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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5968604" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think I'm missing something.Of course comics provide pseudo-scientific explanations. They're set on earth. These characters hang out in NYC, study at university, are frequently great scientists themselves! You're being asked to imagine these heroes as possible within the modern, scientific world view.But D&D doesn't happen on earth. It happens in some other, magical land in which pixies and elementals and ghosts all are real, in which there are gods and primordials who created the universe, and people who commune with them and draw power from them. We don't have to reconcile it with a scientific world view - it's expressly an enchanted place in which the mystical and the supernatural are ubiquitous.That is the explanation for fighters being tough. They're tough for the same reason that vampire's have 18/76 STR (or whatever it is), and for the same reason that elves and halflings in the woods are invisible 90% of the time - that's their nature in this fantastic world! (We don't ask about the structure of a fighter's muscles under medical investigation anymore than we ask about the skin pigmentation of an elf or halfling.)I won't bite on the anime, which I don't know well enough (but isn't the Mighy Servant of Leuk-O a mecha?).But as for myth - where did Gygax get the idea the elves, halflings, brownies, leprechauns etc are invisible in the woods? That Medusa will petrify you with her gaze? That powerful wizards can trap your soul? That channelers of divine power can turn sticks into snakes and part the waters of a sea? That genies can grant wishes when freed from entrapment?The game is imbued with the tropes of mythology, of fairytale, and of a range of religious texts.It's true that it's also imbued with the tropes of reference works on historical arms and armour and fighting techniques (cf the famous polearm weapons list and Appendix T). How to reconcile those two sets of tropes is what this thread seems to have become about.</blockquote>

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