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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5412584" data-attributes="member: 59082">Good point, FireLance, and it is very much in line with the essence of what I'm going for. While I completely agree with you I also think that pure damage numbers are part of it. I think a spellcaster should be  able to cause more damage than a martial character,that there is a reason that in most novels including magic-users of some kind, they are the ones that are targeted first in combat because they are the most dangerous. This has been lost in D&D, especially 4E. I do agree that one of the major factors that makes magic  "Wow! Magic!!" is that a spellcaster can do things that a  non-spellcaster can't. The quickest and easiest way to address this, I  think, is to re-integrate rituals back into "live play." Right now they  are relegated to narrative, out-of-the-moment play. I would also like to  include some mechanism for spontaneous casting which D&D has never  really done but the 4E system may be able to handle. And yes, I agree that there should be compensation, which is where the  Fate Pool idea comes from. The idea being that a non-spellcaster can  create more heroic actions. I think Conan is the example par excellence of  what I'm trying to get at. His evil wizard opponents were always more  powerful than him, but his heroism and pure luck or fate always won him  through the day. You could even say this was the same with Frodo and  Sam. This is where it gets into a quality of deep heroism and that it  may be that a spellcaster, because they have "sold" themselves to their  magical craft, cannot draw upon the same deeply human resources. A  relevant real-world analogy would be that of rational or logical thinking vs, say,  intuition. Logic is a system of thinking that one can be better or worse  at, that can be engaged in debate, in law, and as a kind of  competition. One can use logic to win arguments even when that argument is not truthful.  Logic can support truth but it can also twist it. Authentic intuition is truth.  It is like conscience or imagination - because they are not "factual"  they can be truth itself. Because a work of art is not a "fact," is not literal, it can be true in a way that an almanac cannot. Or, to quote Keats, "I am certain of nothing  but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of  imagination."So in essence I'm trying to get back to the archetypes of swordwielders and sorcerers that we see in Robert E Howard, but that also resonate within Tolkien or Le Guin or even Weis and Hickman. Making magic more powerful, but also bringing in a game mechanism for the capacity of fate, luck, human will and heart that is more prevalent in non-spellcasters simply because they don't have magic to rely upon.</blockquote>

Verification