Opinions on D&D settings "Magic Rules"

[Captain_Bleach]

D&D has had quite a lot of settings, both 1st and 3rd party material. There are a lot of them to keep track of, and I want to know your opinions on each of these individual settings. Overall, how are they game-balance-wise for 3e?

Birthright: Birthright.net has the 3 edition conversion. A setting where each PC rules his/her own country. Also, magic other than Enchantment and Illusion is hard to learn for non-elves and those who do not have Bloodlines. I noticed that magic is handled differently in the setting, something about "Realms magic," that I know very little of. Apparently, magic is like a natural resource: it permeates the land around us, and the Regents (Bloodline leaders) can take advantage of it.
Balance Issues: As Elves do not have to be Blooded in order to access spells that are not Illusion or Enchantment spells higher than 3rd level, and assuming that it is a "standard magic" setting, which some claim, what is to prevent Elves from ruling the world? Of course, I have seen many fans claim Birthright to be Low Magic, with many others claiming it to be "standard, but different, magic." I know little of the setting, so I cannot formulate much opinions.

Dark Sun: athas.org has the 3rd edition conversion, as does Paizo's Dungeon 110 and Dragon 319. A harsh desert world where magic destroys the environment, water is scarce, and Clerics pray to the Elements or Dragon Kings.
Balance Issues: Due to the extreme rarity and value of water in the setting, what is to prevent Water Clerics from cranking out Create Water spells to sustain large populations? Also, what do arcane casters get that Psions don't if players can perform equivalent powers with Psionics without destroying the environment?

Dragonlance: Margaret Weis publishing and Sovereign Press make the 3rd edition books. The big thing is that magic is granted by gifted mortals by the deities, and spell casters that use magic from within (Mystics and Sorcerers) are unknown until the 5th Age, and the god-granted casters have mixed feelings towards them, with most of those feelings being less than friendly.
Balance Issues: As Wizards who learn 3rd level or higher spells must take the Test or become Renegades and hunted down, this presents problems with adventuring, as Frank Trollmann replied in another thread of mine. Either the PCs never meet the mage-hunters, the PCs meet the Mage-Hunters and die due to overwhelming force, where no lesson was learned other than the DM screwed you over, or the Renegade PC views mage-hunters as a veritable experience point source, making it a good idea to be a renegade.

Eberron: Wizards of the Coast makes the 3rd Edition. Magic is technology and ever-present, trivializing its nature and making it like a commodity. Clerics can still receive divine spells and break their code, so they just aren't able to cast spells of an opposed alignment. Now anyone with faith can become a Cleric, but not just a Cleric, but a spell-slinging one. And I don't care that most NPC "Clerics" are Adepts and Experts, this makes PC Clerics have much more leeway in "Code of Conduct," as though they were not powerful enough already. Artificers can break the Wish economy. Honestly, I do not how game-mechanics-wise, the setting holds itself together.
Game Balance Issues: See above.

Forgotten Realms: Wizards of the Coast makes the 3rd Edition. Has a little bit of everything.
Balance Issues: Magic is so common, I do not know how the world can be considered "medieval" without looking like the modern world, but with technology instead of magic. That is, if the spell casters in non-magocracies had a good reason why they are not affecting the world around them, if spell casters, even Adepts, are so common.

Greyhawk: No 3rd edition, outside fan-created material and Paizo's magazines. Most people are not magic-users, and people above mid-level are influential people in their own right.
Balance Issues: Anything that exists in standard D&D, as Greyhawk is the setting that began it all.

Ravenloft: Arthaus made the 3rd edition books. A realm mixing Gothic Horror and D&D.
Game Balance Issues: Spells are heavily changed, and many spells, including necromantic and evil spells, call for powers checks, which, if the PC fails too many, becomes an NPC. Magic of all stripes is rare. Arcane spell casters are hated, with divine casters in some areas trusted more for reasons that I do not understand easily. So, in a typical D&D party, why not have a Cleric instead of an Arcane caster? Not only is your base class more powerful, but you will not be chased by lynch mobs as often.

Planescape: Set in the Greyhawk Great Wheel cosmology. planewalker.com makes the 3rd edition rules.
Game Balance Issues: Clerics not on planes that match their alignment lose "caster levels." Sure, Clerics are powerful, but this is quite severe.

Spelljammer: D&D in space. Need I say more?
Game Balance Issues: I do not know much of this setting other than the above.

Mystara: I don't know much about this setting, either.

[Voss]

Game balance… there is a catch about game balance. If the setting allows the standard stuff, its going to be at least as broken as the default rules. It really comes down to the DM putting his foot down (at the start of the campaign, hopefully, not after the spellcasters start making everyone else cry), and saying you can’t do X, Y and Z.

But, in general, none of these settings really alter the game balance in a significant way. Some of them try and fail, others introduce new broken crap, but none of them alter the potential for a player to throw together a wtf!broken character. Or a wtf!suck character, for that matter.

Specifics-

Birthright.
Its been a while since I look at this one, but I guess I can see why someone thought this was a good idea. And I guess if you like being a bureaucrat rather than an adventurer, it might appeal. Elves vs. other people. In theory, all the PCs can be Blooded, so in that way, their benefit doesn’t matter. In general, though, its one of those little things that make the setting odd, but not any more than the default setting. It just limits who has the power to grind everyone else underfoot.

Dark Sun.
Ah, the ‘power gamer’ setting. Because higher stats are everything to the munchkins. And because its dark, the DM doesn’t have to feel bad about killing characters off. Or something.
Your psionics vs. magic question is a point… but keep in mind it was designed for 2nd edition psionics, not the alternate magic system (with spell points!) that the psi crap has become. As for magic… yeah. This is why the setting is stupid. From create water to wishes, magic exists in a vacuum, entirely separate from the setting, otherwise everything just gets fixed.

Dragonlance.
Exhibit A for why a novel is a novel and an RPG is an RPG. The development of this one is a hoot to read, just for some of the stupid crap while they were playing the adventures that would lead to the novels which lead to the setting materials, etc in a bizarre recursive loop of terrible design. Then take all the random sweeping changes to the cosmology and basic concepts of the setting as new editions came and went (including that bizarre thing where it was its own game with its own odd rules system).
Ignore the High Sorcery stuff, it doesn’t even come close to the most screwed up thing in the setting. No, that honor goes to the ‘steel piece’ as the basic unit of currency. These morons are actively sabotaging their economy buy using weapon grade metals as fvcking coingage. And gold is completely valueless… despite the fact that people wear it as jewelry!

Eberron.
Default setting mark 3, with its own brand of Stupid Crap. Artificiers make breaking the game even easier, and its still pseudo-medieval even with the magical crap that makes it pseudo-modern. Any one of the nations could completely industrialize their farming and production and dominate the rest, but… they don’t. Because no one bothered to take magic out of the adventuring vacuum, except for a few select pieces of stupid crap. Trains! Feh.

FR
Greenwood’s answer to the magic question has been to suggest that almost all wizards are inherently selfish and never do anything to benefit other people. They just ‘gather power’. Never mind the kind of money (which can be translated into other forms of power) a wizard could earn just by setting up commercial teleport gates between major cities… and completely destroying the shipping industry. Not that there can be any real trade between different regions since the ginormous wilderness areas are packed with hordes of monsters.
But 3rd edition fits FR really well. Greenwood loves over the top fantasy- its one of the main hallmarks of the setting, so it works just fine. Well, except for the completely random assortment of gods. Most of them are stupid, with many representing concepts that no one would actually bother to worship. And at some point, someone will explain to me why a Chaotic war god would set up a minor Lawful war god as a competitor. The hell?

Greyhawk
Kind of whatever. Pseudo-medieval. Pseudo-Earth (Oerth, get it?) It was vaguely functional back in the day, but my impression of it has gone down with each ‘progression’ in the time line. The mid-level feel doesn’t work very well, since its based on the assumption that high level characters will go off to the planes and leave everyone back home alone. The gods also have bloody stupid (and often unpronounceable) names. Throw in the fact that its pretty much unsupported and Gygax blew it the hell up after TSR kicked his arse to the curb, and its mostly just an amusing relic, with many lessons in ‘what not to do’.

Ravenloft, Planscape, Spelljammer.
A hell of a lot of whatever. Neat settings, if you like the concept in the first place. All sorts of stupid things run amuck, however, though I think spaceships full of beholders win. And given what sort of things are running around, anyone lower than 5th level should instantly die within 6 seconds of the first encounter.

Mystara.
Ah, this one was the default setting for some of the old modules and for the basic D&D box sets (the simpler alternative to 1st edition). Fairly standard fare- there was a dwarf kingdom and an elf kingdom and… yeah. Balance isn’t really an issue as its just another standard setting.

And thats two pages. My suggestion for you, if you're running something is to go with a setting you (and hopefully your players) find fun. The balance work... well, unless 4th involves a miraculous event of some sort, you're going to have to do that yourself.

[Captain_Bleach]

The more that D&D tries to use magic in a non-adventuring way, as in using it as a common piece of the economy, the more I hate it. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against altering reality, I just hate how the rules as written have it be superior to everything, and that somehow, in each setting, no spell caster is smart enough to use magic to revamp the "medieval" society.
Let us use the DMG's town generation. Let us assume that all the first level adepts in a metropolis of 20,000 use Create Water. Assuming that they are .5% of the population, there are 200. They can create 400 gallons of water per use. Think of how this would revamp medieval societies water system. Most people don't even drink a quart of water a day. Take into the amount of times an Adept can cast 0th level spells a day, and you have a sizable portion of the city with an ample water supply. A small supply, nonetheless, but a supply that cannot be ignored.

[cthulhu]

lol. I wonder if Mages could work if all effects that created something out of mana didn't work, and all effects that had a duration had to be maintained by concentration.

Nah, to many Save or sucks still in the system then,

[Voss]

I always think of it as more a problem with the settings than the game. Or rather, a short coming of the authors, who don't have any real understanding of history or economics, or what magic would do to both.

On the other hand, its really easy to turn spellcasters into 9 to 5 wageslaves, and that really isn't appropriate to the feel most people go for with fantasy. Or history for that matter... the mindset required is a little too industrial revolution.

[Captain_Bleach]

1186465275[/unixtime]]lol. I wonder if Mages could work if all effects that created something out of mana didn't work, and all effects that had a duration had to be maintained by concentration.

Nah, to many Save or sucks still in the system then,

But what if we eliminated "Save or Lose/Suck/Die" spells?

[Manxome]

I actually really love the concept of the wish economy as described in the Dungeonomicon. The idea that powerful adventurers and otherworldly creatures have so much power that they don't even care about the mundane economy is just cool, as well as providing a clear and logical reason that high-level players don't even need to bother tracking their "small" expenses or non-world-shattering possessions. Putting a ceiling on the gold economy is also presumably handy from a balance perspective, as it means that any economic problems that do crop up (such as, you know, infinite wealth loops) can be better contained.

Maybe that's just me, though.

[RandomCasualty]

1186465275[/unixtime]]lol. I wonder if Mages could work if all effects that created something out of mana didn't work, and all effects that had a duration had to be maintained by concentration.

Nah, to many Save or sucks still in the system then,

Well, fixing the economic ramifications of magic is an entirely different problem than fixing the combat balance of magic.

Eberron.
Default setting mark 3, with its own brand of Stupid Crap. Artificiers make breaking the game even easier, and its still pseudo-medieval even with the magical crap that makes it pseudo-modern. Any one of the nations could completely industrialize their farming and production and dominate the rest, but… they don’t. Because no one bothered to take magic out of the adventuring vacuum, except for a few select pieces of stupid crap. Trains! Feh.

Yeah, Eberron hasn't really done too much to get away from the psuedo-medieval archetype. While the flavor of the world is a bit more high magic in that you see magic in day to day life more so than in the realms, the economy is still medieval + a few rather non-remarkable vehicles. A train is really nothing great when you could have set up permanent portals or something.


And the trains are freaking stupid. I mean, trains just dont' work when you've got legions of monsters in the wilderness who can just go and smash your train tracks, whether those tracks happen to be wood & metal or composed of conductor stones is irrelevant. You can just just go smashing em and bring a lot of the trade of Eberron to a halt.

[Voss]

1186465804[/unixtime]]

1186465275[/unixtime]]lol. I wonder if Mages could work if all effects that created something out of mana didn't work, and all effects that had a duration had to be maintained by concentration.

Nah, to many Save or sucks still in the system then,

But what if we eliminated "Save or Lose/Suck/Die" spells?

You'd be down to just blasting. With a touch of battlefield control (basically the walls, since almost everything else works out to save or suck). A bit dull.

[Lago_AM3P]

If you want a setting where magic affects how people adventure and amuse themselves but has little effect on the economy overall, look at the Shadowrun spell list.

It's impossible to craft, conjure anything more complicated than brick out of thin air, teleport, bring people back from the dead or inflict permanent mind control. Probably the most impressive (economically) trick you can do with it is after several months of hard work you sculpt a cavern out of rock and order your task spirits to make it look like an aqueduct. Of course, you'd still have to contact the municipality to get water there in the first place, as reliable irrigation big enough to service a city of 50,000 is well beyond the means of pretty much every spellcaster ever...


So here's the challenge I have to people who want magic in their setting but literally don't want an aspiring wizard prince to conjure an army of golems with mithril equipment out of nothing: take a look at the spell list and limitations of this setting and tell me if this sort of total revamp would satisfy you?

[cthulhu]

1186467908[/unixtime]]

1186465804[/unixtime]]

1186465275[/unixtime]]lol. I wonder if Mages could work if all effects that created something out of mana didn't work, and all effects that had a duration had to be maintained by concentration.

Nah, to many Save or sucks still in the system then,

But what if we eliminated "Save or Lose/Suck/Die" spells?

You'd be down to just blasting. With a touch of battlefield control (basically the walls, since almost everything else works out to save or suck). A bit dull.

And the divination spells!!!1!1!11!!!

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm working on testing a 'save-or-kinda-suck' system, where spells that would normally remove the target from the game are just debuffs: Blind, Slow, Root, etc.

They ratchet up to save-or-suck if the target is enough hit dice below the caster. This is where all the stuff that makes you lose consecutive actions kicks in.

[tzor]

1186464234[/unixtime]]Let us use the DMG's town generation. Let us assume that all the first level adepts in a metropolis of 20,000 use Create Water. Assuming that they are .5% of the population, there are 200. They can create 400 gallons of water per use.

I do agree that magic does change the "medieval" mindset of the land, but then again few D&D scenarios are really medieval in their mindset to begin with. If you take a metropolis of 20,000 (London in the early thirteenth century was a small community situated on the north bank of the Thames River. Including the neighboring areas, it had a modest population of 40,000.) it is more than likely going to be located near a source of water.

Here is some information on Londn in the 13th century and it's water. Before the population literally exploded people actualy liked the local water.

During the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for those parts of London which were near the Thames to use the river as their main source of culinary water. Away from the river, houses were built chiefly where there were beds of gravel or loam. These beds afforded a good water supply to shallow wells until an increase in population led to contamination.

There were also a number of springs outside the city which flowed with good drinking water. Fitzstephens, a thirteenth-century chronicler, expresses annoyance at the number of drunkards and at the chastity of the city's women, but he spoke well of the water. He records that near London there were fountains flowing with sweet and wholesome water.

The thought of a ten score of low level clerics working daily making water seems something that few temples or churches would really consider. Few would even bother to make the effort to build the storage structures necessary to maintain the supply of these clerics, never less the structures necessary to deliver these resouces to paying customers.

On the other hand, if you have a much larger city (say a population of 500,000 where most of the population is located in one metropolitan area) and a more unified church control then this has a tremenous impact. There you need a pletrhora of water to prevent the whole city burning down due to fire. On the other hand, having the ability doesn't mean you have the people with the will to implement.

The notion of "use it or loose it" just doesn't exist in the general mindset. Generaly speaking the spellpower of most cities is generally wasted.

[Captain_Bleach]

So the spell casters of D&D OBVIOUSLY have the power to bring their societies out of the muck and become powerhouses, yet they simply do not have the will/thoughtful consideration to do so, even though spell casters in D&D have the stereotype of being smart and wise.
So what do you get if several spell casters got together to revamp the feudal system. You get a community that sticks out like a sore thumb in the world, where the other communities become jealous, and eventually is destroyed if surrounded by particularly violent neighbors.
In short, the magical economy is put to a screeching halt by spell caster stupidity.

[Voss]

Author stupidity.
You can't blame a creation for what the creator fails to do with it.

[Catharz]

1186493633[/unixtime]]I'm working on testing a 'save-or-kinda-suck' system, where spells that would normally remove the target from the game are just debuffs: Blind, Slow, Root, etc.

They ratchet up to save-or-suck if the target is enough hit dice below the caster. This is where all the stuff that makes you lose consecutive actions kicks in.

One proposed way to do this is to instigate a number of 'status tracks' and have spells push a character down the track as a function of how much he failed the save.

Basically you make charm, petrification, baleful polymorphing, and blindness all behave in a manner similar to fear.

[Voss]

Ouch. I dislike the fear states to begin with. Now you want to throw in
'blurred vision', 'popped an eye' and 'totally blind'?

You could just nick the general condition track from SW Saga, and have everything push characters down the track. If a non-damaging effect drops it to the lowest level, that effect triggers (rather than unconsciousness). Fine-tuned, it could allow for a variety of penalties (from trivial to serious) that can be recovered from (with move actions, perhaps, rather than the multiple swift actions that Sage gives out for no apparent reason). And isn't nearly so screwed up as tracking a mass of conditions separately.

Done right, the track strikes me as a useful thing... it allows a quick a dirty modeling of injuries. Since hit points are an abstraction anyway, combat damage can be handled on a per combat basis, with the hit point pool replenishing automatically after the encounter is over. Perhaps a fortitude save to avoid lasting injuries if a character is severely mauled or pushed really low on the condition track. (with a DC that increases depending on how badly they messed up during combat).

[SunTzuWarmaster]

I played Dark Sun in 2nd ed. (although I have just recently found out that this is what it was... I knew the DM used some system that was desert-based with magic destroying the terrain).

Anywho, our DM disliked playing from a box, so he made LOTS of changes to the systems that he took. In this particular instance, most (but not all) powerful magic-user-kings enslaved anyone that showed any gift at being a cleric, raised them to about level 3, and used them as a water-source for the city. This created a carefully regulated water supply. Also, while we were there, fire was a major problem. The local mafia burned down several buildings because of such limited defense against it.

[Fwib]

I could have sworn that Dark Sun 'had no connection to the elemental plane of water', or something - so that water-creating magics either failed or were very ineffective.