Dream campaign

Are you the person who wrote that screencap? Just curious. I've seen it around a lot.

Secondly; you have to define what you mean by low magic. No casters? Weaker casters?

>reveals how shoddy the systems underneath actually are

I disagree. d20 + modifier vs AC or a DC is simple and effective for most people and campaigns. The rest comes down your dungeon master and how they let the party do things WITHOUT rolling, or how lenient they are in terms of skills or modifiers, etc. I should mention ahead of time I'm not referring to things like the specific numbers or uses of skills or classes, because I don't know 5e, just the basic dice rolling structure is fine and I don't understand why people get so upset with it.

Not sure what system but a campaign that is vaguely like the old show Quantum Leap mixed with fairy tales.
The premise is this:Your characters live in a dystopian future where all the fairy tales ended poorly. A mix of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and a Brave New World.
A strange old man contacts your characters and meets them at an abandon shack in the bad side of town. Inside there is a basement with a sort of time machine; it doesn't send bodies back in time only souls. Your characters end up jumping into different people each time. The players always end up right at the moment something horrible happens and where/when everything went wrong. Example being say Robin Hood. The players arrive in the bodies of random peasants just in time to witness Robin Hood himself (along with a few of his Merry Men) being hung. The evil King John has somehow disposed of his brother as well... The conditions for completing this would be to Dethrone John and install someone trust worthy (preferably Richard but, if he is killed somehow it's still possible to make things right)

These aren't significant people - just random bystanders you're transferring your souls into so each fairy tale you'll be re-rolling class and stats but, for every tale you rewrite or correct you gain a permanent assignable bonus (IE a free +2 each time that stacks you may split or apply to any stat.)

Ideally you'd go through these in order of when the fairy tale was suppose to take place (IE the earliest would be in stoneage times and the latest might be near modern times (1950s or something like that)

Not the guy you're asking, but I share the sentiment so I'll weigh in.

The main problem with magic in DnD and games like it is that magic doesn't have a niche.

>But user, magic can do anything!"

And this is precisely the problem. When magic can do anything and everything, it just becomes a collection of "cheat codes" that some characters can access to bypass entire parts of the game, while characters without access to these cheat codes (such as martials) are stuck with far less in terms of agency and roleplaying options. They're almost playing a separate game entirely. They have to play a gme of "DM may I?" with a horribly underwhelming "skills system" where proficiency only makes them 10% better at something that someone with no training at all, while the characters with magic can just cheat past these parts of the game consistently and reliably if they build correctly. Even worse is the utter river of shit-spew counter-arguments that it's "balanced" because casters have spell slots that can run out. Yes, the character who can do everything some of the time and then become useless is balanced against the character who is mostly useless all of the time.

Magic needs to do a small handful of things that other classes can't do, but it needs to do JUST that. Not do a handful of things nobody else can do and also everything that everyone else can do, but better.

In before grognards with spreadsheets try to claim martials are better in combat, the most fucking boring part of a roleplaying experience. And even there, they may be "better" in terms of raw damage but still lack anywhere near the number of options and gameplay depth casters have.

Before that one troll is summoned, please know that I agree with you. But I feel the issue is more complicated.

For instance; in my homebrew game I changed and limited the classes to the most basic set; Fighter, Rogues, and Mages. The mages later had their name changed to "Sages"; because I made them a support class. Especially when using D&D as a base, you want the Rogue class to be THE puzzle solving, trap avoiding, monster sneaking past guy. The Fighter is the best at fighting of course, so then you should make the Wizardly class into a support unit. Healing, repairing shit quickly, giving off light or fire, protection from spells or undead; similar to what a cleric does. This is a perfectly serviceable situation.

However a LOT of people find a lot of appeal in a deep or interesting magic system, which is where the issue comes in. Having a magic system like in Ars Magica, where you can combine a verb + subject to create a spell effect, is EXTREMELY cool. You could "Create" plus "Fire" to make a fireball. You could "Change" plus "Animal" to turn your little rat familiar that lives in your pocket into a horse, so you can use it as a mount for a short time. Shit like this is classic fantasy and extremely cool, and people want stuff like this in their games. Powers they can actually control. Games without magic, or games with magic being purely in the form of magic items, become a "DM may I?" for everyone. But this magic is also extremely overpowered if only a few party members get it, which is why Ars Magica has EVERYONE make a Wizard and they rotate who is playing them and who is playing a non-magical supporting character.

So what's a good solution? I don't know. It's very hard to figure because it depends so much on what your group wants. Dungeons and Dragons, as well as video games, has created an expectation that people can play a Warrior dude and another player a Wizard dude and they should be of equal value, but they never are. That's our quest.

I'd agree, except I feel support should be the role of clerics, and mages should be "crowd control" forms of damage.

I know wizards already sorta are with things like Fireball and such. But this needs to be one of the ONLY things their class is good at. If you're a piece of blaster artillery, you shouldn't ALSO have mind control, and ALSO have shapeshifting, and ALSO have tons of defensive magic, and ALSO have the ability to see the future, and ALSO raise the dead, and ALSO teleport, and ALSO summon monsters to fight for you, and ALSO 9001 other things.

>I'd agree, except I feel support should be the role of clerics, and mages should be "crowd control" forms of damage.

You're already running into problems here though. Making Wizards the "crowd control" forms of damage is making them into better fighters, but usually better since they can disable foes or deal damage to many foes at once. There is literally nothing wrong with folding the Cleric and Wizard together; make the Wizard a supporting class.

>I know wizards already sorta are with things like Fireball and such. But this needs to be one of the ONLY things their class is good at. If you're a piece of blaster artillery, you shouldn't ALSO have mind control, and ALSO have shapeshifting, and ALSO have tons of defensive magic, and ALSO have the ability to see the future, and ALSO raise the dead, and ALSO teleport, and ALSO summon monsters to fight for you, and ALSO 9001 other things.

Yes, but even choosing one of those categories has potential to step on the non-magical classes toes, with exception to things like healing and protection spells. Combat spells and summoning are like being a fighter, but better. Transmutation, Divination, Enchantment, and Illusion all step on the roll of the party's Rogue or Bard usually. Powers like teleportation, flight, or powers that end monster encounters instantly are too powerful even if that's the only thing the character can do, as they ruin the entire game experience and primary structure for everyone.

In most games the classes that do crowd control do considerably less single-target damage than the classes that focus on doing high single-target DPS.

Play any MMO, the crowd-control classes are great when you're up against trash mobs, but garbage when you're up against the big boss of the dungeon (unless said boss summons trash mobs constantly).

Yes, that's a great idea in theory. But once again; that doesn't really give the magic user any really good niche. Doing a specific type of damage; being a class geared only towards combat and that's it kind of weakens the archetype and makes them too specific. It would work for a game focused entirely on a combat engine, but what about out of combat actions?

I think the biggest problem is that Martials and Casters in D&D is that they are operating on two entirely different tiers of power both mechanically and in setting/lore/fluff/universe but are presented as being roughly equivalent

It's like the martial is stuck being Black Knight and the caster gets to be Doctor Strange and even then the martial only gets to be Black Knight if the DM gives him a good magic sword

The only real solution to this problem is to either explicitly state that a group should all play one or the other with everybody being either martials or casters, or you move them closer together in terms of power, utility, depth and well just about everything else. Of course to do that you need to either remove a lot of magic from the magicians or give a lot of magic to the warrior in terms of blatantly superhuman/supernatural abilities, and when I say supernatural abilities I don't just mean leaping tall building or stopping a speeding lightning rail I mean superhuman levels of skill as well

This misses the point though. In DnD, or at least 5e, fighters are actually more POWERFUL than casters.

The cancer of casters comes instead from their sheer versatility and ability to bypass problems half a dozen ways before they even start. And then, even if the martials have skills that would be useful, the magical solution is usually better and more reliable in every aspect other than the spell-slot cost.

In combat the fighter still blows the wizard out of the water, but again, combat is the most piss boring part of actual roleplaying.