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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8426245" data-attributes="member: 6704184">From the perspective of building a game world and it's supporting mechanics, those are the same discussion, if not the same question. I'm also curious about what motivates characters in general, and about how worlds impact what sort of characters make sense and how far it makes sense or not to bend the worldbuilding to the preferences of players.They're both important. As with much of life, simplicity is an illusion and the answer is a state of tension somewhere between two opposing states.Sure. Players will do what they want. A game that seeks to not be very narrowly about magicians in a world that doesn't know magic is real (though I'd love to see more good ones that don't involve a magic school) but where magic is real should probably investigate how to make such characters make sense in the world if that game is going to support them. For instance, in dnd 5e, there isn't much reason in most published worlds, or the default flavor of the books. Magic isn't so rare that there aren't orders of magic knights, and they don't seem to give up any martial efficacy in comparison to fully mundane knights, it doesn't harm the user, it has no risk of blowback, and there is no suggestion that those who learn it lose anything, but there are several classes that seem to learn to use magical abilities, and all but a couple classes have subclasses with flavor amenable to having learned magic via study and/or practice. I think that part of the reason that bugs a lot of people, in addition to there not being enough non-magical subclasses for the not-necessarily-magic classes for their tastes, is that it makes it harder to present a world where magic is extremely rare and most of history's heroes had no magic, and the number of player options with overt magic makes the game feel like magic is everywhere, which can make it feel off to play joe the mundane fighter. This was actually inspired by a player talking about how they feel about fighters in 5e, and talking with them about possibly homebrewing more magic countering stuff into the game, with the flavor that it's easier to learn how to do that stuff if you haven't exposed your body and mind to a lot of magic, giving the world a reason to have fully mundane heroes of exceptional skill and power. Not just "it's allowed so you can" but a positive, distinct, in-world reason that it makes sense to have martial traditions that lack any magic.</blockquote>

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