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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5777559" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm old enough now that 15 or 20 years my junior isn't even a particular challenge.  I work - and game - with people 15 years my junior.  It's getting to be the norm rather than the exception.This whole 'Vancian Sucks' thing is as tiresome now as the whole 'Hit Points' suck and 'Class Suck' debates.  I agree with Somantus; must we have another thread about how D&D shouldn't be D&D?   When you declare you've been reviewing games for 10 years, it doesn't bolster you in this debate; it just makes me more wary of your reviews.  First, because the past 10 years doesn't give a lot of perspective since I can't think of a time when a single RPG system dominated as throughly as D20/3e D&D did.  Secondly, because if you are just taking it as a given that Vancian magic has no good virtues, then you probably haven't played much outside of it.   If you haven't figured out why nice little well defined fire and forget packetized spells work well yet, then there is little I can do to help the matter.  Good luck with your flexible point buy spell systems and mana pools.  I'm betting that someone who complains about players fudging how many spells they have left and the horrors of balancing spells hasn't been playing much anything other than some form of Vancian magic (formalized spell lists, fire and forget, fixed duration refresh times).  By all means, make your fantasy heartbreaker with my blessing and good wishes, just leave D&D the heck out of it.Vancian magic is the modern system, just as hit points are.  I spent six months or so playing World of Warcraft recently.  It was D&D right down to its bones.  The people that moved away from them thinking that they had really bright ideas, made game systems hardly anyone but us grognards remember.  There are genera I would use something other than Vancian in, but they have different literary structures than high fantasy.  Gandalf probably didn't use Vancian magic, but he used spells with the same pacing and purposes that a Vancian caster does in my games so that if you novelized the game and ignored the 'how' of the magic it would have the structure of the story.  That's good enough for me.As for why D&D is lagging behind fantasy video gaming in popularity, it's quite simple.  For the DM, D&D is often a lot of work and will always be a lot of work.  RPG's exploded in popularity as the only way to capture an experience like Skyrim that was available, but now that you can have Skyrim produced by a professional 'dungeon master' and a massive team of artists and illustrators, well naturally pen and paper has some stiff competition.  An corresponding example would be be Steve Jackson's Car Wars or Star Fleet Battles.  While they are great games, the thought of going through all that calculation to play out an approximation of a real time battle now just leaves me completely cold.  I'd rather break out a first person shooter.  For a game to work as a table top, it's got to be pretty darn elegant.  Vancian Magic has stood that test.  It's not merely the first system; it's the best for what a typical fantasy game is trying to accomplish.  Nearly 30 years of gaming and I've never used a system that captured the classical literary nature of magic as well - rare, reserved, but earthshattering when unleashed.  And if you don't agree that this works, that its time efficient in play, and that its fun to use, and comparitively balanced then build the alternative.  A good 10 years spent trying to build your fantasy heartbreaker might serve as valuable perspective as well.</blockquote>

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