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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8773942" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't know about you, but the magic D&D Wizards (specifically) tend to do, and particularly the same sort of spells people call "game-breaking" just don't jive at all well with magic in fantasy generally. Whether we're talking books, TV, movies, videogames, fantasy is a popular genre, hugely popular now even, and D&D's magic exists starkly at odds with the magic in virtually of that.Most of the magic in fantasy as a genre exists on a spectrum of power and capability that a lot of D&D's stuff doesn't fit well with at all.In particular, a lot of the spells in D&D feel like they should require lengthy rituals, multiple casters, special preparation, and so on, and D&D just doesn't have that beyond the odd 10-minute or 1-hour casting time, really. It doesn't do ritual magic at all, but virtually all fantasy that involves truly powerful magic does involve that.Further in fantasy as a genre, magic tends to fall into basically three categories:A) Very similar to psychic powers/psionics - there's an absolute ton of this, which often gets overlooked, and it's especially common with female authors and more female-audience-friendly fantasy for whatever reason. Prime exemplars would be Mercedes Lackey's work, Robin Hobb's entire Assassin setting (19 books over 25 years so far!), or the "Small Science" in the Grishaverse (Shadow and Bone etc.), which is the dominant form of magic there (and includes a lot of stuff that's very "Psionics Handbook").B) Very similar to superpowers - again, this is just almost entirely absent from D&D, but I'm sure if D&D was being designed today it wouldn't be. There's a lot of this. Prime examples would be most of Brandon Sanderson's fantasy work (particularly Mistborn and the Stormlight Archive), or NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy.C) Spells and ritual magic - This usually tends to be somewhat spooky/dark (even Harry Potter is a bit spooky). Spells are learned and cast in an organised way, rituals are conducted, and so on. This is closest to D&D's magic in some ways, but often is just one form of a magic in the settings it's in, and usually is very high-effort to both learn and use and can go very wrong in a way never seen with D&D's "if you cast, either it works or it doesn't" spells. The Grishaverse notably also has this kind of magic, which is seen as something different from the "Small Science", something terrifying.D&D's lack of any skill checks for casting spells puts it at odds with all of these. In D&D, if you cast a spell, it can fail, but it can never go wrong, and it doesn't fail because of your lack of skill (outside of 4E, arguably), it fails because the target somehow shrugged it off, and generally inanimate objects can't do that, so those spells always work. So D&D is at odds with this stuff mechanically and conceptually/thematically, which I think is a real problem.The same applies to everything you're saying re: grittier except "easier death" in media generally. Easier death is I think a canard people get from thinking about earlier editions of D&D. It doesn't achieve any of the same goals as the rest of the stuff, it just makes people re-roll characters a lot, which tends to reduce immersion, mildly inconvenience groups and annoy people more than making them feel much.Anyway, I generally feel similarly to you, in that, the overpowered magic of D&D isn't interesting or exciting, it's just kind of annoying, and I do think a lot of that is because it's never fit with any fantasy except really Vance - and even that's arguable, if D&D Wizards were Vance characters they'd be able to memorize like, 4 spells at once, not close to 40 (Worlds Without Number shows how to make a playable D&D-style class that works this way, I note).</blockquote>

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