Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7570769" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a CharOp view of what spells are for, and indeed very much a 'card players' view of what an RPG is about.  It has some relevance, but I don't think a list of optimized puzzle solvers is the only thing that a system like D&D needs to be doing with spells.  Still, what I object to is redundant spells.   For example, over the long run any edition of D&D tends to end up with an over abundance of direct damage spells that only differ slightly in flavor and mechanics.  Generously someone puts the spell in because they think some particularly horrific way to die is evocative, but all to often I think that such spells get put in because they really don't require a lot of imagination or creativity.   However, I'm personally OK with what I call 'NPC content', which is options no PC would take, but you can easily imagine an NPC whose job is more mundane and less focused on killing things might consider a superior option to 'magic missile' or 'fireball', provided that content is well done and well thought out.  I consider that part of a games world building, in that it tells you things about what the world is like outside of the battle map (and that such a world exists).  Too often though, going all the way back to the 1st edition of the game, spells are considered only from the perspective of their balance on the battle map, and not on their implications for the setting.  That's why you find spells like 'Create Water' priced as if they are a trivial feat, and not one of the most extraordinary acts of magic, or spells like Fabricate or Circle of Teleportation with their world shaking implications.  Spells needed to be added to a game like ingredients to a dish - carefully and with purpose.  It's not just to increase the breadth of the meta, as it would be in MtG (at least MtG when MtG was good), but its also to basically let your system help build your story by being deep and evocative about the setting.  I don't want to really go into details, but as a good guide to how I think about this, whenever I see a story where a character preforms some bit of magic that isn't just a mumbo jumbo plot device, I think to myself, "Could you do that in D&D?"  There is a lot of magic that I think is missing from D&D that might be needed, and a lot of junk people have come up with over the years that should have never made it in the first place.  It's not just so much "would you ever use this spell to win a game" but "would you ever use this spell to tell a story"?   I think most of the added spells to the game fail both of our tests.Going back to a very early point in the game, WotC have repeatedly made the decision that the best way to make money off the game was to narrow the size of their audience and focus on getting more and more money out of their most devoted fans.  The result is a game that is increasingly inaccessible for new or casual players, with increasingly smaller amounts of pushed cards surrounded by increasingly large amounts of bloat.  The game has also started to hit its creative limits, and since creatures are the most complicated playing piece in the game, the game has increasingly revolved around faster and faster creature clocks, simply because there are more creatures than can be printed for the game than other sorts of cards.  Everything is on a bear now.  Every thing that can happen during play, has to be triggered when something enters play.  Decks can now go big with aggro that formerly would have required weenies, just because the curve of everything is so fast.  And there is increasingly nothing new, just an ever shifting meta that depends on a few deliberately undercosted cards in a sea of overcosted jank.  It's a strategy that has kept the game going for longer than I thought possible, but at the cost of making for a very unattractive game.</blockquote>

Verification