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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6103682" data-attributes="member: 37579">And so arguing against that would be pointless.Vancian magic was based on the writing and magic system of JackVance, so no, it wasn’t entirely for gamist reasons. It may have been chosenbecause it was easy to make mechanics for, but there was always a narrativereason. Thisargument is a little sillier, as most modern takes on the cleric tend to havethem lightly armoured like the wizard because they’re spellcasters.The clerichas its armour and weapons because of its historical source as religiousknights. Mechanically,giving it heavy armour made it a little too similar to the fighter. From agamist perspective it should have had less armour than it does. I agree with that, but it’s harder to add story to somethinglike “the health tracking mechanic.” But classes and races do have story. The first classesintroduced were options like the druid and rogue that were very influenced bystory and not just “here’s a new mechanic to try out”. The origins of the Avenger class come down to needing a divinestriker.It’s unique defining mechanic is basically Advantage. It’s flavour paints it as an offensive paladin or aggressivecleric. “Divine assassin” isn’t a class, it’s a character, a narrow archetype.  And the avenger is one of the better 4e classes. The seeker,battlemind, runepriest, ardent, and warden are all much worse. This was very true of late 3e, and even some early 3e classes like the sorcerer, which was created solely to have another class that used the wizard's spell list. And the sorcerer isn't exactly the best example of a unique archetype screaming for its own class. Yourmileage might vary GREATLY on this depending on your group. The vastmajority of the official game hasbeen focused on this, because WotC really want to focus on dungeons at the endof 3e and during all of 4e. Some ofthis was accidental: the Delve format was built for dungeons and made other adventuresharder to design. But many,many DMs reject dungeons and run exploratory adventures or investigativeadventures or political adventures and the like. And given how successful WotC’s adventures have been, theirdungeon-centric design might not be for the best. So... aslong as you didn’t think, it worked okay? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Yeah, myplayers revel in tearing through logical holes. Nerds in general love lookingfor that stuff. Heck, musing about stuff like that is what has fueled EdGreenwood and Kieth Baker’s entire careers. My favourite is Ravenloft,so 4e didn’t work as well. Monsters didn’t require any special preparation and tactics,PCs were hard to kill and even harder to scare, magic was everywhere, it washard to use just a single boss monster, long combats removed much of the horrortone, it was hard to only have a single fight per day without PCs nova-ing, no firearms, andthe like.The game always descended into something more akin to Van Helsing than Dracula. It’s hard to play a low-magic, fragile heroes, supernaturalhorror game with 4e, which was designed to be a high magic heroic fantasy. (Although, for my two favourite settings, Ravenloft and FFG’s MidnightI’d possibly use inspirational healing. in the former to avoid having a clericto cut down on the magic in the world and in the latter because the onlyclerics are followers of Izrador.)</blockquote>

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