Balancing magic in a Low Fantasy setting?

[Kealios]

I have been working on a Fantasy world for well over the past year. I finally introduced it to my players last week, and got a bit of a backfire in my face. The campaign is now on hold once again.

 

First, I realized that I was really trying to make a low-magic world, but the players rebeled against it, instead preferring a D&D-style magic world. That is fine, but not in THIS world that I've carefully crafted. That's on me.

 

Second, which was the crux of the issue, is my attempt to reign in magic use. I could go into what I was trying to do, but bottom line is simple: I limited the max Active Points a player could use.

 

I then went a bit further, and put limitations on Attack, Defense, and Utility spells based on the Power Categories from 6E. My reasoning was simple: you might need 60 AP to make a useful/powerful Fireball (Yes, I capped DC, but this allows Advantages, etc), but I dont see why I should allow a 60m Flight spell or a crazy-strong Barrier.

 

An example: A player could easily get 30 AP in Attacks, 20 in Defense, and 10 in Utility. I did this instead of going through Power by Power and making limitations. The players really didnt like this. I get it...but I also dont trust players to "play fair", and I dont want a pre-made spell list.

 

Example:

 

I hit a player with a 3d6 Entangle, which is only 30 AP, and quite equal to the 2d6 RKAs they were slinging around. This fighter had 15 STR...and was stuck helplessly for the rest of the fight. He was the strongest member in the group. Yes, he could have dodged, or done a bunch of defensive things differently, but he didnt, and it ruined his night (because he was out of the only battle we did in our intro). I want to avoid this...

 

How do you limit powers in your games? Do you really trust your players? I have BRILLIANT players - and by that, their IQs are much higher than my own (and I think Im a reasonably smart guy). Other than me having to come to terms with player expectations vs my own, Im really struggling here.

[Kaze9999]

I'd tend to give them a low amount of points to begin with, and then lay out story-based reasons for limiting magic based on the world, like for example having magic only be available from specific teachers, who require a lot of learning before you 'get to the good stuff' (i.e. required package deal which mandates buying other, 'related' skills like KS: Herbalism and Survival Skill and Paramedics and such for Healing magic, or Forensic Medicine Skill and KS: Anatomy for Necromancy, etc).

 

Also, if necessary, for some groups I will flat out say they have to use pre-generated spells from the Fantasy Hero and or Grimoire books and 'express themselves' in the execution and tactics more than the design phase of their magic.

 

Speaking of tactics...none of the other players helped to cut the poor guy loose from the Entanglement for the whole fight?

[bluesguy]

The mechanics of setting up and running a low magic world are not that hard.  It sounds like you were headed down the right path IMO.

My last campaign was a low magic world as well.  I think there are two things that really define a low magic campaign.

 

The first is how powerful magic is compared to the mundane approaches to deal with things.  A low magic world the "sword" will be more powerful than a spell.  Especially at the beginning of the campaign.  Here is a link to a description of how magic worked in that campaign and the specific schools of magic. 

 

The second aspect is the frequency of magic being used in the campaign.  For instance I can't imagine there would be very many, if any magic items in the game.  In my game the players didn't find any magic items until the last 6 sessions of the campaign (that was after two years of playing).  Also people who use magic should be very rare.  Most of the opposition won't have magical abilities.

 

The harder part is making sure your players are prepared to play in that kind of world. 

 

In the above game one player was a sorcerer (mental magic) and because of the nature of magic in the world he had to be very careful about using his magic - both from a meta-gaming POV and a campaign setting POV.  He actually had a secondary set of skills as a bounty hunter.  Another character was a reluctant priestess who eventually got divine powers (reluctantly at that). 

 

The PCs knew they were facing a big time mage and his apprentices but that person used his mundane allies to deal with the players for as long as possible. We probably played for six months before they ran into someone who could directly use magic against them.

 

You really have to bring your players along.  Weaning them off of D&D style magic might be really hard. 

[Markdoc]

I've run plenty of games in low-magic (often, very low magic) settings, with no problems. Here's how.

1. Your players have to be on board with it. If you have players who refer to "under level 10" as "mud-D&D", prefer high level games and feel oppressed if they can't teleport directly to the action, then you're probably not going get them onboard.

2. That said, if you are clear with your expectations and they are good players, they can probably deal (maybe with enthusiasm). Like I said, if the plot/game is good, I've had no problems, even with players who grew up in the Pocket Army.

 

Once you are over that hurdle?

 

First off, forget about points caps. I've never used them, and to be perfectly honest, I view them as a crutch for poor GMing. They're also a crutch with a razorbade for a handle and spikes hidden in the pad at the top, as you have just discovered. Any halfway competent player can make fantasy-game wrecking powers even with a relatively low points cap, and powers with a high points total are not necessarily game-wreckers. If you rely on points caps for control of what players can do in the game, you are already doomed to fail.

 

Instead, you need to control what magic can do, and how easy it is to do it.

 

There are a variety of ways to control what magic can do, but the easiest is to generate spells yourself (just as in D&D). I let players create spells, but that has to be done in-game, at the cost of research and rare materials, etc, so it's an in-game process. That means it has to be something they really want to do. You can also create a magic system that doesn't encourage every mage to be a mini-superhero.

 

How easy it is to do magic, is the most important part. As you have already discovered, in a low magic game, even low-magic is very powerful: it doesn't take much to challenge mundane characters: entangle, flash, drain, barrier, invisibility ... these are not high active point powers, but they are potentially game-changers. If they can be used "casually" then they will be game-changers. Again, you can control this,  but you need to do it in the set-up phase of the game, so the players know what they are up against. As an example, I ran a game where to do magic required the caster to use life-force (ie: BOD instead of END to cast). Even minor, casual spells would injure the caster. Since the easiest way to get BOD was by sacrifice, magic-users had a pretty bad reputation. The flip side was that since magic was so dangerous, it was rare, and so magical countermeasures were also rare. A flight spell was a major deal to cast - but in a world where no-one is expecting flying invaders it is also potentially very powerful: it circumvents 90% of castle defences, for example. That approach is probably more extreme than you want to go, but it makes the point: to stop magic being the go-to solution in almost every case, you need to control how easy it is to use.

 

In my last game, I used 4 aspects: all magic required a skill roll (and I enforced penalties for stressful situations), it used LTE instead of END (so it exhausted the caster), it required concentration (thus reduced DCV) and it took extra time. That made spellcasting a hazardous procedure in combat (which was exactly as I wanted) but it was still very powerful: the party's prime spellcaster saved their butts more times than I can count and made it possible for them to go places no mundane adventurers could have gone.

 

Basically, no part of a fantasy hero game is more important than how you set up your magic system. Get that right and the rest is pretty easy. Get that wrong, and the rest doesn't really matter.

 

cheers, Mark

[Kaze9999]

The mechanics of setting up and running a low magic world are not that hard.  It sounds like you were headed down the right path IMO.

My last campaign was a low magic world as well.  I think there are two things that really define a low magic campaign.

 

The first is how powerful magic is compared to the mundane approaches to deal with things.  A low magic world the "sword" will be more powerful than a spell.  Especially at the beginning of the campaign.  Here is a link to a description of how magic worked in that campaign and the specific schools of magic. 

 

The second aspect is the frequency of magic being used in the campaign.  For instance I can't imagine there would be very many, if any magic items in the game.  In my game the players didn't find any magic items until the last 6 sessions of the campaign (that was after two years of playing).  Also people who use magic should be very rare.  Most of the opposition won't have magical abilities.

 

The harder part is making sure your players are prepared to play in that kind of world. 

 

In the above game one player was a sorcerer (mental magic) and because of the nature of magic in the world he had to be very careful about using his magic - both from a meta-gaming POV and a campaign setting POV.  He actually had a secondary set of skills as a bounty hunter.  Another character was a reluctant priestess who eventually got divine powers (reluctantly at that). 

 

The PCs knew they were facing a big time mage and his apprentices but that person used his mundane allies to deal with the players for as long as possible. We probably played for six months before they ran into someone who could directly use magic against them.

 

You really have to bring your players along.  Weaning them off of D&D style magic might be really hard. 

 

 

Really good point, being that "Low Magic" should mean, "Magic is scarce, period." and not, "Magic is scarce for the PC's...but not for their enemies!" 

[Kealios]

Speaking of tactics...none of the other players helped to cut the poor guy loose from the Entanglement for the whole fight?

 

Excellent points all around. In the example above, I did a "danger room" scenario which was a free-for-all pit fight. The PCs didnt know each other, and everyone got paired up randomly with an opponent. The NPC fighting this one player had one spell, which was the entangle, and the player was out of things just like that.

 

In my world, when magic is used (or more specifically, when spells are failed), it summons monsters to this world. This is the "fluff" for why magic should be rare - but the players are just calculating the odds of failing spells, and trying to buff themselves against it. I was hoping to give an in-game enforcement to the "magic is rare" concept, because the players werent getting it.

 

The second point to that is, the monsters DO have magic...and are scary. The fact that magic summons these creatures to this world is terrifying for many of its inhabitants, and a huge rift has been created in scociety, with some people "ok" with the monsters coming from magic, while others shun magic completely because they dont want to destroy their world.

 

It was in this vein that I wanted to put points cap on what the players can do.

 

Maybe I:

A) lower the points value of PCs considerably

remove point caps completely

C) assign some mandatory Limitations (like those you mentioned, above)

D) Hope for player buy in.

 

I'm sure, if I can find the right balance, that my players will come along. They're good guys with decades of experience. Overcoming expectations is tricky...