Why D&D CAN'T BE Low Magic.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- This is a weird one. In this video, I argue that the system of D&D, specifically 5th Edition is largely fundamentally incompatible with low magic settings, from a base system perspective. I explain my belief that the reality of magic necessitates a dramatic shift in our conception of worlds which run on D&D's internal logic, and that any change to that requires significant work.
#worldbuilding #dnd #dnd5e #fantasy #magic
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I like my high-magic fantasy settings to have the illusion of being low-magic. The magic is out there and not too hard to find, if you know where to look, but every mage worth their slots knows that there's ALWAYS stronger mage who prefers you don't rock the boat and bring too much attention. For every mad mage who wants to be a god, theres a cabal of stronger wizards who don't want to be bothered with people who want to treat them as gods.
Ooh, that's a good one
The lower magic setting I play in just caps casting around level 10, so mages can't climb as high
The Pax Arcanum, one might call it :)
@@myboatforacar ooooohhhhhhhhhhh me like
@@MarkD5678oops, remembered the long-forgotten Latin, the word "pax" is feminine so it'd be "Pax Arcana" 😅
Have fun!
and when magic due to power hungry mages gets a bad reputation as the root of why they become power hungry due to the ignorance of those who don't use magic?
So what you're really saying, is that D&D-inspired anime is getting the worldbuilding right, with their ubiquitous low-level spellcasting, and commercially available teleportation circles? Neat.
Hell, the spell for Teleportation Circle outright says most major cities have one
I mean, yeah. Why wouldn't a society with magic do that? It would be by far the most common use for magic. Most people aren't going to hunt goblin bands, but they'd still want something like a fire cantrip to heat up their bath water or a mage hand to clean those hard to reach spaces.
Aldo emphasis major cities and organizations because I actually broke down how much it would cost to make one of those circles. You need 365 castings of the spell done daily, the spell has a consumed costly material component, and if you aren't an organization with the spell available to your members you're going to have to pay for the caster to do the work on top of that. It costs hundreds of thousands of gold to set up a permanent circle network.
Edit: Clarified I meant the hundreds of thousands was for a network, not an individual portal.
@@KingZolem It costs 18,250 gp for a permanent circle.
@AnarchySystem 1 permanent circle. Which is only mildy useful on its own. To set up a usable network would drive the cost up greatly. I'm sorry if my meaning with that didn't come through clearly. Rereading it I see I gave the impression that I was talking about a singular circle by itself. I forgot to reference that the hundreds of thousands were for a circle NETWORK, not just the one circle itself. My apologies.
A question for you to consider: how effective could fantasy monsters and other threats be in undermining the progress of a civilization equipped with magic?
Alternatively one with low or no magic as well
In the beginning a lot, but there is a turning point. Once a civilization can search for potential spellcasters, introduces mandatory education to find them that progress becomes harder and harder to stop.
@@Dreamfox-df6bg Also developing better weapons and techniques to fight monsters unless you have some legendary monster constantly nuking them back to the stone age
Use how firearms led to technological change in armor, transportation, law and growth of society
(Changes in metallurgy and understanding of chemistry drove gunpowder development quickly followed by legal constraints in its development)
@zacharyweaver276 oh yes... That's basically the home brew campaign setting we play in. We did it before mass effect (if you were wondering).
There is a key problem with equivocating innate spell like abilities with innate spellcasting. Spellcasting is a system used in 5e is to hand wave things such as a vampire being able to dissappear or drain your energy. Innate spellcasting isn't necessarily an ability to utilize other magics but rather a system laid on to explain supernatural abilities.
Okay, so what about the elven high magic? It's in the lore (forgotten realms, at least), there are rituals to perform magic effects, the more elves participating, and more powerful magics are possible.
And it is part of their culture, and it can do things above "leveled magic". And magic is part of the elven race because their creators' gods are also a magic god (not the god of the magic, but a god that magic is part of their domains).
In the settings worlds, in lore, there is a plentiful of groups of magic users, places to study and practice magic, many know powerful magic creatures, and ancient dragons with stabilized territory. Just isn't on the rule books and the 4th and 5th editions are in the timeline of recuperation from a catastrophe event that make magic more rare, but is recovering (a mage casted a 15º level spell, killed the goddess of magic by arrogance/accident/stupidity and shutdown all magic for a time).
@@Zarlos01 so, the example given was Yuan-ti, which are gifted abilities from their serpent God. I don't necessarily believe that equivocates them to spell casters.
As for high elven magic, while this is established as a cultural norm I'd argue that the ability to teach your kids an algebraic expression over and ove through generations does not translate to true innate understanding of magic
@@FtechJack I'd just say high elves are uniquely gifted in magic, possess more supernatural abilities than the average elf subspecies, and have a culture of sharing their findings as naturally talented mages with each other to compound the effects. They don't all start off with a crash course in spellcasting. Its just they have abilities, and a talent for it which they then share as a community.
Exactly. One's natural abilities shouldn't be treated as if it's just another spell slot. They're there to emulate the different natural abilities and perks of different races and species irl. Foxes are very clever and extremely good at escaping and hiding, but it's not as though they have to use some sort of incantation to do it. It's just their natural ability and proclivity because of WHAT they are. The whole time you try to chase a fox down, you will be dealing with these "magic" abilities; it's not like it has to consciously decide "I will use Hide in Foliage now" to very very effectively hide in the foliage.
Too many magic systems do what Elder Scrolls have done with racial and species abilities and made them essentially just another magic technique you can use once a day or once an hour or w/e, and it makes it feel pretty un-special.
@FtechJack yuan-ti are 100% spellcasters, not just dudes with powers. They're based on old school sword and Sorcery villains. Their whole thing is that they make offerings to the snake god in exchange for magical knowledge.
Spending a year creating a teleportation circle could be like the TV show Northern Exposure where a small town in Alaska paid for a doctors medical degree and he had to go work in the town for 5 years as his payment.
With magic so common amongst peoples and creatures guards (in terms of a city watch or police) seem limited. Magic responsive officers should be a lot more common. Maybe they'd be special officers mostly stationed near government positions. But even non-magical watch should have some training to recognise various enchantment and illusion spells so they can report accurately to those specialists or handle things themselves.
Also I'd love a video on the soul-based economics of the blood war. It seems not well thought out.
In a world where adventurers and heroes that fight all sorts of magical creatures are common, every remotely trained guard should have undergone a "it's probably NOT the wind, but a magic creature or spellcaster"-course.
Followed by the "an arrow to the knee is just a nuisance until the next short rest"-first-aid-course.
Travis's character in Critical Role: Exandria Unlimited: Calamity was just that. A non-magic user in a city full of mages who was an expert in recognizing and countering magic.
In Esoteric Enterprises, you get to play somethin closer to a B/X wizard with a few small additions like ritual magic. You get a d4 HD and at level 3 you have a mighty three spells per day. A junkie with a glock is a big threat.
The city SWAT team are effectively 3HD blokes with good weapons, good armour, an effective organization and the legal power of a nation-state behind them. All police have the power to summon more police. You are very small and the state is very large, your best protection as a criminal is that they don't know what you're doing. It is very hard for a wizard or any other occult underworld people to outrun the state in the long run without going into hiding in the underworld.
And this is why I love Ebberon. It's everything I ever wanted D&D to be
@@hc256 magical nukes and robots
Came here to point out Eberron. Glad to see a like-minded individual.
Eberron does so many things right.
For anyone who doesn't know eberron: Eberron uses the concept of wide magic, where low level magic is commonly available for a price. Big cities are lit by everbright lanterns, some version of speaking stones are installed at fixed places and used for long range communication, inn keepers use prestidigitation to flavour food etc.. Very cool if you like the idea of widespread magic forming your world.
@@dodobarthel2249 Indeed, it's a setting I draw a lot of inspiration on for most of my own world building
Eberron sounds like the typical magitek setting. Magical trains and all.
In the 3.5e Dungeon Master's Guide, there is a method of randomly generating towns and their population. Player classes make up a small percentage of the total population, but in a small city of about 10k people there's still like 50 of each spellcasting class living there, depending on your rolls. You generate the highest level NPC of that class with a roll, then there's 2 of half that level, 2 of half that level again, and keep going until you hit level 1. If you get a level 10 NPC, that's 2 level 5s, 4 level 3, 8 level 2s, 16 level 1s, for a total of 23 NPCs, and larger cities roll multiple times to find the highest level NPC. For the biggest city size, metropolis, you're looking at massive numbers of spellcasters. And even with the smaller towns, it's possible to have a handful of spellcasters simply living there.
Typical 3.5 W
Another game made the important distinction about the player character to justify their backgrounds
"In a world of farmers, traders and politicians, YOU are the troublemakers" something along the lines so you could have better skills, better stats, and the need of be the showoffs, it was a d100 BRP compatible game/system
I just want to point out that if you take a lot of DnD settings at face value, a city of 10,000 people is not a small city it is rather a moderate one.
@@williamstokes4282 Maybe, but that's what 3.5e classes as a small city. There are like three or four sizes of city above it, with a Metropolis at the top.
@@WandererEris and that's what's interesting about most DnD settings, they aren't what they seem to be at face value. The forgotten realms seem to be a mid mediaeval society but are functionally closer to a renaissance one or a even latter one. They have technology like Full Plate Armor, Spellcasting has superseded or at least slowed the development of firearms and not to mention that there are technically Nukes on Toril.
Eberron. You're exactly describing Eberron.
this
Best setting I’ve run or played so far.
Oh i couldn't agree more. I would speculate that casters above fifth level are rare. But rare in the way a new mercedes is on the street. Out in the boonies you might see one in six towns. But in the city there'll be a good dozen
Magic absolutely has to be commonplace in the standard dnd world. Hell mystra is known to occasionally make someone a sorcerer just for the hell of it.
The reason i would speculate magic wont cause industrial revolutions boils down to secrecy and ego.
Many archmages might be picking apart the fabric of reality studying and crafting spells (some of which might even become widespread) but he like most old time artisans, keeps his secrets close.
There are cases where techniques of engineering were held back from widespread use for decades amd decades more before someone thought to use it in a more efficient method
For example. Gunpowder was invented *centuries* before it was used in the most basic cannon. Or even a reasonable grenade. And part of it was the means of making it was closely guarded, and another because the people who knew it, knew it as fireworks not explosives
Yes there were rare cases of black powder being used as weapons, like the explosive talismans often associated with ninjas, but they were also more like a flash bang than a grenade.
In modern times we've gotten used to different disciplines cross pollinating ideas, but in the old times that was infinitely rarer.
Part of why i like artificers is because their very theme puts them as the person who mixes disciplines and industrializes magic.
But its fair to say that a wizard will look at an artificer and see a magic school drop out that is wasting magic on silly things. Even if in reality those silly things could.. say completely revolutionize farming and ensure more food for a kingdom.
Hell even today certain astrophysicists and other experts in their are known to be very closed minded to new ideas or new approaches.
So while i absolutely believe a wizard could link every major city in a country, and even larger towns with bustling trade. They are much more likely to be unwilling to actually operate the circle for a trader bringing freshly cured leather from the southern isles.
Wizards especially have a reputation for isolating themselves in their towers and not interacting with townsfolk much. And this tendancy seems to magnify with their magical skill. Hell halaster turned a dwarven ruin into an insanely elaborate dungeon, full of monsters and traps and more so he doesnt have to deal with anyone under any circumstances. Ever. And is possibly the Greatest living wizard in forgotten realms.
Agreed, but what if a kingdom furthers education to find those that may be capable to cast spells? Even if a student returns back home because he has reached his limit with level 1 spells, the kingdom can give him scrolls for emergencies.
If the magic school is run by the kingdom, many will be thankful for making their lives better. Supporting magical studies will further strengthen loyalty.
Sure, there will always be oddballs, but what if these wizards are able to stay in contact with their families and friends? If they keep their social connections?
Without the need to look for a master to be trained or the possibility to be left alone with your studies because there are enough others pick up your slack when it comes to people asking for your services? What if that is regulated by the kingdom and you have to go through the bureaucracy for less important things?
There’s no reason to assume artificers would be any more likely to share secrets then a wizard
Actually, regarding your points about weaponizing gunpowder, it's quite wrong. The first reason it took so long to weaponize gunpowder was because knowledge was lacking in how to utilize it, or even in how it worked. The second reason was material sciences; many of the basic concepts we acknowledge as being integral to gunsmithery and cannoneering required a fairly strict level of metallurgy to produce weapons that could withstand the explosion and use it as a launching force. The first grenades were actually ceramic spheres that would explode in a fairly lethal shrapnel spray, over a short distance, though variability in fuse duration meant that they were dangerous to the force using them too; they were often buried as remote-triggerable landmines as well.
@@Dreamfox-df6bg A kingdom could do the opposite as well though. Say it has standardized schools and a system that searches out kids who are capable. With the schools being incredibly conservative and controlling. Only teaching certain things and banning others along with purposely restricting the use of magic for anything bit directly approved by the state.
One thing here I think is kinda being missed is that the rules in 5e are kinda disparate by design, its intended to be broad and appeal a variety of tastes and styles. Examples like the teleportation circle being much more reasonable to use than naval transport make sense if you approach them as worldbuilding functions, rather than as game rules designed for aspirational players who if they are asking about these, are probably excited by the concept of having teleport points or owning a ship or a caravan or whatever, the assumption is some degreee of DM fiat in play in the background to create the kind of setting that fits the desired tone and aesthetic.
This shoddy craftsmanship of the rules is why 5e is not that good.
Eberron was literally created to be a world reflective of the amount of magic implied by the core rules (of 3.5, but 5e basically follows most of the same key assumptions). Magitech is absolutely ubiquitous there, even with only a couple percent of people being anything more than Commoners or other NPC classes. Eberron, much moreso than Greyhawk or Forgotton Realms, should be viewed as the default setting of modern D&D. We've known this for longer than many players have been alive; it should be anything but controversial.
And actually, Eberron really didn't go far enough. It doesn't even have a Wish economy or Teleport Circle-based trade, which it very much should have even though it basically caps at level 15 for all practical purposes. For that you want something more like Emperor Tippy's Tippyverse, which has distinct versions to most accurately reflect the rules text of 3.5 and 5e. And even Emperor Tippy shied away from particularly abusive quirks of the rules like the Commoner Railgun.
if I remember correctly Eberon had wide spread low level magic however high level magic was extremely rare if existed at all
@@einkar4219 A single ambitious 11th level Wizard is capable of Planar Binding Efreeti for basically limitless Wishes and thereby kickstarting the entire Tippyverse. A sufficiently clever Artificer exploiting the spell list rules to cheese the minimum caster level could do it by level 6 if not level 3. The core of Eberron's trade networks are based on Lesser Planar Binding, available to Wizards at level 9.
Eberron is v recent, later than the magic ubiquity decisions. D&D's had a number of 'default settings', all high magic.
@@thekaxmax I don't think anything that's been around for literally 40% of the lifespan of D&D can be considered "very recent".
And sure, other settings like Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms are technically high magic, but they are very inconsistent in their application of it. In notable and explicit contrast with Eberron. There is a distinct quantitative and qualitative difference there that was the fundamental point of what I was talking about.
@@watcher314159 I'm talking about how they're presented and published, not described. High magic.
DnD magic wasn't created with world building in mind. It was created with small unit tactics in mind. In a realistic world there would be a much larger selection of utility spells, and a relatively few combat spells that could be up cast. Darkness is only useful in small unit combat; in a large combat you would move around the darkened area, and target it with an artillery volley. Darkness is pretty useless in any other situation. I doubt anyone would put in the time and money to research such a spell, considering how rare spell creators are. Also, a number of utility spells have cost prohibitive material components. look at continual flame. I think the lantern makers guild must be more powerful than the wizards guild for that
Darkness can move with an object, be covered to be suppressed (and then dropped onto the ground as a free action), and it also invalidates any spells with a 'that you can see' clause. In combination with the right other tools and spells, it certainly could be effective in a large scale combat, especially in the hands of shadow sorcerers or warlocks with Devil's Sight.
Off the top of my head:
Cast darkness on a sling bullet and fling it into your opponent's command center right as you begin a critical charge, adding increased confusion and delaying the correct tactical response.
Send in the elite paladin/warlock multiclass squad shrouded with darkness - mechanically the high AC in combination with imposed disadvantage makes them nearly invincible against attack rolls. A couple high enough level to provide protection auras and high lay on hands values makes them very resilient to magical responses as well (in addition to the difficulty targeting into darkness spells). Throw in one or two 7th+ level Oath of Ancients paladins, and they become a *very* tough nut to crack. Flavor-wise, the ideas still hold: heavy armor in real life is most susceptible to precision attacks - daggers thrust through openings in a grapple, longbows firing into the neck and joints, etc. These would be nigh impossible when your target is shrouded in darkness.
I'm sure clever tacticians can think of a hundred other ideas with Darkness. Many 5e spells have realistic uses in large scale combat. I agree that DnD magic and systems wasn't made with these *in mind*, but the system does have a great deal of versatility in the right hands, even out of the main context it was designed for.
Regarding prohibitive costs for spells like continual flame: this is highly contingent on the nature of the economy as ran by the DM. I tend to treat a gold piece as worth roughly 20 bucks, and notice a similar tendency among many other DMs. (Realistically, the melt value of gold is closer to 400 bucks for a 1/50th of a pound, but there also isn't a 10:1 ratio between gold and silver IRL). 50 gp for continual flame is 1000 dollars on that metric. Would I normally shell out a grand for a lantern? No, but if electric flashlights don't exist, and lamp oil is relatively expensive - maybe 50 bucks for a gallon that might burn for 250 hours or so, and I'm building something where I'd like a light to remain burning for years without maintenance (don't forget the labor cost of relighting braziers, in addition to the fuel cost), it starts to make good sense. Continual flame can burn for millennia if not dispelled! We're *saving* tremendous amounts of money if it burns for just 10 years - and they can be recycled and repurposed infinitely, assuming we don't have 5th level delinquent wizards running around dispelling them all the time.
Plus it doesn't generate heat, which means it won't burn your house down. Also worth considering.
true
I'll go further: magic that hurt people would get those that used it put in prison and/or killed.
I stand by the claim that the Forgotten Realms, from its inception in Greenwood’s mind, is one of the highest magic settings ever created. If it’s second to anything in that regard, it would only be to the Warcraft series.
Forgotten Realms has a lot of relatively high-level people kicking around. Not just iconic characters like Elminster and others but you will routinely run into level 6 thieves running local spy rings or level 5 bards working the local dance halls. The gods are more active through their agents.
And even Warcraft started as a relatively low magic world.
This may not be true for all races, but the DMG suggests giving any deep gnome or drow npc you create the innate spellcasting feature, so those are two examples of races where the average member can be expected to know at least one or two spells.
EDIT: tieflings too
Everyone can use technology (magic), few people (wizards) just use it better than others.
Kinda like how everyone can use computers but very few know how to do coding.
I had a half-elf that used his cultural knowledge about crystal singing and family practice of jewelry making to produce the arcane equivalent of a circuit-board in his armor and equipment, just one player's real world knowledge applied in a fantasy setting without breaking a single rule!
I remember I had that concept during a discussion on how to fix High Magic Guardian Spice or whatever it was called
Any Sufficiencly advanced science is indistinguishable from magic? Does that apply here?
@@Dojibu Not in this instance, technically. Magic, in this context, is the field of study involving the Weave and Mana, such as Geology being the field of study for Rocks and the composition of the Planet. So, if D&D society advanced far enough and followed our trajectory despite the differences, you could get a Bachelor's in Psychology, Geology, and Artifice as an example
Early dnd was much more low magic. It was the jump to 3rd that made things more magical.
Yup 2E was very low magic, though 3E was still much lower than 4E & 5E. Unless we're talking about Eberron. Eberron has magic coming out the ears.
@@DefaultFlame Eberron was built on the mechanical understanding of how 3.5 magic worked. That is why it felt very high magic. It took magic item making as an idea and nearly industrialized it. Early ADnD had settings like Greyhawk which had powerful magic users, but they were a greedy few. Same for the forgotten realms, which had few and power hungry organizations kinda controlling magic use.
Aside from Greyhawk, which is debatable, name one TSR setting that was low magic. All the ones I can think of are high magic.
Dark Sun
Planescape
Spelljammer
Birthright
Ravenloft
Council of Wyrms
All high magic. Just because it was easier to kill wizards back in 2e ADHD doesn't mean any of those settings were low magic.
And no. The minor fringe settings that got swallowed up by Forgotten Realms don't count.
@@CitanulsPumpkin forgot about dragon lance and mystara there.
@@bavettesAstartes Right. Dragonlance is a high magic setting with its wizard academies and its dragon apocalypse.
The only info I recall about Mystara is from one poorly edited video where a guy was describing how the world was made up of different medieval European civilizations, but they were shuffled around to be on different parts of the map, and they were all engaged in a version of the War of the Roses that rivaled WWI.
Counterargument: maybe im built different and my worldbuilding is good enough to get around this mechanical dissonance
depends 100% on what world you're building. I would, for example, not use D&D at all for a low-magic setting--too many changes to existing material to make that worth doing. Example: look at the amount of work they did to make Dark Sun work.
This is why i love Eberron, 1st, 2nd and some 3rd level spells are common place and the utility spells are mass produced or at most a Trade skill, to use Knock for example your local locksmith may know Knock as a ritual for particularly stubborn locks and may sound like he hits it with a sledgehammer, however if you barricade a door and seal it with magic, the guard wont just hammer it down until they can find a locksmith that knows Knock to come and put a civilian in hames way! No they have a disc that casts Knock and blows the door off like a R6 Siege breaching charge. Meanwhile 4th and 5th level magic is considered to be on the cutting edge of research for governmental, commercial, and public use.
I think this is one of those things that need to be decided on a table-by-table basis. Some players play D&D like traditional high fantasy, while others prefer something more grounded and gritty. Things like resurrection may be completely ordinary at one table, but a one-of-a-kind miracle at another. I imagine most people fall somewhere in between those two extremes.
Those players would probably be better suited playing a different system than 5th edition dungeons and dragons. You have to modify the system pretty heavily to work in low magic settings.
@@pedrogarcia8706 Well, that's certainly one way of doing things. Another is looking like the Dark Sun setting and using some of the tools from that campaign, one of which was referenced in this video: a setting being cut off from the other planes of existence. But there are others as well, like forbidding spells of say 5th level or higher, for example.
TL;DR: There are ways of making D&D work just fine in a low-magic setting.
@@daniell1483 There is no dark sun supplement for dnd 5e. That's literally what I'm saying. dark sun is from a previous edition, and just banning all high level spells changes the balance pretty heavily. 5e is designed around high magic and if you try to make it work for low magic, you are homebrewing pretty heavily to the point that it's barely 5e anymore.
@@pedrogarcia8706 People regularly homebrew the hell out of their games. Not to mention there are plenty of other ways of altering the game, I pointed out an example of what that could look like.
@@daniell1483 glad you agree
Its cool that DnD did have an empire of mages who lived in floating cities held in air by the wizards who ruled them. they were however destroyed by a force of magic eating creatures and they eventually nuked themselves and the creatures, kinda but not really setting the entire world back to the stone age in terms of magical progress.
I took inspiration from that when I made my own homebrew world
setting it some 1000 years after the god of magic dies, causing magic to slowly fizzle out as the gods presence fades over the centuries.
their death also kicked off a domino effect which lead to many of the major powers crumbling and dying out.
So now the players are living in a sort of post apocalyptical world full of lost knowledge and forsaken shadows of former great civilizations.
There are still plenty of spellcasters in the world, but no one can naturally go higher than 5th level and those who can are far and few in-between.
then an Arch-wizardd named Karsis created a crown to become a god
@@fangslore9988No, Karsus created a *spell* to become a god. The crown was just shoehorned in as a component of the spell, which we aren't even supposed to know because Mystra yeeted all knowledge of the spell into space and made the spell itself impossible to cast. The spell was 12th level, the only 12th level spell to ever exist, and it was why Mystra made spells above 9th level impossible to cast.
@@barbarianandy the Crown is the spell, Karsis bound the spell to the crown provided the Netherstones are in its setting which is why it can still grant godhood to the one who completes it providing they have Karsis' Netheriese weave which is why it can grant godhood canonically to gale if that were to be your choice in Baldurs gate 3. the Netheriese weave is shattered and scattered in the most deep hidden places where Mystra hoped that no one could find them and put in objects she bound the weave too. Gale happened to have found 1 such fragment in the form of the orb that buried into his chest when he broke the binding spells.
@@fangslore9988 The spell, Karsus' Avatar, was a spell that targets a god and kills them and then the caster takes their place.
If they retconned all that for the sake of some dumbfuck crown MacGuffin then fuck this, the FR lore can't ever remain fucking consistent.
If the spell were bound to the Crown then the crown should be powerless as Mystra made spells beyond 12th level impossible. The reason why Karsus' spell failed was because he chose the dumbest possible target: Mystryl. Gale even says this.
Edit: Read the Annals of Karsus. It explicitly says that the spell is Karsus' alone and that the crown is simply one part of it, along with an Orb and a Sceptre. The Crown absorbs and attracts magical knowledge and gives the wearer dominion over themselves.
I love that story. A race of beings that are fully immune to magic are attacking my magic empire, so I develop a spell that lets me swap places with a god. Which god do I decide to swap spots with? Bahamut? Tyr? Tempus? Nah. How about the goddess of magic? What could possibly go wrong!
I think D&D having a lot of magic is dope and I LOVE thinking about all the ways magic would influence society, even if there WERE only a handful of magic users. Personally I'm watching this video for my own worldbuilding though, lmao.
I think it was a Colville video that introduced me to the idea of a certain percentage of people CAN be 1st-level adventurers, and each additional level makes that pool smaller.
By that logic, my setting's population of 58,750 only has 389 people capable of casting spells above 4th level.
Which video was that one? It sounds familiar.
The 2e black book "high level campaigns" had a wonderful chart of leveled people per population. It was not conservative either!
In our game, it ended up being that any village with a few hundred people probably had a 6-7th level someone there, and dozens of lower level people.
It was awesome to play like that. The PCs were still heroes, but the world was full of capable people with other ideas...
That's tiny. Ancient Greece alone had 7-10 million people. That should be 389 people in a single city can cast spells above 4th level, in a city a quarter the size of Athens.
I know 1e has the math that in a low density but high interest adventuring area the ratio of leveled to 0th leveled NPCs is 1 in 50. In more heavily developed places (cities, towns) that number drops to 1 in 5000. Extremes. 1 in 1000 is suggested to be a better mean across a frontier kingdom with a footprint of a few hundred square miles and a million souls. So in this example, 1000 adventurers, of all classes, exist. That number then needs to be further broken down by class. Fighters don't typically get to cast spells, nor thieves. That's a much smaller pool of potential spellcasters. And for simplicity half of the pool you have left is of 1st level, half of that 2nd, half of that 3rd, etc... How many mid level wizards are their really? Everyone would know their name.
But I don't think that implies you get a high magic setting from it. For one thing, not every wizard is going to be able to cast the spells of great reknown. Sometimes, you're just unlucky, and fireball is not one of the spells you'll ever be able to cast (without the intercession of wish.) Too bad.
Commenting in case anyone links the video
I would love to see older edition (specifically 1e/2e) magic being covered by you
Stick with BX lol
@@spudsbuchlaw Or your B/X clone of choice. They're mostly compatible with eachother.
As a old player. D&d Dungeon's Master Guide from 3 and 3.5 have an actual table for calculation on how many PC class npcs a community should have. And it includes spellcasters...
There was a sourcebook for 2nd Ed which actually had a low magic D&D campaign. Pretty cool idea, honestly.
One thing I loved to think about when it comes to 2E was the suggestion in the books to homebrew an early bronze age setting. Just think about it, a wizard having to bring an ox cart or two filled with clay tablets everywhere to memorize his spells.
To me that's hilarious.
Edit: Here's the part I'm talking about from the 2E DMG, chapter 7: Magic:
"There is no standard size or shape for a spell book.
[...]
The spell book's size and shape is determined largely by the culture of the wizard who owns it.
[...]
The Egyptians would have used a rolled scroll of papyrus, with several required to make a book. Even more cumbersome, the ancient Babylonians would have used clay tables [sic] marked in cuneiform and dried.
[...]
Often a wizard's complete set of spell books occupies several shelves of his library, especially when the character reaches the highest levels. At this point, it is no longer practical for the character to carry all of his spell books with him when he travels.
Therefore, many wizards opt to make traveling spell books.
The traveling spell book is a more selective, more portable version of the character's complete spell books (although there is little that can be done to make clay tablets portable.) In the traveling spell book, the wizard places only those spells he believes he will need while traveling.
There is no limit on which spells can be included, but a traveling spell book has a limited number of pages. Thus, a high-level wizard may need several traveling spell books to contain all the spells he thinks are necessary."
Which ones was that? I know they did a number of historical settings like A Mighty Fortress where magic is less pronounced. John Dee isn't going to run out and fling fireballs at the spanish fleet, but he might sit in a chamber and try to conjure bad weather through a ritual.
@@SusCalvin The Complete Fighter's Handbook. Within it is a whole chapter on how to write fighter-focused campaigns, which included low magic campaigns.
@@DefaultFlame which sourcebook?
@@federerlkonig330 I wrote that in my post?
But in case you want it spelled out properly: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide, chapter 7: Magic.
IE, it's in vanilla, not a sourcebook.
The general assumption of a dnd setting is that it’s post-apocalyptic. That there used to be a lot more magic in the past but there’s less now
Certain suspicions that it was a Wish fueled apocalypse. Perhaps there is some wicked magic tech out there.. but figuring out how it ticks or cloning it blindly is a serious investment in time and resources and skill.
Depends on the setting.
Tho to me it seems like a highly advanced period of it's time.
Chiromancy from ad&d puts it into light by saying the tech always exists somewhere but not common, than at a certain point with printing and all it explodes everywhere.
It also had variants like a wizard cabal.
I've not seen that in any of the three published settings I've played and GMd in.
FR, sorta, cos of Netheril. But the amount of magic didn't change much, just the highest level of spells went away.
One magic user could literally change the world, especially if they got to be mid or high level. Even having a few cantrips and first level spells gives you a decent advantage over other people depending what they are and how clever you are with using them you could easily get yourself a lot of extra time and income. Prestidigitation alone would revolutionize basic mundane tasks that are otherwise time consuming at the best of times.
as Grung makes the point of in his vid on Prestidigitation. :P
Want something to do horrible things to an economy? Fabricate as a ritual, and a magic workshop that allows you to do the ritual at a lower level than normal. With the workshop being big enough to take half a dozen people. Would cost a stupid amount to enchant, but think of what you could do with it!
Esp if you could make an advanced version of Fabricate--probably done by Gondians--that goes past the 5' cube limitation.
Anyone for a 5' cube calculating clock with decorations and many different faces and controls and a long-duration high-accuracy escapement and a jewelled and engraved case--made in 10 min by one person, rather than 2 dozen craftsmen over the period of a year or so?
As someone who has read every editions player handbook cover to cover I’m often surprised by how low Magic people THINK dnd is, but it’s not. LOTR is Low Magic, in dnd literally 1 in 5 people have some form of Magic.
I think it really depends on the setting. Forgotten Realms has a lot of magic around, and relatively many mid-level people. Running into a level 6 fighter or a level 5 wizard is not a huge deal.
Some are much harder on the level 0 world, and even a level 3 bloke is rare.
Other games like WFRP, BRP games etc had much more low magic.
17:20 in our current campaign we encountered 1 magic user. and its a team member. 😅
she is hunted as a witch in cities.
well, settings make a huge difference
presuming that's not a published setting
This is why I lean into it. High magic has always been a win. It's always pulled more people into my table. My magitek settings is loved
unfortunately magic can be a downhill battle reputationally if it becomes too accessable then it can be used in crimes
This video's entire premise rests on "Dungeons and Dragons" referring to specifically D&D 5e, played in an official setting, with all rules available. I think you'll find that a great many people don't play like that 😉
all versions of D&D, except the first one, are high magic. All published settings except one are high magic. His point stands.
Great video. Thanks for it. I agree entirely that magic in a by the book D&D campaign world has to be high magic. I think that a low magic world could be fun, though it would need to be heavily home brewed. You could do a thing where the players come from a different world to a low/no magic world and have to deal with the handful of evil magic users that also came over. An idea that I was thinking of trying for a short campaign was a caveman campaign, where all magic was new and wonderful and being actively discovered. No wizards and other limits on magic. Could be fun for a change of pace.
I would love a video about the Blood War from you.
I don't think I've ever seen someone criticize it quite like you did, and would love to get your perspective in depth.
So a bunch of rare races can cast a couple innate spells. that might effect the lives of those areas they are living in (gnome villages) but what REAL change would it make in daily lives?
For example you approach every elf carefully, since they are probably armed. Something like Americans.
People trying to run modern (as in post-3e) d&d for low magic or low fantasy games just confuses the hell out of me.
The amount of work involved in homebrewing it out just seems like a waste when so many other ttrpgs that serve that niche exist.
d&d players really do need to play more than one game.
Yuan-ti having more spell casters then your entire society. Makes them sound like terrifying villains.
House rule I'm looking to implement to express how mundane magic is given the ubiquity of magical creatures: every character gets a cantrip based on their background, either prestidigitation, thaumaturgy, or druid craft. For spell casters, this doesn't count toward their known cantrips.
In a world where gods and demons exist and nerds can throw fireballs, magic literacy should be viewed as science literacy is in ours.
I never understood why some people get angry when a world where magic is so common that some random farm kids are born knowing how to throw fire exist.
For Pathfinder 2e, in the Lost Omens Travel Guide, it states that 1 in 5 have some innate or learned or bestowed magical talent, but only 1 in 20 of these individuals have the opportunity and desire to develop these abilities to be recognized as a practicing spellcaster. This varies slightly by region and culture, for example hobgoblin and orc cultures reject magic practitioners and gnomish settlements will embrace it and likely experiment with magic.
so a lot of people could use wands and so on but not cast spells. Still has a major effect, potentially. :P
The people calling for low magic and low fantasy settings and world building need to understand one fact.
D&D hasn't been a low magic game in decades.
D&D hasn't put out a low magic setting since a couple of years before Gary Gygax got kicked out of the company by stock brokers and Mormons. The last arguably low magic setting D&D published was Dark Sun, and that's only arguable because that setting replaces Magic with Psionics and all the remaining cities are ruled by sorcerer kings who used their magic to end the world centuries ago.
After Gygax was kicked out, the corporate head of TSR told the devs to rapid fire release new settings, each one more ridiculous than the last until they got to the end times with Spelljammer, Planescape, and Birthright.
High magic space opera.
Higher magic dimension hopping through the multiverse.
High magic... crap! We ran out of ideas! Okay, for this one, every PC starts as a king, pope, archmage, Mafia Don, or cult leader with a base and the army we assumed they would have built by around level twelve in the older settings.
Jerry Holkins said it best. D&D is a game where you start by killing rats in a basement, and you end by killing god.
If you want low magic TTRPGs, D&D is not the game for you. Those games do exist. Find them.
"If you want low magic TTRPGs, D&D is not the game for you."
This is pretty much my approach when running low magic settings. Sure, I could probably make them work in D&D with some extra effort and heavy homebrewing, but I don't really see the point. E.g. Runequest, Pendragon, and Modiphius' Conan are much more suitable, so I'm better off using one of them.
@jarihult3199 One "out there" example of low magic settings I've tried a few times is running games set in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There's an old out of print rpg for the series, but I honestly find it easier to just have the players make characters using 5e (no full or half caster classes) and then running those characters through Call of Cthulhu "adventure modules."
Then I looked into Cypher System and realized their setting "The Strange" covered most of what I was looking for.
Cannibalizing elements from grimdark or rules heavy games and filtering them through the base d20 mechanics of rules light systems like 5e or Cypher System can have surprising results.
I feel like magic users of some level should be at least as common in The Realms as drivers (whether of common blades or rare blades) are in Alrest. Maybe not _literally_ everywhere, but still in a LOT of places and walks of life, from important movers and shakers to some ordinary civilians or lowly bandits, to even the occasional wild monster.
This is interesting. Seems you have been doing some deep dives into how spellcasting can change the course of a world's development. That is worthwhile.
I've always agreed with the notion that there should be plenty of reasonably high level characters out there. And there should be a lot of magic in the world.
As I watched this, I have a few thoughts on this.
1. "Learning to be a Wizard is expensive. So there should be a patron relationship." I feel like that limits the number of actual magic users. Also, learning to be a silversmith wasn't cheap back in the day either. But the master covered the costs of his apprentices. And we already have a "wizards have apprentices" trope. Instead, I would suggest that Rich families and governments should have at least one competent spellcaster on retainer. I also like the idea of wizards, at least eventually, setting up schools for teaching new wizards.
2. We should be ignoring druids. They normally are opposed to the un-natural advancement of civilization. They're unlikely to support projects like deforestation to increase farmland. So to get them involved we need a way to convince them to help. In most capitalistic world views, that's offer them money. But what will they do with money? What can the civilized world offer them that they need or want? I can't think of anything right now.
3. Just as with Druids above, I find myself asking, why? Why do wizards above a certain level do anything? You can charge massively for your services if you so desire. But what do you need gold for that you can't get via your magic at that point?
===========================
My final thought, I keep coming back to is about the teleportation circle example that you mentioned at 7min 18 sec. I keep wondering, "if teleportation circles are so cheap to make, what reason is there to take a sailing ship out beyond fishing waters? What would be the drive to create things like trains or airships?" I realize it is stupid to talk too much about economics in D&D as it wasn't designed to have a strong economic model. But I find myself wanting to look at your numbers.
I see that in 5E they don't mention how much it costs to hire a mage for an entire year. I found that interesting. (This is something that is defined in 3.5e.) It is a cost that is not factored into your equation and the people financing this also need to finance a matching circle on the other side. In addition they have to pay for the mage on the other side. So we could double all your costs and add the ongoing wage for the casters. This could still work out better in the long run compared to standard shipping. (It might also give the trading company that sets it up first an unfair advantage over every other trading group out there. This might result in some interesting in subterfuge by the other trading groups. In 3.5 for example a rogue can use disable device to destroy a teleportation circle.)
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Note: that if you use the 3.5e table for hiring a caster to set up the circle for us, it increases our cost by 164,250GP. Such a cost to hire a caster for this project might be too much for most trading companies to cover. (and doesn't take into account the notion that we also need a permanent circle on the other side for the return trip.) Even if we assume that the wages for the caster are a 10th of the cost of hiring an outside mage to do it, that still practically doubles your cost and becomes an ongoing operational cost from that point forward to keep the teleportation circle functioning.
On a side note: In 3.5 Teleportation Circle is a 9th lvl spell and doesn't require a mage to spend magic to activate it. Setting it up is easier as the spell becomes permanent with the permanency spell. With some quick math, I see that it costs only 8,380 per circle to set up. (This can be done in an afternoon for the wizard who creates it.) The biggest problem then is convincing a 17th level wizard to do it for you. After all, if he can cast wish and get 25,000gp a cast, why does he need your 8,000?
Sorry, that turned out much longer than I intended. Thanks for the great videos. Cheers
The simple counter arguement to this is the Weave itself
The Weave is a hand wavy explaination to let the DM design the world how they want
Want No Clerics in the Game? The Weave is impenetrable for Deities towards the Material Realm
Want No Druids? Same as with Clerics just for the Fey
The existence of Spells in source books doesn't necessitate them at the table
There is no reason to argue what you can and can not do in D&D as it is Table and Campaign dependent, as it should be
There is no correct way to play D&D, There is no correct distribution of Magic
There is only a Design choice You and Your Group make, and noone outside that Group has any say in that choice
If you want Destroy Water to instakill and your Table is fine with that, go ahead
If you and the rest of the table want there to only be Artificers and no other magical classes, go do that
It's Collaborative Storytelling and Sourcebooks are just that, Sources, that can be used, but aren't necessary
There's an NPC in my campaign who follows the players around that can suck magic from anything and place it onto other things (e.g. decursing a sword and using the magic to give your armour a +3), reflexively teleport, and baffle gods, but can't use offensive magic because it would literally destabilize the magic field. Yeah, I'd say my campaign is high magic.
You don't have to jump through so many hoops for that first part. The DMG (or maybe the MM) specifically calls out the "Archetypes," like Scout or Knight, and says that you should apply the PC racial template on top of the archetype for different races. That's enough to prove that the average High Elf can cast spells.
The Player's Guide also specifically says that, "Hiring someone to cast a relatively common spell of 1st or 2nd level, such as cure wounds or identify, is easy enough in a city or town". That's gives us an absolute minimum of 1 third level caster per 10,000 people.
So to make your setting more low-magic, you can just adjust the scale. 1 3rd level caster per city above 50k people means you're hunting for a highly influential mage if you want to witness a fireball spell in action.
@@mars7304 I mean... sure? You can homebrew whatever you like. But the system rules HEAVILY encourage a high magic system. Magic users already get the spotlight by being objectively more powerful. Why would you also want to give them the spotlight by making them so rare that no one should rationally be able to prepare for their tricks?
Setting dependent, of course. Maybe spellcasters are outlawed and they need to keep it a secret that they can do magic. But this risks adding more story beats to magic users on top of more power which can point the spotlight on them even harder.
You could ban casters, but then, why are you playing D&D?
@@lorinkramerone I never said ban casters. I said the prevalence of casters can have a big impact on the tone of your setting
@@mars7304 do you always just repeat what you said without reading what the other person said or did you forget your coffee today?
One thing I really like about D&D 3.5 is that it has a system for generating settlements which includes determining the highest level member of any given class within a settlement. This gives a reasonable upper limit to what magic is available in a settlement of a given size, assuming that you as the GM don't choose to add something custom to the area. A small city, defined in 3.5 as a settlement of between 5,000 and 12,000 people, for example, has you roll for the level of the two highest level of each class - for a wizard, that's 1d4+6 in this size of settlement. In a small city, you might have one, maybe two, wizards capable of fifth level magic - or you might have none. In a large city (12,000 to 25,000), you roll three times and it's 1d4+9, potentially giving you at least one wizard capable of level 7 spells, and in a metropolis (25,000+) it's four rolls of 1d4+12, meaning you'll probably have a couple of wizards capable of casting level 8 spells.
That said, some of the various spells are of different spell levels in 3.5 compared with 5e (teleportation circle, for example, is a level 9 spell, and greater teleportation, which allows you to teleport without any chance of ending up off target, is a level 7 spell), so how any given spell impacts society would depend on that. In 3.5, teleportation would be less of a game changer than in 5e, but it would still be used to allow, for example, the most powerful noble of a large city to get to somewhere they absolutely need to be much more rapidly than more mundane travel would allow. Flight, on the other hand, would be far more useful to those who could afford it, and it would be just as big a game changer as it was in real life.
The whole idea that "earlier D&D was low magic" was, really, pretty fallacious itself. Yes, they did splatbooks based on historical fantasy, but those were outliers. You think 5e has a lot of spells? Earlier D&D literally only had one arcane magic using class, the Wizard; it had *thousands* of spells scattered across various sourcebooks. Settings ranged from Spelljammer and Planescape, places where you literally could only survive as an adventurer by having access to fairly powerful spells - the Inner Planes were literally instant death unless you had the proper magic - to places that, despite their "sword & sorcery" vibe like Greyhawk, were still full of epic level wizards with ridiculous arsenals of magic. Even Greyhawk had Mordenkainen and his Circle of Eight, and that's just naming the tippiest top of the iceberg...
It depends on the setting. OD&D in a crappy points of light region could be played pretty low. It depends on how hard that group believes in a level 0 world.
Forgotten Realms is pretty generous with mid-level NPCs. Running into a level 6 bloke at the pub is not strange. The gods are half-active in the world. Magical events happen across the world every now and then. Planescape and Spelljammer are really up there.
I’d love to see a video on the progression of wizards in an adventuring party and how that fits into the logistics of a world. Sure, if a sorcerer is out casting spells and fighting monsters all day, they’re going to grow more powerful. Same thing for any martial class, where your abilities are going to grow when practically out to use. But wizards? How is a wizard learning fireball from fighting these bandits? How are they evolving their spells in the same way. I have answers I use in my games, but find it an interesting topic and would love to hear your thoughts as well!
In some settings you need to find spells out on adventures. It is relatively easy to find people who know level 1-3 spells. Wizards form little study groups for that in towns. There is a couple dudes in town who can use level 4-5 spells and might teach you if you get in their good graces or do them a service. Being taught a spell becomes a quest reward in a way.
You get one spell free per level in some games, I use that rule myself. That represents the self-study you've done as part of levelling up. A bit like how you start with one or a few starting spells. The rest you must figure out the hard way. In some rules you need to create spells yourself, which you do not do out on adventures. Wizards take some downtime to self-study which costs time and a load of cash, cash you hopefully picked up when adventuring.
Sometimes spells are found in adventures. A spell is only found in a rare book somewhere in a ruin. It's inscribed on a stele of the half-fallen lizard man civilization. Scrolls in the old imperial library have been scattered around the world after the pillaging of the capitol. You don't find them by sitting at home. Wizards are a driving force behind many weirdo expeditions to these places.
In Call of Cthulhu it is easy for humans to learn spells. It just takes a lot of time and some translation skill, but there is no class barrier or special talent. A human can pretty much teach any other human a spell. When a cult starts up, chances are that all of them will have been taught some minor spell when initiated into the higher ranks. Some spells are secrets held by cult leaders, because it's hard to oust the only guy who knows how to call your god in a coup. Either way, spells is something people learn during months of downtime, bit when out on investigations. The slow pacing of some old Chaosium adventures might allow you to do this, because you do weeks worth of investigation and a couple months ocean travel.
The argument that D&D (for 5e at least) is incompatible with low magic systems is incorrect, per the DMG & Xanathar's Guide to Everything.
* Per the DMG (page 9), the assumption is that all major progress is repeatedly lost as various factors (war, extra-planar assaults, magical hubris backfiring, plagues, etc), only to then be rediscovered / redeveloped and for the process to cycle again. Maybe each cycle will make a bit more progress than the last, but it will ultimately collapse when the magic goes 'too high', implodes, and falls back to 'low magic'.
* With the XGE (page 72), we get a table that actually designates the relative 'commonality' of each class (between each other, out of 100 characters):
** Barbarians / Bard / Druid: 7% each
** Cleric: 15%
** Fighter / Paladin: 16% each
** Monk / Ranger / Wizard: 6%
** Rogue: 14%
** Sorcerer / Warlock: 5%
* (XGE Continued): Results in about 43% non-magic classes (where only a portion of characters of each class can cast magic in some form); about 22% half-casters, and about 35% are full casters (those getting/borrowing power - Warlocks, Clerics, Druids - making up about 24% of that, with the remaining 11% being sorcerers & wizards).
It is also important to acknowledge that not only are extraplanar entities rare encounters on the material plane (even if sought out), but even the more 'mundane supernatural powers' some races/species/creatures possess are usually limited in how often they can be used by any given individual, as well as limited by the overall population (to compare to our world from the 1700s to 1900s, so as not to get too far from the general setting D&D goes for without homebrew, we get a max population of around 600 million to 1.71 billion at best, broken down to make up the various intelligent creatures, a majority of whom are likely humans, orcs, goblins, or similar fast-breeding/short-lived creatures).
We can also add on top of that the ratio of unskilled people vs. skilled people (extrapolated to D&D classes). For our world, the rate has varied over the years, but I find a 60%:40% rule works best (60% unskilled, 40% skilled); almost universally there are more people of less skill than there are those of more skill. For D&D ability, it end up looking something like this:
** (1st Break - Overall Population): 60% unskilled people / 40% skilled people
** (2nd Break - Skilled People): 60% Skilled Civilians / 40% adventurers
** (3rd Break - Adventurers): 60% Sidekicks / 40% Heroes (player characters)
** (4th Break - Heroes): 60% level 1 Heroes / 40% level 2+ Heroes
So on & so forth; by the 3rd break alone (before getting into the above class breakdown), we are at only 6.4% of characters being of 1st level or higher, and only 2.56% of characters being of 2nd level or higher.
One can homebrew to change this, but what it says to me is that in basic D&D, we are to assume that while there are a lot of powerful characters in the world (let's say around 38 million on the low-side), only half of them have any sort of real 'magical ability', and a far smaller portion of them are capable of any sort of moderately powerful magic (at least 4th level), let alone actual high-power magic (at least 7th level). It is a world where the number of people who could bring about the changes you describe could be counted on one hand, and even then only if they wanted to and could get others to listen to them for a prolonged period of time, without any sort of strife mucking up their plans.
I dislike high fantasy, not my cup of tea. If people want to play "victorian style" D&D, hey, they can do what everyone does, but to me a world with free food, teleportation and instant communication isn't evocative of the medieval style I want to enjoy in my games.
Sometimes if feels like D&D players are in denial about how broken the magic systems are. They are too many spellcasters, too many races and species in the same setting, and way too many types of casters.
I started playing with AD&D and I dislike so much everyone being some kind of mage with the edition powercreep that in my homebrew rules only those of Arcane descent are capable of doing magic. This includes elfs, half-elfs, and humans/halflings with an elven ancestor. Dwarves can't cast arcane magic.
Most arcane users are killed when they are teenagers, because without training they cast spells by will and wish alone, warping reality, animals and people. The only option for them is to be trained in white magic and control and know exactly what they inted to sucessfully channeling it without damage.
Only the Chosen can use divine magic and the third kind of magic is being a thrall or Emissary of a powerful spirit, exchanging magical favours for sacrifices, so it's more an NPC thing than a player class.
I do think that to a large degree only "PCs" have full stat blocks. This is true in all other aspects, a level 1 human Fighter is still better than a mundane human in a fight, level 3 Fighter is magnitudes more powerful. Player characters (and equivalent "special" NPCs) are portrayed as being miles beyond your generic NPCs, so why not in basic spellcasting as well? Even if you have things like "sorcerous bloodlines," that doesn't mean that every member of that family can cast magic, it just means that they carry some hint of that potential. The PC is likely the _only_ member of his family that can cast magic, the only one in which the "magic genes" were concentrated enough to matter. His other relatives wouldn't be able to pull off a cantrip.
As for some races that have unique powers, these would also be very rare and/or unwilling to cooperate with a "magical economy." Some races are portrayed as existing only one for every million humans wandering around, or might be hostile monsters that would have no interest in working in a lightbulb factory.
I do think you certainly would have the access to casting for nobility, but it would be more akin to a pre-industrial society's access to books or other advanced knowledge, rather than a more industrial level of democratized access. There would be _some_ access to magic everywhere, but not massive amounts of it, not like people flying through the skies all the time or floating buildings in an average city.
in my Setting, every single person is magic, in some way or form. If i want to have a magical world i want my people to feel full of magic too
I hold that magic at the very least requires training and experience to do. Even sorcerers need to have an understanding of the things they can do.
"But they gain spells as they level.", you might say. But I would say, what do you even thonk experience points represent?
i hold that "think" should be changed to "thonk" forevermore. delightful accidental word
Wizard: "Endless study of the underlaying nature of reality and training to control my mind has allowed me to manipulate that reality."
Cleric: "My faith in and service to my god has seen me rewarded with miracles."
Druid: "My reverence and understanding of the balance of nature allows me to restore that balance."
Sorcerer: "My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother got freaky with a dragon."
Bard: "I made fun of a goblin and he exploded."
The way I headcanon it is that sorcery **does** require training, but what it requires training in is fundamentally different from wizards. The magic is innate and comes from you, so you have to understand yourself well in order to be a good sorcerer.
@@prcs420 I saw it and didn't even bother to change it.
I since across your video by some random algorithm and I’m glad I did! These are the types of thoughts that plague my mind enough to keep me from actually GM’ing DnD games. The in-game incongruities rub my soul the wrong way.
One year already! Good job. Always enjoy your content.
Most people tell me I think about it too much ( why things are the way they are and how the could/should be given circumstances) so this scratches the itch.
Sometimes entirely natural abilities are represented by spell like abilities and mechanically follow the rules of spells. Poison spray can be that yuanti can spit Poison at a target within 10 feet. I tend to agree with the tendency of high magic but using the rise of tismat as an example, you don't need any magic in 5th edition unless you're fighting particular enemies.
I came up with the manna to miasma conversion in D&D world building
Classed characters absorb mana
Casting a spell or using a class ability or even spending HP to prevent an injury “burns” manna
Burnt manna turns into miasma
Miasma collects into nodes that turn into dungeons that convert miasma into monster spawn, traps and treasure
Killing spawn, defeating traps and stealing treasure releases multiple kaiju threats until the manna imbalances is ended
Continuing the cycle
The downside of a teleportation network is eventually it spawns multiple kaiju
I agree that D&D world necessarily MUST be pretty darn high magic. Also, sage advice says that the teleportation circle only consumes the material cost after the year elapses. Regardless teleportation circle is worth the money, I agree lol
Magic is awesome. I just embrace it. When I make my fantasy world, I just put a lot of emphasis on magic. If someone doesn't want magic in DND, they should just play a different game entirely. If someone said they don't want much magic in DND, they sound like the fun police. The video mentioned psychic power. That is actually a kind of magic. Psychics are just thier own kind of magician class.
About the species... From what I can recall, innate spells are available to all instances of a stat block (such as drow)
Runequest without magic is much easier than D&D5e without magic.
As long as the ducks are there I'm happy.
I like the idea of it being like Fullmetal alchemist. Alchemist are rare but collected by multiple States, so they end up seeming more common than they actually are.
you know how many cultists i encountered that can cast low level Cleric Spells? you know how many Tribal Societies have Shamans that can cast firebolt, entangle, and healing word? you know how many rural cities have a cleric with at least lesser restoration? you know how many times i encountered gothlolis who can cast fireball with just the frustration as the only required component? this was true even in old school D&D and the like. the setting was pretty high magic since the beginning. look at how many published settings were swimming in magic daggers and magic longswords. look at how many modules included exactly enough magic spidersilk dresses to gear up the party rogues and wizards in a system where rogues and wiizards couldn't wear armor? look at how many level 0 funnels included an optional lake with a maxed out holy avenger turning a PC who took a leap of faith and swam to the bottom of the lake into a 1st level paladins, elevated to any minimums they didn't previously meet.
DnD can’t be low magic, sounds like something a jaded old man who failed at making a low magic setting would say
I don't disagree about the baseline settings...but how common are the heritages that have inherent magic in any given setting? How willing are they to share? Take into account demographics, especially things like tieflings and aasimar *could* be more rare.
to be fair, in 5e gnomes and tieflings are by the core rulebook considered "uncommon" in comparison to humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings.
Gygax said that only 3% of the population are adventures and only 1% of adventures are spellcasters. When he said that, there were only four full casters (two of them were just specialized versions of the other two) and two half-caster classes. I would hold that that ratio holds still just with more types in 5e..
Old school D&D felt low magic because of
1 - very low spellcasting at levels 1-4
2 - going up in levels cost gold in the amounts even aristocrats would cry at
3 - making magic items was mainly a lost art
Eberron 3e was deliberately what a society looks like with “magic” in everyday life where magic was a steam/early electrify metaphor
The setting is very much not “low” magic having fun campaigns in for 8 years, but it can be very dangerous
5e is junk - it has no internal consistency about the impact of magic in MCU … (M for magic)
AD&D had some rules for making magic items and potions. It cost time, cash and most importantly xp. Some wizard had to decide if they really wanted to pay 3000 of their had-earned wizard xp to make some +1 item or a handful of potions. More advanced items could cost tens of thousands of xp. It was something wizards did at the end of their career, when either vanity or duty made them consider leaving a lasting gift to the world behind. It was a couple masterpieces that defined your legacy. Not something a few level 3 blokes can sit and cobble together as a school project.
The idea of magic being almost exclusively, with extremely rare exceptions, the purview of non-humanoid creatures whose goals are fundamentally incompatible with those of humanoids sounds exciting, actually! Really ramps up the danger level of the setting, with humans the underdogs fighting against an objectively superior enemy. I bet you could do a lot with that 😊
Sounds Warhammer fantasy to me.
@@HectorGuevaraNavarrete or Hyborian age.
I think you may be forgetting an important part of the Dnd tradition. “Deep Time”.
Magic, magic items, even spells themselves - don’t come from recent history(with a couple of exceptions) they are ancient and lost knowledge. We don’t know how to “invent” magic anymore.
Even when you create a magic item like in Xanathar’s expanded rules - you can only create a magic item that ALREADY exists. You’re at best imitating something old. Not new.
And there’s no player facing rules for creating new spells at all.
This has some major implications about magic and how it’s manifested/discovered.
Maybe that’s why the races that start with magic for the most part have a “reason” to start with it. Elves get magic because they live a long time. Gnomes too. Duergar have it built into them from their mindflayer-slave days.
That’s kind of the final distinction. Is magic biological? Or is it learned?
High elves it’s probably learned. Duergar it’s probably biological. Yuanti probably biological/religious(master-race ideals and all that that they have).
In AD&D it cost xp to make a magic item. Some wizard had to decide if 5000 or their hard-earned wizard xp was worth it. Wizards might end their careers making a couple magic items, if the sense of leaving some enduring gift appealed to their vanity or sense of duty. A real big one could take tens of thousands of xp. A chump level 3 adventurer isn't going to do that. Same with potions and spells, even if they were more economical. A magic item is more like your final defining masterpiece.
In points of light, you are sometimes walking on the ruins of an older civilization that made these things and rediscover them. No one makes scrolls in town, but since the sacking of the old capitol there's old scrolls spread around here and there. If you find one, you can copy that spell to yourself and eventually your little community will have this spell. But you don't make up spells by sitting at home, they're somewhere out there inscribed on steles or copper plates or practiced by that dude who is definitely not allowed in town any more.
Posting about Eberron again, just so more people would become aware of it.
Seriously, fellas, Eberron is one of the best high-magic settings for D&D out there.
It's not my game, but I respect how someone finally embraced the magitek fully. It's the setting which fits what 3.5 became.
Also, rules as written, teleportation circle only transports _creatures,_ it doesn't transport _cargo._
Or clothes, I suppose.
but an elephant with a cargo saddle....
@@thekaxmax Elephant, yes, cargo saddle? No. Cargo? Definitely no.
A better argument re: "these innate spells are in fact innate" is that you can refer to the DMG's section on monster creation and that there are NPC templates if races that, applies to the commoner stat, include innate casting
The forgotten realms does kinda have an explanation for this lower than expected magic. Essentially the world is a post apocalyptic one where before the spell plague it was very high magic. The average person knew cantrips and could buy third level spells easily and high level mages were casting 10th and 11th level spells. You could very easily say that most spells were invented by this society, and the reason spellcasting is uncommon is because the goddess of magic intentionally made it harder to cast spells. After all, allowing high magic societies to exist ended in someone cast a 12th level spell and killing her. So she might not be inclined to allow magic to progress much.
When i think low-magic, i think Dark Sun.
that's about it, for D&D
*This is part of the reason i have gotten out of DnD 5e.*
I'd just like to point out midway through now. You said foreign commodities are impossible to get fresh(In the age of sailing). I'm certain there are spells for that too! While teleportation for the kings import of exotic herbs is one thing. I'm sure a smart merchant could make sure his goods stay fresh during the voyage either through stasis, cooling, or some other magical effect.
scarcity - the number of wizards may be very low and the number of wizards of each successive level will be lower and lower
availability - a person of such power as 5e magic casters have are in no way beholden to the wishes of larger society to make their magic available. and they only got their magic in the first place by an internal focus and dedication even more so for those of higher level so they will be predisposed to isolation.
scalability - even if you have a decent number of magic users available to magically industrialize your society the method that magic is attained is not scalable to work over a whole society. maybe you have a dozen wizards who can cast teleportation circle, but they can each do it once a day and while they are doing that they are unavailable to do any of the other magical tasks you require them for and you have no way to replicate or transfer their capability to others.
the three of these mean that unless the bar for magical capability is so low anyone who puts in a few years of effort can get high level spells the magicalness of your setting is going to be limited. the high magic stuff may be out there and the low level stuff may be common but how the society looks due to magic users will be less drastically different then you make out.
outside threats however are depicted as commonplace in 5e and would have a terrible effect of society, like you said of yuanti and hags and devils. creatures like these would end up ruling or destroying any 5e setting.
The Witcher does a good job of this. Sure mages are available, but they're incredibly rare. They also all know each other, and you can't afford their services unless you're a world leader of some kind or hatch a crazy plot that they want in on. They also have a limited range of things they can do at any given time and their sources of power are also very limited. That way even the more fantastical moments feel limited in scale, because you're made aware of the limitations as rules of the world.
Seems reasonably clear that you are right in the main point. D&D usually isn't low magic, it is considerably high magic (at least at third edition, which is the one I know something about). I wonder why the argument feels necessary. Is the case that "low magic" became at some point an desirable atribute in itself, for some people?
Are those people then forcing plausibility for the sake of "protect" their beloved game from the "accusation" of being high magic?
By where I am sitting there is no shame in loving a high magic setting, no objective superiority of low magic over high magic. Things are relative, and one can always mention a MORE extreme high magic example (but it will probably be a comic setting and/or from Japan). Those settings are not "worse" than D&D average flavour for being high magic compared to such D&D recipe. Neither is Middle Earth "better" to such settings for having lower magic.
On the other hand, I would bet that any bold enough Game Master can cook a Low Magic setting (lower than Tolkien's even) with D&D rules. Actually, even a no-magic setting. Would take some creative choices, to balance things, I suppose. And the result would taste different from average D&D setting. Still, it is possible.
Dungeon Master privy. The world builder should allow or disallow some spells to even exist, and for that matter, can modify any of it. I prefer low-magic or rare-magic settings. The game is grittier at low levels and it makes the mundane details that would otherwise be trivial, suddenly not trivial at all.
Gnome to elf, "Did you bring the rope?"
Elf: "Uhhhh...."
Fourth wall breaking gnome wizard: "Damn it dungeon master, now I know why you made Feather Fall not exist!"
And so the party clambered down the ancient well, going hundreds of feet down into the gloom. Every handhold and foothold on the bricks felt like it was never good enough. At every moment, the pair were on the brink of disaster. The real threat of losing their grip became a bigger threat than the goblins they had dispatched only moments before.
High magic zones, low magic zones, no magic zones, eh…whatever. Magic Shmagic.
I think you are building up your case backwards.
0. You didn't provide definition of terms of low and high magic. That's context and a set of terms that would be useful to provide a similar operating paradigm. You termed some things, but not others. Many times your description of vision creeps into high magic, where absurd things are afoot and assumed without check.
1. You fail to establish a number ratio of mundane to magic users, much less other adventurers. Adventurers, and NPCs with classes, are a rarity. In First Edition, there are estimates as to the prevalence of leveled NPCs, and that ratio given varies from 1 in 50, to 1 in 5000. A mean suggested is 1 in 1000. Per million people, 1000 classed adventurers, from fighters to any kind of magic user. Maybe at most 40%, if you group the classes.
2. You fail to establish the ratio of magic users of first level to second, to third, etc. I presume half of the pool is 1st level, half of the remainder 2nd, half of that 3rd, etc. if you have a world supporting a large amount of high level magic users (8th and up) you require a very large population. But you are speaking in vague terms, and don't have a definition of high level. There is also the distribution of spell knowledge. Just because fireball is known to the players, doesn't mean every wizard is capable of casting it.
3. While you do reference innate spell abilities, you equivalate them to the Vancian system in a way I don't think they work, even in 5e. Certainly, there is a serious preponderance of natural magic throughout the world. Easily this puts us into the range of mid-level magic in the setting. But this doesn't mean some wizard is just gonna pop out of the air on the daily, because he had a hankering for cinnamon toast. Certainly there won't be enough movement to undermine the vast network of shipping lanes and vessels that ply them. Just because pixies and dragons exist, doesn't mean there are magic teleporting freight centers, and sinister-powered rebels sprouting up from the ground like dandelions.
5e has certain things to it that I believe silly, and you probably can't argue it's low magic. But you are making certain claims about high level magic you cannot make without really discussing the numbers. Demographics and logistics are still very important.
In 1e, I have had numerous discussions about the potential scope of magic. It's not nearly as low magic as some might believe. Virtually anything can have an enchanted intelligent, from the common intelligent sword to the buckets, pools of water, fire, illusions... and these are just what the DMG raises as possibilities. And those could have spell abilities too. Magic doormen, intelligent illusions, the entrance of a cathedral reading your alignment and telling evildoers to atone for their sins.
... what does 5e have that makes it special?
I don't think I've heard a better argument for 1e and 2e D&D in quite a while. It's too bad I like worlds where low levels of magic are commonplace.
Of course, worldbuilding-wise, this is definitely an argument to consider when building the role of magic in the world. I think I'm going to limit magic-grade components more in what I'm writing. Could help with how higher-power magic is able to be used.
Spells like fireball and magic missile are like guns. I have them, I hopefully will never need to use them as an average citizen
I would say you've taken a lot of "idealistic" expectations with your worldbuilding examples. Specifically it's not accounting for greed and paranoia.
Take for example the Teleportation Circle and it's effects on long distant trades:
Your competitor has employed a mage, while you are currently using ships. If their circle is completed, you ships will not be able to compete on a scale of time/manpower/cost, and the value of those goods you currently trade from afar will dramatically drop as the market is flooded.
In this scenario it within you own personal interest to either eliminate the circle, or the mage creating it in order to maintain your business interests.
Sure you could try and hire another mage (or offer a better deal to draw the current mage into your employ), but now you are the target of some other business trader not yet in the teleported goods market, let alone now also an immediate threat to the profit margins of the other trader who is/was in the teleported goods market. Both of their interests are best served eliminating you ability to teleport goods.
As much as you want to push the wizards-will-wizard on the world building; assassins-will-assassinate is also a factor. Contract killing in the name of making sure the rich and powerful stay in those positions is unavoidable.
Next is the threat of the wizards and their teleportation circles to a town/city. If an enemy city/state/army wants to attack the town you rule over, if they can find the sigil sequence of a circle you've got established behind your defences, those are a lot of enemy troops charging into your city in 6second bursts.
Even if it's on the outer walls, that's still a mount for a distant army to mobilize onto without weeks/months of marching long distance.
As a ruler of your city, it'll be in the best interests of security to eliminate any known teleportation circles within range of your city, and put any known mages on a short leash to prevent them from undermining your city's defenses, let along the blood frenzy they trigger amongst the merchant class.
And we're not even done yet. Look at the destruction potential a lowly level 5 wizard can do once Fireball is on their spell list. Sure a trained veteran will have the fortitude to charge through such destruction to try and neutralize a renegade wizard, but your town guards and rank'n'file soldiers in their neat little formations will be incinerated by the dozen with each well placed blast fired from 150 feet away. And it only gets more devastating as those mages get more levels and have access to greater spells. All the more reason to maintain a registry, watchful eye, and short leash on the mages, and be quick to hire adventurers to eliminate any the second they start looking sideways.
It's almost like there's justifiable reasons that wizards like to be reclusive in their wizard towers, keeping their magical tinkerings secret, and as collective mage guilds keep eachother out of interfering with merchants or politics. Because that road always leads to the wizard-wars. And even if they win; all outside forces will view them as the badguys. see Forgotten Realms with both Netheril and Thay; both the most well known magocracies and without a shadow of a doubt universally treated as antagonists and a threat to be eliminated.
Yes; there is a rich quantity of magic around in the world setting; mages aplenty. But the smart ones lay low, leaving the world setting appearing low magic.
There are the academies that train others in the arcane arts; you see teachers and their students by the class load.
But once they get out; they either lock themselves in a tower, or experience the world of "Fool" around and find out.
The Mage types that go for living their lives loud on the open stage either have to get very good very fast, or get taken out.
This is why both the Adventurer and BBEG types of mages are exceptional compared to their reclusive peers; if they weren't they'd be dead.
And that's not even getting into the nightmare that is endgame spells. Even amongst the heroic adventurer kind; ALL wizards become evil given enough time. It's just a matter of how good a friend you are to them as to how long it takes you to notice there ever growing list of warcrimes and discover their plans for immortality are going to involve armies of clones, successive rounds of body snachings (see Magic Jar), and the eventual slip into lichdom, or trying to succeed where Karsus had his folly
I agree with a lot of the points that you made. I do think Eberron and Exandria are much better high-fantasy settings because they take D&D magic and monsters--and their implications--into the worldbuilding.
On thing that could limit a magitek industrial revolution is assuming that all arcane spells have a physical cost, or at least for most spellcasters, therefore the need of expensive ingredients. Adventurer have easy access to them because they kill monsters. This would be also why spells need to be prepared and can't be spammed. Divine spells are easily arbitrarily limited. Magical creatures just spend their lifeforce.
When I am world building my own campaigns I like to look at what doesn’t make sense in my world and figure out what detail will make this make sense and change as little else as possible.
For example, my current campaign is a Fallout-Esque game, where due to the sharp decline population during the apocalypse, there was not enough faith going around for the gods to sustain themselves, and they all died. The thing is I am not a fan of limiting player options so Clerics still exist, which doesn’t really make sense if there are no god to give them power.
The solution I came up with: what if the power doesn’t come from the gods. Gods get their power from the faith of the followers and then give it back in the form of magic abilities. Many Clerics of this world unknowingly give themselves power.
This lead to a new faction in my world called the Eternal Church. They figured out that there is no longer a middle man in the process. They promote people to grow their innate divine power by preaching the Philosophy of “faith in the self”
My issue is how little ANTI magic there is in dnd. In a setting as magical as you describe there are very few items/ways to restrain spellcasting. In a big city with multiple casters you'd expect some form of counter-spell item that the guards/army can use to confront magical troublemakers. Silence is a 2nd level spell that can stop a high level casters from using most of their spells. Ways of common people dealing with magic problems are almost never explored
Just one problem with having to research the exact somatics and words to cast a spell: it doesnt have to be the same everywhere.
D&D can be low magic, just not very many of the published settings.
For even more verisimilitude, I suggest something along the lines of “E6” as a ruleset.
I don't get why speculate about "what would a high-magic society look like" when Eberron exists. Except for the fun of it, I guess.
Something to consider though is that many settings with such high level artifacts is due to there being a past where magic worked differently, or was more accessible. Forgotten realms has that very specifically, Dark Sun is in a state of disrepair, and Eberron doesn't have many rarer items because of its setting.
There is a good amount of casters, but it works somewhat differently for characters compared to NPCs, especially with newer rules where they imitate spells without actually casting them.
But yeah definitely for some lower leveled magic there would many casters in most settings
Face it, nobody really understands how magic works. If they did, then it wouldn’t be magic. Right?
My issue is more a dearth of high-level spellcasters, not that you need high-level magic to have a big impact.
My homebrew requires higher ability scores for higher level spell or risk permanent madness. How many 200 IQ people are there?
The only way I can see a D&D setting being "low magic" is if you take the Dragon Age approach, which is that magic is feared by most and mages are heavily regulated, like through religious institutions and the Templar Order in Dragon Age. Even then, magic is still commonplace in those games. There's magical creatures and magical items throughout the games that you can come across, and some of the subclasses even state that they use some form of magic like Bloodreaver Warriors.
That's the approach I take in my own setting, at least in certain time periods of the setting. There's a magical dark age where most spells above 5th level were lost because of book burnings and mass destruction of magical knowledge after a cataclysmic event caused by a mage, but even then most nobles have court wizards and are more than happy to have enchanters and other magical crafters to make magical items for them. Spells above 5th level might be exceedingly rare, but bags of holding and +1 weapons are still commonplace.
It's always exciting to see a new upload from you in my notification box, you're a big source of inspiration to my writing as you apply logic while still using the rules of these settings to inform that logic. I especially loved your idea around a "sending language" being developed to fit more information into a sending spell's 25 word limit.
Keep doing what you're doing. Your content is amazing and I greatly appreciate you and your content too
😄
One could argue that the 5e classes are the adventurers version of the class.
A court mage who isnt an adventurer might only be able to cast high level spells slowly and in perfect conditions.
But the impact on society would be huge
Let's not forget about the implications created by the mere existence of the Order of Scribes subclass
I think the best thing is is to be clear that you are refering to faerun/forgotten realms specify what world cause there are several officially dnd worlds that are low magic