Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6568680" data-attributes="member: 82106">But then you are back to Pemerton's point of the 'Spartan World' because its implausible that the DM has a coherent understanding of a theory of magic to present and use the principles of which to determine whether or not the PC's idea has merit or not. D&D presents no theories as to how magic actually works, or what principles are involved, etc. beyond random bits of color and what you can build out of its entirely gamist mechanics. That's SOMETHING, but the only real way the DM can adjudicate in a 'knowledgeable' way is to simply state that nothing is possible except what the rules spell out, and possibly other things that are basically indistinguishable from those (IE I'm granting the leeway that if a player makes up a new spell for his PC to research that you can credibly say that the DM 'knows' it will work, but note that Gygax's criteria for that were TOTALLY GAMIST).Now, I think it is within the realm of possibility that your DM may be one who has expounded in some fashion on some theory of magic, but I'm going to say as well that I find it unlikely that such a theory is highly developed. The main reason for this is that such theories inevitably clash with the existing system too much, since it IS totally gamist and really admits of no overarching principles. The upshot being that the DM really in an practical sense must just make a judgement call, probably entirely based on gamist considerations, as to what happens when the PC fiddles with the rules of magic to try to do something new. Its going to be yanked out of thin air. Of course every reasonable DM is going to try to maintain suspension of disbelief and cloth his gamist response in some sort of 'logic' to make a nice narrative. So I'm not really sure that your requirements here are any more stringent than ours, except you seem to prefer that the gamist and fairly arbitrary ad-hoc aspect of it be kept out of sight if at all possible.</blockquote>

Verification