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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6146266" data-attributes="member: 42582">What is Gandalf's magic? An ability to rouse the spirit. And do you also count Grima Wormtongue as a magician?Treating what Gandalf did as analogous to casting Remove Curse in D&D seems to me to miss the underlying dynamic of the episode (although the movie version portrayed it more along these lines).There are a range of issues around building this sort of stuff into an RPG. For instance, suppose reading that chapter takes you 30 minutes. Then to get the same degree of narrative satisfaction in an RPG, you might want a similar arc to unfold in 30 mintues of play. How long, in the game, is that going to represent? In most versions of D&D combat, not weeks or months. Minutes at most.Most movies also compress the time required - hence the "action movie" variant I mentioned upthread - unless they adopt a montage approach.In my view the change of relationship between fictional time and real time for the playing out of an arc is a function primarily of medium, not underlying thematic weight.As for instantaneous healing, there are multiple episodes in LotR that could play out in healing terms in 4e. For instance, Merry is paralysed by fear of the WitchKing, but then is moved to act by Eowyn's bravery - in 4e this would be psychic damage (plus dazing, perhaps) with an inspirational effect from Eowyn then restoring the hp lost to pyshic damage (and/or granting a save vs the daze).All "healing" means in this context is "restoration of hit points" (it is the counterpart of "damage" which means "loss of hit points", even when that does not correlate to physical harm, as per psychic damage in 4e or psionically-deal damage in AD&D).Restoring hit points improves, in a very noticeable mechanical fashion, the fighting spirit of a D&D PC - because the player is empowered to play his/her PC in a different way, and to take different sorts of risks.That's not the leader as tactician (which is not an archetype I have mentioned at all in this thread, though others have). That's the leader as inspirational (whether symbollically, or by speaking words).The idea of classes as careers isn't the only take on them.For instance, when I started playing D&D with Moldvay Basic I didn't assume that my elf had chosen elfishness as his career!Other well-known D&D classes that are not careers are the paladin (you don't choose it, you are called to it a la Joan of Arc), the cleric on at least some interpretations, the monk on at least some interpretations, the barbarian and the sorcerer.</blockquote>

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