Magic and culture in D&D Lore

[SkidAce]

[MENTION=6686378]Kalontas[/MENTION], I somewhat agree. You will notice I discussed letting the players be whatever they choose, it's just the cultures that have a strong tendency to one type of thing or class.

Another example from my stuff that I just re-earthed from the file bin.

Say only elves craft mithral. Good for campaign flavor, sounds limiting to the human craftsman. Well the human craftsman is a PC and is unique. So he learns how. Maybe from old legendary scrolls, maybe from an elf tutor. Maybe on his own (brilliant!).

PC gets concept, campaign gets flavor.

P.S. I didn't like the racial limits on class level either! And solved them pretty much the same way. NPC halfling* fighters tend towards low level. PCs? Just keep on going!



*as a side note, there are no halflings in this world, an ancient necromantic society designed a genocide spell and used it on the halflings. Then everyone else ganged up on them before they could cast it again. What a shame...

 

[Dwimmerlied]

I guess that might be the crux of an interesting issue. A system that by-the-rules absolutely forbids something a player would like to play may frequently result in frustration. On a certain level, a system that provides the tools for a GM to create their own mythology is likely to reflect the gaming paradigm as it stands now, and has for some time. Alternatively, if the flavour of the system reflects a particular mythology that evolved in its own perculiar way from extrinsic inspiration and intrinsic internal logic, well that's kind of cool too. In other words, I'm definitely not championing the stifling of other's creativity, but perhaps my original post was attempting to explore the quirks and interesting elements in the game, which have evolved for whatever reason.

For where I am now in my gaming, I really like the idea of working within the framework of an established mythology, I think it challenges my creativity. I'm not likely to enforce anything on my players, though I might encourage. With magic, correlating different school/subtype or class tendencies with (yes, I agree) cultures (which are often synonymous with race/subrace in the standard mythology), is an excellent idea. Devising a level-limitation scheme is also a great way to reflect that some schools or classes can be achieved by anyone, though this particular culture are the true masters of such.