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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RFisher" data-source="post: 2044274" data-attributes="member: 3608">Yeah. & you can still have Merlin's & Gandalf's: NPCs who weild magic by GM fiat rather by a set of rules.You could even keep in the spirit of this & have PCs weild magic by GM fiat rather than rules. e.g. Like what Mouse pulls off just before he becomes the Gray Mouser.Understandable.But...just because the PCs don't weild magic doesn't mean that the NPC magicians are clearly "more powerful" than the PCs. Conan & Lieber's Twain could defeat magicians without magic.Gandalf, of course, was a Maia. Do you prefer to exclude all supernatural entities that can do things the PCs never can from your games?Even Merlin (at least by some accounts) wasn't completely human.I certainly don't always want to do things this way, but it's generally consistent with the kind of fantasy literature I enjoy. Magicians tend to be helpers & antogonists rather than adventurers.(Generally. A good counter-example being Vance's Rhialto the Marvellous.)Overgeneralize? That's the nature of generalizations: They don't hold when you look at specifics. I think its a perfectly fine generalization. (Although, admittedly I automatically tend to try to "factor out" the effects that D&D has had on literature.)The point isn't really about the protagonist not weilding magic. It's that magic is a servant to the plot no matter who is weilding it. It generally doesn't follow a known set of rules. (Some of the rules may be known, but seldom are they all known.) That even holds for Rhialto & Harry Potter.The easiest way to allow magic to serve the same role in a game is to make it GM fiat rather than a set of rules.</blockquote>

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