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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6971013" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Not the Vancianism. Vancianism has never been all that popular with D&D players anyway--hence the popularity of spell point variants over the years. What is popular is the structure and the content. Predefined spells, schools of magic, 1st-9th level spells with exponentially-growing effects (although 5E is ambivalent about exponentialism; some spells grow exponentially with level and others are just linear), Fireball and the way it interacts with HP, Polymorph, Magic Jar, Clone, Teleport, Shapechange, etc., etc. During my GURPS years I tried many times to shoehorn in something approximately D&D's Fireball but it never quite felt right. Neither did MERP. Shadowrun had some cool bits, and it definitely affected the way I view 5E (esp. Planar Binding), but it doesn't really have a satisfactory Fireball either, and that's one of the reasons why I'm not playing Shadowrun 4E right now.But Vancianism per se isn't popular, as we can see from the fact that 5E has mostly discarded it.I did exit the hobby partly for that reason, and came back partly because of the magic system and partly because of the class/XP/levelling system and partly because of combat/HP/monsters. I still don't run murderhobo dungeon crawls or weird wizard shows, and in a lot of ways my adventures would fit more naturally into a GURPS topology... but right now I'm playing 5E, and it's not because it was a default option.And when I introduce people to 5E, it's not because I don't know any other systems that might interest them, it's because it seems like a good match. (There are other people whom I hesitate to introduce 5E to as a first RPG, because it's so combat-centric. But I haven't ruled 5E out either.)I thought about mentioning those, but decided against it because "more interested in X" doesn't imply "entirely disinterested in Y." But he clearly spent way more mental energy inventing mad wizards and spells by mad wizards than he did in inventing new polearms, or we'd have hundreds of polearms each with its own special abilities instead of only a dozen-odd.</blockquote>

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