NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5483862" data-attributes="member: 54877">As far as why not copy literature, there is another drawback besides protagonist script protection and having a group of people involved:  The mechanics for the magic system must be manageable.   You can do (and authors have) all kinds of fantasy stories with something like "ley lines," where magic is much more powerful on the lines, and has to be stored away from the lines.  Perhaps you even have different kinds of lines.  But in a game system, unless you abstract heavily or put a lot of work into a world-simulation, concrete type system, that gets unwieldy rather rapidly. If you abstract heavily, you can easily lose the uniqueness of the ley lines--or it is just fluff layered over something that could be readily explained with some other magic power source.  Nothing wrong with that, but if you wanted ley lines to inform magic, you have now lost that aspect.  Likewise, if you go with concrete, you better have a very particular idea in mind and a good handle on it.  If I do Robert Aspirin's myth series ley lines, I'm going to do them differently than Harry Turtledove's "WWII in a magic parallel universe" version. It is not unlike systems where casting varies on the current zodiac--either you abstract it out to barely matter, or you embrace the details.  You don't want the details, it gets tedius.  You try to compromise in the middle, and the whole thing falls apart. I can have a system that checks strength of nearest ley line, distance to it, and perhaps affinity for that particular ley line.  Whether I want to answer that question consistenly as a DM every time a player wants his PC to cast a spell is another question.</blockquote>

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