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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6557531" data-attributes="member: 996">So true. I don't recall mentioning them, specifically.  Did you ever find a reference to a Dying Earth magician memorizing more than 6 spells, BTW? I'm sorry if it's topic drift, but I often mean D&D more generally, and say 5e or 'classic D&D' or 3.x/Pathfinder when I want to get more specific.  Thing is, 5e is (intentionally, according to what Mr. Mearls was saying leading up to and during the playtest) quite representative of D&D in general.  So it shouldn't make a big difference. Sounds very Lensman - and not very heroic fantasy, at all.  The fantasy equivalent of wormholes would be, in D&D, Gate, Planeshift, and the like.  Some version of Wish have had language about how to mess with characters who try to use it for time travel or messing with time - though they'd also give advice about using time travel to mess with non-time-travel wishes.   Yep.  Harry Potter's also one of those sub-genres where everyone of any power is a caster.  They're fairly well-modeled by games like Ars Magicka (which has the good sense to warn players that non-mages are decidedly inferior character choices), and Mage (which doesn't even offer non-mages as a PC option).  Not at all well by D&D - thanks to Vancian casting as well as the existence of non-casters as PCs.Though, really, Harry Potter duels are mostly rocket tag - whoever gets the spell off first wins.  That bit 3.x/Pathfinder did pretty well. If D&D were just spelling out that non-casters are just there as mooks and minions and victims to be saved from evil casters, and PC were all meant to be wizards and the like, sure, it'd be a meaningful example.  But D&D wasn't trying to emulate that genre, in part because it didn't exist when D&D got rolling. Well, according to himself.  Petrification, lightning, and deathspells, though, are all things D&D wizards have been able to do.  The first was not suitable for destroying armies in any edition I can think of.  The others could two could make some headway, how much depending on the specifics of the ed.  What magic did he actually use in the course of the story?I've read some Niven, but not that particular story.  The utterly invulnerable enemy is a cute way to challenge an overpowered protagonist, so I can see how it'd be a glaring exception to the usual genre conventions - it's sure looks like it was written to intentionally invert genre conventions, in fact, like Moorcock's Elric, but moreso.  But, really, what you've got there isn't an heroic fantasy story, name of the character notwithstanding, but a superhero story, a nominally magical superman vs a kryptonite villain, in broad terms.A science fiction character, an example of genre-inversion, and something as recent as Harry Potter hardly speak for the heroic fantasy genre D&D was trying to emulate - if, indeed, any of them could even be said to be part of it. Though Harry Potter'd be a fine target for an uban-fantasy game where all PCs are going to be young wizards. I'm actually doing my best, IRL, to be a 5e evangelist.  Especially to new players.  One reason I'm keenly aware of how it defies genre expectations in negative ways.D&D in general has always gone this path of throwing everything a genre caster might do into a long list of spells (and every magic item into a long list, for that matter) and letting casters do tons of them, with a mechanic that only fits one sci-fi series version of 'magic,' and that's an egregious failure, both in terms of modeling genre, and in terms of game balance.  Particularly because of the bizarre double-standard in which non-casters are held to RL ideas of realism, and generally don't rise to what corresponding genre archetypes can do, at all (ironically, sometimes they can't even keep up with RL - there was a thread on here about that months ago).The game would be much better if we could get it closer to a good balance among all the classes, without genre-defying, archetype-based double-standards.  It'd mean bringing casters down to the level of individual protagonist characters in genre, and non-casters up to their corresponding archetypes, and further tweaking the lot around for playability, but, even with such sacrifices, would also end up bringing the whole closer to modeling a broader swath of the genre. Thanks for that.</blockquote>

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