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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2273547" data-attributes="member: 6533">To be honest, I think that this is a mistake from both sides.If the goal is to allow you to play DnD with Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser then it's not that you are making up for the lack of magical items with other magical abilities its that you are levelling out the system as a whole.What we have is a historical cognitive dissonance here.  We are so used to the standards of DnD from years of playing it that we have gone from thiking of 'in DnD if you lack magical items you are screwed when facing a dragon' as a complaint to thinking of it as an aesthetic necessity.Watched Dragon Slayer the other night.  Now you can fight me on this, but I think of that as a pretty perfect example of a GnG movie, at the very least its the best heroic fantasy take on magic in film and the best dragon slayer movie of all time.  And it struck me how much magic items just don't enter it.  There's one magic item and two masterwork items in the whole movie.   The magic item is a literal magic item.  It's not some sort of thrice blessed sword it's a rock that lets you do magic.  The masterwork item is hard to get on the one hand as its made of dragon scales and the other is simply hard to make.The other thing that struck me is that the dragon wasn't a threat because it was a magical beast.  The dragon was a threat because it was a magic beast with the tactical advantages of fortifications, mobility, reach, strength, armor, napalm, and intelligence.  People go out to get a wizard to fight it, but noone thinks they can't hurt it through mundane means.  Just that doing so will be pretty nastilly difficult, and the only way even the wizard can see to defeat it is through suicide bombing.  Even the magic is tactical.But the point is that noone in the movie thinks we're screwed we have to go home.  The whole point of the movie is that everyone has to think we're screwed, we have to figure out a way to get unscrewed.It's also worth noting how much preparation figures into the story as an element of each attempt against the dragon.The thing I'm looking forward to most about IL is how much it rewards preparation.  Cause what it's essentially down is replaced magic items with tactical sense.  The two classes we've seen require preparation and the class we've seen that explicitly doesn't, the Berzerker, still requires you to really consider and evaluate the advantage of every blow struck against you.  It's the first class where I can actually picture the eye of the hero, the whole heroic cinema trope of the hero getting into the fight and then evaluating each opponent as he prepares not only to make the next move but to recieve it, making sense.</blockquote>

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