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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9501223" data-attributes="member: 6790260">That it is a trope does not mean we need to follow it. "X is a trope" simply means it's been done repeatedly. Tropes are tools; we should not use an oven to make a garden salad, no matter how prevalent and useful ovens are.D&D, as a game, has proffered an experience of peers adventuring together. Not merely people who remain useful to you even when you become powerful, but genuinely comrades (if not necessarily friends) standing together on a heroic journey, whether that be Greco-Roman heroism or the modern (Christianized) heroism of selfless good-deed-doing.If the game is giving us signal after signal that it is for peers adventuring together--that the party members are, in some sense, equal participants, and that the players are equal contributors--then it behooves the game to actually be designed to match that.I think it is perfectly possible to design a game where martial characters are peers of magic-users. That does, I admit, require that we not allow magic-users to reach the same maximum height that magic-users can potentially reach in fiction, because "can potentially reach in fiction" would mean literally godly, not just godlike, power. I further admit that it requires that we take a relatively expansive attitude toward what is possible for the martial characters.Neither of those things is unverisimilitudinous in its own right--except in the fact that magic is precisely as unreal as crazy martial derring-do. The spellcaster is necessarily a dweller in the fully supernatural. Nothing about verisimilitude, or setting consistency, or anything else, forbids us from putting martial characters in the transmundane, where they are not strictly supernatural, but are no longer limited in all the ways that the utterly mundane are.And the warrior who resists supernatural forces with nothing but grit and skill and still triumphs? That, too, is a trope. Hell, Conan exemplifies it!</blockquote>

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