D&D General It's all Jack Vance's fault

[niklinna]

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.)

 

[RealAlHazred]

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.

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.

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?

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.

 

[RealAlHazred]

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.)

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.

 

[SakanaSensei]

My current darling is Kevin Crawford's Without Number series of books, and the casting in Worlds Without Number is really spot on for the feel of Vancian magic. The spells, starting at first level, are all INCREDIBLY powerful, not to mention interestingly named and with multiple potential uses, but spells cast per day is significantly lesser. I think a max level character tops out at 6 a day?

From a game perspective, he ended up having it set up where there are no slot levels, and you can cast any spell you have memorized for the day with any slot, but due to the non-combat focus of the mage in the system, you still end up preparing higher and lower level spells for that toolboxy feel.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yes, but that's the point.

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.

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.

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.

 

[Laurefindel]

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.

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.

So the adventuring mage would make its bullets and load them in its mind-gun in its laboratory, using instructions from its spellbook. Once a bullet is fired, it's gone; you have to rely on your other bullets until you have the time to make new ones and reload your gun.

Of course the higher level the mage, the more chambers its mind-gun has, and the bigger the caliber. But the bullets have to match the caliber, you can't over-gun or under-gun.

 

[Sacrosanct]

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.)

"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".

 

[niklinna]

"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'?

But yes, I do wonder why I read it with a hard 'g'. Maybe I'm using priors like "flugelhorn" or "auger", which also have a 'u' before the 'g' (and "cugel" is very close to "flugel"...obscure as that word may be, I'm editing a book by a trumpet maker right now so it's certainly current in my memory banks, but I was not editing the book when I read the Cugel stories!). And then you have "centrifuge", so there goes that theory (although that 'u' is actually a diphthong).

 

[Sacrosanct]

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".

 

[Fifth Element]

My 7 year old learned that in 1st grade. Kinda like the "I before E except after C" thing.

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.