I tend to agree, but I pretend that Vance simply "refined his understanding of magic," as other authors might have put it. In "Turjan of Miir," Pandelume explains that the underpinning of magic is higher mathematics. Not sure what became of that idea.It really feels like the magic in Rhialto is a totally different thing than in Dying Earth, Overworld, and Cugel. Enough that I wonder when he decided magic involved sandestins, daihaks, and the like.
Look, man, when you have forty D&D supplements detailing thousands of spells, it's easy to pick-and-choose what you want for flavor. Even back in the day, we used other games as sources for spells, like RoleMaster.This is interesting! The first thing I thought when I read "three burning hands" was, isn't that not possible in early D&D? Did you make up lots of homebrew spells to provide those alternatives?
My understanding is that Vance himself pronounced it "KOO-gel," with a hard "G," but I never ended up sending him that fan letter I always wanted to send, so it's hearsay.Aside! How do you pronounce "Cugel". I can think of three ways off the top of my head:
- Rhymes with "cudgel".
- More like "coo-gel", with a soft 'g' like in "gelatin".
- Or like "coo-ghel", with a hard 'g' like in "gelding". (This is how I pronounce it.)
The point of Ascension’s Magic system is to be unbalanced, yes, which makes it not a great example to point to if you’re trying to illustrate that flexible casting systems are hard to balance. Balance is not the goal there. It would be like pointing to Action Park as an example of why water parks are unsafe; yes, it is a water park and it is unsafe, but it was never attempting to be safe in the first place.Yes, but that's the point.
The classic WoD lines weren’t designed with crossover in mind, so how a mage’s magic interacted with supernatural creatures from other lines was a matter of ST discretion. If an ST decided a starting mage character could turn an antediluvian vampire into a lawn chair, that was their call to make, and again, game balance was never the concern of the developers at the original White Wolf. Maybe that has changed with the new White Wolf, I stopped paying attention after the Paradox folks made it very clear that their target audience did not include me.And there's absurd from a strictly mortal point of view, and there's having a neophyte Mage turning an antediluvian vampire, one of the more powerful creatures you could run into in the WoD, into a harmless rock because, since it is undead, it is not alive, and therefore is considered Matter, and transforming one form of matter into another is a bog easy feat that can be accomplished by a basic build starting character.
My go-to analogy was that the mage's mind acts like a revolver gun, albeit one with chambers of different calibers. Making the bullets takes a lot of time and is not practical on the field, but firing them only takes a moment.The way I explained it back when it was fire and forget was that you pre-cast 99% of the spell. That last utterance just triggered one of the spells you had loaded up and ready to go.
I actually assumed (right or wrong) that since D&D grew out of a wargame, spells and spell slots represented different types of artillery that the "wizard" unit had prepared.
Whatever the case, the way spells are handled in D&D is simple and easy to track so it works reasonably well. While I'd prefer some sort of spell point/mana pool for casters, that has it's own issues. Getting away from pre-selecting individual spells and "upcasting" spells is a move in the right direction. Now if they would fix bonus action spells.
"E, I, and Y make the G sound 'juh""Aside! How do you pronounce "Cugel". I can think of three ways off the top of my head:
- Rhymes with "cudgel".
- More like "coo-gel", with a soft 'g' like in "gelatin".
- Or like "coo-ghel", with a hard 'g' like in "gelding". (This is how I pronounce it.)
So you pronounce "gelding" with a soft 'g'?"E, I, and Y make the G sound 'juh""
My 7 year old learned that in 1st grade. Kinda like the "I before E except after C" thing. If e, i, or y follows a g (as long as it's not the first letter in a word), then it's a "juh" sound, like "agent" or "egypt" or "digit".
So you pronounce "gelding" with a soft 'g'?
My 7 year old learned that in 1st grade. Kinda like the "I before E except after C" thing. If e, i, or y follows a g (as long as it's not the first letter in a word), then it's a "juh" sound, like "agent" or "egypt" or "digit".
If it's as reliable as i before e except after c, then there will be more words that break the rule than follow it.My 7 year old learned that in 1st grade. Kinda like the "I before E except after C" thing.