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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9599441" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It turns out, appeasing fans via imitation and trying to infinitely drag out the stuff they liked before, is almost always less successful than a well-executed new vision. Even if you execute that imitation and nigh-infinite extension really well, it just wears out eventually.It's one of the reasons why I have always, always, always hated the "we need to make magic feel magical again" argument, because it's fundamentally unsound. The reason magic felt magical in the 80s is because the people who want to see that now were kids who didn't know the spell list back to front, who couldn't name the monster manual in alphabetic order by clade and by raw name, who didn't know the statistics of three quarters of all magic items, etc. Healthy ignorance--the ignorance of the uninitiated, which all people necessarily have when they start out!--was the single biggest factor in magic "feeling magical", and no amount of rules trickery or trying to take magical things away from players or making magic painful and costly, or any other technique you might use, can ever replace that awestruck feeling of discovery and exploration as you learn what's in the books.In order to make D&D magic feel magical again, it has to either:Jettison all the classic spells and magic items for totally different things (which the folks who want "magic to feel magical again" will never accept)Abandon the way D&D approaches magic in general and replace it with something new (which will never be acceptable in a mainline D&D game, we've already seen that proven)Stop having magic be systematized at all, and instead express magic in a freeform but still balanced way (which no D&D design team would ever willingly do because it's a design nightmare and far, far too likely to fail)Failing that? We will never have magic that "feels magical" again, because the magical-feeling-ness was bound up in not knowing how magic worked. Once you know the rules, they aren't magical anymore, they're systematic. So you either need to keep the base system and jettison all the details (path 1), or you need to replace the base system with a radically different base system (which fans have proven they're unwilling to accept even a minor rewrite of that system), or you need to abandon the idea of having a "system" at all (which the designers are, quite reasonably, unwilling to do).</blockquote>

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