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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7490231" data-attributes="member: 4937">Good question.Well, does it work?  Presumably, wizardly spells work whether you believe that they are going to work or not.  In fact, priestly spells in D&D traditionally work whether you believe that they are going to work or not.  Belief has nothing to do with it.  D&D priests pretty much have no use for 'faith', any more than a priest of Thor or priest of Zeus spent any time thinking about faith.  Faith or belief is not how religions work generally.No.Divine magical sources are extraordinarily different than arcane sources.   Divine sources are external to the user.  Arcane sources are internal to the user.  Divine sources are like receiving aid.  You call up Thor in your designated time slot, and he dispenses a Flamestrike spell for you to use.  You don't have to know how its works.  You don't really have to do much work yourself.  Thor or his designated agent builds the spell and sees that it gets to you.  And those beings can do magic because they are inherently more 'real' or 'powerful' or have 'authority' that you don't.  All divine magic works by using someone else's power.Arcane magic on the other hand, is basically technology.  It's not technology that would work in the real world, because the real world has a periodic table of elements and so forth and we can be reasonably convinced that magic is impossible in it.  But it's technology within the setting were it occurs because it is based on manipulating something in the setting using words, movements, and potent ingredients as levers to get something moving using relatively little force.   So wizards build the spells themselves, slowly while 'memorizing them', winding up the spring as it were so they can let it lose in a single powerful event.   Bard, use basically the same approach, just with more music in it and less numbers and crazy diagrams.   But then again, music is numbers.   Sorcerers on the other hand are in some way inhuman, and have inherited whatever mojo that gods, spirits or other powerful beings have.There is not 'just because' about it.The easiest way to think about this is imagine a world were just one spellcasting class exists, and think about what that implies about magic in that world.  A world with just wizards means that there are no external power sources, or at least none anyone can tap into, but its a world where reason can somewhat deduce how the world works and nudge it to produce occasionally spectacular effects.   A world with just sorcerers is a world of mutants, where the only people who can do magic are the people who are born with it.  It's a world where people have knacks for different things depending on their birthright.   The world of Avatar the Last Airbender might be considered just a world with only sorcerers that have to be from one of 4 bloodlines (plus the Avatar, who is special).   The world of Mistborn is a similar sort of thing with just a very limited spell selection and a cool take on what powers spells.  Although, spoilers, it turns out there is more than one sort of magic - more than one spellcasting class - in the world.</blockquote>

Verification