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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6830113" data-attributes="member: 996">To answer that question, you have to consider that D&D has two different kinds of magic.  It has spells and other magical/supernatural abilities possessed by creatures, and it has magic items.In classic D&D (which, to me, mostly means AD&D, especially 1e), memorized 'Vancian' spells never seemed that magical, to me.  They felt more like some sort of very odd 'sufficiently advanced technology.'  A D&D magic-user was like a soldier issued a selection of very specialized grenades and a swiss army knife instead of the usual rifle & bayonet.  Conversely, magic items often felt pretty magical, some of them were quite recognizable from myth/legend/fiction - often, but not always: there were also some decidedly technological-feeling ones in the bunch.3.5 managed to make more sense and inject some consistency into things.  Most magic items worked like the spells of the casters who made the item.  Spells weren't memorized but 'prepared.'  I'm quite fond of consistency, so, on balance, that wasn't a bad thing at all.  It did make magic across the board feel more like caster magic in 1e, a little less magical, a little more predictable, like a dependable, if not-well-understood, technology.  Where 3.x did manage to make some magic feel more magical was with the Sorcerer and Warlock.  One of the things that made traditional magic-user feel so weird was the way they could memorize any spell on in their book (clerics/druids any spell on their list, period), changing what they could do radically from day to day among a huge range of possibilities.  The Sorcerer was still a times/day caster, but at least he had a set of known spells that didn't change too rapidly, allowing his brand of magic to be differentiated from the next caster's.   Later, the Warlock (and war-mage, I suppose) came along and could cast something every round, which also seemed more magical than tossing a selection of highly-specialized grenades.4e took all the casters more in the direction of the Sorcerer or Warlock, making them feel a great deal more distinctive at the individual character level, able to free do a few magical tricks most of the time, and thus a bit more magical.  Likewise, it threw away the consistency of 3.x in having PCs, NPCs, and monsters all neatly using very similar rules (and spell lists), which was sad in its own right, but did have the benefit of making NPC/monster magic-use less like PC magic-use, and thus less familiar/predictable and more distinctive and 'magical.'  It also added rituals, which necessarily feel a bit more like traditional (that is, RL traditional beliefs about) magic, than the combat-useable/point-and-shoot magic of D&D.   Magic items became distinct from caster abilities again, but they also faded into the background a bit, because they were relatively low-impact.While 5e hearkens back to a lot of the feel of the classic game, it does keep at-will cantrips and rituals for casters, which allow them to have a few frequently-used, slightly defining magical abilities, rather than just odd pick-a-set-of-grenades sufficiently-advanced-technology, though neo-Vancian 'slots' don't stray as far from that as they could (now each grenade is configurable in the field).  Magic items, OTOH, are right back to feeling magical again.Did it happen when he walked into The Enchanted Forest?</blockquote>

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