Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9152174" data-attributes="member: 6690965">That's kind of missing the point of a supernatural power source.  The how/what of magic is necessarily arbitrary; to pick a popular fiction example, Sanderson has people swallowing random, often poisonous metals (and actually, come to think of it, swearing magical oaths in the Stormlight Archives). Common tropes include "gathering some intrinsic power generated from the wider universe" to "drawing specific runes" to "burning your lifeforce" to "everyone has an extra internal battery for this stuff, you just have to be trained to do something with it." Personally I'd love a more solid magical monism or maybe dualism, let's get a few essential systems/norms in place that are expressed in different ways, but it's not actually that important. I don't really care what's empowering a paladin to do stuff normal people can't do, but having that explicit edge lets us write techniques for them with arbitrary limitations because we aren't beholden to the mundane action resolution system anymore.The problem with the fighter is that it's defined in opposition to a power source. As soon as you tell me "actually it turns out advanced halberd forms are effectively somatic components" then our options expand. The Fighter as an archetype isn't an excuse to do those things; it's instead exactly the opposite, it's just a list of norms they aren't allowed to break before someone gets mad, and an extra helping of fairly arbitrary and slippery limitations on how any techniques they deploy should work to keep them within "mundane" norms.</blockquote>

Verification