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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6344975" data-attributes="member: 18">Hitcher, honest question, why do you always take what I say to mean something really extreme? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The space between "outright goofy" and "super-serious" is pretty massive. 95% of D&D games I've played were somewhere in that space. 2E, in my experience, tended towards the serious, because it was all presented in a very serious tone and there was silly stuff, but it tended to be tucked away. Whereas 3E tended towards the goofy, pretty strongly, right from get get-go, when you were summoning Celestial Badgers and leaping around with double-swords, and so on. 4E was somewhere in between those, in my experience, sillier than 2E, but easier to take seriously than Celestial Badgers. 5E seems to be in a similar place to 4E.In the grand scheme of RPGs, D&D is perhaps slightly closer to the goofy end of the axis than the serious end, design-wise, but it's still very near the middle (all IMO).I think Earthdawn and many others show that it's possible to both quantify magic enough to make it totally playable and to have "everyday magic" without making it un-magical, but let's be fair, D&D was operating in a vacuum, in the dark, they had no idea what a magic system could or should like, and by that standard, it's not bad for magic-ness. But it's the obsession with neat little "spells" that both increases D&D's goofy-ness and makes the magic seem "scientific". I do wish that, for semi-magic classes (Ranger or Paladin, for example) who weren't primarily "about spells", in 5E, they'd gone with more 4E-style "magic powers", which defy the sort of analysis spells are subject to. But hey, they sort of have, with Barbarians/Monks. So, not bad. Trinkets are definitely an example of how to do it right.</blockquote>

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