Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doomhawk" data-source="post: 1886511" data-attributes="member: 26187">No, we're telling you that the designers decided that a duration of "24d4 minutes per caster level" was way too much freakin' effort, even though it still averages out to the same duration. The D&D system is just a set of rules to imitate a fantasy setting, not necessarily the way that the characters themselves would see things. For instance - in older editions of D&D, arcane spellcasters could not use armor. Period. This was because of game balance issues mainly, and also because it interfered with their movements (now represented by ASF). The Dragonlance campaign setting tried to rationalize this, by saying that wizards couldn't use armor because the gods had realized how powerful arcane magic was, and in an attempt to limit it, they had forbidden arcane spellcasters from wearing armor. OK, kinda iffy, but under 2e rules, it made sense.Then 3e came out, and suddenly wizards can wear armor and cast (although not necessarily well) by the RAW. Now, an explanation introduced in Dragonlance as a piece of fluff trying to justify OOC knowledge suddenly became an inconsistency, and looked like some kind of corny joke. What was formerly the logical fluff conclusion of crunch mechanics, had become an illogical limitation artificially placed upon the mechanics.Now, I personally like Dragonlance, and I certainly don't hold the above occurrence against them. If you have a good in-game reason to introduce spell levels as IC knowledge, go with it (the above post by Elder-Basilisk about how the three kingdoms have different ways of tracking spell levels is a good example of this, I think). But if you use it only because "there's no way around having it as IC knowledge", then what will happen if, for instance, D&D 4.0 arrives and fractional spell levels are introduced? Does everyone become something such as a Caster Who's Kind of Straddling The Second and Third Circles? You have to pull a trick like the Dragonlance one above, which feels fishy and places annoying limitations on players unless there's a good reason for it (the Dragonlance one actually isn't so bad, since the gods used to be quite active - it's not hard to believe that they actively forbade arcane casters from wearing armor, so it meshes at least moderately well with the setting). I still don't like the idea of my character being aware that he's casting a 4th-level spell, for the same reason I don't like the technobabble names of psionic powers; it just doesn't seem to fit. Some people, however, love to spew psionic technobabble in-character; that's their game, I'm not going to interfere with them.</blockquote>

Verification