Quote from: Black Vulmea;955616Saying it's a world without divination magic may not be, but the part about 'chaos spouts' and the 'Gods of Law' most certainly is, to my narrowed, jaded eyes.

Given that divination is the very last form of magic I would throw out, yeah, it seems a bit like 'no cellular service or Internet access' in a modern game, a way for shitty referees to dodge access to information and aid by the players' characters.

But it sounds like you didn't really think it through, rather than set out by design to fuck the players in the earholes.

To follow along with the metaphor, if divination spells are the equivalent of internet and cell phones, they'll still be able to find shit out. It'll just be more difficult, or take longer. Experiment versus button mashing. A sage, instead of a spell slot. the short cut is missing is all. We'll see how it works.

(P.S. what do you feed that bug up your ass to keep it so hale and hardy? You can hear it buzzing in every fucking post you make)

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;955643Interesting way to put it. in what order would you throw types of magic out of a setting?

If we're going by the D&D 'schools,' evocation and alteration go first, followed by illusion, enchantment, conjuration and summoning - with the caveat that all the monster summoning shit can go straight in the dustbin from the giddyup - then necromancy and finally divination.

Quote from: cranebump;955648To follow along with the metaphor, if divination spells are the equivalent of internet and cell phones, they'll still be able to find shit out. It'll just be more difficult, or take longer. Experiment versus button mashing. A sage, instead of a spell slot. the short cut is missing is all.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the players having to work harder to get information, but it's a common refereeing crutch to want to fall back on The Gauntlet of challenges that higher level characters, by virtue of abilities, spellcasting, &c, can readily bypass: 'Why no, you can't wind walk over the Jungle of Robotic Kaiju 'cause . . . uh . . . anti-magic field! Guess you have to go on the ground.' *nervous laugh* To me, that's the worst kind of lazy-ass refereeing, after illusionism.

Quote from: cranebump;955648(P.S. what do you feed that bug up your ass to keep it so hale and hardy?)

The plentiful tears of gaming forum posters.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955652The plentiful tears of gaming forum posters.

If only Chuck Norris posted here - then you could cure cancer!

Wizards Eye and Clairvoyance at least have the risk of you peeping a Medusa and getting remote stoned.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955550I tend to avoid 'high concept' shit.

So like always you have nothing to offer except insults and anger?  Good to know.

As for the OP, I've done similar for various games.  I once ran a Super's setting that had no 'magic'.  I've taken out Evocation spells out of a 3.x game (Didn't affect it in the least.)  Shoulda hit the Divination school (which was obscenely overpowered in 3.x.)

Quote from: cranebump;955532So, my question, has anyone ever done this sort of thing, no divination spells? (abilities like Paladin sense still work, though).

Your fiat is a much more generous variant of what I'm doing in my current campaign;).

Quote from: Omega;955669... and getting remote stoned.

Is that like when someone smoking pot walks past you in the street and you inhale the second hand fumes?

Quote from: Black VulmeaIf we're going by the D&D 'schools,' evocation and alteration go first, followed by illusion, enchantment, conjuration and summoning - with the caveat that all the monster summoning shit can go straight in the dustbin from the giddyup - then necromancy and finally divination.

I'm surprised Enchantment was so high and Necromancy was so low. I figured your approach would be based on how subtle the effects were. What's your criterion?

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955652There's nothing inherently wrong with the players having to work harder to get information, but it's a common refereeing crutch to want to fall back on The Gauntlet of challenges that higher level characters, by virtue of abilities, spellcasting, &c, can readily bypass: 'Why no, you can't wind walk over the Jungle of Robotic Kaiju 'cause . . . uh . . . anti-magic field! Guess you have to go on the ground.' *nervous laugh* To me, that's the worst kind of lazy-ass refereeing, after illusionism.

Right. But there's a difference between throwing up an on-the-spot roadblock/set of railroad tracks to "protect" your adventure and laying down a setting convention and sticking to it, across all adventures, whatever or wherever they may be.

I think it's also important to note that, if they can't use divination, I can't, either. So, no scrying and spying from afar by any magical bad guys. No detecting lie through a spell when party tries to bluff their way past the court mage. If it works both ways, it's fair. If it's something I'm doing on the spot to simply or temporarily avoid a design challenge, then, yeah, it's being a lazy dickhead. Then again, if I have an "explanation" for why shit doesn't work, like, say, all the reasons certain things do not work in, oh, the Tomb of Horrors, then I guess I'm no longer a "lazy" DM, but a "challenging" one?

Quote from: AsenRG;955689Your fiat is a much more generous variant of what I'm doing in my current campaign;).

Oh, man...what ARE you doing?

Quote from: cranebump;955701Oh, man...what ARE you doing?

There's no magic except some hard to obtain potions, the magical abilities of magic creatures, and the Powerz of Thy Swords.
http://storiescharactersandsystemsinrpgs.blogspot.bg/2017/03/my-low-fantasymythras-setting.html

Quote from: AsenRG;955707There's no magic except some hard to obtain potions, the magical abilities of magic creatures, and the Powerz of Thy Swords.
http://storiescharactersandsystemsinrpgs.blogspot.bg/2017/03/my-low-fantasymythras-setting.html

See, now, you have this "you have your powers, here's the tradeoff" thing going, which is always something I can always get behind. That's why I like magic with some element of risk involved. You're tinkering with awesome forces. It's dangerous. There's a price to pay. Nice!

I was working with the same idea while creating a system that used a version of "Strain," which I called "Exhaustion." You could "overstrain," but with increasing consequences (and every spell *might* have a consequence, if you flub the casting roll). But we went with 5E, and seeing as how I've already nuked some magic in the current campaign, for good or ill (to include making Necromancy illegal in the "civilized" lands), introducing an additional sub-system might be a bit much.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;955691What's your criterion?

I like magic that feels like trafficking in spirits and I like the implied setting it suggests.

Quote from: cranebump;955700. . . [T]here's a difference between throwing up an on-the-spot roadblock/set of railroad tracks to "protect" your adventure and laying down a setting convention and sticking to it, across all adventures, whatever or wherever they may be.

Not really, if the purpose is to make your life easier by cock-blocking the players. In fact, it's considerably worse, in my experience.

Quote from: cranebump;955700I think it's also important to note that, if they can't use divination, I can't, either. . . . If it works both ways, it's fair.

'Fair' doesn't enter into it. There are Imperial fucktons of shit in my campaigns which are in no way 'fair' to the player characters.

Quote from: cranebump;955700Then again, if I have an "explanation" for why shit doesn't work, like, say, all the reasons certain things do not work in, oh, the Tomb of Horrors . . .

Oh for the love of fucking Baby Jesus, can we please stop using that stupid module as a surrogate cock for dick-measuring? It's a fucking tournament one-shot, not a gawddamn campaign design treatise.

Quote from: cranebump;955700Then again, if I have an "explanation" for why shit doesn't work, like, say, all the reasons certain things do not work in, oh, the Tomb of Horrors...

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955733Oh for the love of fucking Baby Jesus, can we please stop using that stupid module as a surrogate cock for dick-measuring? It's a fucking tournament one-shot, not a gawddamn campaign design treatise.

Does B2 Keep on the Borderlands count?  Pretty much all the undead in the Shrine of Evil Chaos have amulets of protection from turning.  The amulets just bump them up a row on the turning chart (e.g., the zombies are turned as if they were ghouls) rather than giving them immunity, so it's not a total "fuck you" to the players, but it still smacks of "the players have an obvious easy solution, and I don't want them to use it" to me.

Well, the high-powered magic abilities are one of the reasons I don't run D&D at all.

I have made some mid-campaign rulings affecting what exists, which led to me deciding to think about those things in advance. So my decisions like that were mainly in TFT, which has a much more limited/balanced/manageable magic system. For instance, there are NO healing spells and only very limited healing potions ($100 each, heals ONE point of damage.) One of my first reactions was to the only (IIRC) strong divination ability, which is an enchanted crystal ball. I didn't handle it well, having the first player to hire the use of one get a vision of an assassin waiting for them to leave the building they were in. It did at least have the effect that they never tried looking in crystal balls ever again. And I then quietly made crystal balls slip into unavailability by casual consumers and anyone else relevant to the PCs. And I came to wish I had ruled that they didn't exist or no one knew how to make them. Which partly led to me deciding in future I should intentionally give thought and carefully limit what is available.

I also find GURPS Magic abilities overwhelming just to try to think about the implications of as a GM running a world with various powerful wizards in it.

I tend to be much more interested in non-magical problems and solutions, and the magic I'm least interested in tends to be the kind that makes interesting game situations trivial - e.g. healing, resurrection, long-distance teleportation, and spells which make needs like food/light/shelter/carrying/knowledge vanish in a puff of 95+% chance probability spells.

So what I have tended to do for many years now is build limited magic into my settings. Instead of "all magic exists" as the baseline, I start with "no one knows any magic" and then specify who knows what magic, and how they learn it. So, the Pyromancers on Penzance teach aid ritual, ignite, shape and restrain fire to apprentices, and certain more advanced spells to higher ups, mostly just fire spells with a few others, and a couple of mostly forbidden & forgotten spells locked in a dusty tome in storage. Then, the Druids of the Huldre Forest know Commune With Trees, etc etc etc. And that's it. Makes it possible to think rationally about who can do what, and I just really like that sort of thing.

And divination spells in general are a particular area that boggles my mind, because it seems like a nightmare to think of who's scrying whom and predicting what, IF the spells are as they're written, almost always giving nice accurate information without much restriction or uncertainty. I tend to want to nerf divination into more like real-world divination, where it is intuitive, uncertain, and gives feelings and hints and perspectives and enigmatic suggestions, and are not at all certain or reliable. (To my GM's mind, tracking political intrigue without any magic is bad enough, but as soon as people are commonly able to spy on each other with super-reliable instant magic, or even predict the future, that's crazy to think about the tactical implications. And, several of those implications involve ruining the fun and/or lives of independent adventuring parties starting to gain useful abilities.)

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955733I like magic that feels like trafficking in spirits and I like the implied setting it suggests.

To each his own. P.S. That's "grand concept," or, as I like to call it "rationale for the way things work."

QuoteNot really, if the purpose is to make your life easier by cock-blocking the players. In fact, it's considerably worse, in my experience.

How about we assume that isn't the purpose, since I already detailed the conditions by which magic works in that one campaign instance, and also admitted it was a spur of the moment decision (and ALSO added "we'll see how it works," to indicate it could turn out to be a poor decision). Further, we might also assume that I've GM'ed WITH all those spells for 30, 40 years now, and have been able to handle them ably enough.  

And finally, we might assume that ANY GM can attempt tweaks or changes in order to create a setting feel, without having some sort of agenda concerning how to make their own lives easier, or to primarily block our player options (indeed, if another, less convenient option is available, then the players are SLOWED, I guess, but not blocked).

Really, Black -- just because your first inclination seems to be douche baggery doesn't mean the rest of us play (or, evidently, live) that way.

Quote'Fair' doesn't enter into it. There are Imperial fucktons of shit in my campaigns which are in no way 'fair' to the player characters.

If fairness doesn't enter into it, then it doesn't matter why a GM wants to tweak his campaign, because now we've removed the main criticism one would expect to receive. Or let me put it this way: you basically imply "cock blocking" ain't fair (above), then said fairness doesn't matter. So, which is it? Or are you making your decision about Syria even as we watch you stutter through your speech?

QuoteOh for the love of fucking Baby Jesus, can we please stop using that stupid module as a surrogate cock for dick-measuring? It's a fucking tourhen if it doesn't, a GM could "cock-block" all he wants to, because nament one-shot, not a gawddamn campaign design treatise.

Again, a whole lot of talk about dicks. Guess it was a rough time in Alcatraz last night...

I think we can cite ToH as a ready made, well-known, prime exemplar of GM dickery, totally designed to force the players to play the DM's way, written by a master DM. I would imagine the stuff you use that "isn't fair" fits the same mold, and is really no different than someone else saying, no cantrips, no enchantment, no summoning, etc. Because fairness doesn't matter.

(P.S. I don't actually disagree with the criticism that making a campaign decision simply to screw with players is poor GM'ing. But it's hard to figure where you're coming from -- most of the time -- because (a) you don't seem to like anything anyone else does, regardless of what it is, and (b) your manner of knee-jerk, guttural presentation too often obscures any insights one might gain from your wisdom or experience (assuming they want to parse their way through the dick references). Don't worry--I've no expectation that anything anyone says is going to make you change your stripes. It'd just be nice if, even on occasion, maybe once a week, maybe even once a year, if you were less able to so easily forgive yourself your own blustering douche baggery. That whole, adolescent, "Well, you don't have to listen to it" argument simply doesn't hold water anymore, kemosabe.)