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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5600157" data-attributes="member: 4937">You misunderstand.  I mean that the rules break themselves.  Spells in the game work much like cards in MtG.  They do what they say that they do as a special exception to the rules.   They may work on some common ideas, but they may be as specific and esoteric as the writer likes.This might be worth forking because I recognize that my claim that D&D is generic and adaptable is not a widely accepted one, but I'm fairly sure I can defend it.   The trick here is to consider what it means to support a setting.  D&D achieves support for a wide variaty of settings precisely because it makes no attempt to match any particular fictional setting well.   D&D isn't tightly coupled to setting, but it can do a passable job with any of them by leveraging its abstract combat system, its gamist spellcasting system, and its tinkerable system of subsystems.Take the much derided 'Vancian spellcasting' system.  People complain about this all the time, specifically that the restrictions on spellcasters in the system (spell levels, spell slots, memorization, etc.) don't seem to match to any restrictions in the source material of some fantasy story X.   People are expecting some tight coupling between what they imagine the mechanics are and the game mechanics.  But that is hardly essential to modelling a story.  First off, few if any fantasy fiction novels have very tight descriptions of the limitations of their spellcasters.   It's true that Harry Potter doesn't seem to have spell slots or spell levels.   But it's equally true that Harry Potter doesn't do a very good job of explaining what Wizards can do and what their limitations are.   In fact, most magic in the story serves the simple purpose of advancing the plot.   Wizards in Harry Potter can do what they need to do to advance the plot and when they don't, they don't seem to use spells.   So the question becomes, not whether the mechanics of spells in the game are the same as the mechanics of magic in the Potter universe, but whether the mechanics of spells in the game will match a story where Wizards appear to have restrictions on how much magic they may use and use that magic fairly sparingly.   And it will.  The PC's will use sparingly at important moments in the story, and generally not outside of it.  All that's really important about simulating the outcome of Harry Potters magic system is that magic is a limited resource.  D&D does this well.  The only thing that might have to change just a little is how we color the process of filling spell slots, and since most groups I've played with pay little attention to the in game mechanics of spell components and memorizing spells (because after a while this would be boring), that change is in fact a very very small ammendment to the rules.Likewise, there isn't a hint of spell levels or spell slots in Tolkien's stories.  But its equally true that there is almost no description of how magic works in Tolkien's stories.   All we really know is that Gandalf seems to use magic sparingly, and that he seems to at some point become depleted of power and can't work magic again without some rest.   So once again, while the Vancian system doesn't tightly emmulate whatever the mechanics of magic are in Tolkien's universe, in terms of outcome in play we will see the same pattern of magic use that we see in the story.   Gandalf very well could be a 6th level wizard or 6th level sorcerer.   The only thing that might have to change just a little is how we color the process of filling spell slots.To anticipate where this conversation goes so that I don't have to go there again, IME, when I make this argument, the responce to it is first to deny that people who've experienced this have experienced it.  In other words, groups have actually used D&D to model almost any sort of setting, so objecting to the notion that you can involves convicing people they didn't experience what they've experienced.   Secondly, people will concede that people have done it, but then insist that D&D doesn't do the job well according to some arbitrary measurement of well.   But I don't even have to bother to quibble with this objection (even if it is wrong).  All I have to do is note that while it may be true that a system specifically designed to model some setting or the other would do a better job than D&D, that claim does nothing to harm my own claim about D&D's generic nature.  Ultimately, the answer to that claim is, "So what?"  I don't have to insist that D&D is both generic and that it models settings better than systems specifically designed to do so.  After that, people typically respond that simulating some setting with D&D is badwrongfun because it was never intended to do that, which is not only insulting but circular logic and counterfactual.  It's quite clear that early on people did think D&D was simulating a very wide range of fantasy fiction and could be adapted to many settings.</blockquote>

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