For myself( and I'm sure a lot  of their GM's) I really dislike spells that completely tilt the odd to the players advantage  such as teleportation, polymorthing , cure disease, cure critical wounds, demon/monster summoning. I'm not saying I don't allow any of this stuff, but I want to make it a bit more justified and reasonable ( unless  you found some one-of-the-kind artifact or  the PC is at a super high level). A cure critical/heavy wounds should stop the bleeding, but it  shouldn't mean you can attach your severed arm. Otherwise every Peasant and Swineherder will be whistling dixie  knowing they  can get their hacked  off leg or pox ridden lungs back to normal by their local cleric.

Quote from: mrk;304734For myself( and I'm sure a lot  of their GM's) I really dislike spells that completely tilt the odd to the players advantage  such as teleportation, polymorthing , cure disease, cure critical wounds, demon/monster summoning. I'm not saying I don't allow any of this stuff, but I want to make it a bit more justified and reasonable ( unless  you found some one-of-the-kind artifact or  the PC is at a super high level). A cure critical/heavy wounds should stop the bleeding, but it  shouldn't mean you can attach your severed arm. Otherwise every Peasant and Swineherder will be whistling dixie  knowing they  can get their hacked  off leg or pox ridden lungs back to normal by their local cleric.

This is only an issue in game worlds where everyone has a huge number of levels. How many people in the bible, or the odyssey, or king arthor, or lord of the rings are powerful enough to cast spells like that? Just don't run a ton of high level npc casters.

Quote from: Cranewings;304737This is only an issue in game worlds where everyone has a huge number of levels. How many people in the bible, or the odyssey, or king arthor, or lord of the rings are powerful enough to cast spells like that? Just don't run a ton of high level npc casters.

It's not about the NPC's but the PC's! And if your playing any edition of Dee N Dee, those spells are easy to come by. For myself,  the games that I GM  it's not much of a issue as I have changed many of the spells, but for other GM's It has to be a real headache! Especially with  the "new" rules.

Quote from: mrk;304734For myself( and I'm sure a lot  of their GM's) I really dislike spells that completely tilt the odd to the players advantage  such as teleportation, polymorthing , cure disease, cure critical wounds, demon/monster summoning. I'm not saying I don't allow any of this stuff, but I want to make it a bit more justified and reasonable ( unless  you found some one-of-the-kind artifact or  the PC is at a super high level). A cure critical/heavy wounds should stop the bleeding, but it  shouldn't mean you can attach your severed arm. Otherwise every Peasant and Swineherder will be whistling dixie  knowing they  can get their hacked  off leg or pox ridden lungs back to normal by their local cleric.

I think its a shame that you don't like these sorts of spells as I would say they are staples of the fantasy genre (maybe not so much the cure spells) . as for peasents getting access to such things I think it unlikely. Personally I am still a 2E fan so our clerics all have spheres and quite a few don't even have cure spells, but even if we don't use that then a local 'preist ' in a village chapel would be 1st - 2nd level at best (if not a 0 level human) and require some sort of offering to their gods in return for miracles.
If you look at the 'making magic more medieval' idea this is definitely the case as access to the priestly class was severly restricted for the poor. The best they could hope for would be the local abbey giving out alms or the administration of the basic sacrements by the local priest.

I was looking in my collection last night and would recommend the following texts for an understanding of 'Magick'
Lewis Spence - History of the Occult (good pooted histories of all the big names St Germain, Crowley, Eliphas Levi etc)
Colin Wilson - The Occult (just a great book)
EE Evans-Pritchard - Witchcraft and Magic amongst the Azande (this is the best 'modern' treatise on the logic of magic)
Buck E Schieffelin - The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers (good analysis on ritual forms but I might be biased as he was my proff at Uni)
Also if you can trace them down then there are some excellent essays Levi-Strauss's on shaman as psychanalysts (http://www.whalecrow.co.uk/whalec/2009/04/06/shamans-as-psychoanalysts-claude-levi-strauss/) , and Leech's 'Magical Hair'.
Lastly if you are curious this google book has csome good stuff on Baraka and Marabouts (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bIdQHy2O_MsC&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=marabouts+and+baraka&source=bl&ots=ob8_3aqAaX&sig=qArYIXUXMxIkSi7mWEOrBTQvf_A&hl=en&ei=3_kcStX4H9Po-QbSzuXWCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA149,M1)

Quote from: jibbajibba;304785I think its a shame that you don't like these sorts of spells as I would say they are staples of the fantasy genre (maybe not so much the cure spells) . as for peasents getting access to such things I think it unlikely. Personally I am still a 2E fan so our clerics all have spheres and quite a few don't even have cure spells, but even if we don't use that then a local 'preist ' in a village chapel would be 1st - 2nd level at best (if not a 0 level human) and require some sort of offering to their gods in return for miracles.
If you look at the 'making magic more medieval' idea this is definitely the case as access to the priestly class was severly restricted for the poor. The best they could hope for would be the local abbey giving out alms or the administration of the basic sacrements by the local priest.
/QUOTE]

I NEVER said I don't have that form of magic in my game only just that it isn't as easy or accessible. I've done my fair share  of powergaming in the past and I just don't have an interest of returning back into that style of gameplay.

Also the fact that magic is real and quite abundant in a Gygaxian world, those basic spells would change the world drastically. If you look at it realistically, a basic healing spell could mean stopping a wound from festering or making food out of  air  could put a hold  of or even stop  people from starvation. those basic spells people take for granite in a game would have major consequences upon the world and society  as a whole.

Quote from: mrk;304811I NEVER said I don't have that form of magic in my game only just that it isn't as easy or accessible. I've done my fair share  of powergaming in the past and I just don't have an interest of returning back into that style of gameplay.

Also the fact that magic is real and quite abundant in a Gygaxian world, those basic spells would change the world drastically. If you look at it realistically, a basic healing spell could mean stopping a wound from festering or making food out of  air  could put a hold  of or even stop  people from starvation. those basic spells people take for granite in a game would have major consequences upon the world and society  as a whole.

I definitely agree withe h statement about it changing the game world and where I have a lot of magic tha tis exactly what is does. My games are generally low magic but the PCs are likely the exception to that rule (well they are if they are mages or clerics). I wouldn't take them for Granted though and they certainly wouldn't be available to the masses.

I've always kinda liked the idea of low-powered magic (like cantrips or zero-level spells in 3e) being accessible to most anyone who learns it. I know in many cultures they think (or thought) that almost anyone could cast curses and minor spells, put charms or wards on doors and windows, etc. Save the high-power stuff for true mages and adventurers, but why not let Goody Nestor know "Mend" or something useful to the peasants, but ignored by the mighty?

Never actually done this, mind you, but I don't have a conceptual problem with it.

Some of the best best Cantrips rules I've ever seen is the ones in Arduin Grimoire 7 and 8. I liked them so much I 've actually toyed the idea of expanding them and make them into the primary magic in my  game world- now that's really crippling people wanting to play magic users  

Quote from: RPGPundit;304655Now THERE'S a premise for a modern horror game if ever I saw one!

RPGPundit

Nah, Paranoia, only each time a clone is activated, a clone is made of it, with the inevitable presence of errors in the copy. How many do you think he has gone through by now?

A suggestion for D&D (I can't remember where I saw this, maybe the odd74 forum) was for memorized spells to have cantrip like side effects. So if you had fireball memorized, you could do things like light pipes, or anything else you could do with a lighter. Personally I like the idea of Evard's black tentacles setting the dinner table

Liber Ka is also good; if you can check out the oWoD Dark Ages Mage that had some changes to the regular Mage system that might be useful as inspirational material if nothing else, as Mage is a little overpowered for a serious medieval setting.

You know, with the exception of Forgotten Realms and Eberron, I've never seen anything in D&D that suggests that magic necessarily has to be "abundant" in any way shape or form.  In my view, PCs are supposed to be special cases, a cut above even the gentry, the heroes and villains of the game world.  There's nothing there that requires every other town to have a 20th level wizard, you could just as easily run a campaign where even a 6th level one would be incredibly rare and revered or feared as a great figure by the local populace, or even thought of as only a legend.  Seems to me this was even the case in old school D&D, that after the mid levels you were approaching some seriously legendary power and that was why the assumption that everyone would move towards consolidating that power in the form of their own kingdom or guild or tower.

that's not the problem as you can run a campaign at any level.  The truth is it's not about the NPC's, but the  PC's and one of my biggest peeves is sometimes the players get  too much power and overbalance the game. Afterall, you don't want the PC's to just easily TELEPORT into the Dungeon, you want them to  WALK inside. Being able to "cheat"  through things just removes a certain aesthetic to the gameplay.That's why I like keeping magic at lower forms of power that way the high level stuff really is special and not just another spell people can cast at their disposal.

Any RPG where players can use magic ceases to be truly "medieval", even Ars Magica, due to the necessity of codification.  Magicians become scientists and engineers purely as a consequences of that necessity, much as their real counterparts did- as discoveries in the recent years reveal, a lot of the ancient world did understand far more about how reality worked (i.e. scientific understanding) than previously believed, and many priesthoods did functional work as scientists, technicians and engineers because that is how they found and kept their "magic".

The answer, therefore, is to remove access to magic-working from the players.

Try getting a book "Magic in the Middle Ages" by Kieckhoffer? IIRC it might give you some ideas. One of the things I've noticed is magic often has subtle effects: warding, healing, etc. That few games focus on. (The significant difference between magic and faith is essentially: Religion propitiates and Magic demands/commands. One says "please help.." the other says "DO THIS..")