D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

[Raiztt]

You don't allow... what? Official Barbarian Subclasses?

Correct

 

[Micah Sweet]

That is a fair point, but I think it ends up becoming a matter of perspective. I use the terms mundane and supernatural from the perspective of comparing this world tho the magical and fantastical worlds of DnD. That isn't meant to lessen the achievements of people in our world, but to put into perspective that the fantasy world is more than our world.

That is what those terms are for.

 

[Yaarel]

ok, look, i get claiming he's not supernatural, but claiming he's not extraordinary is just silly (especially since being extraordinary should be perfectly acceptable for high level characters regardless of whether they're magic or not).

Beowulf is Extraordinary, a much higher level than all of the other warriors who Grendel defeated.

Grendel himself is an eoten (Norse Jǫtunn), specifically a thyrs (Þurs), a grotesque form of animistic nature being.

 

[Yaarel]

The 5e game engine is generic, suitable for almost any kind of genre, and I use it as such.

 

[FrozenNorth]

ok, look, i get claiming he's not supernatural, but claiming he's not extraordinary is just silly (especially since being extraordinary should be perfectly acceptable for high level characters regardless of whether they're magic or not).

The context of the post is @Micah Sweet claiming that D&D fighters and rogues must be mundane because their PHB write-up doesn’t explicitly state that they are extraordinary or supernatural.

Applying that reasoning to Beowulf, Beowulf is also mundane.

My personal opinion is that both Beowulf and fighters are heroes in a game/saga of heroic fantasy. I don’t particularly care why a fighter is able to perform great feats, so long as they can. I do feel that this is best decided on a table-by-table basis: to give a specific example, I love the idea that a halfling rogue’s Evasion is just an outgrowth of her supernatural luck, while a goliath rogue just powers through the pain.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You wrote:


I responded with several examples, including Batman and Green Arrow.

You responded by shifting the goalposts.


All non-tabletop characters benefit from plot armor and metacurrency. That is the difference between written fiction and a tabletop game. Your distinction doesn’t hold up.

You claimed that a mundane character can’t be a class fantasy because there are no fictional mundane characters that can challenge a CR 10 creature.

Except there are. Batman fights multiple parademons. Jack the Giant-killer kills multiple giants. Sinbad the sailor defeats rocs and other monsters. Ulysses defeats the sirens and the cyclops.

Players definitely seek to emulate the fantasy of playing those characters.


I read Beowulf. Nowhere in the saga does it explicitly claim that Beowulf is extraordinary or supernatural. Therefore he is mundane.

But they can't emulate a high mundane fantasy in D&D, because the metacurrency you would need to play them that way doesn't exist in D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So, again, you already don't play 5e. You play Level Up. So if 5e admitted to being a game you wouldn't want to play... you'd continue using Level Up. So why should we care if the game you aren't playing becomes something you don't want to play?



Yes I did.



You would be wrong. In addition to being wrong about that, it also states that most humans have traces of the supernatural in them, making them non-mundane, as per our previous discussion. So, they are not mundane and they are not stated to be the most populous. So your point fails on both fields.

Fair enough. 5e has changed the game in yet another way I don't care for, destroying the concept of a mundane PC and ruining the ability to reasonably play any number of inspirations from fantasy.

You win.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

The context of the post is @Micah Sweet claiming that D&D fighters and rogues must be mundane because their PHB write-up doesn’t explicitly state that they are extraordinary or supernatural.

Applying that reasoning to Beowulf, Beowulf is also mundane.

My personal opinion is that both Beowulf and fighters are heroes in a game/saga of heroic fantasy. I don’t particularly care why a fighter is able to perform great feats, so long as they can. I do feel that this is best decided on a table-by-table basis: to give a specific example, I love the idea that a halfling rogue’s Evasion is just an outgrowth of her supernatural luck, while a goliath rogue just powers through the pain.

oh, so the statement being silly was the point, i see. that makes sense.

...i realize that might've sounded sarcastic, so i want to emphasize that it wasn't.

 

[Yaarel]

To me it is obvious that high tier Fighters and Rogues are magical. But the how − the explanation − matters.

I feel the solution is, the default setting (FR) can define the high tiers themselves as "tapping into magic".

In the case of the Martial power source, it is possible that the "ki", the part of the soul that emanates the bodily aura, is able to achieve the Extraordinary effects. This kind of ki magic is innate and has nothing to do with the Weave.

Meanwhile, the low tiers − levels 1 thru 4 and 5 thru 8 − are strictly "mundane" and refer to reallife to adjudicate narrative scenarios.

At the higher tiers, it is more helpful to refer to superhero comicbooks and mythic tropes to adjudicate narrative scenarios.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Re: the OP.. the mechanics of magic in 5e (and most D&D) are barely defined, and that definition appears to boil down to:

Magic works because we say it does ("Listen guys there's this Weave thing and it's in everything. What is it and how does it work you ask..Well..it's magic and it works magically of course")

And the reason classes that can use magic are able to do so similarly boils down to

The class can cast spells because we say it can ("This guy reads a lot of books so he knows how to do magic..that guy has a magic body or something, that one sings magic songs I guess..How does any of it work? Magically of course")

As such, I'm not too inclined to battle it out over the appropriate thematics for each spellcasting class, or else I'd be battling over all of them.

None of them make any real sense..and that's fine.