Feedback Needed for Magic Changes

[cellingwood]

First, I have a setting that I am working on where the god(s), if they exist, aren't making their presence obvious. So I want to eliminate Divine Magic from the rules. To do this I plan on removing at least the Druid, Cleric, and Paladin classes from core, and incorporating some of those classes' spells into a new school of magic for wizards and sorcerers.

Second, I wish to remove major, obvious game-breaking powers to magic. Such things include, but are not limited to: teleportation, matter creation (such as Create Food/Water and Wall of Stone, and things like Message (I don't need e-mail in medieval times!) and Speak with Dead (CSI episodes that last 30 seconds!) This is the one that I'm a little unsure on how to accomplish apart from digging through the rulebooks ripping out spells and writing out new spell lists, which would prove tiresome and tedious for both my players and I. The best way that I can think of is just pretending that these 'bad' spells don't exist in my campaign world, never mention them, and hope my players follow along (). I guess the problem to that plan is fairly obvious.

So that's my plan, but I'm eager to listen to any feedback/criticisms/concerns that you guys and gals can come up with. I'm sure my tiny lizard brain has missed some gaping, obvious flaw in my plan, so I hope if I have people point it out now, I will be able to fix it and have less problems when I take the campaign to the table. Thanks!

[Thomar_of_Uointer]

Originally Posted by cellingwood

First, I have a setting that I am working on where the god(s), if they exist, aren't making their presence obvious. So I want to eliminate Divine Magic from the rules. To do this I plan on removing at least the Druid, Cleric, and Paladin classes from core, and incorporating some of those classes' spells into a new school of magic for wizards and sorcerers.

Second, I wish to remove major, obvious game-breaking powers to magic. Such things include, but are not limited to: teleportation, matter creation (such as Create Food/Water and Wall of Stone, and things like Message (I don't need e-mail in medieval times!) and Speak with Dead (CSI episodes that last 30 seconds!) This is the one that I'm a little unsure on how to accomplish apart from digging through the rulebooks ripping out spells and writing out new spell lists, which would prove tiresome and tedious for both my players and I. The best way that I can think of is just pretending that these 'bad' spells don't exist in my campaign world, never mention them, and hope my players follow along (). I guess the problem to that plan is fairly obvious.

So that's my plan, but I'm eager to listen to any feedback/criticisms/concerns that you guys and gals can come up with. I'm sure my tiny lizard brain has missed some gaping, obvious flaw in my plan, so I hope if I have people point it out now, I will be able to fix it and have less problems when I take the campaign to the table. Thanks!

If you want to remove the more game-breaking magic in D&D, you might be interested in trying E6.

Beyond that, one option might be to ban wizards, or force wizards to specialize to 1 or 2 schools of magic (works great in Pathfinder, wizards have to use 2 spell slots to prepare prohibited spells). Sorcerers and bards don't need many limitations because they already have the built-in limit of spells known.

There's another option which may work better for a setting with no distinction between kinds of magic. Just use generic classes, and spellcasters are simply spellcasters.

One other option, which has a lot less impact than any of the above changes, would be to take all the spells you consider game-breaking and attach very expensive material components or focuses to them. For example, you could say that teleport only works if you cast it on top of a "moongate" or similar structure.

[akma]

Instead of removing the cleric, druid etc, you can refluff them. Clerics could be called armored magicians, druids could be spellcasters that use nature`s power for their own goals, instead of in harmony, etc.

As for the spells: tell your players what kind of spells you think are gamebreaking, and if they misunderstand and pick a "broken" one, just tell them to pick a diffrent one instead. Unless it`s a big precentage of the spells (like 30%) then rewritting the spell list seems redundent.