Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justice and Rule" data-source="post: 9017699" data-attributes="member: 6778210">Because that's how the wizard channels the fantastical: through magic. But why not do it through knowledge? You know enough things about the esoteric arcane that you can come up with a solution? I don't see the problem. That's just being fantasy Batman. The same with a warrior: they channel the fantastical through their fighting skill. Maybe certain people might need magical weapons to hurt something, but the high-level warrior cuts so cleanly that he can get through even magical defenses. You define this as a "magical effect", but it's not if it doesn't involve magic. Again, the fantastical isn't necessarily magical unless you let it be.I mean, Iron Man steals the gems from Thanos, why not? Why can't the thief be that good? And I don't understand your argument about tension: requiring a skill check adds tension because it can fail, but something like Raise Dead is just automatic. It's just spending a spell slot to do something automatically, no matter how much flowery language you add to it. There's no tension there because there is no risk. Like, why can't that party member be the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Skillful_Brothers" target="_blank">greatest tailor in the world</a>?Doing fantastical things without magic doesn't make things hijinks, it just means your characters are inherently fantastical. You can have a serious campaign where the barbarian can shake the earth with a stomp or cause a lesser man to die simply with his battle cry without it being all jokes. If you can't do that seriously, then I find your idea of "serious" to be very limited.No, you don't understand: reliability doesn't matter when you can't do anything interesting with it. Who cares if you can always knock a door down when you have someone in your party who can walk through walls. Your design space is already so small that it doesn't matter because nothing you do is going to be particularly satisfying.This is what I'm talking about. That is amazingly lame and limited given that spellcasters can alter reality at higher levels. That's not a groundwork, that's just bad and we shouldn't look towards it. If my reward for being 20th level is that I can bend iron bars consistently while the guy next to me can cast Wish, what are we even doing? Let fighters be like Wuxia heroes, where they can jump fantastic distances, bat away volleys of arrows, stymy battalions of soldiers. I don't understand this weird, artificial barrier we set out, especially when it is apparently built on the idea of "seriousness".</blockquote>

Verification