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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7466241" data-attributes="member: 5142">Now I get it. You are misunderstanding me. Or perhaps arguing with me out of force of habit, but I will assume that you are arguing in good faith. Let's work with another example: water. Me: Human beings are composed of water. You and Max: Humans are not water, nor would we count as water. OR Me: Human bodies are naturally radioactive. You and Max: Humans are not radiation. Your counterpoint strikes me as an absolutely absurd argument to make that would be beside the point that seems to make a semantic leap from what is meant by "are magical." At the point where Emerikol defined 'magic' as "changes to the universes ruleset." From the perspective of our modernist scientific materialism, the humanoid soul would be and is classified as a supernatural or magical conception that lies outside of any non-magical physics. There is no "mundane" in the sense that objects in D&D are devoid of magic. You and Max appear to be using "magical" in a mechanical game sense, as in being counted as "magical" for the purposes of overcoming magical resistance or equating to "spell-caster." My sense is aesthetic, as my initial conversation with Emerikol was about ways to rationalize the in-universe aesthetics of fighters using Heroic Surge and Second Wind via the Ki energy that D&D presumes exists within living creatures. In the worldview of D&D 5e, there is an inherent magic to everything. Both you and Max seemingly agree with me on this point, as you both admit that magic is pervasive through every and all matter, energy, and existence in world that D&D 5e presumes as its baseline. And this would include the Fighter who happens to have the life energy known as "ki." The universe that D&D presumes is not a Euro-American Modernist one; it is a decidedly Pre-Modern one that sees magic and supernatural forces as pervasive realities in the cosmos. And they are. You can't say that the Fighter is on the one hand "just mundane" (with the sense of a strictly materialist person in our world) while also saying, A strictly "mundane fighter" and the "pervasiveness of magic in all creation" are fundamentally contradictory positions. There be magic in that fighter. And if Emerikol goes to Pathfinder 2, I suspect that he will be faced with a similar set of assumptions about the Fighter when it comes to Magical Resonance. Not quite. I have said nothing about whether his preferences are valid or not in regards to the fighter. His play preference desire to have a fighter devoid of any and all magic is of course valid. I will repeat myself for you and Emerikol just in case: I think that Emerikol's desire to have a completely mundane, non-magical fighter is valid. My argument was originally made, however, to help provide Emerikol assistance with a rationale for using these fighter abilities in a manner that makes sense in-universe from what D&D 5e, in particular, presumes about its universe, much in a similar manner as he does with rationalizing the mechanics of Vancian casting from an in-universe perspective. In other words, if the mechanics seem disassociated from the fiction, how can we associate these mechanics with the fiction? But I also believe that the universe that D&D 5e presupposes as its baseline has already invalidated Emerikol's play preferences, not in terms of their validity, but in terms of what is presumed as the norm of the fiction. I hope that Emerikol does indeed find a way to play the fighter with his given play preferences. But I think that we have to recognize that this will require an aesthetic or mechanical departure from D&D 5e's baseline set of presumptions on some level or another. And though Emerikol may not be satisfied with 5e because of what he regards as disassociative mechanics - that naturally stem from his valid play and aesthetic preferences about the presumed norms - in his opening post, he signaled awareness that he likely would need to make changes at some point: whether through mechanical house rules or aesthetic work-around explanations. I attempted the latter with my whole fighters draw bluntly and crudely on their "ki" proposal.</blockquote>

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