look at various forum or reddit posts, you'll see people who can imitate Gandalf with a lvl 5 cleric, or even with an outright fighter. Everything Gandalf does, a fighter can.
Yes, Middle Earth would have a different magic system. I've heard before that Gandalf's magic would be more like racial abilities of the maiar and his class would be closer to fighter or paladin. However, Middle Earth did have magicians who actually can cast magic spells, but they just didn't take a major part in the books.
The Wyrm Ouroboros |
I, personally, don't like this. I find it's way too much of a strech. Many of the stuff in the books lend themselves to this (I remember an old rant for 3.x where, citing the material components, someone was arguing that hardly any of it was magic at all, and that casters were essentially mad scientists).
Some of the effects might be dismissed as "not-magic", but some spells are simply not replicable by non-magical means, even at low levels. Create water? Air Bubble? Dancing Lantern? Those are just outright impossible to achieve through normal means. If you look at the rest of the spell list, most of the spells have no un-magical ways to acheive as per the spell description (and the closest mundane imitation is far off).
'Create Water' is actually one of my standby examples: the 'spell' is a set of reminders and instructions of where you can find water (where-ever you are), or how to cause it to precipitate in whatever condition you happen to find yourself (on a becalmed boat, in the desert, etc.). As I said, it isn't for everyone - but with acquiescence to the idea, followed by a bit of creativity and leniency from the GM, you can make a go of it.
storyengine |
My homebrew world is magic poor w a twist.
THE FLUFF:
Some mages got together to end a multi-generational magic war and made it impossible to share spells, so no apprentices, scrolls don't work (unless you wrote it for yourself), etc. Within a generation, the magic using community greatly declined and the war ended. This premise is similar to the tower of Babel story in the bible - everyone one once spoke a common language, but God took it away, fostering the separation of nations and cultures. Everything that happens after this is pretty easy to extrapolate.
THE MECHANICS:
A product of low magic use has proven to be greater magic potency (because bigger supply). The spell DC formula adds 1/4 caster level.
Also, we use mana points instead of spells per day. A spell costs level x 3 in mana (min 1 for 0 lvl spells). Starting mana is a percentage of Primary Stat + 1 level (depending on if full or partial caster). Thus a 4th level spell is 12pts (4 x 3). Each target, rd or min of spell duration costs 1 mana. There are customer feats that 1) allow spending mana in excess of your mana pool - called overcasting - which causes magic HP dmg. Magic HP dmg cannot be healed except via rest (allows magic power similar to base game, but it takes on a hail mary flavor), 2) reduces the cost of certain schools to 2 mana per level (to simulate spell specialists), 3) allows a caster to get rds or minutes per level = to his level for a selected school by default (instead of having to buy duration, etc w add'l mana).