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: 5323535" data-attributes="member: 4937">The thing to keep in mind when looking at stories the ones you site, or Transformers, or any Anime featuring mechs, is that the story itself largely seems to ignore the effects of scale.  Although you have characters who exist at several different scales, the story tends to ignore the realistic effect of 100 lb preteen interacting with a 40 ton mech, robot, or dragon and instead treats the two characters as effectually near peers.   If you keep that in mind, you realize that very little is actually needed to emulate the story.  The problem people get into here is that they try to come up with mechanics for emulating not the story, but the described world of the story.  They are then astounded when the resulting mechanics don't actually result in the story they are familiar with.  But this shouldn't be surprising.   If you try to emulate the described world of comic books, rather than the stories of comic books, you end up with very different mechanics and results.   D&D does a very good job at emulating a broad range of stories because its mechanics are fundamentally abstract.   The fact that it it doesn't emulate the specific described worlds is one of its strengths.Harry Potter describes a world of pervasive low level magic that appears to carry no costs.  People with sufficient skill and natural ability can cast spells basically at will.  D&D up until 3e sucks at this, because D&D allows for big story changing effects, but it constrains how often you use them.   D&D 4e however reverses the games usual strengths and focuses on allowing pervasive low level magic, and should be an adequate vehical for Harry Potter.Harry Potter though, I should say, is going to be a very very hard system to game because most everything that happens in it happens with 'the power of plot', whereas D&D tries to be more simulationist.   While you could do Harry Potter with a 4e system, for 'characters have the power of plot' story, you'd probably be even better off going to a strongly nar system.  I'd probably be adopting a system similar to 'Dogs in the Vinyard' or some other indy game.</blockquote>

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