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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5956734" data-attributes="member: 996">Nod.  There's really no way to reason with that attitude.  That's probably quite doable...Maybe, ideally, the game could have modules to cover very different styles. One might have rules for very simple fighters and wizards and everyone in-between who balance at a 'gritty' power-level, with fighters doing mostly-realistic things and wizards doing mostly rituals and 'magic' that might conceivably be little more than legerdemain, chemistry (and/or other anachronistic knowledge), and cunning.Other modules might add more extreme fantasy elements, making wizards into true casters using undeniably-real magic, even in combat (with some difficulty), and fighters into super-human paragons of strength and courage who, likewise, do impossible things. The dial could go up so far as to have virtually super-hero-like characters of any class.I know a few steampunk fans who would disagree with you about that being /bad/, but maybe it's not 'good sci-fi,' exactly.  In fact, steampunk has a bit more in common with fantasy.Fantasy, of course, does neither.  It takes outlandish premises - many of them - and runs with them in outlandish directions.  While the premises of fantasy are preposterous by the standards of science of sci-fi, they're quite familiar to us all, because they are drawn heavily from myth and legend.Where science fiction asks you to take a leap of faith in accepting one stunning premise, but then settle back into a mode of scientific inquiry and skepticism, fantasy asks you to leave all that behind and experience the fantastic with a sense of wonder.See what I mean?  No, fantasy does not work the same way.  Just because booksellers but fantasy/sci-fi on one shelf doesn't mean they're the same thing.  I understand the impulse to use the rules as a sort of 'laws of physics.'  It's a very detail-oriented, nerdy/science-geeky thing to do, and I am certainly detail-oriented and nerdy in my own right.  I quite enjoyed using 3e that way at the time.  But, I also quite enjoy getting away from that assumption and using rules to model what we find in fantasy stories, rather than to model a world in which such a story might, possibly happen, once in a very great while (but probably never to my character).</blockquote>

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