NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5323518" data-attributes="member: 4937">Rubbish.Fantasy stories usually have in their background various exposition about how magic works.  But all of these descriptions come down to one of two things.Either magic is always available to those that can wield and they do wield it all the time, or else magic - for whatever reason - is not always available to those that wield it and much of the time they refrain from using it.   Because pervasive magic tends to trivialize the accomplishments of the hero by making everything too easy, in practice most fantasy stories fall into the second category.D&D can successfully emulate pretty much any fantasy story that falls into that second category, and not only that, it often emulates the story _better_ than attempting to emulate the mechanics of magic described in the exposition.  For example, in the 'Lord of the Rings', presumably Gandalf could use magic pretty much all the time.  He doesn't however.  In fact, he rarely uses it.  The in story explanation of this is that he's essentially refraining from using magic for what are personal and moral reasons.   But, if we directly ported these 'role playing constraints' to a game, we'd quickly find that - like all 'role playing constraints' - they would not in the hands of most players actually constrain the story to resemble that of 'Lord of the Rings'.  Players would find excuses to use magic all the time.  On the other hand, if we made Gandalf literally a 6th level Wizard, the player of Gandalf would be constrained to parcel out his magic in small doses most of the time, saving his big splashy effects only for emergencies.  Even though the underlying conciets are very different, the story we are creating is to an observer unable to see the game mechanics, potentially and often actually very much the same.Rubbish.It's obvious to me that we aren't going to see eye to eye on this.  M&M is a great system, but I don't buy that it's capable of emulating every genre or subgenre any more than I buy that of D&D.  Both are quite flexible systems driven by many of the same underlying mechanics, but they have limitations.   However, the limitation being cited here isn't one of them.   I think D&D is actually better at emulating the range of 'gritty realism' to 'epic demi-god like power' than M&M.  M&M is really skewed toward doing the upper end of that (and it probably does the upper end of that even better than D&D).</blockquote>

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