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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9674003" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, three things.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Genre fiction. That's pretty much what D&D is built on. Further, it's one of the reasons why both Eberron and Dark Sun were functionally instant classics. Eberron contains several types of genre fiction which are closely adjacent to the pervasive tropes of the usual D&D genre fiction, but not quite reachable because it required dipping just a little into modernity: train heists, noir (whether detective or otherwise), any fiction set in the IRL "Interbellum" period between the two World Wars, specifically archaeological pulp fiction (e.g. Alan Quatermain, Doc Savage, Indiana Jones, etc.), the whole 19th century Spiritualism "movement", the Egyptomania that swelled and ebbed from basically 1800 all the way to WWII and was thus the foundation of a HUGE set of modern thriller/horror/occult fiction, etc. Likewise, Dark Sun captures a different "side", if you will, of some of the genre fiction D&D is built on, while also capturing a different, distinct set of adjacent genre fiction elements compared to what Eberron does: sword-and-sandal, sword-and-planet, the gritty-survivalist side of Conan, the "Dying Earth" notion, various dystopias, what Pratchett would have termed "a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset" where it actually is in question whether or not we "live in vain", etc.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">As noted above, occultism, 19th century Spiritualism, and descendants thereof are a popular and interesting field. We of course have to be careful when working with it, as those things grew from kinda crappy soil, full of Orientalist nonsense and built on the back of flagrant cultural appropriation. (And I really do mean appropriation, as in, LITERALLY stealing the cultural heritage of Egypt/North Africa, Greece, and South and Central America to cart off to museums thousands of miles away for white people to look at...or destroy...or eat....) But that doesn't mean we cannot ever touch such things. We just have to go in eyes open and recognizing what we're doing, and try to handle it better than our ancestors did. Though, surprisingly, even some of these stories are less racist than one might expect--certainly not great by modern standards, but including things like "maybe disturbing the long-dead of a different culture is a BAD thing that people just SHOULD NOT DO??? I dunno, could be smart". Then, postmodern remakes like 1999's The Mummy show how there are ways to be respectful of the local culture without completely jettisoning the cool stories we love. In that case, splitting Ardath Bay from Imhotep, making the former a guardian of the tomb and an ally to the lead characters once the titular mummy has already been released, who simply wanted to prevent said mummy from being released.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Using mechanical distinctiveness to reinforce thematic distinctiveness. While I am a fan of fundamental mechanics being streamlined (e.g. I think all things which have a chance to inflict damage presuming the effect is successful should be attack rolls, not a mix of attack rolls and saving throws), I actually think it is a very good thing to back up strong thematic distinctions with some degree of mechanical distinction as well. This helps make it feel different to use Power Source A instead of Power Source B. Sometimes those differences can be quite subtle (e.g. in 4e, most Divine AoE powers were "friendly", meaning they only affected enemies, while most Arcane AoE powers were "unfriendly", meaning they hit all creatures indiscriminately--that's a mechanical distinction, albeit a soft and subtle one.</li> </ol>Naturally, these are all Doylist reasons, not Watsonian ones. If you were hoping for Watsonian reasons, I'm not sure there can be a non-contextual answer to the question.Separately: Does D&D really have that many truly distinct forms of supernatural power? The overwhelming majority of supernatural power is not just "magic", it is very specifically "spellcasting", which has a ton of thematic baggage that comes with it and which often needs to be awkwardly nixed or rewritten to fit with other sorts of things. E.g. the playtest Psion has to have a blanket rule deleting components...except costly material components...because psionics implicitly should not have that thematic element, but spellcasting inherently does.The overwhelming majority of supernatural power accessible to characters is spells. It'd be cool to have at least one class option which is supposed to be an equal match for a Wizard, but who genuinely never casts spells despite caling on great supernatural power.</blockquote>

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