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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1626161" data-attributes="member: 16936">I had to go with "love it," but it's not a deep and abiding love.  It's more of a "Hey, that's usually pretty cool" feeling.I don't have one big reason for feeling this way, though; just a lot of little reasons.  For one thing, I've never really been all that fond of traditional fantasy settings to begin with; I don't "get" them, I suppose.  I wouldn't want to live in a world like that, so I find it hard to empathize with characters who do.  Adding tech (whether magic-based, magic-separate, or magic-opposed) does tend to make the setting less depressingly standard and blah and more like a modern society (which I can understand and enoy), so I kinda like it.Then there's the issue of magic itself.  I still don't get it when people talk about "keeping magic mysterious" to explain why they don't like magic-tech; was it ever mysterious?  There are extensive rules for magic, the mechanics of spellcasting work the same way every time (and any exception you find has been written up as a one-time "hey, look how weird this is, spells aren't behaving the way you'd expect them to, isn't that unusual?" thing), and about the only mystery older editions had in their magic systems that 3.0/3.5 doesn't is that the older editions didn't let PCs have any obvious, built-in way to do things like design spells or build magical items.  And that really wasn't making magic mysterious, it was just making new spells and item creation a GM-only playground.  So since I've always had the impression that D&D-style magic is a very orderly, predictable thing, mixing it with technology doesn't faze me at all.  In fact, it usually adds new complications and possibilities to the generally-predictable magic system, and that can be fun.Also, I like tech.  I like it better than magic, and I like it better than powers.  I've always preferred playing skill whore characters (PCs who know how to do a lot of mundane things, some of them extremely well) to playing powered characters (PCs with weird, beyond-human powers).  Technology tends to favor the skilled over the powered, and I'm just selfish enough to enjoy that.I even like the way most magic-tech settings state or imply that civilization is improving itself, discovering new things, setting higher goals, and generally making the world better than it was before.  I get so sick of the tired old genre convention that says "a long time ago, there was the ultimate Golden Age of magic and enlightenment, with flying cities and no sickness and everything was great but then disaster struck and now all that's left are the uncanny and inexplicable artifacts of our great and powerful ancestors and we're just rebuilding our little shantytown of a civilization in the shadows of their mega-cool ruins, and isn't it sad how lame we are now compared to back then?"  I think there's more than enough room for settings that say the best works of civilization are ahead of it rather than far, far behind it.  And I admit that's a snobby and petty attitude, but I did say that all of my reasons for kind of liking magic-tech were little ones.I dislike some stuff about magic-tech, too.  For example, I don't like how difficult it seems to be to build a good, solid system for it that is both easy to use and actually fun.  Many times, you seem to get only one or the other; either the rules are straightforward but have all the excitement and color of a tax form, or the setting describes really cool magic-tech things but the rules are so weird or so broken or so nonexistent that trying to work with them gives you a headache.  I need magic-tech to be both playable AND cool for me to really get behind it.So in the end, I just decide whether I like a particular magic-tech setting on a case-by-case basis.  But I've liked enough magic-tech settings well enough to say that I generally like the concept of magic-tech, so it takes a shoddy execution of that concept to drive me away.--i think i would've liked the old weg game 'bloodshadows' more with a better rulesetryan</blockquote>

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