No more 'dance of the narrative' then is required to explain people shooting fireballs out of their fingertips or raising people from the dead. The only difference is that in D&D, fireballs and resurrection have tenure.
We are talking about a fantasy world here, with fireballs and dragons and beholders and stuff. I don't see where mundane guy who owns a sword really fits in, or has any business looking for the trouble that exists in that world. Still, the guy with a sword is a fantasy mainstay, and people want to play them. How do we make this mundane guy with the sword logically fit into this world? By letting him do the sort of things action heroes do, thats how.
I actually find it made less sense before, when your special powers consisted solely of "owns a sword".
Yes! This is good. This mirrors my thinking, as well.
Telling stories or running games which are full of mundane guys with swords is fine. I like low fantasy, too. I like playing in those sorts of campaigns, sometimes, too.
But how do you "realistically" explain those mundane guys with swords, who we're declaring to be, essentially, "not much different" from any normal fellow here in our own real world who
happens to have trained a lot in fighting with a sword, slaying things like
ancient dragons and incorporeal dread wraiths and death titans and hordes of demons and incredibly powerful magic-wielding liches and exarchs of GODS?
If you keep anything which a "normal guy with a stick" couldn't realistically be expected to be able to defeat
out of the game, then sure, a low-magic game where Fighters and Rogues are highly mundane but skilled folks, essentially on par with Navy Seals or CIA operatives or world-champion martial artists or similar real-world "martial heroes" would make a lot of sense and work great.
But when you say, "I want all of the martial characters to be really mundane, normal, non-magical, non-mystical basic tough guys with great fighting skill, and only able to do the same sorts of things which George S. Patton or Bruce Lee or Miyamoto Musashi or Richard Marcinko or Alexander the Great or Jack Bauer or Jason Bourne or Indiana Jones could do" and then throw them into a campaign full of insanely powerful supernatural threats and mythological monsters . . . I find
that to be a greater strain on credulity and verisimilitude than the idea that maybe the guys who are kicking the crap out of demon princes and fire-breathing beasts the size of large houses with nothing but a four-foot-long piece of steel and a bad attitude just
might have to have some superheroic capabilities beyond anything that anyone on Earth can muster.
Conan and Aragorn (and Drizzt, and any other martial-type protagonist in a
D&D-based novel) were
not mundane, even if they
didn't throw around anything flashy like fireballs, super speed, flight, or the like. They fought things which no "mundane" man could ever reasonably be expected to fight, and won. Regularly. (More so Conan than Aragorn, but show me the normal fighting man on Earth who could realistically scrap with
Nazgul and I'll retract my point.)
Being "really skilled" would only take you so far, when you're fighting against magic, myth, colossal beasts and extraplanar immortals of awesome might. There'd almost
have to be some degree of superhuman power going on, logically, for these "mundane" sword-swingers and dagger-chuckers to
survive in such encounters, let alone
prevail.
That's just me, though. I guess if it makes more sense for people to imagine the
Krav Maga instructor who lives down the street from you killing the Tarrasque, go for it. It's your game, have fun any way you want.
But
if 4E D&D happens to represent a fantasy world in which the non-spellcasting heroes who are expected to overcome these massive, epic, impossible challenges have some degree of personal, internally-derived "magical" or "mystical" or "supernatural" power which allows them to be victorious, I consider that very much a
sensible feature, not a flaw or something which damages immersion for the sake of gamism.
I can, of course, see how some people wouldn't
like that style of game. Some people just prefer low(er) fantasy, and I get that. By all means, play what you like. It's not
"wrongbadfun" to prefer a less over-the-top, less magical game setting and less superheroic characters. I really like that kind of game or fiction, too. Go go
Lankhmar!
I
can't, however, quite get their logic if they're running games which purport to be about protagonist heroes who are as mundane and un-superhuman as normal Earth folks, yet feature the kind of paranormal monsters and magic-using enemies which make up the vast majority of opponents featured in all
D&D books since day one, as well as
most other fantasy stories and roleplaying games, ever.
I tend to view all PC protagonist hero characters in
D&D as being a whole lot like the concept of "Adepts" from
Earthdawn. Everyone had their own kind of "magic", even if that magic was just being able to fight really, really well with a sword, or be an incredible thief. The point was that Adepts were special and could do things that normal people couldn't, because they fueled even their seemingly-mundane skills with an inborn, internally-generated "magical" power.
That makes
way more sense to me than just,
"I'm basically a regular guy, but I've been practicing my sword forms out in the back yard for the last 20 years, so now I can go kill a gargantuan dracolich who could decimate cities and armies . . . with my trusty sharp stick here."
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