Normies in the Minority

D&D 5E is old enough now that it is covered in complaints and criticisms; its flanks peppered with spears and arrows, its hide pierced, its skin scarred and scabbed; yet it marches grimly on, like an immortal Dark Souls boss. Many of its wounds come from the same old fights all over Reddit concerning RAW and power level and player options. Not interesting to me.

But one of the criticisms that I’ve seen a lot that does kindle a fire in the old brain-furnace is kvetching over the creep of magic into every aspect of character creation, and the dearth of non-magical options available to players. A few barbarians, rogues, and fighters are essentially mundane, but the majority of the class archetypes within D&D 5E are explicitly magical; either including spell slots in their loadout, or otherwise featuring spell-like abilities that only make sense as magic.

Reason 1: 5E’s Power Progression

This is the obvious one. A first-level character is already remarkable by the standards of an ordinary person. A 10th-level character is a superhero. A 20th-level character is a (figurative) god.

This tightly constricts the options for non-magical PCs. Yes, we can accommodate a few people theoretically operating at the top end of normal human physical performance (fighters and barbarians) or trained and skilled to such an absurd degree (rogues) that they can keep up with their magical peers. We can fit a few Black Widows and Batmen in our superhero team. But the majority of those superheroes are going to be mutants, magicians, aliens, and (literal) gods. 

In contrast, in a low-power OSR game, it’s more practical to introduce scores of mundane classes. If damage scales slowly, or not at all, the game opens up a lot of space for the ordinary; for occupations, for race-as-class, or for humorous inversions. It’s why a Troika party can include a character with the background “sceptical lamassu,” with wings and claws and magical spells, side-by-side with a character with the background “poorly made dwarf” or “befouler of ponds.” The low scaling and indifference to power levels makes something like the GLOG work – what mundane character concept wouldn’t work under GLOG rules? 

Reason 2: Absence of Productive Ambiguity

This is the less-obvious one. Aside from the way power (and particularly damage) very visibly scales in 5E world, the resolution of those abilities (particularly in combat) is highly defined by the rules.

What does that mean? Well, compare it to a PBtA game. In the Urban Shadows in which I'm a player, characters can become quite powerful in ways that are theoretically just as dramatic as the abilities of high-level 5E characters. But instead of measuring how far their DPS has risen since level one, it’s more ambiguous. That means the game can include (relatively) normal people as characters shoulder to shoulder with vampires and wizards. It does so by embracing abstraction. 

For example, the Veteran archetype has the following move. “Too Old for this Shit!: When you get caught up in a fight you tried to prevent, you get armor +1 and take +1 ongoing to seeing yourself and others to safety.”

What is the +1 armor in this situation? D&D 5E would need to define some kind of abjuration aura literally protecting the characters. The modifier would need to be weighed and measured against other, similar powers. Magic seeps into everything. 

In a PBtA game, more can be abstracted into not just skills and training, but even genre conventions and dramatic story beats. 

And it’s not hard to go a step further beyond PBtA systems. Consider Fall of Magic, a storytelling game with no stats, no advancement, and very little randomness. The resolution of each scene is a matter of interpreting prompts, asking questions, and negotiating the details of the world with the other players. When we tried Fall of Magic, it was easy to for me to play an utterly mundane refugee, side-by-side with several more fantastic characters.

This doesn’t make story games better in my mind – I have just as much fondness for the OSR approach that (in a very broad sense) goes in the opposite direction. But it does demonstrate how 5E is always caught in a lurch between competing desires and demands, and how the prevalence of magic is one of the downstream effects of its compromises.