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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7637287" data-attributes="member: 4937">It is and it isn't.  Let me return to that point about the fact that D&D has always looked at magic from two points of view.  The first viewpoint is what can PC's do with magic, and it tends to toward 100% rules with magic as a sort of technology that is available to the PCs for them to use to solve problems in comparatively tightly defined ways.   So a PC in D&D is used to being able to cast fireball, tightly define where the fireball is targeted, and then essentially know the stakes of the proposition before hand because they know precisely how fireball works.  But at the exact same time, D&D in the larger sense of the imagined game world that D&D takes place in and not just a rules set is largely a product of Gygaxian fiction, and Gygaxian fiction is heavily a product of pulp fantasy authors like Howard who have a fiction closer to 0% rules.  And Gygaxian fiction has always assumed that for the purposes of creating fiction, magic as a system and as is available to the PC need not apply.   So Gygaxian fiction, and by extension D&D fiction, has always validated having magic as this weird inexplicable force capable of doing whatever the narrative needs when it is outside of the control of the PCs.  This is the world of D&D were you have gems growing on trees, magic fountains that bring strange blessings on the drinker, and magical "slot machines" that impose weird effects on those that dare play them.  It's the world where a curse takes a sentient form and has fairy tale powers, where ghosts rise from the dead because of the gruesome circumstances of their death, and demiplanes were time and the laws of space are weird, and artifacts break the laws of the game with respect to magic.  This is that part of Gygaxian dungeon design where he wants you to invent and put a "Special" in the dungeon.All of that is going on at the same time as the "magic as science" system that the PC's have access to.  What's never actually been done in D&D is any really extensive functional attempt to let PC's step over that line and get into the weirdness.   In other words, very rarely and only in limited ways has D&D ever validated that the PC can grow to be more than a practitioner of magic, into a master of the esoteric and arcane arts.   I think Gygax had some vague ideas in mind about this, and we can see it in the 1e AD&D DMG in what Gygax had in mind about PC magic users researching their own spells, making their own scrolls, brewing their own potions, and generally stepping off into the weird.   But because Gygax always left this up to the imagination of the DM and put such hard restrictions on it, in practice nothing really came off it.  There was never a supplement for generating the rules implied by Gygax's suggestions, and because it was so burdensome for everyone involved and so entirely the purview of the DM, little ever came of it.When 3e tried to reconcile the PC world with the NPC world by giving PC's and NPC's a unified rules system, the problem was that it was far easier to stick to a simple mechanistic system to describe making a magic item than it was to get into the details that Gygax wanted to push the game towards.   And without the fluff and esoteric ingredients lists and creation processes, instead of letting PC's step off into the weird it just broadened the scope of what was in the PC's engineering training.   You mention presentation for game play, and I think that you are exactly right that this is a big part of it.  Compare the feel of outlaying 12000 g.p. to the requirement to discover and assemble an esoteric ingredient list.   The former not only doesn't feel like anything but a game move, but it implies the existence of some Magic Mart out there with off the shelf components for making a DIY Staff of Power.   And again, without doing the heavy lifting for the DMs, your going to have games that just handwave all of the numinous weirdness away until you get to something that feels entirely game-y in nature.</blockquote>

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