D&D General The Original Reason for Spell Components: Balancing Bad Jokes

[Gradine]

I don't know if there a specific joke here, but the one that always stuck with me was Taunt, which required the caster to hurl a snail at the target

 

[DrunkonDuty]

The tuning fork thing for Planeshift always struck me as invoking The Music of the Spheres.

 

[Staffan]

From Tasha's Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter, Unearthed Arcana: "The material components of the spell are a small feather, a tiny wooden paddle, and a minute tort. The tort is hurled at the subject, while the feather is waved in one hand and the paddle is tapped against the posterior of the spell caster."
Pie in the face, tickling with a feather, and... mimicking being spanked?
In 2e onward, the paddle was omitted.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The tuning fork thing for Planeshift always struck me as invoking The Music of the Spheres.

Only if viewed through a very modern lens. In the height of the Hermetic craze, during the Renaissance, it was understood to not be a music heard by the ears, but by the soul--more a metaphor than anything else.

Modern ideas, however, have very much embraced the concept of having an infinite spectrum of realities, each with their own unique "frequency" (these days, usually scienced up by calling it a "quantum frequency" or "quantum harmonic" or the like), with every possible teeny-tiny variation taking you to a similar-but-different world. The tuning-fork concept thus reflects that same bizarre modern-yet-renaissance-yet-medieval-yet-modern mishmash that is so typical of D&D, and as a consequence, an enormous space of gaming and fiction that simply borrowed D&D wholesale without thinking about what or why.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Metaphorical music for sure. But that's magic for you, crossing the line back and forth between metaphor and reality.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Metaphorical music for sure. But that's magic for you, crossing the line back and forth between metaphor and reality.

Well, I was more meaning that if you'd spoken of somehow using a tuning fork in relation to the musica universalis prior to, like, the 20th century? You'd have gotten some real weird looks. The "music" was about integer ratios between things--planetary orbits, musical intervals, architectural proportions, human body proportions, artistic representations, etc., etc. To do that thing you talk about, "crossing the line back and forth between metaphor and reality" is the Modern Period/Empirical Project understanding of "magic". Any prior period, even most of the Renaissance, would not really gel with that.

 

[Starmaster]

I've always wondered about the tuning fork of the Plane Shift spell. I assume it's meant to evoke tuning to the specific frequency of the desired plane of existence, but I can't figure out what real world reference that might come from.

Interesting fun fact:
The "cosmic key" gizmo from the 1987 movie "Masters of the Universe", was covered with spinning components that roughly resembled tuning forks with asymmetrical tines. It generated tones that could tear open dimensional doorways to different universes.

 

[Starmaster]

¿Por qué no los dos?

Agreed. It's largely a combination of sympathetic magic, adages, and puns. Once this occurred to my players and me, we had a lot of fun combing through the spell lists to figure out all these hidden meanings in the 1e AD&D PHB. It was Gary's very clever early version of what nowadays we would call an Easter Egg.

 

[Milieu]

I don't see any connection with whitewash unless you're saying that a coating of white coloring infers magical power.

No, what I was saying is a combination of the literal meaning of whitewash and the metaphorical one: to gloss over or cover up. Making your sword appear like a shiny new +1 sword, when it's actually a plain old sword.

 

[Bohandas]

I still think the steel production explanation makes more sense