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What does "magic" mean? [Read carefully, you can't change your vote]
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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8474131" data-attributes="member: 7006"><p>Indeed! In fact, I always found it interesting back in the 3E era when people would come onto the message boards asking what spells were going to be needed in order to create magical traps for themselves (either DMs for their adventures they make, or players for their keeps they build and so forth). Because of the rules that were put into place to create magic items, it gave the impression that every magical thing in the game had or needed some underlying game mechanic rule to allow it to exist. So someone would ask "I'd like to make a trap that does X, Y, and Z" and there would be all this talk not only about what spells would be needed to "make" it... but also arguments all about the levels spellcasters would have to be in order to get the spells needed to make these traps. It gave us the idea that there HAD to be all these high-level spellcasters throughout the course of history just to have the capabilities to create all these magic items and magical traps and so forth and it blew up people's sense of reality.</p><p></p><p>But any attempts to just tell people to handwave it and say "If you want the trap in the game, just put it in the game" were oftentimes met with disagreement if not outright disdain, because the game was set up to give us rules for everything. So by some people's accounts there <em>needed</em> to be these rules in the game because that's just what it required to function and anything else was a dreaded "house rule" (and of course we also then got the occasional whackadoo who would also chime in with your standard "The designers are all lazy bastards because they won't give me this thing that I think the game HAS to have!"... which honestly really hasn't changed much at all since then, LOL.)</p><p></p><p>This is the one thing I really love about 5E... they specifically tell us that whatever we want to do is fine and we don't need any rules in the books to do it. It has cut down on a lot of the caterwauling that we otherwise would be hearing if it didn't.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 8474131, member: 7006"] Indeed! In fact, I always found it interesting back in the 3E era when people would come onto the message boards asking what spells were going to be needed in order to create magical traps for themselves (either DMs for their adventures they make, or players for their keeps they build and so forth). Because of the rules that were put into place to create magic items, it gave the impression that every magical thing in the game had or needed some underlying game mechanic rule to allow it to exist. So someone would ask "I'd like to make a trap that does X, Y, and Z" and there would be all this talk not only about what spells would be needed to "make" it... but also arguments all about the levels spellcasters would have to be in order to get the spells needed to make these traps. It gave us the idea that there HAD to be all these high-level spellcasters throughout the course of history just to have the capabilities to create all these magic items and magical traps and so forth and it blew up people's sense of reality. But any attempts to just tell people to handwave it and say "If you want the trap in the game, just put it in the game" were oftentimes met with disagreement if not outright disdain, because the game was set up to give us rules for everything. So by some people's accounts there [I]needed[/I] to be these rules in the game because that's just what it required to function and anything else was a dreaded "house rule" (and of course we also then got the occasional whackadoo who would also chime in with your standard "The designers are all lazy bastards because they won't give me this thing that I think the game HAS to have!"... which honestly really hasn't changed much at all since then, LOL.) This is the one thing I really love about 5E... they specifically tell us that whatever we want to do is fine and we don't need any rules in the books to do it. It has cut down on a lot of the caterwauling that we otherwise would be hearing if it didn't. [/QUOTE]
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What does "magic" mean? [Read carefully, you can't change your vote]
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