Quote from: Shipyard Locked;919124Regarding making NPC casters rare; I believe that actually worsens the problem. As a few people have mentioned, the best defense against society warping spells is other spells. If you have only a handful of doddering eccentric Merlins around in your world then your PC wizard will have pretty much free reign to make a mockery of your pseudo-European kingdoms, especially as he rises in levels.

If your players are mainly concerned with gaining political power in the game world, I'm not sure D&D is the right game. And what are the other players doing while the wizard player wants to take over the kingdom?

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;919124I'll bet the second or third most common cause of high level campaign collapse is the queasy realization that the godlike plot-killing powers sucked most of the fun out of the proceedings and there's no way to go back.

High-level D&D is pretty much broken in every edition. That's why the overwhelming number of campaigns wrap up by 12th level, and by that level they're going on plane-hopping quests to slay demons and demi-liches. I've played for 35 years and only had two campaigns reach 10th level.

So I assume you don't have much interest in a typical D&D campaign where the PCs explore dungeons, fight dragons in their lairs, etc. until they reach 12th level or so?

Can you say "Arcane Backlash?" Make magic risky.

Quote from: Spinachcat;919118In OD&D, I don't have to worry about caster supremacy. They are awesome, but since they have less spells per day in OD&D and less HP than in later editions, and less ability to have dozens of magic items, the fighter isn't notably behind the curve. For me, that's one of the reasons our crew greatly enjoyed 4e as well.

They do? In O a magic user got a d6 for HD. They just progressed slower in accumulating.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;919124I’m actually thinking of statting up two types of specialized NPCs in the future to deal with this arms race. The first would be some kind of witch finder, and they would be about as common as sheriffs or guard captains. Their entire function would be to watch for magical crimes and prevent them if possible. They wouldn’t be combat monsters necessarily, but would be trained to resist mental subversion, be highly sensitive to signs of alter-self style magic, and possess a few low level spells to make caster trickery difficult, like Detect Magic or the Magic Alert spell I put up for consideration.

The other type, more controversial, would be spell-breakers, elite soldiers who can use Dispel/Counterspell once per day. Aside from that one trick they would otherwise be regular fighters. Their function would be to make medieval style warfare plausible in a world of nuclear flying/teleporting PC mages.

Both of these imply a level of sophistication and organization that doesn't exist in the default D&D setting.

And yes I realize a plausible fantasy setting could be constructed that was that sophisticated and organized. My view is that it is a more satisfying challenge to make it work without any addition to the rules. Given the premise of the rules and the implied setting how could it plausibly work as described?

The downside of this approach is that is results from action of PCs that you view unacceptable for your setting. You are punishing them for figuring out the how the setting works and taking advantage of it. They will view the existence of these NPCs as unfair.  But there is little they can say if you come up with better tactics that uses the rules 'as is'

Limiting access to scrolls is another way to curb some casters like magic users. Even good ol RNG loot drop can do this. A player I know online keeps a log of her loot and by level 10 had found the following from looting.
2 Warlock spell scrolls. Charm person and Arms of Hadar.
1 Wizard cantrip scroll. Thamaturgy.
2 cleric spell scrolls. Bless and Sanctuary.

With our own group I dont recall us finding hardly any scrolls at all.

Type of adventuring can really curb your access if you arent encountering anyone likely to have spells or spellbooks.

Quote from: cranebump;919146Can you say "Arcane Backlash?" Make magic risky.

To second Cranebump, I think adding a degree of unreliability, or dangerousness to magic, can work well, provided you're careful not to outright nerf casters in a way that unbalances things.

Low Fantasy Gaming (in my sig) has a "Dark & Dangerous Magic" rule you could slot into any D&D style game. Basically an initially small but escalating risk of something dangerous happening every time a spell is cast (not including cantrips, which LFG doesn't have - ahhh hmm yeah that could be a problem with a 5e game).

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;918986Thing that has been seriously bugging me lately: The average D&D setting (not the player characters, the setting itself) seems strangely lacking in the resources necessary to remain functional in the face of what casters can actually do. While 5e (my current edition) does include tricks like Detect Magic, Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum, Nondetection, Truesight, and Counterspell, many of these are of higher level or short duration, requiring a setting with an abundance of mid-level NPC casters constantly employed in the mundane tasks of making sure yet another baron isn't scryed, teleported to and dominated. Meanwhile, who's looking out for the merchant emporiums ripe for plundering by any two-bit shmendrik with a Charm Person spell and a little patience?

 Thoughts?

I use something comparable. A solution of silver, spread via atomizer, can make a 10' cube immune to mage hand for 24 hours (a typical atomizer has enough for 10 uses, costs around 5sp). Something like this *has* to exist to D&D land, as mage hand (like most other spells) just gets ever more powerful and scientific in every edition. If there's nothing like this, there's no such thing as a merchant, because he'll just be robbed blind, all the time...and this is pretty much what you're saying, as these kinds of countermeasures are the only way most D&D-type worlds could possibly function.

Any alchemist can make such a solution, and there are more advanced solutions that can render an area or creature immune to cantrips for 24 hours (1gp), and higher level solutions are rumored to exist.

This simply adds to the maintenance cost of running a castle or whatever, and you wouldn't even need to cover everything (as long as you don't make it common knowledge...note this even opens up the possibility of bribing a guard to get this information). Since it needs constant maintenance, it has little effect on, well, the main activity of most D&D games, going into weird dungeons, killing monsters, and taking their stuff (although, sure, some monsters might some alchemical ability/knowledge). Granted, higher level spells won't be stopped...but at that point it won't be much of an issue, much like fruit stands don't put bullet proof walls around their cashiers (though you might see the like in banks).

Now, the old "Charm Person" could be snapped in half with "Protection from Evil" but they got rid of that because it weakened caster power. Bring it back. In D&D land, there are totally going to be temples and shrines and such, and regular worship at such things strikes me as credible. Most every altar has a limited "Protection from Evil" effect or something similar, and "All must touch the sacred statue of our City God before entering the Jeweler's Emporium" is hardly more troublesome a requirement than metal detectors are today.

I haven't been able to come up with satisfying solutions to the succession/assassination problems, however. A king dies, his heir takes over...five years later, the king is brought back by a wish. Now what? Sure, you can handwave with "the law sayeth...", but it just seems like there'd be fairly regular civil wars in a world where the dead don't necessarily stay dead, making line of succession damned hard to enforce, and assassinations quite a bit more problematic than Ye Olde Real Earth.

Could you guys please stop trying to 'talk me out of' D&D or 5e? One of my campaigns did end, but the other is still going and is overall much better, so I need to maintain confidence in the system to continue delivering what they deserve.

Quote from: CranebumpCan you say "Arcane Backlash?" Make magic risky.

I do have a soft spot for Warhammer fantasy, but this is too far outside the norm for D&D.

Quote from: EstarBoth of these imply a level of sophistication and organization that doesn't exist in the default D&D setting.

I admire you Estar, and the things you post in general, but in this case I personally feel the ship has sailed. The 5e DMG says the standard setting assumes magic common enough that most peasants will see a bit of it at least once in their lives, and regardless of edition there's no way to maintain medieval Europe over the long term once the system decides to hand out super-powers to the players. Remember, comic books introduced super-villains and things like kryptonite for a very good reason.

Quote from: PsikerlordLimiting access to scrolls is another way to curb some casters like magic users. Even good ol RNG loot drop can do this.

I agree with those of you who limit spell learning access, this has kept the wizard in my still ongoing campaign manageable in some regards, but it doesn't do much to clerics and druids, who still have pretty solid spell selections on a silver platter. Estar's "have their god pull rank on them" solution may have merit.

Quote from: Doom;919201I haven't been able to come up with satisfying solutions to the succession/assassination problems, however. A king dies, his heir takes over...five years later, the king is brought back by a wish. Now what? Sure, you can handwave with "the law sayeth...", but it just seems like there'd be fairly regular civil wars in a world where the dead don't necessarily stay dead, making line of succession damned hard to enforce, and assassinations quite a bit more problematic than Ye Olde Real Earth.

I fixed this issue to my satisfaction ages ago by saying, "For whatever reason, the vast majority of people, once dead, choose not to come back to life in this world." Most modern writings of resurrection magic include a clause that the subject has to be willing, so it works out.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;919128Go back to the original edition of D&D.

This is a good start. In many situations the over inflation of caster power comes from not enforcing or outright house ruling away the restrictions on casters that are meant to limit their power.

WOTC versions of D&D did most of the work for you. TSR D&D for the most part balanced caster power somewhat IF the rules were followed.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;919251Could you guys please stop trying to 'talk me out of' D&D or 5e? One of my campaigns did end, but the other is still going and is overall much better, so I need to maintain confidence in the system to continue delivering what they deserve.

For what its worth, as long as you are playing a system which is designed to ensure that every character regardless of class will be able to contribute to combat equally, AND half or more of these classes can sling magic of some kind, you will have a couple of consequences. Casters will be superior to non-casters because of all the cool stuff they can do without having to trade any combat effectiveness, and classes traditionally centered on being the best combatants (fighters) will effectively be obsolete.

Its like being a computer specialist then joining a company in which every employee must be a computer specialist at a minimum. You simply are just not that special.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;919251Could you guys please stop trying to 'talk me out of' D&D or 5e? One of my campaigns did end, but the other is still going and is overall much better, so I need to maintain confidence in the system to continue delivering what they deserve.

Ah ... I didn't read the original post too closely ... didn't realise you were referring to ongoing 5E games, so my earlier post was more smart-ass than intended. Didn't mean to be quite as contrary and unhelpful as I was.

More usefully, some kind of anti-magic material seems to be a reasonably simple solution for a lot of issues -- something that occurs in limited amounts naturally, and which can be refined into a highly effective substance at greater expense, the sort of thing built into every King's bedroom, places where secret cabals meet etc ... Unfortunately, it's also something that's hard to just drop into an ongoing campaign as a reasonably ubiquitous countermeasure if no one has ever heard of it previously.

Eog filled this roll in ICE's Rolemaster/MERP, although it was hideously expensive and very rarely used.

All I can do is echo "spell availability", which with 5e is going to take a bit of pushiness to limit player entitlement.

But since I seem to be an ACKS exponent, I'll dig into the implicit setting there, which is what I base my 5e worldbuilding off of:

1 in 200 people is a arcane caster of at least level 1. But given the default templates for adventuring mages:

24% elementalist with burning hands and detect magic.
24% magical scholars with sleep and read languages.
16% necromancers with choking grip and darkness.
16% eunuch sorcerers with summon berserkers and wall of smoke.
7% soothsayers with protection from evil and magic mouth.
7% warmages with magic missile and shield.
2% hedge wizards with slipperiness and ventriloquism.
2% court mages with charm person and unseen servant.

Really the problem for keeping the peace here is the 1 in 1200 people who can summon berserkers, not the 1 in 10,000 who might be able to charm. But those berserkers are a much more visible effect, and only around for a few turns per day, so as long as there are survivors who escape, a posse can be brought in against evildoers soon enough.

The warlock and elven spellsword templates have a similar distribution of the difficult spells; every warlock template starts with choking grip as its default spell, and is only going to get a second starting spell if the character has a high INT.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;919251I admire you Estar, and the things you post in general, but in this case I personally feel the ship has sailed. The 5e DMG says the standard setting assumes magic common enough that most peasants will see a bit of it at least once in their lives,

In our own history, most medieval peasants also see priest and other scholarly figures throughout their lives. Yet in medieval Britain there were only between 20,000 to 50,000 so clerics compared to around 2,000,000 (pre-plague) inhabitants. Clerics meaning all those living under canon law. Doesn't mean they are all literate tho but I went with the more expansive definition just to show how thin those pursue specialty occupations were on the ground.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;919251there's no way to maintain medieval Europe over the long term once the system decides to hand out super-powers to the players. Remember, comic books introduced super-villains and things like kryptonite for a very good reason.

Over the long term you are a 100% right. But then again because of how things worked culturally and technology our medieval Europe couldn't be maintained over the long term. And that the key thing to remember.

Unless your setting is set in some mythic age with extraordinary being from the get go (think Exalted) then it has a timeline where there was a point that civilization began, and also a point in the future where the implications of the world's "physics" (like magic) was fully exploited. However to get from the dawn of civilization to that future point, the people of that world will have to undergo their version of the Glory of Greece, The Roman Empire, The Carolingian Renaissance, The Renaissance, Reformation, Englightenment, and Industrial Revolution.

As each age of our own history increased the sophistication and complexity of civilization. We often find that we could have done many thing with earlier tech 'as is'. But it took the Enlightment and the Industrial Revolution for people to even conceive of doing of those things. Mass Production for example, in the 18th century saw the first factories. They revolved around organizing craftsmen doing handpiece work in the textile industry. The machine were introduced later to make the factory more efficient. So the Medieval Era could have had factories but because they didn't have the intellectual foundation built over the succeeding centuries, they couldn't even imagine it.

For example the Roman came close to building factories with pottery and other crafts. But they lacked a couple of crucial elements to turn it into an industrial revolution. Elements that were present 800 years later in Great Britain.

You can place your campaign anywhere in your setting history. The implied D&D setting that you are wrestling with is simply set in the time before their Renaissance/Enlightenment.

The timeline also highlight the fact THAT THE CULTURES OF THE WORLD BEEN DEALING WITH THIS ISSUE FOR CENTURIES. What stopped the wizards of D&D version of Sumeria from taking over the ziggurats, canals, and cities.

Why the clerics did. Likely clerics, druids, and warlocks were the first of the magic using classes. Followed by Paladins. To me the most probable outcome given how literacy developed in our history, is that clerics dominated magic from the get go. And clerics are not free to do as they wish, they are agents of their religion. And the first successful civilizations would likely have religion that were "sane". Not bat shit crazy stuff worshiping chaotic evil demons. (Sane doesn't mean a pleasant philosophy either).

The pattern was likely this. We started with hunter gather with shaman clerics/druids. Along with the occasional natural born sorcerer.

The Neolithic revolution occurred and agriculture allowed for a settled lifestyles. Settlement grew in size and complexity leading to the first temples and organized priesthoods. In trying to get a handle on the creased complexity of life in these proto cities, the priests started rationalizing magic. Started to ask their patron deities for more sophisticated spells to help them out.

Sorcerors grew to be a big problems, because as you pointed out they have super power without having to work for it. They are just born with it. Some became god-kings in their own right, other integrated with the emerging civilization as divine champions, or god-king in service of the city's patron deity. However the big problems of the sorcerers was the rarity of their bloodlines, as implied by the 5e PHB, and that the deities were at least an order of magnitude more powerful. Eventually the independent god-kings were brought to heel and forced to seek out their own patron deities.

So you have a situation where you have several growing cradles of civilizations, with a mix of sorcerors, clerics, paladins, and warlocks woven into their cultures. The "police" for all this were the clerics as agents of their deities. If warlocks and sorcerers got out of line, the clerics sic the paladins on them along with the occasional divine intervention for the really bad cases. Druids still haunted the wilderness and attached themselves to remaining hunter gatherer or later pastoralist cultures.

Some where along the line as a result of growing knowledge of how Warlocks and Sorcerors wield magic, wizardry was discovered by the clerics. It probably emerged as an obscure specialty with a few practitioners in the religious hierarchy knowing how to use it.

But nothing last forever including the various cradle of civilization. The rise of pastoralism meant that nomads could compete. While less sophisticated than the neighboring civilizations, the nomads could boast of their own clerics and had their own paladins, warlocks, and sorcerors to call on.

In ordinary times the nomads could not touch a civilized cultures. But war or natural events have a way of shaking things up. Suddenly there is an opportunity and while pastoralism was an effective way of life. The wealth of the civilizations was far more appealing. Invasion resulted along with the ensuing chaos.

A few cycles of this, there will come an opportunity for knowledge to escape the control of the heirarchy. At one moment in time, probably some ex-clerics trying to survive, the independent wizard was born.

However history marches on, and peaceful time will return. To the civilization as whole, wizards are not too much different than Sorcerors, and they also come with vulnerabilities in that they have to have the resource to study magic as they are not born with it. Because of their experience with Sorcerers, civilization already knows how to deal with Wizards. Some will be hunted and killed, other will be co-opted into the existing social structure. Either way they are brought to heel within the context of civilization.

Then there will come civilizations where the idea of individual is woven into the culture. In these civilization, the culture will change enough to allow for wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers to live independent lives. But they also will retained enough of the old ways of doing things to rely on the clerics and their paladin to be bring any recalcitrant to heel. A few more centuries of development, of times of peace and chaos, the setting finally emerges into their medieval period knowing how to deal with wizards with the rules being using 'as is'.

Again, I stress there are other plausible outcome, perhaps even more probable ones. The key thing to remember is that above has been playtested for at least 20 years starting with GURPS Magic 'as is'. A system far more prone to abuse than anything that D&D has come up with. It works, and I have been able to keep Wizard characters in check without being heavy-handed. Wizard characters have their moment in the sun all societies have cracks and circumstance that allow the unprincipled full use of their powers.

And in 30+ years of gaming, there was never a time when I introduced a after the fact restriction or limitation, or counter that it was well-received by the players. Nearly every time it was viewed as an unfair ruling on my part. With this I am using the rules 'as is' to beat the players at their own game. Not only that I managed to do often this with lower powered character than the PCs.

And here another trick I didn't mention, I had the PCs figure it out for themselves. You may know that when I run a fantasy campaign, 90% of time I use my Majestic Wilderlands setting. The result of previous campaigns serve as the background of the next campaign. Starting in the 90s I ran the occasional "theme" campaign. One theme campaign was everybody played 50 point City Guards (normal is 150 points) in GURPS. And one of the problems they had to deal with was "PCs" running amuck including wizards.

The result of that campaign is that they basically developed a book of tactics using the GURPS rules 'as is' that worked to control characters that were as powerful as normal PCs. And most of it translated over into my house ruled OD&D as well which is what I use currently. Most of it revolved it around superior organization, and the fact that quantity has a quality of its own.

The take away is that if your PCs are continually outwitting you in terms of tactics then turn the table by setting up a campaign where they have to outwit their prior selves.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;919128Go back to the original edition of D&D.

OD&D is not special in this regard.

You've got a bunch of suggestions.  
I like the witch hunter class.  I was going to introduce a formation magic resistance mechanic based on moral so as long as soldiers don't break and stay with their standard, fire balls and other AOE spells have their damage divided amoung the group instead of each individule taking the same amount.

Anyway bunch of suggestions.  Are they going to work for you?  How much are you going to change the system?  Can you give a couple example of your problems?