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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="awesomeocalypse" data-source="post: 5154387" data-attributes="member: 85641">Interesting. While I know virtually nothing about Wuxia beyond the films that have broken through in the west, I nevertheless almost qualified my original statement by pointing out that, while western fantasy novels share only superficial similarities with D&D in terms of structure, there are other types of fiction beyond games which are more similar. Shonen manga/anime is a big one. A party of badasses with diverse skills and crazy backgrounds (the D&D cliche of a party consisting of nothing but one-in-a-lifetime geniuses, racial anomalies like good drow, and other zany backgrounds, is pretty much de rigeur in shonen manga anime, where every important character has some crazy unique background and skillset), who essentially do nothing but wander around fighting and growing stronger. The main difference there is that loot is typically much less important, and fights are typically all against powerful groups of opponents (which meshes with 4e and to some extent with 3e, but flies in the face of the random encounters of previous editions). Superhero comics share some similarities as well, especially with 4th edition. I'm fond of pointing out that the oft-maligned at-will/encounter/daily power structure almost perfectly parallels how superheroes like Superman use their powers--they have their go-to basic moves (flying, being super strong and fast) which most of their fights primarily consist of; they have somewhat more obscure powers (freezing breath, heat vision), which show up with regularity in a lot of comics, but are essentially never spammed throughout entire fights, even when it might be useful to do so; and then you have the moments where the character goes all out and just throws the enemy into space or pushes the moon at him or something, which probably will only ever happen once a story arc or so. Never mind that Superman could, theoretically, just throw *every* enemy with some degree of invulnerability into space, or that he could simply go into orbit and use super-sight, x-ray vision and heat vision in conjunction to snipe his enemies for every fight. That might be "logical", but it doesn't make for good drama or interesting fights, so he simply doesn't do it, he is limited by the conventions of the plot to only using his powers in a frequency of inverse proportion to how effective they are. This is EXACTLY what 4e does--it recognizes that 1 trick ponyism is boring, and that using a really cool power which wins the fight for you is great once in a while, but destroys the game if spammable. So classes like Fighters function just like Superman--they use a few reliable moves at will, some cooler moves once a fight, and their really devastating ones once a day. Other kinds of fiction can definitely be useful in helping us understand D&D, and to both play and dungeon master more effectively.</blockquote>

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