D&D General World Building and Magic

[DragonLancer]

Take a shot every time I swing into a thread and say "Eberron did it best".

Eberron did it best. The "basic" D&D assumption is that magic is a pretty common phenomenon that anyone with aptitude can use and it works in reliable, codifiable ways. That means it's basically just an extra set of the laws of physics on top of what laws of physics D&D implicitly inherits from real life.

On the flip side, I never liked how Eberron worked because of this. I played two campaigns under 3.5 back in the day and it was the magic as technology angle that I could never get my head around. As a case of study, it showed how a D&D world could look like if the magic levels of the game were realised but to me D&D was never intended to be that. I think even in the early days it was meant to look like Middle Earth or Conan and the like, even if the magic and monsters element pushed the boundries a bit.