Magic, Mundania, and 5E

1st - 2nd Edition Party

A long time ago, when I thought to run a game in Newold in an OSR-vein, I wrote a post for this blog called On System and Setting, Magic and Mundania, in which I noted, "When you're trying to set a particular tone for a campaign world, the system you choose will have a huge impact. Third edition, with so many prestige classes which gave magical powers to otherwise mundane classes and with no limitations on demi-humans, has a tendency to make the PCs too magical too early. While 5th edition seems to be a well-balanced system, I can see some of the same tendency in it. I wouldn't call this a flaw, just an aspect of the system."

Having now started gaming in 5E, I can see my concerns were justified, as fun as the games have been so far. OD&D had four races, and AD&D seven, all but one--humans--were severely limited in what classes they could be and how high a level to which they could progress. That gave a powerful motivation to play a human in any long-term campaign.

Since the introduction of the thief, OD&D had a reasonably "mundane" mix of characters, especially since only humans could be clerics and only humans and elves could be magic-users. AD&D had a good mix as well between mundane, magical, and late-magical (classes that started mundane and gained magical powers later, or who started with only minor magical bonuses) classes:

Mundane: Fighter, Thief, Assassin
Magical: Cleric, Druid, Magic-user, Illusionist
Late-Magical: Paladin, Ranger, Monk, Bard

That's seven classes who start with little to no magic to four that do. The balance of the party, as a result, would tend towards characters that solve their problem with wit and sword rather than those who cast a spell.

Fifth Edition has no less than eight non-human races, most of whom have at least two sub-races. Humans are, well, lost in the mix. And of its classes, look at the breakdown (ignoring paths that enable some mundane classes to gain magical abilities later):

Mundane: Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue
Magical: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard
Late-Magical: Monk, Ranger

That's seven magical classes to five mundane or late-magical, or six to six if you think the paladin shouldn't count as magical since the class focuses on fighting. Small surprise, then, that the party is tending more towards a fairy-tale menagerie than a band of rough men taking on a magical world by the strength of their sword arms.

5th Edition Party

And that's a great pity, to my mind. It starts the players off with the mindset of being the exotic things of the world instead of finding the exotic things of the world.

Now is that going to ruin my fun? Not at all. But it does require some rethinking of the world, especially since I don't want cities lit by continual light spells or conducting trade by teleportation rings. Magic loses its power when it's used as technology.

One of my favorite old school blogs and campaigns to read about is the Hill Cantons, which gives us some wonderful tools for dealing with exactly this situation: The concept of the Corelands, the Borderlands, and the Wierd, and the wonderfully gameable Chaos Index. The basic idea would be that the domains ruled by Law (mostly the human realms) are mundane and banal, but that as you go further into the wilds, you find increasing amounts of magical Chaos that impact everyday life. PCs can be so inhuman and magical precisely because they are denizens of the Borderlands between Law and Chaos.

This idea actually accords with a great deal that has already been established in-game about Newold, including the existence of the Dreamchild, the chaotic and incomprehensible planar structure held together by the mysterious Iron Spike, pockets of raw Chaos that wizards are known to seek out as power sources for their magic, and the eternal recurrence of the rise and fall of magic in the world.