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Thread: a less magical world
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02-25-2004, 03:53 PM #1
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ok my second ever post maybe i have a fever
when i run a game i cut down a lot on magic and magical effects.
trolls regenerate like lizards over days, weeks or months not immediatly
summoning magic doesn't make creatures appear immediatly they have to travel from where they are and do not work on sentient creatures unless the spell is of a very high level.
also a lot of spells with more fantastical effects i make one or more levels more difficult to cast.
what do people think of doing this is there anyone else that does this
like my last post the people i play with seam to be 50/50 for and againstMORNINGSTAR
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02-25-2004, 04:58 PM #2
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Well,after years of playing Forgotten realms i was tired of the barkeep being a 20th level psion/beserker/priest of Loth.Birthright was a pleasant change from that.For me its all about the fact that there are very few magic items of note and magic although rare kick ass when it happens.Remember there are like a couple score of humans able to do true magic so its waht i call the "Gandalf effect"I like where your going with the spell efffects and stuff.My Dm had to eliminate teleport because we would get a adventure done he had planned for the whole night in an hour.One thing about being a dm i can tell ya.You should try to play to what the players want as long as it dosnt overtly contradict what your trying to pull off.Hope that helps. :wacko:
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02-25-2004, 06:17 PM #3
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you try and go with the players up to a point but they know from the start what the rules are and they only have a problem with it when thier under attack and the animals they summoned to aid them don't arrive right away.
also the only ones that have a problem with it are the power gamers that hastle me to let them be an awnshe. they dont get to be but hey they dont give up and if they can do it in game fine.
a lot of the weaker magic you might call it is down to a lack of magical knowledge in cerilia in my games
for instance extraplaner magic, summoning etc are very rarely cast , researched or even known about by mages so this is part of the reason they are more difficult to cast in my game. if someone was to do extensive research the difficulty of casting them might goMORNINGSTAR
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02-26-2004, 12:08 PM #4
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I agree with Graham here. As I see it DnD does not have a very suitable magic system for the BR campaigns I play. When the number of spells and spell lists for the magic users are primarily balanced around a dungeon crawl with fighting encounters, it quickly becomes unbalanced when slapped straight into a political and skill heavy game.
That said, I generally use the DnD system with some minor modifications. It works on the low to lower-mid level range, and it saves a lot of conversion work.
Cheers,
Don E
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02-28-2004, 09:16 AM #5
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I've been wanting to run a Birthright campaign using GURPS, in part for the more down-to-earth magic system. Actually, GURPS has several. I was going to use a variation on the rune magic system from GURPS Magic.
The idea is that you learn magical "nouns" and "verbs" as separate skills, and then combine them to case a magical effect. It's got a lot in common with Ars Magica, come to think of it. So if you're good at Fire, Create, Move, and Learn, you can start fires, throw fireballs, and scry by gazing into a bonfire, but you're going to sweat trying to put out a fire (Destroy), or do anything with Ice, Water, or Animal until you put real learning into those skills. (In GURPS, you can always at give it the old college try even if you don't have the required skill. Good luck.)
I figure the verbs are skills you can learn on your own, but the nouns require sources behind them. So a volcano source would provide Fire, and a forest grove for Plant or maybe Animal.
Either that, or allow mages to learn anything, but using those skills without an appropriate source would be at a hideous minus. Under this system, there would be sources for both nouns and verbs: maybe an enormous army ant colony for Destroy, and a salmon spawning ground for Create.
I didn't start jiggling the actual numbers because none of my usual crowd were at all interested in Birthright. I think some of them just can't stand the idea of having to take orders or behave themselves in public.
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02-28-2004, 05:30 PM #6
I have decided that I too will adopt the noun/verb system, but only for
arcane magic. I currently have no arcane spellcasters IMC, so this isn`t a
problem. Keep us appraised of how the Gurps system you apply works.
Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com
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02-29-2004, 08:31 AM #7
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Originally posted by bulletmagnet@Feb 25 2004, 05:58 PM
Remember there are like a couple score of humans able to do true magic so its waht i call the "Gandalf effect"I like where your going with the spell efffects and stuff.My Dm had to eliminate teleport because we would get a adventure done he had planned for the whole night in an hour.
I am not as sure as to whether or not the d20 version here limits magic to the same degree :unsure: so if you have/can find the original you may want to check that version out. Adding one little spell or clerical sphere can cause a world of problems for rulers. B)
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03-01-2004, 01:00 PM #8
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Originally posted by Foundry_Dwarf@Feb 29 2004, 03:31 AM
I am not as sure as to whether or not the d20 version here limits magic to the same degree :unsure: so if you have/can find the original you may want to check that version out. Adding one little spell or clerical sphere can cause a world of problems for rulers. B)Duane Eggert
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03-01-2004, 03:51 PM #9
I do my best as a DM to intimidate my players from using any kind of teleport magic other than the Travel blood ability because of the danger that the Shadow World represents. And now that a horde of undead is marching out of the edge of the Erebannien into Ilien, the threat of the SW is being nicely reinforced...
I eliminate Teleport w/o Error as a spell, and hike up the chances of error for the normal Teleport spell by a good bit, with most errors dropping the caster there (as Foundry Dwarf mentioned).
Even on the Travel spell I've written in some limitations. Like for Vorynn, I insist that the spell must begin and end beneath moonlight (during moonrise or moonset, as normal, though I'm lenient and allow for overcast conditions). So this limits the spell to "anywhere under the moon," but takes away indoor and underground teleports. The other derivations of Travel already have pretty good limiters built in, I think.
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