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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5513911" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with Hussar - this is tending to push the game out of the &quot;heroic fantasy&quot; genre and into something slightly different. Which is fine in and of itself, but I think that D&amp;D is well served by also supporting heroic fantasy play. And at least in my experience the alternative genre - grim and gritty musketeers or swords &amp; sorcerry - also isn't harmed by dialing down the &quot;mega-magic&quot;.I tend to think that there is a tension between these two paragraphs. Part of the issue, as I've indicated in previous posts, is that the presence of &quot;mega-magic&quot; means that the players, in interacting with the situation, have to choose between gimping their PCs and preserving the genre/story/flavour/whatever-label-you-want-to-give-to-walking-to-Gondor-rather-than-teleporting.That is why, in my Rolemaster games, after a certain point the players decided that we would exclude teleport and a good chunk of divination from the game.Now that is a modest mechanical tweak. Probably even a rookie GM and/or players can reflect and think of doing it. But the more the &quot;mega-magic&quot; - or, as KM and Prof Cirno are describing it, narrative-controlling magic - is embedded into the game system, the harder this sort of tweaking gets and the more one might be looking for fundamental changes to the magic system.If you compare HARP to Rolemaster you can see that a lot of this was done (although, while they got invis and save-or-die, they missed fly and teleport). 4e is another example, obviously. It's an open question, of course, who prefers which game on either side of the &quot;mega-magic&quot; divide, but I think it's pretty obvious that there's a singificant issue here, of what sort of mechanics support what sort of play. I don't think the designers of HARP and 4e are just jumping at shadows!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5513911, member: 42582"] I agree with Hussar - this is tending to push the game out of the "heroic fantasy" genre and into something slightly different. Which is fine in and of itself, but I think that D&D is well served by also supporting heroic fantasy play. And at least in my experience the alternative genre - grim and gritty musketeers or swords & sorcerry - also isn't harmed by dialing down the "mega-magic". I tend to think that there is a tension between these two paragraphs. Part of the issue, as I've indicated in previous posts, is that the presence of "mega-magic" means that the players, in interacting with the situation, have to choose between gimping their PCs and preserving the genre/story/flavour/whatever-label-you-want-to-give-to-walking-to-Gondor-rather-than-teleporting. That is why, in my Rolemaster games, after a certain point the players decided that we would exclude teleport and a good chunk of divination from the game. Now that is a modest mechanical tweak. Probably even a rookie GM and/or players can reflect and think of doing it. But the more the "mega-magic" - or, as KM and Prof Cirno are describing it, [I]narrative-controlling magic[/I] - is embedded into the game system, the harder this sort of tweaking gets and the more one might be looking for fundamental changes to the magic system. If you compare HARP to Rolemaster you can see that a lot of this was done (although, while they got invis and save-or-die, they missed fly and teleport). 4e is another example, obviously. It's an open question, of course, who prefers which game on either side of the "mega-magic" divide, but I think it's pretty obvious that there's a singificant issue here, of what sort of mechanics support what sort of play. I don't think the designers of HARP and 4e are just jumping at shadows! [/QUOTE]

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