Arcane vs. Divine in 4e

[eamon]

In WotBS there's a shism between arcane and divine magic. I kind of like the idea, but I don't quite see how this fits nicely into 4e - I mean, the distinction doesn't seem relevant. And of course, there are other power sources, including martial, psionics, primal power, and now shadow...

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this fit well? How should I explain that the inquisitors care whether the "dangerous magic" is an invoker's or a wizard's, say?

 

[OnlineDM]

Personally, I've handled the Inquisitors as being suspicious of non-divine magic in general. So, a primal or psionic or shadow magic user would still be rounded up by Inquisitors in my version of WotBS.

I believe the WotBS 4e adaptation was well under way before Players Handbook 2 came out, so the only power sources at the time were martial, divine and arcane. I interpret the Inquisitors' flavor as being anti-everything that isn't martial or divine.

 

[malcolm_n]

Personally, I've handled the Inquisitors as being suspicious of non-divine magic in general. So, a primal or psionic or shadow magic user would still be rounded up by Inquisitors in my version of WotBS.

I believe the WotBS 4e adaptation was well under way before Players Handbook 2 came out, so the only power sources at the time were martial, divine and arcane. I interpret the Inquisitors' flavor as being anti-everything that isn't martial or divine.

I'll second this remark; although there are some druids (quite a few that I can think of) who work for Leska.

 

[RangerWickett]

Originally in 3e the idea was, "Inquisitors don't like magic being used by anyone but them."

So most inquisitors were clerics devoted to Leska's ideology that most people were unworthy of magic, and they could channel their faith to counter spells. But Kreven in adventure 8 was a sorcerer who learned arcane counterspelling magic. The druid in adventure 12 was similar. Anyone sufficiently loyal to Leska, who valued magic more than flesh, was in.

 

[eamon]

Thinking as I type here...

• Let's reimagine counterspelling as less of divine vs. arcane and more as divine vs. everybody else.
• I could consider "everything else" to be non-divine implement powers, and leave the effects intentionally a little vague.
• I think some weapon powers should probably count as supernatural too; that would need to be examined depending on the actual party composition. E.g. a swordmage using transposing lunge or whatnot... uncertainty is fine here, as long as I'm consistent - and that could even mean partial counterspelling or situation(&plot) dependent counterspelling as it makes sense.
• I don't think I'll want to open this can of worms as a player option, at least certainly not without considerable cooperation (e.g. the player would need to design the rules himself with DM participation).

 

[Morrus]

The Counterspelling power we put in the Vancian Mage would work well for Inquisitors, I think. And could be used by PCs against monsters. We had to define "magic", and power sources didn't really work well. So we went with this:

What is a spell?

A spell is defined in the rules as any arcane power.


Because monster powers rarely specify a power type, DM adjudication is required for the Vancian Mage to use Counterspell effectively against monsters. We recommend the following as indications of arcane powers.

• Powers with the Enchantment, Charm, Illusion, Conjuration, and Zone keywords
• Powers with effects not associated with a weapon or physical characteristic of the monster
• Powers that share the name of a known spell
• Powers belonging to creatures with a name evocative of an arcane caster (Mage, wizard, witch, gish, etc…)

We also recommend the DM make these determinations ahead of time and indicate to the player of the Vancian Mage when a monster is using a power that qualifies as a spell.

That works for whether an NPC or monster is using "magic"; but it could easily be applied to PC powers (of course, PC powers have other helpful keywords ike "Implement" which can be useful).

But, generally, I think a keyword-based determination is the best, combined with a little common sense and DM adjudication.

 

[DragoonLance]

I plan to do it a bit differently, the background for the Inquisitors will be that they were originally sorcerer hunters. From Coaltongue's perspective he controls the army, the church (In my setting he's made himself part of the pantheon, in Ragesia at least and the wizards guild (by controlling the master wizards through blackmail, intimidation, Leska, etc.) The one thing he can't control is some angry peasant who can suddenly toss fireballs into the local guard tower. Thus, the Inquisition. Leska then uses his death as an excuse to expand their power to include all magic users that don't swear allegiance to her. This way it includes any primal, psychic or divine characters as threats.