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Err... there are a lot of mortals in mythology. Heracles is a mortal up until his death. Demigod is nowhere close to being the same thing as a god. The entire crew of the Argo? Mortals. Most of the cast of the Illiad and Odyssey? Mortal. Every other demigod hero? Mortal. Most don't possess even...

The idea that mundane things can be done at-will without end is hilariously naive. I presume you can ride a bike. Can you ride a bike for 24-hours on end without stopping? I doubt it. Of course mundane things have limits! Human beings don't run on magic or machinery. The idea that magic is...

You are so completely stuck in a certain game design paradigm that it seems like you can't see outside of it. Why does magic need to be codified into spells? The answer is that it doesn't, that is just an arbitrary choice D&D made at the beginning. There is no necessary reason for magic to...

And yet, the D&D wizard is expected to be able to do those kinds of things. If the wizard can't reshape the landscape, disintegrate unwanted landmarks, or teleport the party into an alternate dimension, people complain. Letting the fighter re-dig riverbeds at least lets them keep up.

Real life and action movies are your baselines? You need to broaden your horizons a little. I draw my inspiration and expectations from history, mythology, classical literature, movies, anime, videogames, and novels of all sorts. I am pretty sure that everyone knows that broken glass can cut...

Only if you think that "complex game mechanics" and magic are synonymous. There was nothing magical about the 4E fighter, or the 3E Warblade. They didn't throw fire around, fly, teleport, or transmute. They don't polymorph into strange creatures, raise the dead, or open portals to strange...

The problem is, the limits of what is "realistically possible" are constantly being evoked to place limits on what fighters can do. So, I can't play a D&D fighter who can slice hills in half, or jump across a 40ft wide canyon. These limits also contribute to the long-standing problem that...

I think you are very wrong here. All playstyles ultimately derive from the game rules. Thus game design can have a significant impact on playstyle. Solving the problem of 15 minute adventuring can certainly be done by changing the mechanics of the game. What is the point of making a new edition...

Can you name a character from mythology who can throw lightning bolts or fireballs and isn't a god?

The idea that everything corresponds to real-world physics except when magic intervenes is completely ludicrous in the context of D&D, though. D&D worlds involve giants, dragons, beholders, undead, divine intervention, and multiple alternate planes of existence which are readily accessible. How...

Since when were there spellcasters in Middle Earth who used overt magical rituals? Even Gandalf does no such thing, ever. All of the magic he uses is either so subtle that it is near invisible, or a quick and immediate application of his power without much overt casting. Most of all, he simply...

You miss my point. Aragorn doesn't cast spells, but he is definitively super-human. He lives for like 200 years and can heal people with a touch (at least, the "hands of a king" are ascribed particularly potent healing properties). Yet, none of these qualities are segregated out from the norm as...

The entire idea of a strict mundane/magical divide is a silly conceit of D&D and its off-shoot fiction that has no basis in the mythology and literature D&D was originally based on.

It sounds unnecessarily convoluted. Spell lists would more than triple in size and become harder to read and sort through. Tracking of spell use would also become significantly more complicated. The only way it could work was if a Wizard could only ever prepare 3 or 4 spells at once. So you...

This idea might work if people are willing to put up with more convoluted mechanics added onto the currently already messy Vancian casting system. I think that if you want to bring Vancian casting under more control, you need to rebuild some of its basic assumptions. A simpler way to do what...

Alright, you might be trying to go for a more low-key experience, but the stuff I described above: (flying wizards shooting lightning bolts, fighters drinking potions that turn them into giants) isn't really that fantastic or unusual for D&D. We are talking about level 1-3 spells in...

And low key probably shouldn't be assumed to be the default everyone plays by, since there are a lot of players out there who enjoy over-the-top and fantastical. How do you play low-key anyways? Do you not have a wizard or cleric on the team? Do you not fight any monsters larger than Medium size?

That isn't even necessarily true. A maneuver or combat power is just a mechanical effect, the same as a 1/day luck bonus. You could reflavor it in multiple different ways with the same character, just like a basic melee attack, or you could use the same flavor for multiple different combat...

What? I was drawing a comparison to the mechanical difference between a "weak attack" versus a "strong attack". In Street Fighter, that means the difference between a jab and a right hook, or between a karate chop and a drop-kick. I didn't even make reference to anything fantastical! And to say...

Huh? What do you mean by saying "That's exactly what I'm talking about."? I don't follow you. Anyways, I mentioned Street Fighter because, while it is still a fantastical abstraction of combat, if is both less fantastical and less abstract than D&D, and goes into much greater depth with its...