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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 921157" data-attributes="member: 2804">Whose concept of magical items in a fantasy world?  Certainly not mine.  Yours perhaps.  And although you are not the first to decry magic items and magic because of the magical arms race you feel takes place at higher levels, my theory is still valid.The magic arms race is simply the logical extrapolation of a world where magic works.  Just as in the real world, where guns have evolved to replace swords as the weapon of choice, so will more powerful magic items evolve to replace others.  Technology is limited only by the laws of physics but magic, since it doesn't exist can only be limited by two things.  Writer's fiat or by imposing upon magic a set of internally consistent rules or laws.  In other words, magic as science.Now some of you may prefer magic by writer's fiat, and that's fine.  You prefer not to want to know how magic works, you just want to be captivated by it when it does.  But ultimately, I'm unsatisfied with this.  Since magic isn't real, I have to engage in the willful suspension of disbelief to be captivated by the writer or DM's portrayal of magic.  But since the "mysteriousness" of magic is dictated to us by a writer or DM who is just as human as we are, certain logical inconsistencies invariably crop up.For example, if there exists certain creatures with a certain amount of power, DR, spell resistance, etc.  Then I expect those monster to be held in check by characters of a certain power level.  If they are not, then I don't find it believable that a certain monster will not rampage uncontrollably across the countryside.  A town of 1-3 level NPC commoners cannot exist anywhere near a dungeon filled with CR 10 or higher monsters.  The only way it can is by the DM coming up with some metagame rationale for it.Likewise, if mages have access to teleport or fly or can create magic lanterns, then I find it unbelievable that a mage would prefer to walk across the countryside or that magic lanterns wouldn't be commonplace.  Either the DM or writer has come up with some metagame reason why they can't or they have decided to impose magical laws upon their world to justify why they can't.  But once you impose understandable laws of magic it then becomes possible for people to use those laws to their advantage.  To know how to manipulate them to increase their own power or profit by it.  Such is human nature.  Anything else is arbitrary writer's fiat.  And when such writer/DM's fiat is held up to the light of logic, I find it suddenly thrown into sharp relief and I can no longer engage in the willful suspension of disbelief.The rules framework of the d20 system can be used to simulate a wide variety of worlds.  But you must be prepared to make changes to maintain internal logic and consistency.  If you don't want your world to contain high level magic items you either must use DM's fiat to simply say they don't exist and ignore the fact that your game world no longer has any internal consistency.  Or you have to change the game system itself.  See my previous post for the kinds of changes you would need to make to play in a viable low magic world.If magic was not used in D&D as a balancing factor then you could remove it from the game without having to make any other changes at all.  But you can't.</blockquote>

Verification