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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5782555" data-attributes="member: 4937">Let me take a different tack then.  Jack Vance is reasonably obscure.Roger Zelazny is not, and certainly not with in the fantasy/science fiction community.  He won both the Hugo and Nebula for 'Lord of Light' in 67/68, and 'Chronicles of Amber' was at one time one of the most renowned fantasy series ever.   It would have been the hot series at the time D&D was being forumulated, and its spells are of the 'fire and forget'/'prepare and trigger' type.Moreover, both Zelazny and Vance were much less obscure at the time that D&D was written, and D&D's target audience would have been extremely familiar with their works.  Post D&D fantasy series are often explicitly or implicitly inspired or influenced by D&D or actual D&D campaigns.  These would include among many others Fiest's 'Riftwar' novels, The Chronicles of the Dragonlance, and Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion.   All contain either explicitly Vancian magic, or magic that is inspired by Vancian magic and given looser narrative form.  Therefore I utterly reject the notion that the mechanic is unique to an obscure and largely forgotten text.  This is just my casual off the top of my head list of examples.  I'm sure there are more.Prior to D&D, magic is usually presented in ways drawn from mythology and legend, and is so less accessible, more arcane, and less comprehensible than in post-RPG fantasy novels.   Therefore, its often not at all explicit how magic works in these stories and wizards are more usually mentor/helpers or antagonists than protagonists.   When magic doesn't work as deus ex machina and have the apparantly limitless power of plot, Vancian magic is as reasonable of an approximation as any  for what is going on in these stories, and certainly does as good of job as any at approximating the pacing and use of magic within the narrative.   Where magic does have the apparantly limitless power of plot, it's unsuited in my opinion to a D&D style game.</blockquote>

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