Aldarc, I know you like to be "sensational" with your radical ideas. Please just know that you are making yourself look like a fool by claiming that is the implied D&D setting. You have no basis for it. Your examples are lame.
So keep poking. I'm starting to think you aren't really seriously discussing this issue. You just keep making up extreme statements to try to get people upset. It's common place for many on here to project back crazy ideas into old school D&D but you are talking it to a new height.
Your ad hominems and unsupported claims don't hold much weight here, Emerikol.
I am not projecting onto "old school D&D." I hoped that would have been clear in reading my posts. I have only spoken for the worldview that D&D
5e presumes. I have even made that explicit on numerous points, as I have been clear to include "5e" to clarify that this pertains only to 5e. I have not looked into the flavor text of earlier editions, though there I'm not sure how different the 5E norms they would be. Who knows? I have kept with reading the 5e texts here, because you were concerned about playing in the context of the 5e ruleset. In particular, this tangent came about due to the matter of how fighters, as living creatures, would possess, in some fashion or another, the magical energy that "ki" describes.
My basis for my argument is and has been the texts we have of D&D 5e. And as it turns out when talking about an implied setting of D&D 5E, a textual basis is a far stronger basis than a basis of your preferences. You are welcome to have those preferences, and I do sincerely believe they are valid. But I also disagree with your textless reading of 5e's implied world. If you disagree with my reading of these texts, then please use any 5E text at all in your analysis. That certainly means something more than claiming that I have no basis or that I am using "lame" examples and not elaborating why without devolving into puerile insults. When you do read the 5e texts, it should be evident where my ideas come from and that they are not radical, as they are within the presumed norm of the text. And I am hardly alone in sharing this reading of D&D 5e's worldview in this thread. Even if I disagree with his reading, I can respect [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] because he does engage the text.
Furthermore, I did not even expect this particular conversation tangent to erupt as it did. My intention was not sensationalist by any means or stretch of the imagination. My intention and preference was to have a conversation with you and help you find an acceptable rationalization for the mechanics you find problematic that would move them from being disassociated from the fiction to associated with the fiction. In particular, I was hoping that we would be springing ideas back and forth as part of collaborative brainstorming. The idea that fighters are drawing on what monks refer to as "ki" for some of their abilities was part of that. This is not even my idea or something that I necessarily would adopt for my own games or settings.
The game has mundane characters. Except where explicitly defined differently, we expect the world to work as ours does. We don't expect a peasant farmer of which there are millions more than there are adventurers to suddenly whip out a magic power. We don't expect horses to fly. We expect them to be ridden on the ground. The examples could go on forever but please stop wasting our time with this train of thought. The old move the goal posts and claim the game never was the way it was is getting tiring.
There are several issues here. The mundaneness of D&D is relative to within its own idiomatic context. What is mundane for me in this world, is not necessarily what is mundane for them and vice versa. The characters that the game has are mundane in scope but not necessarily mundane in their objective quality of existence. If we follow 5e's flavor text, your most mundane of farmers in D&D, for example, has latent ki energy.
Furthermore, your average real world farmer has an incredibly different worldview than your average farmer in D&D. There are supernatural forces at work in the world (and in themselves). Their crops are not just being with subjected to weather and climate conditions, animal pests, and microorganisms. There are gods, spirits, magic, and other supernatural forces constantly at work with the crops. An average farmer nowadays is not gonna consult a priest or a even shaman for good weather or blame a hag for a bad crop. In D&D, just like many places elsewhere outside of Euro-American modernism, they will and they do. In D&D, however, that cleric, druid, or shaman could make it rain or appease their gods/spirits to intercede.
When we are sick, our minds go almost immediately to germs or the microbiology level. In the pre-modern world, your mind likely went to spirits, demons, or humours. We may think of the ancient Greeks as super-rationalists when it came to "inventing Western medicine" but they also believed that the body was composed of and afflicted by supernatural forces (e.g., gods, demons, spirits, etc.). We may scowl at this superstition from our Modernist scientific materialist perspective, but in D&D? This junk is for real. There is an incredibly real possibility that your ki energy is out of balance and affecting your health in D&D! Hope your local farmer knows a good Kiurgeon.
Likewise, we may not expect that the farmer will whip out a magical power, but we are told that everything has a latent magical power in it. This would naturally include the farmer. They may not do anything with it, but it would still be present therein. And this likely would include the farmer's child who later discovers their draconic sorcery bloodline.
This is because the anthropological metaphysics are different, our own modern anthropologies are not self-evident. I know through my own work, that the conceptions of the human body and its composition differs between the ancient Mesopotamians, the Greco-Romans, the Egyptians, and the Israelites. Though they were "natural" to their cultures, their conception of the human person was intimately tied to supernatural. This is why we frequently speak of
theological anthropology when discussing these conceptions of the human person. On some level or another, the imagined human person shares a fundamental nature with the supernatural forces of the world. D&D takes the magical imagination and worldview of our pre-modern world and makes it a reality. So that farmer and fighter are inherently magical by our standards but may be considered mundane relative to the rest of their world. Any given human in D&D cannot be completely devoid of magical energy anymore than any living person in our world can be completely devoid of water. That is really my main point.
Let's hypothesize. Suppose a supreme being existed first. That supreme being spoke all of the natural laws into existence as he was also creating the universe. So gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak forces, etc.. all came into being at his command. At any time, if he chose, he could command some part of the universe to break the rules. If such happened, it would not mean the end of the rules of the universe except in that case.
It depends on what we mean by "break the rules," as this could get us into the sort of convoluted theological scholasticism that debated whether the Deity could create a square circle.
So sure, the D&D universe is no doubt different in many ways than our own. The key for me is that where the game is silent I fill in a cinematic version of our universe by default. That is the way I believe most people have played D&D through the years but without a doubt in the early days.
Sure, that is true where the game is silent. And if you are running your own campaign setting, then you can refluff the game to various levels of reasonable silence. But the issue of debate is that default game text (i.e., 5e) is far from silent on the issue of magic permeating* all existence, matter, and energy. We are told in no uncertain terms that latent magic exists within all things and that ki energy flows through all living things in D&D's worlds. So what monks call "ki" does not just exist in monks, but also in your mundane fighter, rogue, and villager.
* Also including here other synonyms and related ideas that 5E uses.
So without a specific magical rule, a person cannot do a second wind. It would be easy to make up such a rule. I won't for the fighter because I want a non-magical fighter and rogue. The very use of the term second wind indicates it is non-magical. If it were a magical power it would have a more magical name. If you had a sacred order of magical knights who drew upon the arcane forces of the universe to do magical things, I'd be fine with that. I don't want that though for the basic fighter and rogue. My players don't want it either. I'd say the barbarian and monk are both those sorts of classes. No one has played a barbarian in my games and the monk only once.
I would say here that the rogue and fighter still remain relatively mundane, or proportionately mundane, in the context of D&D's presumed world even if one conceded that all people have latent magical energy, ki, and/or other magical forces.
So I do think that there is conceptual room for the fighter to be relatively "non-magical" while the fighter simultaneously taps into the latent magical forces of the world (i.e., ki) for performing their cinematic feats of martial prowess (e.g., Second Wind, Action Surge). To everyone else in the world of D&D, these things are pedestrian and prosaic, hardly worthy of being called "magic." And for them, it probably isn't considered magic, because D&D operates from a different set of baseline assumptions about the world they inhabit. Fighters remain fairly baseline.
That said, I have stated before that I believe that these mechanics already constitute associative mechanics for me and therefore entirely plausible within the realm of in-character choices via their personal training, bodily physique, and martial prowess. But I am not attempting to dissuade you on this point or claiming that you are engaging in any badwrongfun for wanting mechanics that associative for your sense of the fiction.
