Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8454335" data-attributes="member: 6937590">Yes, that's a fun take on wizards. I like particularly like the <a href="http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-digression-about-wizards.html" target="_blank">Goblinpunch version of it</a>, which doubles down on the strangeness of Vancian casting:"Memorizing a spell is not like memorizing a series of noises and hand motions.  It's like inviting a spell into your brain by creating a suitable environment for it to reside. [...] To put it another way, it's like weaving a netted bag (out of your neurons) to catch (invite) a fish (spell). [...] Because spellcasting requires a very specific microenvironment in a very small part of the wizard's brain, the act of "memorizing" a spell requires cultivation of certain mental traits.  Not only must wizards learn otherworldly esoterica, but they must also believe some of it as well. [...] And so wizards believe such strange things because they must.  If they stopped believing in these things, they would cease being wizards. [...] They guard their thoughts by following strange traditions.  They filter their perception of reality by isolating themselves in towers and in monasteries.  In their books they have built a false history of the world with false maps and false assumptions.  And yet the same wizards who can level a city block with a few words are also the ones who have no idea how boats float or babies are concieved."But, you know, that's a little avant garde for most players (as is almost all of the creative genius on that blog), and I'm fine with the more banal interpretation of wizards, that magic is a scholarly discipline and that you can study it. However, I also have some objections to the common interpretation.Making the jump from wizards are scholars to wizards are scientists, or even physicists, always seemed like a mistake to me. Most academic disciplines rely on rationality and the cumulation of decades or centuries of theory and academic tradition. That wizards study spellbooks and have schools doesn't require them to be scientists. It makes as much sense to compare them to philosophers, theologians, Jungian psychologists, and English lit majors as to physicists.Though wizard magic in D&D follows consistent and generally replicable patterns (oops, he made his saving throw), its logic is symbolic. If you look at 5e's spell components, they are all silly medievalisms. And though they are presumably based on past empirical observations--i.e. using a pinch of fine sand, rose petals, or a cricket is known to allow one to cast sleep--spells don't connect to anything or cohere in any cosmologically meaningful way.In my mind, 5e wizard magic is an academic discipline (or guild profession), built upon inexplicably functional cargo cult thinking, that is practiced as an applied science, like medicine, but with (probably) many traditions of pseudoscientific nonsense built around it, like new age medicine <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😝" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61d.png" title="Squinting face with tongue    :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:" data-shortname=":stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />.</blockquote>

Verification