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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 3197405" data-attributes="member: 6779">I was musing on the "Time Stop" spell the other day and it occurred to me that it's the kind of thing you might see Merlin or the evil sorcerer in, say, a Conan story fire off. OTOH, said sorcerer would not be able to fire off magic missiles, acid arrows, and summon a dire weasel to act as his meatshield.I think this is the main thing that creates cognitive dissonance (for me at least) about magic in out-of-the-box D&D: a powerful wizard is not one who can command a mighty spell or even a handful of mighty spells, so much as one who commands a boatload of piddly little ones. Of course, for gameplay there's a good reason for that, i.e., that giving a PC mage a single powerful spell and nothing else makes for a) a one-trick pony, and b) a massively-unbalanced one at that.In literature, magic tends to be a plot device rather than just another tool in a character's skill set, and as such it has more "catastrophic" effects when it shows up. In a game, a wizard's magic blast tends to do roughly as much damage as the fighter's attack, whereas in literature the same wizard's magic blast would instantly annihilate (or at least incapacitate) whoever was blasted by it -- because why would the author bother with a blast that didn't? And for that matter, in literature, giving a wizard a plethora of mediocre abilities rather than one big one would be dramatic clutter.I suspect this cognitive dissonance is why "low-magic" alternative systems, from Conan OGL to Iron Heroes keep popping up; a lot of people are looking for a gaming experience which is closer to the "inspirational sources". The challenge is finding a way to magic "rare and powerful" without making it unplayable for the would-be PC wizard -- and without making wizards unbeatable foes.And of course, figuring out ways to compensate for the lack of "a buffer item in every slot," but that's another topic. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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