Low Magic for "Noobs"

         When I first ventured into bringing new players to the gaming table it was partly out of necessity.  I was a player with no DM, and at most a newbie DM with no group.  Once we got the 'pregen' adventure out of the way, I introduced my first attempt at a campaign 'setting' to the players and we commenced character creation.

         A concept that I recently read about in Dave Noonan's blog reminded me of one of the key elements of the campaign.  I decided to have our world be 'low magic', going so far as to limit access to arcane spell casting classes and all non-human races.  Think first season of Game of Thrones (low magic) vs. Return of the King (high fantasy).

I did this for two reasons:

         1.  I wanted the world to feel feasible for new players who may not be well-versed in all of the fantasy tropes and commonalities.

         2.  I didn't want to deal with the planning, improvisation, and easy monster slaying issues that being able to cast fireball presents (this was AD&D aka 2nd Ed. rules).

     In retrospect I might have done things differently.  I don't think I gave my new players enough credit for their imaginations and willingness to take flights of fancy.  I mean after all, they were sitting down to a D&D table.  And I  have to say, there were one or two cool unintended side effects that we can also learn from.  We'll cover those another time.


Do you prefer low-magic,  high-fantasy or some other flavor for your campaign settings?  Comment below!


Thanks for reading.


-DM Josh