I want to create a compelling world for my DnD group to play in but I just can't stop sabotaging myself...

I want to create a compelling world for my DnD group to play in but I just can't stop sabotaging myself. To me the spells and divine powers are too powerful to create any compelling stories and obstacles.

For example, say there is a war going on and your commander wants you and your crew to go and deliver an important tactical message to some other company behind the frontlines. Here is the thing, I just ask myself

>why does the military don't use a "sending" spell?

I mean sure there can be hundreds of pretexts you can create but this is a problem. I continuously find myself trying to come up with different excuses as to why anything couldn't be solved with magic. This is not a problem with my players, I do this to myself.

How the fuck can I stop overanalyzing this shit Veeky Forums?

Stop being a fucking autist.

Pull excuses out of your ass or just say "because nobody thought of that".

>why does the military don't use a "sending" spell?
Because they don't have one? Because even in 3.5, casting a sending spell costs, what? 450 gp? That's half the cost of a house. Why wouldn't he just pay some messenger a few silver to do it? Now is it through dangerous territory? Okay you need to send some mercenaries. Which cost 2 sp per day to hire. The characters probably cost a few gold per day to hire. Nothing on the order of four hundred fifty fucking gold to deliver a 25 word message. Sending is the most worthless goddamn spell unless you are contacting other planes with it. There's a reason it was cut down to level 3 in 5e.

Also
>implying your army even has a wizard of that level
>implying the wizard wouldn't just fly over to deliver the message in person
>then fireball the opposing forces under the effects of greater invisibility

For gods sake
>I continuously find myself trying to come up with different excuses as to why anything couldn't be solved with magic.
Everything can be solved with magic, in 3.5. But magic is also rare and expensive as fuck. So unless you REALLY need magic for something, you're not going to use it.

Well, we are playing 5e, so magic is not really that expensive. Thay may be the part of the problem.

My players don't question such things. I am just trying to satisfy myself so "nobody thought of that" thing doesn't work for me as even I can think of it.

Would it break the game to cap even the most powerful npcs to level 6 or something?

It's not a coincidence how wizards are depicted in more "serious" fantasy.
They always have few of the following attributes:
very few, secretive, mostly weak, despised or even persecuted.

These are not just to give "flavor" to the setting, they make it so any institution, like a kingdom, would have trouble finding or using the collaboration of magic.
It is in the hands of few, frowned upon as unnatural, or immensely complicated and expensive (precious gems as components??).

Imagine, as a comparison for diffidence, genetic engineering in the world of today. "Why doesn't every nation just build supersoldiers and manipulate genes??".
It's frowned upon. It's just "immoral" or "controversial", for a number of reasons that as always boil down to "it's against nature, against religion, and against tradition". If it is done, it is done in secret. It's fucking hard to parade around genetically engineered Frankenstein monsters in a legion and avoid people's pitchforks. Same goes in (some) Fantasy for an army of fire elementals or undead.

In a different scenario, we could compare it to Nuclear Power. It's super expensive, and only super experts can provide it. We do have it but it's seldom used in history, with extreme care and, again, moral issues. Plus, expensive "components".
"Why doesn't a Nigerian Warlord just get nukes???" "Why can't Greece just build nuclear reactors to save on power?"

In the middle ages, keeping knowledge secret is even easier. Kabals, secret societies and the like existed for millennia, there just was no magic in them, only other secrets (spiritual, political). Think of Harry Potter's Hogwarts.
Why don't humans just benefit from magic?
Because mages are secretive and hidden, and nobody is ever sure whether it's a fairytale.

Fuck that would be a really great way to balance things if weren't for the cantrip spamming pc wizard that screams magic everywhere he goes...

>why does the military don't use a "sending" spell?

Well, for one, welcome to the problem with generic high fantasy, it really doesn't think through the implications of magic.

As for an answer:

Enemy wizards are scrambling communication with their own magic

Enemy Wizards will intercept sending with their own Magic

Magic creates some kind of obvious phenomenon that would tip the enemy off that new orders had been sent and discretion is important for the mission

Magic is inherently dangerous in some way and casual use is Ill advised. For a good example, see Warhammer Fantasy

Really though, all you have to do is untether yourself from reality and take magic to it's logical conclusions and you'll create a fairly alien and inexplicable world

>Why doesn't every nation just build supersoldiers and manipulate genes??".
Because they can't because that technology doesn't exist. You're kidding yourself if you think govts wouldn't go into that full throttle of they thought it was reasonably possible, asshurt religious groups be damned. The CIA and FBI treat the law like suggestions as it is when it comes to national security matters.

You could make wizards a big fucking deal.
As in, as soon as he casts a spell in a tavern, the whole crowd goes silent and stares at him, and the guards immediately seize him because the Duke wants to personally meet and evaluate every wizard in town, and maybe it's illegal for them to move around in the domin without two guards always controlling them (and the guards could be other PCs).
Maybe there is straight up a witch hunt EVERYWHERE, or a "High College of Wizardry" that highly disciplines its members as monks indoctrinated to love peace and use their power sparingly. So a wizard MUST wear bright green robes everywhere to assure everyone he has the college's "seal of quality".
This same college makes wizards swear to "never serve a king against another" because great wars were fought with magic in the past and it resulted in entire cities wiped off the face of the Earth, so Wizard only serve "The Silent God" or "The interests of the College" or "one's own conscience" (heavily indoctrinated by the school of wizardry at an early age lol).

If all these ideas sound unoriginal it's because they are! Plenty of settings, from Dragon Age to freaking League of Legends have "strict mage law" as a fundamental part of the setting.

>freaking League of Legends
Not anymore sadly

Summoner League is kill

>Well, we are playing 5e
Well there's your mistake. Delete the idea of wizards being commonplace, and your problem solves itself.

>nuclear analogy
Thanks user I was trying to think of something like that, and you nailed it. Good job.

The most powerful spells require intricate rune circles, prohibitively rare ingredients, several mages casting in tandem, and an intricate week-long ritual to cast without fail.

...The United States would.
Russia would.
China would.
Not freaking Zimbabwe and the Republic of Macedonia, and the "Concerned Moms Foundation".

The point is that magic/this power needs to be contained and limited, and maybe hidden underwraps, not that it wouldn't exist at all!

If in the setting magic is like "CIA" or "FBI" stuff, the goal is accomplished! You have a fantasy setting where magic is an urban legend that truly exists in the closet of the biggest superpowers of the planet. Sounds good to me!

Wasn't that setting a work of art though?
It was so unique, what a pity.

There's one simple answer to this. You don't want to hear it, but here it is.

HAVE YOU TRIED NOT PLAYING DND?!

Fucking damn, every time.

>>why does the military don't use a "sending" spell?
why does you don't into english language

Huh?

Eberron is the only D&D setting that actually takes into account the ubiquity of low-level magic in a standard campaign

Read the chapter in Intrigue Adventures concerning "magic and intrigue". It will solve 90% of your issues and remind you why casters are only as OP as you allow them to be.

Think again

>>why does the military don't use a "sending" spell?
maybe they don't have wizards

Yeah, and playing a martial sucks in Eberron because it really drives in how you can't do shit except hit things. Have fun with your roleplaying "options".

MAYBE HE LIKES PLAYING D&D?

You badwrongfun police are so stupid.

Pretty much the only real answer you're gonna get. So sick of DnDrones complaining about how much DnD sucks when they refuse to even try anything else.

Also this , but apply it to all of DnD as a whole.

I used to have the same problem with magic as you. I found a solution that works for me personally. Pretend magic is like computer messaging. the enemy has ''firewalls'' which prevents you from disrupting their affairs, but they can be slipped through by a skilled ''hacker''

>You badwrongfun police are so stupid.

Look at that fag, so angry about how nobody plays his shitty, unpopular tabletop. All he can do is shitpost online about people having more fun than him, green with envy.

I actually really want to play something else but couldn't find a better system.

Especially in 5e, don't give NPCs classes and levels. Maybe they have a couple of specific abilities from PC pools, but otherwise ignore the restrictions/progression. The hedge wizard is not actually a level 2 wizard, but an NPC with 6 HP and 2 spells in a spellbook. Maybe she can cast something normally out of an adventurer's reach at that level, as a ritual - she spent years learning that one spell and setting up a whole room to cast it. This is a luxury adventurers don't have.

People with actual classes are rare, especially anything that goes over level 5. From the PHB:
>These characters have become important, facing dangers that threaten cities and kingdoms.

>why does the military don't use a "sending" spell?
It does. All 4 of of its wizards capable of it.

>Worldbuilding
>For D&D
There are exactly three kinds of people who pick up a game of D&D and decide to homebrew a setting:

The first is the kind of smug, self-satisfied person who has active disdain for a number of foundational fantasy conventions and thinks that "subverting the tropes" constitutes quality writing. This is where you get all the the eye-rollingly "wacky" settings that people propose instead of the dreaded "Generic European Fantasy:"
>What if we ran a D&D game with gunpowder weapons in a post-apocalyptic wild west?
>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to city states floating on sky islands?
>What if the only playable races were gnomes and bugmen, and everyone lives underground, and magic comes from eating mushrooms that grow on the backs of wild elves?

How twee. How wacky. How inteszzzzz....

The second is the kind of person who's too lazy to run someone else's world consistently. They can't put in the effort to memorize the base details of Dragonlance or Ravenloft or even Forgotten Realms, so they create their own Forgotten Realms with the serial numbers filed off and the geography mixed up a little bit. They throw another bog-standard fantasy setting on the pile: another laundry list of proper nouns that the players have to re-remember even though they mean the same thing as any other D&D setting.

The third is the failed fantasy writer; the wannabe Tolkien who is actively more invested in showing you their fantasy realm than running your campaign. They're no less self-congratulating than the first, no more creative than the second, but has become so enraptured with their own escapist flights of fantasy that they'll stew in disdain for their players not caring as much as themselves on the obligatory globe-trotting slog.

In all cases it's not a good sign for the quality of your GM, both in the sense of the quality of their game and the quality of their character.

What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to city states floating on sky islands?

That actually sounds fun.

In other words, only ever play official D&D settings?

@55337478

Shit son those last two sound fun as hell to play in. Fuck you and your boring ass

>@

>giving (You)s to pastaposters

>giving (You)s to people who give (You)s to pastaposters

>giving (You)s to people who give (You)s to people who give (You)s to pastaposters.

I think this concept has been stated in earlier posts, but it may be more helpful to have a stronger resource...

The 3.5 DMG has guides for generating towns based on their size. This begins on page 137.
On page 139, they include a table to generate the level and number of player class NPCs in the town.

You'll note that a "Metropolis" (defined as a population of 25,001+) would only have a wizard of max level 16. I.E. level 16 wizards are essentially the pinnacle of success in the wizarding world, and you're more or less not going to find one without seeking them out specifically.

A large city (probably more what you'd be dealing with, depending on your setting), would only have a max of level 13. Keep in mind, this is the max you would get on the roll and you're only talking about 1-3 people who are even this high in the class. Out of a population of 12,001-25,000.

All that said, this is setting-generic, so you can make up any reasoning/numbers you want. But, even the "default" implies that finding capable magic-users is like finding a needle in a haystack. Randomly finding a wizard level 5+ in a world that strictly adhered to these tables would be impossible until you started roaming around places with populations higher than 2,000-5,000 people. Even, then you're looking at one guy out of those thousands.

To further wrap this up and make it more directly meaningful to you...

The 5th edition DMG also has a similar system for generating towns, but it uses different population tiers and names for them.

Despite that, it's not too hard to take the ideas and concepts from 3.5 mentioned in my post and apply them to what is already in the 5th edition DMG.

All that said, at the end of the day, you can do whatever you want and make up your own numbers. If the players are fine, then whatever you do (within reason) is fine too.

>why does the military don't use a "sending" spell?
A 5th-level character is a pretty big deal, and that's the lowest level you can be while still being able to cast sending.

Maybe the general is an eldritch knight of sufficiently advanced level to cast the spell, and that's how he issues orders, but the fact of the matter is that most commanders aren't going to have access to sending and other magic.

Someone did the math at one point, using average experience from the different categories of encounter and accounting for the probability of failure and death. Something like only 10% of characters with class levels will be 5th level or higher. If you assume that all classes are distributed more or less equally, that's 0.833% per class. You end up with maybe 2% of the class-leveled population having access to sending. And that's going to be the most powerful and important 2% of the population, so why the hell would they be wasting their time on something so minor?

So, given that anyone who decides to write a setting is a terrible DM and their setting will be worthless, where do you think that official D&D settings come from?

Step 1: Make a list of the spells that ruin things for you
Step 2: Forbid them or alter them to not ruin things for you

>giving (You)s to people who give (You)s to people who give (You)s to people who give (You)s to pastaposters

Why do you hate everything user

Literally nobody in my playgroup is at all familiar with official D&D settings. Why would I give them all that homework when I could just ask them what they want to play and put together something that suits it?

boring thread

>unpopular

I agree. Why don't we keep bumping it to the top, user?

You're kidding yourself if you believe that the only thing in the anthrax shot I got was vaccination against anthrax.

A soldier is property. The government does whatever the hell it likes with its property, and occasionally has to pay out if something bad happens and the case actually manages to make it to court.

>>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to city states floating on sky islands?
So, you're saying that Spelljammer, an official D&D setting, is shit. Well, sir, in my opinion, I happen to think you're an unfun faggot.

If you're having problems designing a setting that works with DnD, don't play DnD, it's a fine game but it doesn't seem to be doing what you want

No fear.

Runeqest is around as crunchy as D&D but the magic is weaker in general, but also more flexible.
The Combat is really dynamic and things rarely come down to "i keep standing on my field and hit him with my sword." There is a whole bucket of moves, finishers and parrys.
Currently more of a setting less system, but there is also the runequest setting, which can go from "familiar and some exotic tropes" to "wild fever dream" dependong on where you play.

Warhammer fantasy, never got the chance to play it myself but the setting has pretty clear guidlines on where and how magic happens.
The setting is pretty much grimbright.

Un-ironical i'd also recommend Traveller as a mechanic system. Combat is fast and lethal and with Mongoose Traveller 1e you also have a truckloads of supplements, including one for magic. Or you could just call psyonics magicans and have it as another thing people can develope as a skill, and less of something people build around.

Then there it "roadtrip the RPG", which is "The dark Eye" which is an ass old sytem from germany. Magic in general is pretty tame and it's more about the travel and charakter development than it is about combat. Magic is also a thing but not as broken as in DnD.

Then there is the (un)holy trinity of generalist systems
Strike, Fate, GURPS.

In general: Any System that handles Magic more balanced than DnD will also feel like their magic got castrated for a DnD player.

because the other side has magic as well.

So, don't play a martial. Problem solved!

Use your imagination and make something up. Maybe the opposing side has magical track spells that detect and redirect sendings, or something.

>deliver an important tactical message to some other company behind the frontlines
Snore

>This pockmarked landscape is littered with magical towers designed to interfere with our spellcaster, please take some of my mooks and go storm these towers and destroy them so we can have our wizards use Sending spells to deliver this important message,
Neat

step 1: Stop playing DnD
step 2: create a better setting yourself using a different less retarded system
step 3: have fun world building

You can ban spellcasters, account for everything a society with spellcasters should be capable of and prepared for, or let your players be the only spellcasters in the setting because they're special or something. In all three cases, you'll probably go insane, but it might be a fun kind of insane.

>why does the military don't use a "sending" spell?
They probably do. It's not much better than semaphore.

Depending on how literally you take magic "being magic", sending might be semaphores.