Okay, here goes my blog post.
Recently I've started Divinity: Original Sin 2. It's probably everything I hate about modern fantasy.
From the start everybody hurls fireballs, has three resurrection scrolls, conjure poison out of thin air. Every fucking body.
You fight with some faggot bandit who wants to rob you? He can turn half of the ground in a diameter of 50 m into a lake of fire. You fight alligators? They can teleport!
Fuck this shit, seriously.
If magic is so commonplace it stops being interesting, it becomes just stupid. Just imagine a world where alligators can teleport. How would society change? I bet it would be hard to even imagine it.
If magic is limited and/or rare, every spell can have an impact on the world. Gandalf making scenes by puffing smoke from a pipe creates a sense of wonder, some feeling that there is so much more to see.
There is nothing like that if it's everywhere though. When everybody is Gandalf, no one is. When your heroes can at level 4 can wreck a small city's whole guard regiment with thunderwaves and shit, it's so hard to create a story that would be relatable.
Okay, here goes my blog post
Well then, stop playing video games.
I've previously thought this too. Divinity, despite having some very nice worldbuilding hidden away in it, might be the least immersive game I've ever played.
That being said, the availability of magic makes the otherwise bland combat much more fun, so in that respect I can see why they did it.
>Magic should be one way
I'd say fuck off to /v/ but that is the kind of bullshit logic that lives here. Nobody cares about your retarded opinion and you killed a thread just to post this.
Agreed.
I will go one step further and say that not only magic but heroes should be low powered.
Everyone needs to be that big god damn hero these days.
No one is content with saving a village or saving a single person these days.
Everyone needs to be equipped with +5 armor of brightness and they need to save the kingdom from the evil wizard by stealing his macguffin.
You can have great pleasure from doing small but fullfilling and realistic tasks.
OP here, fucking this.
Killing five goblins that threatened the village should make you feel like a real hero. Make you proud and revered by the villagers. Working all your way up to slaying (or helping to slay) that Smaug should make you feel someone absolutely special in the world, take lots of wits and probably cost you a lot.
Heroes who overcome problems with guts and wits are much more relatable than those who throw fireballs. And, at some point, no mundane obstacle will be able to stop you. Where's the fun in it?
>imblying it isn't about D&D first and foremost
How are your level 4 wizards wrecking a whole game of stronger wizards, if what you say is true?
Yeah but the reality of a game designed to emulate this is that when characters are weak and fighting is hard you're basically just in a RNG meatgrind and crossing your fingers that one of your characters makes it through that RNG to become 'the hero.' Which isn't particularly better really as your characters just become disposable.
See any very early edition of D&D where 1HP wizards died to housecats.
>tfw your favorite system is low fantasy
>tfw magic is not broken or unbalanced
>tfw a lucky hit by a random bandit can kill a high level character
>tfw realistic armor that actually requires effort and the right weapon to penetrate
>tfw most people never even see magic in their lifetime
Why are you still playing DnDesque games again?
Try warhammer fantasy roleplay.
Even with a fully equipped and armed party you have to think really hard before deciding to engage a group of thugs. Or good heavens a boar.
Just like IRL desu.
I say fuck off with your boring bullshit. Go play mount and blade or something if you want your retarded peasant in the mud shitting pain simulator.
>When your heroes can at level 4 can wreck a small city's whole guard regiment with thunderwaves and shit, it's so hard to create a story that would be relatable.
But in a world where everyone has magic, the city guard is also blasting the party with thunder-waves. It's almost like magic being so fucking common among everyone is a wonder unto itself.
Yes I've played this and it's just an RNG grinder. I mean it's fun for what it is but when your characters are hilariously weak and disposable you don't get attached to them and therefore don't bother really roleplaying them as well as you might as you've already got 3 more character sheets lined up ready to go when Bob 4 dies.
It doesn't need to be like that. Give them fate points to stimulate more narrative approach, like something you would see in a novel. Give them some metaabilities. And make fights rare.
I really don't know. What system are you talking about?
Play Dragon's Dogma, there's a group of bandits right outside the first town that will fucking clobber you without a thought.
But Magic is common in dragons dogma too, and it's not the vague magical fairy fart plot magic that barely comes up to inspire "wonder" either. Even the bandits have it. They still toss around firebolts and lighting strikes, it's just not as grandiose as divinity makes it since it doesn't have skills altering terrain as a gameplay mechanic.
Video games =/= tabletop games. Why is this even a thread?
People want their "I LOVE LOW MAGIC LOW FANTASY" hipster cred.
Maybe you and probably the DM are approaching it with the regular rpg minset?
You dont want to have fair fights in WHFRP, if you really really have to engage in combat you want to gang up on enemies . 2 to 1 is acceptable, 3 to 1 is good.
And you must use every advantage you can get to survive any engagement.
Pounce on them when they are not suspecting a thing, ambush them. Get extra help. Throw peasants at them etc etc.
Fuck you, I want to be a demigod among superheroes. I'll take high fantasy every day.
You're the type of nigga that shit talks classical music when you know damn well that it is in fact enjoyable for a lot of people.
yeah plebs
>ambush them. Get extra help. Throw peasants
OP's point of contention was that you can't be a true hero in most modern RPG games as your character is so powerful that there's no stakes or sacrifice involved.
I fail to see how using peasants a shield , stabbing people in the back or getting other people to fight your fights is particularly any more heroic but that's the nature of a harsher system.
So evidently a system being deadlier actually discourages rather than encourages heroics.
This.
I don't want to be Man-in-Cap running away from a goblin.
I want to be Big Ted with his Big Holy Stick smashing the skulls in of the blasphemous hordes of undead that some uppity necromancer who thinks he's the next Dark Overlord has unleashed against the local city.
The problem is, when you take those worlds to logical conclusions they just start falling apart.
If you're taking a high fantasy world to its 'realistic' logical conclusion you're playing it fucking wrong.
It's like someone who thinks he's being high brow by saying 'why doesn't anybody ever go to the toilet in action movies' haw haw.
PEOPLE ARE HAVING FUN IN WRONG WAYS AND MUST BE STOPPED
I for one would find a high magic world actually taken to it's post scarcity conclusion interesting and trippy as hell
Very few people reach those heights though, and when you do, you tend to go off to very obscure parts of the world to fight very specific threats/find very specific items/seek very specific knowledge/do very specific deeds/etc.
Things certainly go high-power, but are often very specific and very obscure just out of the fact that the initial circumstance of people/things reaching those heights is so rare in the first place.
>inb4 why wouldn't they just win wars for lods of emone/take over the country/etc
Unlikely to be interested at that point or likely they would be aware of something even greater/more horrifying/more interesting to occupy their attention.
Hey guys, it's almost like everyone can play however they want and it doesn't need to have anything to do with your tastes! In fact it won't effect you or your game at all! Isn't that neato?
Not, really. I mean, low fantasy "high impact magic" can warp worlds a lot more than people just slinging fire balls everywhere depending on what it's capable of. Since at the end of the day, the latter is just flashy archery.
What if, in a High Fantasy setting, magic nearly always warps your mind? So the stronger you get, the less 'sensible' or less likely to do what 'a logical/sensible/normal person with near-limitless possibilities at their fingertips' would do?
Outside of combat, I mean.
So the highest level NPC mages are like Battlemagic savants, where they'll warp and twist and destroy your mind, body and soul ten thousand ways to Sunday, but don't really do much with magic outside of battle, at least not the kinds of things a player might use 9th level spells for?
The reason that crappy magical improvements to society are so slow and crappy is that they're all being done by low level mages because the higher ones don't bother/can no longer conceive of the ideas
Fuck you OP for making me reply to your garbage.
1 - There are other games where everyone has access to magic. Off the top of my head, from video games, there's the Elder Scrolls series. From tabletop stuff, there's Earthdawn, as well as the nation of Halruua from FR.
2 - In-Universe it makes sense. If anybody who is intelligent enough to learn magic can, why wouldn't they? And considering that 0-level cantrips would require average Intelligence to learn (going off a D&D-like system), why wouldn't they have a spell or two that makes their life (or combat roles) easier?
3 - Fuck off and die with liking your low-fantasy garbage. If you want to go jerk off to it, you're just fucking dumb.
What he's talking about sounds more or less fitting for The Riddle of Steel imo.
Maybe Harnmaster, from what I've heard about it, but I have yet to read it myself.
>2 - In-Universe it makes sense. If anybody who is intelligent enough to learn magic can, why wouldn't they? And considering that 0-level cantrips would require average Intelligence to learn (going off a D&D-like system), why wouldn't they have a spell or two that makes their life (or combat roles) easier?
Because in universe that's not how it works in D&D. If you don't have the talent you can't learn it. It's mechanically possible for anyone to learn it with a high enough int, but the reason not everyone does is because they lack the ability to store magic in their heads like wizards can.
>because they lack the ability to store magic in their heads like wizards can.
Nothing actually says this. It's head canon to justfy a class being rare.
The real limiting factor on wizard rarity is society structure and general lack of education. Books and shit are expensive. No class in D&D that isn't either a Monk or Psionic in nature "stores" magic within themselves.
You dont have to tell al the details when you are paying the bards to sing your songs of heroism.
Marketing yourself is a very important aspect of being a hero you know?
This is what Beyond the Wall does. OSR except for the fortune points that keep your low fantasy, coming of age protagonist from getting eaten by wolves.
I've played a bunch of warhammer and this only happened in the very beginning. Afterwards we played smarter, and did well. you still die sometimes, but if every character has 2-3 fate points you can afford to die without even losing your character.
This is stupid and bad.
>I dont know how the world works the post
Except it's more like flashy, fully concealable, highly mobile artillery piece. High fantasy battles should be more like battle of Stalingrad, with with poor foot soldiers getting shelled by magical fire while fighting for every room.
so then dont play it.....?
>I don't understand people want to play actual heroes
Actual heroes tend to not live long.
Real heroes die during character creation.
>You fight alligators? They can teleport!
This would be cool if it was a game of Rifts.
Not cool in a game of D&D.