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Message: <blockquote data-quote="molonel" data-source="post: 1719206" data-attributes="member: 10412">Okay, you simply don't buy it. That's valid. But in how many fantasy stories have you read about people who give the local hedgewizard a wide berth? Or where the local druid is elusive, shadowy and only appears when people need him? That crazy old man with his books in the tower? It's cursed, you know. Don't go there. Nobody ever does. I simply don't see the evidence for "magic as technology" in the charts. If you do, that's fine. I think it's entirely up to the DMs presentation. And I don't think the rules dictate how that should go.Here is how I see the difference between standard D&D magic and the world presented in the Lord of the Rings trilogy:There are no divine spellcasters, because there really aren't any gods to grant divine spells. There is nothing like the evocation school with arcane casters. Magic is very low with the hobbits, who distrust it, and very high with the elves. It is passing from amongst the world as the elves retreat into the West, and the dwarves become more reclusive and retreat into the mountains. I would consider the Fourth Age of the Sun to be a truly low-magic world. But the ground of this discussion has shifted several times: it's according to the commonality of "magical" beasts. It's rated according to the distribution of magic items. Now we're dealing with spellcasters per capita. At every step along the way, I've been willing to look at the books. Pretending that I'm being deliberately vague, or avoiding evidence, is just dishonest. I'm not. I see differences between standard D&D cosmology and world-building, and Tolkien's world, and I don't believe that the latter translates very cleanly into gaming terms. MERP was a very D&D-esque interpretation of Middle Earth, and ICE had to play very fast and loose to put divine spellcasters (animists, I believe) into the world. They just didn't fit.Am I going to do a line-by-line explication of all of Tolkien's works to provide a statistical breakdown of spellcasters per capita? No. And neither is anyone else. That is not a good use of my time. You may attribute whatever motives to that statement you wish.The end result is: I don't consider Tolkien's Third Age, or Howard's Hyborea, to be good examples of what a low magic world should look like. What we are ultimately talking about, in this discussion, is what a low magic gaming world should look like. And while I don't think the underlying fabric of a very specific time in Middle Earth is as different as some here do from a D&D world, I also don't think the world as a whole translates very well into gaming terms.</blockquote>

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