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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 8305088" data-attributes="member: 58172">The original post organizes D&D magic into six sets of themes. This organization mainly derives from an analysis of every spell in D&D. It also considers other magical features. Each thematic is flavorful, and is about equally powerful to the other five thematics, in terms of spell selection and so on.The class descriptions in the Players Handbook are vague about power source. However a brief sidebar describing the Weave loosely divides the classes into the arcane power source and the divine power source. Now psionics becomes more prominent, and the distinction between power sources more central to thematic concepts. Designers have mentioned by name, arcane, divine, psionic, primal, and "other power sources". More official D&D references to power sources seem to be on their way.Each of the six thematic sets correspond well to a power source, especially when arcane splits up into its many themes. Probably the "elemental" power source can be renamed "arcane", in the sense of the alchemy-esque protoscientific flavor of the Wizard. But here, the power source is called elemental to disambiguate. Thus, in addition to divine and psionic, there is elemental and shadow, plus primal. The ethereal power source can relate to magical energy itself, thus somewhat resembles the 3e Universal spell school.The number of power sources and their suggestive themes reminds one of the MTG colors. I am less familiar with MTG, and appreciate those of you who are knowledgeable about it scrutinizing specific examples from MTG. These six "power sources" here are robust presentations of D&D tropes. But their connection to MTG is more exploratory.Healing is primal, relating to living creatures, and closing a wound is a kind of shapeshifting. Thus the Cleric is largely divine-primal. Likewise both Druid and Bard who are the primary D&D shapeshifters are primal. The main difference between the Druid and the Bard is, the Druid also is competent at elemental magic, while the Bard is also competent at mind-affecting magic (enchantment and illusion) whence psionic-theme magic.</blockquote>

Verification