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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5600239" data-attributes="member: 4937">I disagree.  Combat does vary tremendously in its depiction across authors.I don't understand what you mean unless you mean, "RPGs lead to endless arguments."  What's to understand about 'you got hit and took n points of damage'?  It's a system that's so elegant its been implemented in virtually every RPG influenced computer game that's ever been made.Stop there.  Hit points do nothing to push a game world full of healing potions and spells.   That's a genera decision.  Most people use lots of healing magic in their games to maintain a high pace of play with few time outs where people rest and recuperate.   But that's a game decision, and nothing that the rules force on you.  You can play D&D without healing or healing potions, you just slow down the in game pace of the story with longer healing breaks between combat events. Moreover, I totally disagree that the source material of D&D is generally lacking in healing magic or even healing potions.   What's Miruvor in game terms if not a healing potion?  Even the orcs are shown to use a similar device of their own making.   Harry Potter is filled with healing magic.  Lucy's vial of crystal from the Narnia series is essentially a healing potion that fulfills much the same role in the story of keeping the characters up and in the story rather than recuperating as a healing potion does in D&D.  And we could go on and on.  Granted, most fiction involves protagonists that are less than 6th level and most doesn't have a Magic-Mart on the corner, but those are game setting decisions and not anything that the game forces on you.   Many people play lengthy campaigns of D&D at under 6th level and many also play without Magic-Marts.Totally disagree.  I've played those systems and most do a worse job of simulating the way magic is seen in a story than D&D does.  Most also do a worse job of putting really big story changing effects into the hands of the players as well, and most are even more dependent on DM fiat to have NPC produce large story changing effects.   D&D beats most point buy systems hands down when it comes to creating a narrative that will resemble the narrative that you'll find in author created fiction.   I hear this and I'm almost certain that this a totally theoretical opinion by someone who hasn't tried very often to do both.Not at all.  Because if you divorse yourself from the mechanics just a second and look at the narrative of play and compare it to the narrative of literature, you'll see that even if literary spell-casters aren't specified in the text as 'forgetting spells' in the narrative they act like they do.   That is to say, fantasy narratives generally show the spellcaster only doing as much with magic as is necessary to overcome the challenge (almost everything else they do could be summed up by something like the Prestiditation spell).   You don't in fact see literary spellcasters exercising their magic nearly as often as point buy or roll to cast allows for.  Instead they do occasional small spells, and occasional big spells, but they do something and then they stop doing it just as if they'd expended that usage.  Of course, in the story this is occuring for different reasons - repeated narrative about the same magical use would be boring - but the outcome is the same.Even in something like Avatar the Last Airbender, the spellcasters in the story act by and large like they are Vancian spellcasters despite the fact that almost nothing in the described setting matches the mechanics of that.   They cast different sequences of discrete effects, and quite often leading up to the biggest splashiest finishing moves.   If these finishing moves don't defeat the baddy, they often stand back and simply watch them escape... just as if they'd used up all their spell slots.  The real proof of this though is the ability of D&D to go the other way and generate the novel from the mechanics of play.  Many fantasy series from Feist's Riftwar Saga, to Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksinarrion, to the DragonLance series themselves can be read as and were often inspired by the mechanics of play.  Yet they read much like any other high fantasy novels.Not at all.   There is a much better argument that the D&D wizard is a specific archetype.   The cleric is a very good implementation of a generic fantasy spellcaster and its far more appropriate to historic magic to have it tied to invocation of spirits, dieties, and mystic powers than the D&D's Wizards almost wholly modern origins.   Clerics occurs everywhere through out literature, myth, and legend.  The Wizard is the modern origin, and its going to be very very hard to find examples of the Wizard in literature that aren't influenced by the D&D Wizard. Again, that's based on setting and adventure design.  The rules don't force it on you.  I frequently gamed in 1e without access to a cleric, and if you change the assumptions of the setting and the assumptions of adventure pacing you can dispense with clerics entirely in any addition should you desire.   Repeatedly you've asserted that the tropes and sterotypes of generic D&D prove that D&D can't be used for something other than generic D&D.   But the tropes and sterotypes of generic D&D are themselves based off certain particular conventions of how the game should be played.  But D&D doesn't have to have a generic setting or generic assumptions and that was recognized from almost the very beginning of the game.   If you change the assumptions of the setting design and of the adventure design (that is if you prepare for play differently) then you have a game that seems very different from generic D&D while using the same or almost the same rules.</blockquote>

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