D&D 5E The Decrease in Desire for Magic in D&D

[Hussar]

Edit: Ninja'd by @Mort

It feels like there's a big difference between "not DnD 5e" and "a particular not DnD 5e game except Call of Cthulhu, PF1e, and PF2e."

For Roll20 Q4 2021, it was 55% 5E. The next game is Call of Cthulhu which is 9.3% - but for all editions combined, and then it drops to 3.3% for PF1e, and 1.14% for PF2e and then the rest.

For Fantasy Grounds the latest I found was 2020 Q4 (I didn't look too hard). 71% 5E, then 7% PF1e, 6% PF2e, and then drops to for 3% Savage Worlds

My point being that the pool of potential players on something like Roll 20 is probably several hundred players larger than your local pool of face to face players.

Hit up Reddit for whatever game you want to run, post a link to your game and you’ve likely got a group in a month at most.

There is zero reason to not play whatever game you want to play.

 

[Hussar]

Yes. That's what magic is, it's the explanation for the things in the fiction that can't be done in our own world.

And if for no other reason than pure game-play purposes, there needs to be a clear and obvious distinction between the two so as to allow dispelling or nulling effects to work as intended.

Thing is, if everyone is a little magical what then happens to these people in a null-magic zone?

And yes, I've already given this a great deal of thought over the years. In my own settings all "fantastic" creatures (i.e. anything that doesn't exist on Earth now or in the past) are to some extent magic-based and reliant on the presence of magic in the setting for their survival, and if stuck in a null-magic area will weaken and die. For very magical creatures such as Elves or Dragons this process starts immediately and kills within a few hours; for less-magical creatures it can take a few weeks or even months, but weakness followed by death is inevitable.

My players even came up with a term for this: "magic-sick".

OK, so if that's a given then go the other way: make magic powerful but add in lots of risks to using it or carrying it, and clamp down on how often it can be used. Magic items can break and maybe go 'boom' when they do. Spells can be easily interrupted and if so, they can surge wild-magic to who knows what effect(s). No more at-wills, no more non-slot rituals. Etc.

It can be done, if anyone has the cojones to do it.

Heh. 40 years of gaming and I’ve never seen or used a null magic zone.

 

[gorice]

PHB or MM

50% of the PHB by volume. MM has 20 different colours of Chaos Warriors.

 

[Cadence]

Heh. 40 years of gaming and I’ve never seen or used a null magic zone.

Is that what the beholder main eye makes temporarily?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Actually... (because all salvos in pedantry pissing matches must begin with 'actually')

1. "Literal actual psychology research" is not very compelling. It's not like it's actual, peer-reviewed physics research. Psychology (and social sciences in general) have a p-value of threshold of 5%. And, on top of that, a staggering amount of published psychology experiments cannot be replicated. And for each paper you find claiming that humans are good at detecting lies, another can be found claiming the opposite.

2. That link was to an abstract, not to the paper, so I don't know how large of effect they are claiming to have found. Is relying on instinct rather than looking for tells a detectable difference, or a significant/useful difference? Sure, I agree that humans evolved to have a subconscious ability to detect lies, and an innate ability to tell lies. The two largely cancel out.

3. Moreover, I would expect they designed their experiment to minimize the emotional investment of the participants, e.g. asking them to detect lies about something they don't care about. But it's precisely when we do care about the outcome that detecting lies matters, and that investment will sway how we interpret the evidence. C.f. 'confirmation bias'.

4. Finally, the conclusion of that study...that instinct is more effective than training...is the exact opposite of what people in this thread (and others) claim: that you can learn how to detect lies. That it's a skill that improves over time.

I've seen following (non-professionally) this question for years, mostly in the context of law enforcement, and how the confidence police have in their own ability to detect lies leads to forced confessions. Which is why the profession is (too slowly) moving away from bogus training to detect lies through "tells" and toward the more reliable techniques I described above.

But...to try to be self-aware...it could be that my emotional investment in the issue may distort my own perceptions on this question.

My only responses, since I am no longer interested in continuing this conversation, are firstly that you were in error when you leapt from "less-conscious" to "instinct is more effective than training." What you call "instinct," according to the reporting on the study (I can't access it any more than you can), can actually be trained. What is in error is not training, but our socially-constructed ideas of what things are "tells" and what aren't. Humans are in fact able to refine our skills at detecting deception, but in order to do so we must unlearn the bad and inaccurate lessons taught to us by society (e.g. that eye contact breaking alone is a tell) and instead apply a mix of effective analysis techniques (such as establishing a baseline for a given person before beginning to look at their responses that are in question) and actually using and refining intuition/"instinct."

Secondly, I can't say I'm surprised to see you completely dismiss the entire social sciences field out of hand simply because it isn't physics. As a physics guy myself, I find that academic chauvinism incredibly frustrating, counterproductive, and (oftentimes) hypocritical. Ever heard, for example, of the pentaquark issue, where physicists confidently reported that they'd discovered pentaquark matter, only to then find they were in error...which causes the entire subfield of pentaquark studies to become a pariah, with almost no one doing any research into it due to the stigma of one group having a replication failure? Or how about the Bogdanov affair, where two French physicists/mathematicians (or should I say "physicists"...) published a series of papers purporting to describe the physical theory of the pre-Big Bang universe, but their peer-reviewed and published papers were found to be stating actual nonsense and otherwise seriously flawed enough that even a casual analysis by physicists of other specific foci could see the absurdities right away, and the brothers' PhDs were found to have been built on similarly questionable grounds.

And, I just want to be clear, I say this as someone trained in and loving physics. Physics is what I want to dedicate my professional life to. But this "eww, social science...gross..." attitude is unhelpful at best and actively trying to reduce human knowledge at worst. Yes, there are problems, and yes, those problems are significant and need to be addressed. Treating that as a reason to dismiss an entire field is foolish. Keep in mind that the "common sense" theory of light from literally just a century and a half ago was almost totally wrong, despite being widely accepted by the physics community. The caloric fluid theory of heat held sway for ages despite having provable flaws. We knew Newton's laws were failing us long before Einstein gave us relativity, and even when he did, the suggestion that Newton might be wrong was scandalous for a time. Continental drift and meteor impact as an explanation for cratering were considered ridiculous for most of the 20th century, yet they are now such solid parts of geology and astrophysics that to question them would be practically unthinkable. Fields develop over time. Psychology, and other related social sciences, has only been even remotely a formal science for perhaps 150 years. What errors were common two thousand year ago when Aristotle began writing the Physics?

But yeah. I'm done. You're clearly not interested in using equitable standards of argument, so there's no point in further discussion.

 

[Hussar]

I agree with that.

But then I read the kind of powers some people want their non-magical, martial fighter to have...holding their breath underwater for three days, jumping over buildings, throwing ogres around...and I have to ask how, exactly, are those things non-magical? Is it because there's no glowing sparkles around it? Because the damage type is still B/P/S? Because it works in an anti-magic field?

Honestly?

It’s SFX budget. If I could do whatever it is without a green screen and whatnot then I’m probably good.

So throwing an ogre? Sure. That’s just wire-fu. Jumping over a building? No worries. Hold your breath for three days? No problem.

Blast fire from my fingertips? Ok that one’s probably a bit too far.

I mean right now my ranger can make up to 17 attacks in a single round, all with sharpshooter with volley and horde breaker.

Why is that not a bridge too far?

 

[tetrasodium]

It was annoying in some senses, but PF1e (and I presume 3.5) spelled things out at least:

View attachment 261910

I doubt anyone would agree with all of the classifications, but it might be interesting to see what one could make with a campaign where only (Ex) or only (Ex+Su) abilities were allowed. Is the former what would often be classified as Martial or non-Magical by many (or at least a subset of it?).

Anyway...

For Barbarians, Fast Movement, Rage, Uncanny Dodge, Trap Sense, and Damage Reduction are all (Ex). There are rage powers of each of the three types:

Rage Powers – d20PFSRD

www.d20pfsrd.com

For Druids, Natures Bond, Trackless Step, Resist Nature's Lure are (Ex), Wild Shape is (Su)

For Bards, the Knowledge is (Ex), the performances are (Su)

For Paladins, the Aura of Good and Divine Health are (Ex), Detect Evil is (Sp), Smite Evil, Lay on Hands, and Aura of Courage are (Su)

they also used those little tags to determine if an ability provoked an attack of opportunity or not

 

[Micah Sweet]

I said it once and I'll keep saying.

There is an empty space in D&D for a empowered humanoid warrior class similar to Warhammer's Space Marines, Chaos Warriors, and Grail Knights where the PC is turned into a 7 foot hulking mass of muscle with x-ray eyes, steel skin, and 3 hearts because some god fancies them, they ate a dragon heart, or they drank a bunch of options at once and didn't keel over.

Everyone steals from D&D, time to steal back.

Just don't use Ultramarines as the base template.

I would love for someone to actually make that class.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I would love for someone to actually make that class.

Wouldn't really fit with the theme of the thread though, would it?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Mythic does not mean magic.

Neither does epic (as in great or a lot not as in super high level) skill.

Look at Shang Chi (without the rings, I'm thinking of the recent marvel movie). He's a representation of someone who is just that good, without magic. A level of training that can be achieved in the MCU, but not in the "real" world.

True, but its still B/S/P damage, no weird elemental effects, no extra radiant damage, no ranged aoe.