Too Much Magic

There is too much magic in modern fantasy gaming. It is everywhere, in most subclasses; some classes are entirely magic, and it is magic, magic, magic everywhere and all day long.

It gets tedious. Nobody can be skilled at anything anymore. You need the magic crack to do anything.

AD&D 1E featured anti-magic fields, creatures, weapons, and even planes. Put any modern D&D 5 characters there, and they will be helpless. There is too much magic in the game, setting, and universe. It isn’t high fantasy anymore; it's ultra-fantasy and magic overload.

Some of the old modules had lists of spells that were not allowed to be used in certain dungeons, and too much magic was a problem back in the early days of D&D, too. There were dungeons where a simple passwall spell would ruin the whole thing, the Tomb of Horrors being one of them.

I doubt there are many 5.5E classes that aren’t magic-touched anymore. Look long enough, and every class has to have overpowered magic options, which begs the question: Are you anything without magic? Do skill and non-magical training matter?

Magic in D&D is like sex on the Internet: it's everywhere, there is too much of it, and I am tired of it all.

In Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy, four of the seven classes were non-magical. In Advanced Fantasy, eleven of the twenty-two classes are non-magical. That is about half or more of the classes have no magic whatsoever. While there are magic items, half of the classes themselves are entirely non-magical. The game is set in a low-magic world, which is the norm.

I could easily play OSE without magic; you can do the same with both BX and 1E. It wasn't a problem, and the game had enough to it that removing magic would not feel like you were losing too much.

There is so much magic in fantasy these days that it does not feel like "magic" at all; it feels like power entitlement and magic being used to prop up weak class designs and lackluster combat options. The amateur game designer uses magic as a crutch. If your game works without magic and is exciting and engaging, you've got me.

The default setting for fantasy should be a low-magic world. This keeps the game grounded and believable. This is also the reason humans should be the default choice for races, since they are the most diverse and familiar race to which we are accustomed. I find that in a game where everyone is forced to play humans (ACKS II being the best example of this), we get a wonderful diversity of cultures, whereas in fantasy games that allow the typical fantasy race selections, the diversity of the average tiefling, dragonborn, or dwarf is actually quite low, and they fall into stereotypes and parody way too often for my tastes.

In GURPS, I have the freedom to create campaigns without one bit of magic at all. I can play a historical game without being weighed down by magic, witchcraft, divine magic, nature magic, or planar interference. Not all humanoids are magical, elemental, or fay, as they are in D&D 5.5E. I can create a compelling fantasy game with not one iota of magic in it. I can craft authentic fantasy campaigns based on real historical settings.

I don't have to default to a multiverse planar setting at all.

I can play a pirate game in the Age of Sail and not worry about a mage flinging fireballs at the other vessel. Use the cannons, please, you aren't a cannon yourself. I know, that's not fun, but in a game where I expect my scurrvy dogs to be able to learn how cannonry works, what is the point if half the party can fling equal death from their fingertips? Use the cannons like a pirate and stop complaining, or you are walking the plank.

Better yet, without magic, players have to drill down and focus on melee weapons, how to fight, archery, thrown weapons, special attacks, advantages that give them the edge in combat, weapon reach, defenses, and attack and defense actions. The flow of combat becomes the "magic" in the game and the key to victory. Knowing how to fight, stacking the odds in your favor, and never giving the enemy a chance are your "spells," and there is no easy solution to a fight.

Players need to pay attention to the combat system and rules to do well, and they can't lean on spells or special powers to save them. Thank you, finally, sanity is in my game. Immerse yourself in the world and realistic fighting techniques and tactics, and you will find a much greater satisfaction in mastery there than you will in casting an infinite-use cantrip every turn and being bored with your choices.

Too common magic isn't magical.

It is the mundane and the everyday.

There is no mystery or unknown.

And it becomes boring.

Dungeon Fantasy: Magic

I was reading through the magic section of Dungeon Fantasy and prepping for a game, and the system feels less detailed than Pathfinder's (on max settings, full components, acquisition, and study). There are no spell components and spells are all cast the same way, dependent on skill level with gestures or words. As you improve, the mana cost, required words and motions, and time to cast (except for bards) go down. It feels very much like a superpower system, with casters having an energy reserve pool, then mana costs going to fatigue, and then hit points as resources run out.

If you like the Pathfinder 1e Vancian magic with the detailed rituals, components, and spell acquisition - stick with that system. Magic does feel more "magical" when you have all your settings turned up and casting is difficult again.

This system is better than "cheating" at Pathfinder 1e and ignoring components since it drops Vancian tropes and just makes spells a power list to pull from. If you are not into that detailed game and just want to "cast a spell" like a superpower, this system feels better since you are not fooling with daily memorization, spell limits, and that problem of having the right spell in your spellbook but you did not memorize it today. I know, scribe scrolls and keep them handy, and in a max-setting Pathfinder 1e game that is what I would do in downtime, burn gold and time and create a cache of one-shot scrolls to pull out and use when I really need that extra fireball spell.

Here, this works like a simplified "magic powers" style system with a few steps less complexity on tracking and memorization. GURPS has complexity in the personal combat area, so every game has that complexity budget and some things need to have less detail than others to keep them playable.

vs. GURPS Magic

GURPS Magic (and you can put the Magic expansion Thaumatology in here as well) is the sort of "superhero magic" of the main GURPS system and it also includes a bunch of spells that would be grossly abusable in a Dungeon Fantasy game (I turn into a dinosaur!). Dungeon Fantasy also makes tweaks to spells to balance them better and improve their function for a more dungeon-oriented game.

This is sort of the difference between this game and something like Fantasy Hero (Hero System), where you are using the base game's full power set to create fantasy spells, with balance and flavor be damned. Sometimes that is fun, but I can see how in a dungeon-crawling genre and setting you do not want your mages taking over the game and becoming gods. This happened to us in AD&D 2e and it killed our Forgotten Realms campaign. I see GURPS Magic as like Doctor Strange magic, sort of superhero style do anything spells that let wizards stand toe-to-toe with superheroes and others using the main rules plus expansions. Dungeon Fantasy is more the "D&D mod" for GURPS, with everything carefully gone over and made fun and balanced for party play.

If you want complex magic with components, symbols, and all sorts of other different styles of casting, use GURPS Magic with Thaumatology, and this will get you back to max-settings Pathfinder 1e. I am sure if you tweaked things enough you could use Thaumatology with Dungeon Fantasy, using the latter's spell lists and avoiding the unbalanced spells for Magic.

Dungeon Fantasy Magic: More Common

With power pools and the style of casting in Dungeon Fantasy, it feels more like a higher-magic world than a max-settings Pathfinder 1e game. To balance this, make casters way less common in the world, reduce the number of spellcasting NPCs, and let the players and only the VIP NPCs be the spellcasters.

One cleric in a village temple is a very powerful thing, and I would make most of the temple attendants non-magical followers and devotees. In Pathfinder 1e you can get away with a level 1 NPC cleric in every town and temple, and things still won't get terribly crazy since one light healing spell or otherwise a day does not make too much of an impact.

A 250-point Dungeon Fantasy cleric in every town and temple? No, these are clearly hero classes. If you want to do that, use the Delvers to Grow book and do 62-point clerics with 6-7 basic cleric spells and a 1-point power pool (so they are burning fatigue quick). Still, that is more like a level 3 Pathfinder 1e character, so make those relatively rare as well. A full 250-point Dungeon Fantasy character feels like a sweet-spot level 7-9 Pathfinder hero and has room to grow.

But overall, characters have way more powers in Dungeon Fantasy (even at the Delvers to Grow levels) and can use them in a lot more situations more readily. Casters are way more capable here.

The Spell Game

The magic here is more "rulesy" than Pathfinder 1e magic. There are maintained spells, concentration spells, and a few modifiers for casting spells while other spells are still up. With Pathfinder there are way fewer rules around maintaining spells with ongoing effects, but here the more a caster keeps up, the harder it gets. The best comparison in a superpower system, but this also makes me feel like Dungeon Fantasy's spells are way more "anime-like" than their Pathfinder counterparts.

I say that because these spells feel way more like spells you would find in a Final Fantasy RPG or Skyrim, where you cast, mana comes off a pool, and the effect applies. There is a cost to maintain buffs (that reduces as you level and can be zero), and with each magic spell that you try to simultaneously maintain others get harder to cast. Also, like in Final Fantasy, you are not dealing with Vancian memorization, the spells you know are the ones you know, as they are trained, learned, and improved like skills.

Is it better? Depends on what you like, honestly. There are times I feel the Vancian magic system is overused and a bit too close to D&D. As an alternative magic system that simulates a more videogame-style system of magic this works well.

No Clerics? No Problem?

What do the above two games have in common?

No divine magical power sources or cleric classes. They keep to a holy-less trinity of fighter-rogue-mage where the only source of otherworldly power is the mage. No clerics, no gods, no paladins, no praying for power, and no second column of magical power exists in these worlds - it is just the mage.

The duality of mage vs. cleric seems like a staple in fantasy, right? Well, Tolkien's well-known world of Middle Earth just had wizards as the "magic users" as well, and the beings that could be considered "gods" weren't your typical D&D high-fantasy style gods who gave everyone who prayed to them cure light wounds. The holy-less trinity defines these stories as well, as magic was practiced by mages.

And speaking of no-clerics, then there is Game of Thrones as well...

D&D has always had this injection of spiritualism, even in the original 1974 edition of the game had fighter, mage, and cleric as the trinity classes (thieves/rogues being added later in the first Greyhawk supplement). MMOs are rife with divine power sources, like World of Warcraft and other games. There is always this "occult versus the divine" conflict going on in the more D&D style of fantasy, feeling like Westernized religious values being placed on top of Tolkien-style fantasy to create a conflict of power sources.

And D&D's history with divine beings has been notoriously messy, at least in our experience. The old Deities and Demigods book made gods monsters out of the Monster Manual. They were superheroes and super-characters in D&D 3.5, and finally MMO horrendously under-powered end-game raid bosses in D&D 4. Thankfully Pathfinder and D&D 5 (and games like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord) leave the monster stat blocks for gods at home and makes the gods stat-less beings, making them something like "Q" in the old Star Trek: The Next Generation lore - there to affect outcomes and make snarky remarks, but as monsters or characters on the tabletop? No way, and no thank you.

Seriously, the injection of "gods as monsters" thing has messed up so many of our campaigns that it leaves a bad taste in our mouths when we play these versions of the game. Whenever the "gods got involved" in our past games the players rolled their eyes, wondered when it was going to end, and wished for the times of searching a dresser drawer full of silver pieces and a giant spider guarding the horde. When a game goes "big divine" it becomes "all about the gods" and the focus shifts away from the heroes and onto a divine soap opera worthy of Greek tragedy. For us, at least, and we prefer the heroes to be the focus of the game, and leave the divine super-characters to the background.

If the Forgotten Realms had that supposed problem of high-level NPCs "messing up" adventures, in our experience and our games it was "super-character gods." Give us a high-level NPC any day, because at least those can be ignored, walked away from, or made enemies of and smacked upside the head every once and a while to keep them in line. Making Elminster a recurring enemy to insult and mess with is fun, while having various gods show up again to stop the party in the real world is not.

But removing the cleric and divine power source entirely? It feels like heresy in high fantasy RPGs nowadays, but there is a simplicity and elegance in the world structure once you remove the "power for worship" access to magic. Power is not gained through faith, but in the three historical forces of humankind: might, deception, or knowledge. Removing faith from that mix creates a darker world, where access to magic is controlled by the mage, and there is no "faith versus knowledge" conflict.

"Faith versus knowledge" can also be summarized as "religion versus science" and you can see why this conflict feels natural to us, but in high fantasy this conflict is typically hand-waved off because we need the magic user to be able to adventure with the cleric and the band of merry men. In many high fantasy game worlds and MMOs you will see the "holy church of X" sitting right beside the "mage college of Y" and no problems whatsoever between them. Does it bother the church that those faithless mages have power equal to their followers? Does the mage college feel threatened by the mass of worshipers who only need to pray for power and not need knowledge?

You take that conflict out and the world feels a little strange, but then again we can't have the cleric and the mage fighting in the dungeon because it would slow up play and start real-world fights when the mage doesn't get a heal, right? Ah, dungeon crawling and the sacrifices we make for party-based play.

Take out clerics and divine power sources, and the problem is removed. Hand-wave the divine-arcane conflict off and it is gone as well, but something feels interesting when mages are the only ones who hold the keys to power. It does feel more Tolkien, and magic feels more arcane and special.

What is the lesson here? I guess it is "know your game" and understand the basic assumptions a game makes changes the world. Don't always be so beholden to the typical tropes of high-fantasy and MMO gaming, and games where divine magic is removed create interesting world models of power and how people acquire the same. What you play is your preference, but be open to games which may take you out of your comfort zone and experience "the power of magic" in a new light.

The Michael Bay Effect: Magic

We met sci-fi author Charles E. Gannon at Salt Lake Comic Con 2015 and he used the term "The Michael Bay Effect" during one of the writing action panels we attended. To paraphrase:

It is like a Michael Bay movie where you have explosion, explosion, explosion, and all of a sudden, explosions are the new norm. They aren't special anymore. You now have to do something bigger to wow an audience.

It is a fun statement, and true. If all you show people are explosions, they aren't special anymore. It is a theory of keeping the special events rare and unique, so they continue to have their power and impact over an audience when they do happen.

Mr. Gannon is a cool guy, and he actually got his start writing role-playing game supplements for the old GDW and MegaTraveller. We chatted endlessly about GDW, Traveller, his books, and sci-fi - and nowadays, he writes the most awesome hard sci-fi books you can get your hands on. We left the convention with autographed copies, so we are happy sci-fi readers for the next few months.

More on his books later, I want to get a chance to read them before we share a review. They look cool, and from what I read, they will be cool.

Now, the "Michael Bay Effect" in regards to magic?

Let's think about magic in fantasy role-playing gaming for a moment. With D&D 5 and Pathfinder, you typically get a "high fantasy" experience where magic is commonplace and everywhere. To be fair to D&D 5 and also Pathfinder, they have options for creating low-magic worlds, but to me, that does not feel to be the norm. If you look at the massive lists of magic spells, magical monsters, and magic items in this world and the page count which they cover - magic feels like a large and important part of both Pathfinder and D&D 5's assumed worlds.

You can't devote two-thirds of your page count to magic spells, items, and monsters and then turn around and say "people can run low magic games" - that does not compute, nor will it be what the average player expects. You also can't give magical classes infinite "blaster" spells to use to satisfy damage-per-second concerns of mages, as it is in D&D 5 (and to a lesser extent Pathfinder). If a wizard is walking around in D&D 5 like he is in a Gauntlet videogame blasting magic at everything in sight, you have lost me with the whole "low magic" feeling thing - even if you say "oh no, magic really is rare!" If it was truly rare, it wouldn't be used like that.

As a sidebar, D&D 4 really turns the magic up to 11 for all classes, and this rule is probably more appropriate for that setting as well. With that game, everything and everybody has magic and none of it feels special.

As a strange comparison, the old-school retro-clones actually have a lower-magic feel to me. Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord go back to the rarer magic feeling more than the D&D 3 and beyond games do, in my feeling. I feel you can run a low-magic game in those better than modern games because there isn't that much magic to begin with, the spells are simpler, and the balance between non-magic classes and magic-classes feels better.

Half You, and Half the Game

So the "Michael Bay Effect" does apply evenly to both world design and the game itself, so half of this problem is how you handle magic and the other half is how important magic is to the game. If the game supports dozens of magical classes, monsters are balanced against players equipped with an assortment of magic items, monsters themselves use or are created by magic, and the spell lists are long and cover every possible situation - the game is a high-magic game.

Contrast this with a lower-magic game such as Legend or Runequest, where the game assumes you are a normal person good with weapons and armor, and magic is so rare it is not the norm. In those games, you rely on steel and sword, and magic is something rare - even in a typical adventure you are lucky if a spell or two is cast. Here, magic is rare. It feels special. It is not being used every turn for even the most minor of problems, or a quickie one-shot attack spell. If magic is used, it is used for something big and noteworthy.

What the game expects is key here. If the game expects you to kit yourself out with level appropriate magic items or you can't keep up with the bestiary, like D&D 4, you have a situation where you get a Michel Bay effect with magic. It doesn't feel special. You need it to keep up. It is everywhere and everybody uses it. Magic isn't cool, it is a part of this videogame inspired balance thing to make play exciting and who cares what happens to the feeling and lore of the world?

That Escalation Thing

Now yes, games like Pathfinder and D&D 5 work well, and you can play them while ignoring the Michael Bay Effect and have fun. Magic is supposed to be common. We have fun upgrading our magic items like an MMO and accept the power curve. So what if every class can use magic and feel like they are contributing?

Well, there is typically a problem where the game's designers failed to account for the power of non-magical classes and solutions versus magical ones, and you get the whole thing in D&D where mages turn out to be end-game gods. Spells are king. They can solve every problem any other class could. They can wish away problems and do absolutely everything. Some games re-balance non-magic classes to compensate, but with the D&D lineage games, this has never really worked well.

But, with common magic, all of a sudden you need magics better than magic to create a sense of power and wonder among players. This isn't just ordinary magic, it is ancient creation magic, or metamagic, or somehow godly super magic! It is more magic than magic. You see the same thing in campaigns infested by common and interloping gods, all of a sudden, you need beings more powerful than the gods, like ancient gods, god-gods, or somehow nether-realm beings even more powerful than the supreme rulers of the universe.

You get escalation because what was supposed to be special is commonplace, and you need something to attract the audience's attention once again. And sooner or later...

"How can we top that?"

Is There an Answer?

It is up to you if you want one, of course. You may be happy with how things are, but you need to realize that the way a game is designed sets expectations for every player coming into it. The game's design may limit how far you limit magic because the game is designed around a particular set of assumptions and levels of magic present in a party. Players may come into the game with their favorite "build" based on high-magic assumptions, and saying "low magic" will disappoint them and unfairly limit something which they believe should be allowed since "everyone else plays that way."

I like games that start at a lower-magic base and let you scale up to high-magic, rather than a game that starts at high-magic and suggests you can play with low magic. With magic, it is hard to put the horse back in the barn and pull it back. The game has to be designed with a lower-magic base in mind, and balanced for a party of heroic normal non-magic classes. Then we add magic, and then we balance from there as powers ramp up and become more commonplace. The referee's guidelines then suggest how you balance for a higher-magic game, and the system supports everything equally well.

To be honest, the current and most popular games out there feel like high-magic designs with roots in the world of MMOs and character builds with an emphasis on magic and magic items as a part of the design process. For us and the groups we play with, we like magic (and those who use it) feeling powerful and special. As a referee, I don't want to have to justify more powerful magics just to get people to pay attention to the new threat. It gets tiring after a while, and in a high-magic world with commonplace casters, there is always someone else around to solve the extra-magical problem you face.

Personally...

I like low magic. I like magic feeling rare and special. I like players who use magic to have that sense of awe and wonder, and also that sense of secret and unlocked power.

I dislike the MMO arms race. I dislike magical powers feeling like blaster powers out of videogames. I dislike games that take away options by printing 1001 spells and magic items and setting player expectations that all of that stuff will be present and used in character builds. I dislike games that do not provide great and balanced options for non-magic characters.

As a referee, I like presenting normal challenges to players, and non-magical solutions work and are good options. I like not having to constantly escalate to get people's attention. I like normal enemies to be seen as threats, and not having to use magic to make something 'more threatening.' I like magic to be the 'wow' answer to a normal problem, not the expected answer.

I am in a mood right now where I am rolling back on magic in my games, and looking for games that provide better options to non-magic characters. This is not because I dislike magic, but because I love magic and I want magic to be special again. Honestly, the current big-name fantasy games are not doing it for me, and I am looking for alternatives.

It sometimes feels like a superhero game could do D&D and Pathfinder better, because that is where all of this is going anyways. Why mess around with the old-school d20 veneer of rules and systems when my archer could use the same rules a Hawkeye character is using, or my tank something more suited for Iron Man? There comes a point in fantasy gaming where you really what you are doing is playing a superhero game and the built-for-dungeons d20 system holds you back - with escalation in play. Without escalation, we are back to the good old realistic dungeon crawl, and d20 works well.

But yes, the Michael Bay Effect is real, and it is something you should think about when creating worlds, playing games, and most importantly, choosing the game you want to play. Game design matters, and how the designers expect magic to be used is something you should consider when playing in order to align your expectations with what the game delivers.

Fun With D&D 5 Magic: Silent Image

Goblins: "Greeah!"

Mage: "Run!"

Fighter: "Run?"

Mage: "Just run! Down to the corner, here, let's wait for them out of sight."

Fighter: "Care to tell me-"

Mage: "Silent image, right there on the wall where the hallway turns, now it looks like a straight hallway. And there we are, running right down it, isn't it cool? Now be quiet."

Fighter: "I have no idea-"

Goblins: *run into the wall at full speed*

Fun With D&D 5 Magic: Telepathy

Cleric: "But it that reef shark willing?"

Mage: "Sure he's willing, he's willing to bite me, so he's willing to listen to reason. And he's familiar too! Look, he's swimming around right there."

Cleric: "I don't know, don't ask me to rez you should this go wrong."

Mage: "Don't worry about it! Lookie here casting telepathy! Bang, he has an INT of at least one, so now it works. Oh, wow, I am hungry now. All I feel like doing is swimming and eating."

Cleric: "I told you, hey! Stop biting me!"

Mage: "Sorry, old habits. Now, suggestion!"

Cleric: "Did it work?"

Mage: "I'm Aquaman! I'm Aquaman!"

Fun With D&D 5 Magic: Fire Safety

Party: "Oncoming orcs coming through the woods! Mage!"

Mage: "I got them, watch out, fireball-"

Mage: *gets clocked by a giant bear paw*

Party: "What the? Mage is down!"

Sooty the Owlbear: "Remember, the only fire spell you should use in the wilderness is fire storm. Only that spell specifically has an exemption that does not affect plant life."

Cleric: "But what about dead leaves, or firewood, fallen branches, or twigs? They aren't plant life anymore since they are not alive, are they? Otherwise it wouldn't affect a house made of wood."

Thief: "What is that, an exemption druids lobbied for? All I'd have to do is wear cotton."

Fighter: "What about the orcs, if we set them on fire, won't they fall over and set the plants on fire?"

*the rest of the party gets clocked*

Sooty the Owlbear: "Don't get smart with me! I'm not your dungeon master."

Fun With D&D 5 Magic: With Friends Like These

Shopkeeper: "And my whole store is 50% off, just for you guys!"

Party: "Yay!"

Mage: "Guys, let's just get in and out, okay? This shouldn't take long, right?"

Party: "What's the rush? We have just got here, and it's all 50% off!"

Shopkeeper: "AGAIN????! I'M GONNA KILL YOU GUYS FOR-"

Party: "???"

Mage: *casts friends cantrip again*

Shopkeeper: "Gotcha, didn't I? Aw, guys, don't mind me, go ahead and keep shopping, it's all 50% off today, just for you guys!"

Mage: "Don't worry about him, he just has a nervous tick, that's all. Stress. That's it. Stress. We're best buds, me and my shopkeeper pal here. What a kidder, I tell ya."

Fun With D&D 5 Magic: Plane Shift and Gate

Mage: "Hey guys, I have a great idea! Let's use my gate spell and go beat up Zeus, lord of thunder!""

Party: "Yeah!"

Zeus: "No you don't the gate spell says gods can disallow such tomfoolery! Gate denied! Do not annoy me again! ZEUS HAS SPOKEN!!!"

*thunder rolls*

Mage: "No problem, I'll just use plane shift instead, and it's only 7th level. Everyone hold hands!"

Party: "Hello Zeus!"

D&D 5 vs. Pathfinder: Magic Systems

As I read through D&D 5's magic spells I am struck by one thing, and I have saw this in our "Fun With D&D 5 Magic" series. D&D 5's spells all seem very version 1.0, they can be exploited with combos or special tricks, have huge area of effects, infinite-cast cantrips give immunity to all forms of melee damage, and there are just a lot of ways to abuse these spells. They require a different way of thinking about magic and powers, and they do have a D&D 4 magic rethink feeling to them.

D&D 5 puts the dungeon master squarely back in control of the rules though, so a lot of these exploits are "to be denied" by the dungeon master when they come up. It puts a burden on the referee, but it gives the game a more old-school and freewheeling feel.

DarkgarX has an issue with calling these "old school" style spells, and he fought me on this point. He's partially right, but I still think they are old-school inspired. His reasoning is that these are spells designed with more modern design techniques and considerations.

In comparison, the majority of the spells for Pathfinder were created under the OGL in the year 2000 when D&D 3 came out. These spells were revised and balanced under D&D 3.5, and then again for Pathfinder. So the D&D 3.x to Pathfinder line of spells have been balanced, used, and playtested for about fourteen years. These were the original spells created by the Magic the Gathering type team at Wizards, so they were crafted with a new level of balance and usability in mind.

D&D split from D&D back in the 3.0 days with AD&D 2.0 being the last faithful version, and it turned into a highly tuned Magic the Gathering style roleplaying game. Pathfinder is that MtG RPG nowadays, and true D&D continues on with D&D 5 and also the retro-clones like Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy RPG.

It is an interesting lineage, and the Pathfinder spells are clearly better designed, streamlined, and balanced. If you read Pathfinder spells and compare them to their D&D 5 counterparts (reverse gravity, etc), I feel the Pathfinder spells are just a better designed and working set of magic powers as a whole. The D&D 5 spells are simple and easier to use in a more casual setting, but the Pathfinder magic spell set has been beat up, used, and exploited for a long, long time, so they feel like they have been through the battle and they work very well.

Yes, in both these games casters are very powerful, but that's just the world we live in. The point is, they are powerful enough, giving them a set of spells that feel like a step backwards before D&D 3.0 in balance with exploits makes these wizards even more powerful. Magic has always been a headache for referees, and I prefer a set of spells that have been used for the last 14 years and most of the bugs worked out. They just feel like better working spells to me.

Part of me would like to see D&D 5 errata that corrects some of this, but then again, part of me doesn't. I am tired of errata, and D&D 4 has soured me to the entire concept where I would rather play a semi-broken "rules as written" game from my books than have error-filled books and pages of printouts with corrections to cross reference. With D&D 4, there was so much errata if felt like the game kept changing, and there was a version in there we liked, but it was patched and fixed to a point where we didn't recognize the game after a point and we just quit.

Pathfinder has errata, yes, but at least I can keep my PDFs and Hero Lab up to date, and that is what I play with anyways. I love my books, but I play with the most up-to-date electronic copies. There is a clear benefit to Paizo's PDF-centric business model for players and referees, and I support it because it makes my gaming life easy.

So I will take the D&D 5 spells in all their sort of silly, unbalanced, and exploitable forms as they are, and just chalk it up to "this is how this world works." The books I buy for this game are it for my group, and I am not buying into errata or character generators that are different to what I have on paper. I'm not interested in a D&D 5.5 later on either.

Besides, old-school magic is supposed to be and exploitable and rules-less Wild West to an extent, and those referee headaches are part of the fun for players. It does turn the game into a "gotcha" sort of simulator, where the referee makes monsters use the same magic spell exploits on the characters, but coming from Basic Fantasy RPG and Labyrinth Lord, I am used to that. There is a sort of freewheeling fun to it, so it is not a problem for me because I understand where it's coming from. D&D 5 is more of a casual RPG, and a lot is left to the referee. It's cool and I actually have a place at my table for that sort of game.

If I am playing seriously, like in a tournament or a setting where rules disagreements could affect the outcome of a competitive game? I feel I will stick with Pathfinder. In these settings and organized play, I want rules and powers that have been beat up a little bit and have all the problems worked out. There are still problems with balance in many spells, yes, but overall, Pathfinder may be a little more complex, but this complexity came out of the years of using the system. There is also a fairness in having rules for everything that protects organized play that I appreciate, and this design mentality goes all the way back to Pathfinder's sort of Magic the Gathering roots.

Fun with D&D 5 Magic: Lightning Bolt

Okay, old-school storm chaser dungeon masters, listen up. Today we light things up with lightning bolt.

We get a 100-foot long bolt of lightning that is five feet wide. I'm assuming the actual lighting bolt is just an inch wide, and the rest of that width is a conductive danger area that forks out along the main bolt.

The line must be 100-feet long. Because lighting is the way it is, it won't bounce off of living tissue, it will pass straight through in a line to the next thing. The silly "carried or worn items will not be ignited" anti-player-complaint gear-protection rule is back here again, and I summarily ignore it because old-school is cool. Nope, you get toasted by a lightning bolt and all bets are off for your gear, just like fireball.

"DMs can improvise," page 5, PHB, so don't complain about your broken magic items. That stuff was paid for when you found it.

They say that you get a DEX save to take half damage? If you are wearing metal armor, you get disadvantage on that roll, lighting rod. I may even up the distance from the bolt where you can be hit to 10 feet, especially if there are other objects nearby that can get hit and transfer the shock to you. That candlestick near the bolt took a strike, and it jumped all the way over to you. It may up the power of the spell, but this is the sort of freedom you get with old-school rules that is cool and gives the referee the flexibility to adapt to situations.

Lesson? Don't stand next to an iron golem if the mage casts a lightning bolt at it, I just may rule it jumps to every adjacent target in melee, especially characters hitting it with metal weapons.

When this bolt hits a solid object, things get interesting. You could rule one of two things. In old-school versions of D&D, lighting is wonderfully bouncy, and it would reflect in random directions all over the map until it expended its length. In the real world, the wall or ground behind the lightning hit would absorb the electricity, but act as a conductor and spread the electric shock out to a 20-foot radius sphere through the walls and floors.

Since I am an evil DM, I will roll a d6 on each impact, on a 1-3 it bounces, and on a 4-6 it grounds and causes area damage. I love bouncing lighting, but causing it to ground and fry everyone nearby helps you understand why you shouldn't stand near trees during a storm, so it is in. If the dungeon is made of metal or water, I would rule bounces produce grounding damage as well.

To be fair, it is all one jolt with one voltage, so you can't take damage twice from any combinations of direct strikes or grounding. You are either connected to the current or not during the millisecond flash, and you take that damage once no matter how many times you are hit.

If lighting hits water, everything within a 100-foot radius of the strike in the water takes damage. Stay out of the pool during a dungeon exploration for your own safety, please.

The lightning may bounce back and hit your friends, so be careful where you cast it. To be fair, bounce direction should be random, you can't really predict the angle of whatever it hits on the map, so just come up with a random direction based on a d6 roll, and bounce away until it grounds and stops. No, you can't predict lighting and do a cool bounce shot, you are unleashing the cruel forces of nature.

Noise? What, I can't hear you because this stuff is loud. It is probably safe to assume the entire map has heard your little experiment in voltage transfer, so monsters are likely on their way (or running). Enemy mages can use lightning bolt as well, and I toss those scrolls into magic wielders with enough frequency to make my players' eyes twitch anytime they see a caster. DM's, you are not old school unless you regularly fling the same spells back at the party at least a couple times during the adventure. What fries the geese can fry the gander.

The only way to truly balance powerful magic is give it the chance to kill the caster, break magic items, and wipe out the party. Then, the caster thinks twice before summoning unholy power, and the party's thief loses all thoughts of backstabbing the careless mage before trigger-happy Gandalf gets them all killed.

This is the old school. The DMs are evil and turn the party's own tricks back onto them with alarming frequency and maniacal glee, either through stupid mistakes, random chance, or by a monster's own hands. If you want your game to capture that OG flavor, you pull no punches. Magic spells this powerful does not come with warning stickers and safety caps.

Fun with D&D 5 Magic: Fireball

You know where this is going, so let's start off with a bang.

Fireball creates a 20-foot radius flaming explosion that "spreads around corners." Let's assume for a moment this is the old-school fireball, and it fills a volume. A 20-foot radius sphere is 33,510 cubic feet of fireball, or about 34 ten-foot cubes of 1,000 cubic feet each.

Let's cast this into a 20x20 room with a 10-foot ceiling. That's just 4 of our 34 cubes used up. The rest of those thirty squares of fireball have to go somewhere, right? Let's assume there are three ten foot wide and high halls coming out of this room, doors or not those will likely get blown off so let's treat them all equally. Three halls among our thirty remaining cubes of fire equal ten cubes each, so we can assume each one of those hallways is getting a 100-foot long fireball racing down their length.

Boom, I hope you weren't casually throwing that fireball into the room from 60-feet down the hall, otherwise, you and your party are getting too close to the grill today.

Now, the one strange part of the spell is that it says it ignites flammable objects in the area that aren't being "worn or carried" - so if you are carrying vials of oil, flammable parchment, bundles of dry moss, firecrackers, TNT, or open containers of gasoline, you are safe. In this game, not in real life, so don't try this at home!

Geeze, people.

Wow, this is a major pull back from AD&D 1st Edition, where if you were following the rules, you started making saving throws for every exposed piece of gear, magic items, armor, and weapon in your party You could lose your backpacks and have that treasure go all over hell, your scrolls could burn up, you could lose that +3 longsword, the cloak of elven-kind was probably toast-ed-kind, and you were sitting there making saves for rings when all was said and done.

To me? D&D 5 brought this old-school wraith upon itself, and I am forcing spell DC saving throws for all exposed gear. Go cry in your D&D 4 books, retro is cool nowadays. Stuff that is resistant to fire (metal, gems, asbestos) gets advantage on the roll, while fragile and flammable stuff (scrolls, glass, gunpowder, cloth) is getting disadvantage. Ignitable items that fail saves are getting burned up like smores dropped into a bonfire, and explosives are going boom-boom for full rolled damage to those stupid enough to carry gunpowder with a trigger happy fire mage in the party.

Smoke? Yes smoke, if fires are set or dungeon furniture was burned up. Too bad there are no rules for smoke or choking in the rules, so it's DM fiat time. In every square affected for the next 10 to 30 minutes, CON Save or take 1d6 damage, plus heavy obscurement and blindness if the smoke is acrid enough. If the dungeon is small enough and there's enough to burn, I will just fill the whole place with smoke and start to up the damage as the oxygen depletes to a d12 on a failed save or something.

Locked doors may be destroyed, and the treasure and furniture of the room will need saving throws, so there may not be much left in there after you nuke it from orbit. Traps may also be destroyed, so have those makes saves too. If a door makes a save, save those squares of fireball and have them go somewhere else! That door is also probably stuck beyond repair too having survived an explosion like that.

If I am feeling particularly nasty, structural damage may come into play. If this is an old and structurally unsound dungeon, tomb, or cave, I may have affected areas make spell DC saves or collapse. Don't forget localized damage to door frames, arches, statues, stairs, fountains, levers, mechanical devices, or other items character may have needed to use to solve the adventure.

Oh, and if you think that an explosion in a small space that if outdoors would be heard for miles isn't going to wake the dead, rest assured the entire map is going to hear this and start sending monsters to check out the carnage. They could also send others to investigate, and you better pray to one of the pantheon of deities they don't have a fireball to shock-and-awe you to return the favor. What's good for the monsters is good for the party, and my monsters don't pull punches.

Sooty the Owlbear says, only you...would be so stupid to cast a fireball in an exposed space.

Fun with D&D 5 Magic: Plastic Surgery for Free

"Quick, okay, get the thief in here."

"Okay, we need you to impersonate the King."

"But I look nothing like him!"

"We can fix that, okay, mage, Flesh to Stone, now!"

"Great, okay, druid, hit him with Stone Shape. Make him look like the King. Sweet. Now let's wait a minute."

"Nice, okay, welcome back thief."

"What did you do to me???!"

"Flesh to stone keeps deformities after the spell ends, and stoneshape is of permanent instantaneous duration."

"Hey guys, we need to impersonate the Queen, not the King."

"Hey thief, where did you go?"

Fun with D&D 5 Magic: Reverse Gravity

Wow, this has to be one of the most destructive magic spells known to fantasy gaming. And that makes it one of the most fun.

The spell reverses gravity in a 50-foot radius area 100 feet high. If you strike something while falling, you take normal impact damage. If you don't hit anything, you kinda float at the top of the cylinder up there according to the spell description. You should either splatter or fly off into space, because at the end of a fall like that, your body will be moving at 55mph after a 2.5 second fall - "normal falling damage" typically means this is physics-by-the-book. It must decelerate you for safety's sake, but that is a heck of a stop.

Since the spell is concentration, if you cancel it just before the target hits the top, the target's velocity alone should throw them another 100 feet in the air before they stop and begin to fall back down - a total of a 200' rise and fall. This spell would be so cool to fling people up 200-foot cliffs because they would be in freefall at the apex of the fall.

If you cast it on a house, the effect would be to take the whole house and turn it upside down for up to a minute. Given the fact that most houses, stone walls, fences, or other constructions aren't built to allow for gravity being reversed, the house would most likely fly to pieces and be utterly destroyed.

If you cast it on half of a ship it would either rip in half or flip, and most likely both. Many things do not take well to gravity being turned on its head.

If you cast it on a body of water I'm not certain what would happen. The cylinder would likely fill up with water completely since nothing can go past the top, but when you released it the whole 22,138 metric tons of water would come down in a devastating local tidal wave.

Volcanoes. Volcanoes are fun, but since this magic spell only has a 100 foot range I wouldn't recommend it unless you had fire resistance.

If you had two mages, with that range you could cast one on top of the other for double the fun. Though I'm thinking a second reverse gravity would reverse the original if it was cast on top of one another, so you'd have to stack. If you got enough mages together you could build towers of any height just by raising 100' blocks up and having them chain cast. You'd need a giant or two to push them into place, but hey, we're in a fantasy world, remember?

With more than one mage, it's possible to get things flying upwards at terminal velocity if the last one cancels the spell at the right time. Neat.

If you cast it on a forest fire, the smoke would go down and possibly smother the fire. The heat would also go down, creating a superheated area at the base of the tower that would likely explode and flash violently when the spell stops, since it's only a minute maximum - not really enough time to smother a huge forest fire. Thermodynamics and gravity are cool. Or hot. There's a lot here to think about, especially with heat and gas reactions to flipped gravity.

The spell is centered at a vague "point within range", so presumably that point could be up to 100 feet underground. That would be great for digging up earthworms or backing up a city block's sewer system into the surrounding neighborhood. The spell also goes directly through any material, so you could give a 100' deep and wide area of a dungeon a pretty powerful love tap before you got started for the day.

Good morning dungeon! I hope all of you like the fresh smell of ceiling this morning. And the floor. Double falling damage for you all and we'll be down to collect your loot in a moment.

Don't cast it on the king's castle if you don't want to piss him off at you. Did you know most all giant castle or temple stones aren't mortared or 'glued' into place, this thing called, um, gravity holds them down? Yeah, that's going to really piss him off.

Warning: Do not cast this spell on piles of boulders, jetties, cliffs, large statues, or on huge piles of logs.

Even reasonably rocky or forested areas would see tons of debris flying into the air, logs, stones, leaves, yard waste, animals, trees with roots that can't support their weight, and anything else not tied down would go - up. Letting that crap go would turn the entire area into a hailstorm of death and flying debris.

Caution: Do not use on objects in motion that would leave the area of effect! Avoid casting near freeways, rivers, or rockslides.

The rest of the creative, silly, and destructive ways this wonderful magic spell can be used is left up to the fantasy gamer's imagination. A smart DM would probably rule against all of the above and make the spell work as-intended, but where's the fun in that? Science! It's made for fun and a classic part of old-school role-playing craziness, check it out.

Fun with D&D 5 Magic: Detect Glibness

D&D 5 has the spell Glibness, an 8th level transmutation spell. This spell makes "magic that would determine if you are telling the truth" indicate that "you are being truthful."

Okay, fire up that "detect lies" spell again and get that mage back in my throneroom. 

Mage, repeat this back to me word-for-word, "I am the king of this land."

It's a funny difference and oversight in the D&D 5 spell compared to the Pathfinder version, which works a little better with a "no discernible lie" qualifier. Sometimes when you rewrite a spell for simplicity, you lose the language that made it clear and work correctly in the first place. This is the reason why the 3.x line of D&D spells just bloats with special cases, exploits, and other silliness.

It really is a question of "how much do you want the referee to rule against cheese?" versus "how much do you want to handle special cases?" - and ultimately an ease-of-use thing. With too many special cases, it's likely time to rewrite the spell than spend a half-column of page space explaining something that's broken.

With D&D5's spell of Glibness, it's not broken, it's just poorly worded in that if you take this literally, there's always a way to detect it by forcing someone to tell you something you know is a lie. A good DM would call this BS and disallow it, but rules-as-written it's pretty hilarious.

I might allow it once if a player came up with this clever tactic on his or her own, and then disallow the spell and lie detection method because it's been posted to the Internet and now everyone does it.