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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6104471" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Refute away then! Quotes are free... Personally I don't have access to my copies of those (yup, predictably I own them too) so I am not going to sit here and debate you about the exact meaning of something that I haven't read in at least 25 or maybe 30 years. I can look at my Chainmail rules and it is quite plain that the magic there was used as the model for the D&D magic, ALL of the spells have the same names and 'complexity' maps almost exactly to spell levels. Note how the "level" of the magic user (names are used here not numbers, but the names are all used in OD&D as level names and even the numbers of spells usable are similar). It looks like a pretty straight translation to me. The main things that OD&D added was an actual spells/level table (Chainmail lets you TRY to cast spells of any complexity, but there is a sort of spell failure check). Thus a Chainmail 'Seer', the weakest type caster, can cast one spell per day, can counterspell on an 11, etc. He has no chance to cast a might complexity 6 spell, needing an 8 for complexity one and 9, 10, 11, 12 for the 2-5 level spells on 2d6. Honestly this system is almost closer to Vance than the OD&D 'Vancian' system, though all magic users do get invisibility and either fireball or lightning bolt for free (again it is unclear if they can cast these ever turn or once per battle, but in practice every turn casting makes them rather stupendously powerful for their point cost). Again it is quite clear that the mechanics for D&D casting largely derive from the fantasy supplement. It has the concepts of harder and easier to cast spells, higher and lower level casters, limited amounts of spells available, and limited casting of them. I don't see any indication one way or another that Vance was being emulated here, but you could certainly make a case that this system is 'Vancian'. It is certainly gamist, Chainmail is overall fairly abstract and the spells available seem oriented towards making mass combat interesting but not being completely overpowered.</p></blockquote><p></p>

Verification