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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Android Blues posted:

You can play hardball 4e. Nothing about the system prevents it. It just doesn't have save-or-dies or obstacles that do character-killing amounts of damage in one hit (the save-or-die's deceitful cousin), which causes people like this to read it as just impossible to ever beat their wretched players, arrgghh :o
If you can't keep your hands out of your pants when you think about the Tomb of Horrors and spheres of annihilation, you'll hate 4e!

Mikan posted:

Yeah, definitely this. It was hilarious and kinda pathetic but some of the guys could be funny as hell. The company didn't take itself so seriously back then
If there was a time when WW took itself the most seriously, it was when they realized What They'd Done and started filling sourcebooks with essays about how you shouldn't be playing Blade and other comic book characters even though they'd spent years designing splats and mechanics to allow exactly that. Then they wrote metaplot where ancient vampires got killed by ghost-nukes and magic solar mirrors and that poo poo was all out the window all over again.

FMguru posted:

D&D 3E was guilty of many sins, but its approach of "here's a bunch of cool stuff, do what you want with it, no metaplot!" was a extremely welcome blast of fresh air at the time it came out.
Wasn't Forgotten Realms the first setting for 3e?

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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

PeterWeller posted:

Technically, Greyhawk was. But that's not much different.
Man, I read that older Greyhawk stuff was great for basically being anti-Realms. What do you think of this here?

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Mystic Mongol posted:

You do indeed gain power for defeating Satan's Stampede.
Stampede?


quote:

And if you're a Harrowed (super-zombie, basically) you can draw out the defeated Los Diablos spirit to gain its EVIL COW POWER.


:smug:

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I handle elves in D&D by only running my homebrew campaign setting that doesn't have elves in it.

Edit: Although those elves sound like gay immortal versions of Roger and Virginia Clarvin, which is hilarious.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:29 on May 25, 2010

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Angry Diplomat posted:

this is awesome as hell and I support it completely
M&M doing away with 3-18 ability scores is almost as good an idea as D&D doing away with 3-18 ability scores

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Fire posted:

I vaguely remember in 2nd edition, in one of the red "Complete Splat" books, Elves had a two or three year long gestation period and mature very slowly. They are also much less fertile than humans. (Thanks Gygaxian Naturalism)
Nothing about elves in D&D makes any good sense most of the time, but their breeding rate isn't really what I hate about them. They're supposed to lean toward Chaotic Good and live in the forests and be overemotional, but every elven NPC I've seen is a haughty Lawful Neutral/Good tightass. They also love swords, which they presumably forge out of metal that grows on those trees they love so drat much.

Sulevis posted:

Yeah, but it's using homosexuality as something to distinguish elves from other races. Also it smacks a little of trying to be "edgy".
It also doesn't make much sense if elven society is egalitarian. Homosexuality as a norm and heterosexuality being mainly for procreation makes a lot of sense if you have a society like ancient Greece where there are rigid gender roles and a man can only find an intellectual equal in another man because women aren't educated, but if all elves work and live among each other as equals there's no reason not to have heterosexual romance.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

quote:

The sad fact is, however, that this was not done, so many campaigns are little more than a joke, something that better DMs jape at and ridicule - rightly so on the surface - because of the foolishness of player characters with astronomically high levels of experience and no real playing skill.
It's just so weird that most of us didn't come to tabletop RPGs through wargames and so we have an entirely different ethos than the guys who invented it. There's got to be a midway point between tabletop RPGing being about "playing ability" on the part of the players and an ethos I saw a lot in 3.5 where it's kind of expected that it's the DM's job to give you just the right level of challenge to hold your PC's hands on the way to epic level.

Red_Mage posted:

Yeah "I'll prove it" is apparently slang for post a bunch of opinions from limited experience. These two threads are a goldmine of nard.


lighttigersoul posted:

Every time I see that image I want to smack the person who posts it un-ironically.
Europe didn't have fighting techniques of any kind, didn't you know that?

Syrg Sapphire posted:

You're gonna have to explain that one to me, I don't think I recall the original title.
Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords was a very late-in-the-game 3.5 sourcebook. It introduced three "martial adept" classes who learn fighting maneuvers and stances that refresh between encounters. It was designed to make the fighter not suck, basically, and even the odds between spellcasters and non-spellcasters at higher levels. Honestly, a lot of the innovations in it laid the groundwork for 4th edition, where every class has at-will and encounter-use powers. A lot of people hate it (because they are stupid).

Benjamin Black posted:

How on earth can you hate on Book of the Nine Swords? It made playing as a melee combat character in 3.5 actually fun. I mean, let's face it, even after this book, wizards were still more powerful, but at least they were in the same ballpark afterward.

It had its own style. Honestly I don't really pay much attention to Asian culture but a lot of the powers were very imaginative and while they were probably Asian inspired, I couldn't imagine too many people being able to make accurate comparisons to some lovely anime.
All martial arts are Asian, all martial arts tricks that can't be done in real life are anime.

Benjamin Black posted:

Is having fun as a 3.5 melee character some sort of cardinal sin I'm not aware of?
You're supposed to be playing a fighter because you're the DM's little brother who can't handle anything more complicated than "I attack with my longsword this turn" and the lovely saves and skills just makes it easier for him to be mean to you.

Piell posted:

Everyone rags on 3.5 but it was like, light years ahead of 2E, which was just really really bad. I'd say it was by far the worst of the editions, because 1E has that old school charm, 4E is pretty great, 3.5 has some problems but is at least mostly consistent in its rules. 2nd edition was just bad.
I can't really express my feelings about AD&D without a video camera and some syrup of ipecac. Original D&D or Labyrinth Lord or whatever looks like a lot of fun, though.

NorgLyle posted:

In all seriousness, you'll often get people saying with no irony at all that it's not 'realistic' for a guy with a sword to be able to deal as much damage as a wizard throwing a fireball. I don't know how or why it happens but somewhere people get conditioned to think that wizards who hurl lightning are 'realistic' but fighters who can hit really hard with a sword stretch the bounds of belief. They're also usually insufferable about guns and frequently about different types of swords / fighting techniques.
Those are the same faggots who go on and on about how 4e raped their "Vancian magic system" to death. They have never read Jack Vance's fantasy.

OtspIII posted:

There's something really funny to me about the way that being stabbed gets downgraded in these discussions. Even if a fireball could cause more destruction than a sword-swing, it's not like there's a person on the planet who could survive a single well-aimed sword thrust from someone who even half-knows what they're doing.
I'd be willing to make a deal with the grognards. Fighters' bizarre maneuvers get scaled back. In return, their wizards are now actual Vancian Magicians. At 20th level, they can memorize 5 4th level spells per day, as long as they have access to their personal library.

Red_Mage posted:

I wanted to point out that the Book of Exalted Deeds, a WotC product about being the goodest of the good heroes, had a feat that required intimate relations with a nymph.
I took that one. I think I got it for free for being a Harper Paragon and it gave me a saving throw bonus, so whatev.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Malachamavet posted:

Let's break down the book of nine swords, because it's freakin awesome

Desert Wind: Arabian-nightsy
Devoted Spirit: Godly
Diamond Mind: Fencery
Iron Heart: 4e-Defendery
Setting Sun: Jujitsuy
Shadow Hand: Ninjay
Stone Dragon: Dwarfy
Tiger Claw: Berserkery
White Raven: 4e-Leadery

I really miss Setting Sun, to be honest, so I hope that style of powers makes it in more, but jesus there's one, maybe two of the 9 that are in any way 'anime'.
Diamond Mind seemed very kendo-ish, Setting Sun had kind of an aikido vibe, and Iron Heart seemed very specifically German Talhoffer/Liechtenauer to me, but yeah, I get you.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I still can't for the life of me understand anyone who says they don't like 3e or anything that came after it because it has "too many rules." I mean, yes, skills and feats, but that's a lot more straightforward to me than Strength 18 (76) and a Bend Bars/Lift Gates attribute.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

NorgLyle posted:

It's always seemed counter-intuitive to me to have rules for that kind of thing, though. If you want to run a Leiber-inspired game, you shouldn't need any kind of rules for getting rid of the treasure that the party accumulates; accumulation of treasure is the primary motivation in those games. You start every adventure with something like "You roll out of bed at the end of your fortnight long revel, awakened by the sounds of an angry inkeeper storming up the stairs accompanied by what sounds to be a group of local toughs. What do you do?"
Barbarians of Lemuria actually just assumes that your characters have frittered away all their wealth at the start of each adventure, rather than having rules for getting rid of gold.

quote:

I know the 90s rightly eat a lot of poo poo on RPG forums, but one of the things 90s RPG design did right was bring to the front the idea that you're theoretically here to play a game with a bunch of your friends and that it shouldn't be up to the DM to armtwist your characters into participation. "My character is rich now so he doesn't want to go adventuring" might be a perfectly valid thing to say, but the DM response should usually be "Okay then, make one that does and we'll get started."
That's kinda funny to me, because I got into RPGs in the 90s, starting with White Wolf stuff, and their books ended up encouraging the GM to think of himself as a "Storyteller" and the PCs as passengers moving through the predetermined plot points of his Grand Epic. The New WoD changed all of that quite deliberately.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
It's not so much rose-colored glasses as the fact that it always comes down to the individual gaming group, and the fact that White Wolf had a tendency to be hypocritical. There were some Vampire adventures published (Transylvania Chronicles comes to mind) where there were some big plot points that were obligatory, and the climax consisted of watching elder NPCs do stuff. Most of the scenarios in Gehenna let the players have an impact, but the actual outcome involves watching Antediluvians do stuff.

I played in a couple oWoD chronicles that were very "So, what do you do?" I also played in an ill-fated nWoD chronicle where the ST didn't really "get" the oWoD and the plot involved tying up loose ends from his Mage: the Ascension game and we chased godlike wizards through time and accidentally created alternate timelines where vampires ruled the earth with continent-spanning parasol domes.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Dominion posted:

Yeah, I think partially that's going to be an issue with published adventures. There need to be some plot points that happen in a published adventure: That's what a published adventure IS.
If there's one single string of plot events which all happen a certain way and the PCs can't change this, the module sucks. "After they've been in the city 3 weeks, there's a Sabbat raiding party" or "Either Lucius or The Ghost will put in a bid for priscus depending on which is currently stronger" are good fixed (but flexible) plot points. "The module must conclude with 7th Generation NPC killing 5th Generation PC in front of the PCs and then being crowned Prince of Chicago, and the PCs must be prevented from doing anything about this" is a recipe for an awful published adventure.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Mark Rein-Hagen obviously took a lot of inspiration from Anne Rice's vampires, although that wasn't the only source. But one or two characters having repeated arguments over the moral quandaries of being a vampire, or one vampire locking himself in a house and reading books while he starves for decades? As fiction it works fine but it's not suited to the general setup of a tabletop RPG where you form a coterie of like-minded individuals who "adventure" and go do stuff in pursuit of their goals. Even in Rice's fiction, years and decades get described through a few anecdotes and general descriptions, or you'd get an awfully repetitive nightly log of "Louis eats some rats, Lestat laughs at him and murders two prostitutes, they bitch at each other more or less."

So the style of play that evolved and became common (from what I've been able to observe) was political struggle, espionage, and gang war.

With all the new clans, Disciplines, etc. published in sourcebooks, this sometimes tipped the playstyle into "superheroes with fangs." One thing I really didn't like was the increased amount of crossover in later sourcebooks, and even moreso, the emphasis on mystical MacGuffins, powerful elder NPCs, and ancient globe-spanning conspiracies and mysteries. The crossover with Mage and Werewolf made the game seem a lot less like a World of Darkness and more like an "edgy" 90s comic-book universe, and the grandiose-plot-arc stuff ran the risk of tipping the playstyle into Raiders of the Lost Ark With Fangs.

Requiem squashed most of that by bringing concerns back to the local level and emphasizing the importance of blood supply and other scarce resources. Whatever version or ruleset is used, my favourite playstyle for Vampire is essentially a mob movie where business, crime, politics, family, ancient struggles, and personal angst all come together and create havoc. Like The Godfather, Gangs of New York, and Eastern Promises. With fangs.

Gerund posted:

Oh yes, that incredibly well defined and all-agreed-upon term "act of war".
Are you actually arguing about this? Hey, my grandfathers might have killed some totally innocent Axis janitors, by the by. Ask me about being descended from mass-murderers.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

moths posted:

Did Wizards actually announce Gamma World is going to have TCG rules or was that just chicken-little grogs?

e: Wow, gently caress this looks legit. :(
Sounds like they're trying to compete with WFRP 3rd or something. Whatever, you can always play Mutant Future or that D20 Fallout floating around.

Ansob. posted:

Except for the part I just listed and all the parts like it which make the Empire into something interesting with interesting characters instead of a comically EVUL ersatz British Nazi Empire, I agree.
The Empire is "interesting" because it has hordes of troopers in shiny identical ogre-faced armor and is run by an evil cyber-wizard and his mutant-wizard master, and controls the galaxy and destroys planets with gigantic super-lasers.

I saw the Star Wars trilogy before my sixth birthday. Star Wars movies are kids' movies. Trying to give them some kind of geopolitical realism is a fool's errand. Haven't you ever read a rant by one of those Proudly Childfree adults whining about all the kids underfoot when they went to go buy the new Harry Potter, followed by an attempt to make sense of the wizard economy and how much unicorn hair and dragon heartstring costs? Yeah.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 4, 2010

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
edit:dp

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Ansob. posted:

Yes, looking for a wider geopolitical meaning in the films is dumb; but there's no excuse for making any setting a stupid, shallow affair. Since what you change in the EU doesn't change the films in any way, there's no reason not to make the EU politically interesting. Just because it's based on a series of kids' films doesn't mean you can't make it into something intellectually stimulating.
If you write novels based on a series of movies you should probably make the novels about whatever it was that made the films interesting.

If you want politically interesting intellectually stimulating sci-fi why are you reading Star Wars?

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Dominion posted:

No, it isn't, it was hyperbole. But you do seem to be saying that it's impossible to write a real "big-boy" book set in the star wars universe, and I disagree with that.
Now me, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's pointless.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Ansob. posted:

Yes, I too find the idea that poo poo things can be improved upon "insufferable." :rolleyes::fh:
You're the only one calling Star Wars poo poo, dude. Star Wars is great for what it is. A plausible internally-consistent geopolitically intricate universe it ain't, and trying to turn it into one is missing the point.

Ninja edit: Caught you before the ninja edit!

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
You know, if you want sci-fi that has intergalactic travel and fighting machines and laser guns and super martial arts, and also has conventional warfare and political intrigue and some sense of sociological implausibility, you can always read Frank Herbert or David Drake.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

NorgLyle posted:

God I wish someone would put you and Halloween Jack in charge of Marvel and DC comics. Can you write mature, thought provoking and challenging stories about literal juvenile wish fulfillment power fantasy characters? Sure. Someone with enough skill can write good stories about anything. But in the end, Batman's still going to hit that guy with a car battery and the Joker is going to escape from Arkham Asylum again and, within the context of the books, the world is supposed to be a better place because of it. At the end of your story, once you're finished with your giant epic tale of loss and redemption, everybody forgets about it and things carry on just like they have been for 70+ years. There's no layers. There's no symbolism. There's the next issue out in a month where Batman is back to kicking Mr. Freeze in his big glass dome.
Comic book characters in the Big Two universes are a special case because dozens of people write them over the course of decades and there's no one "original" version. I say there should be an Adam West Batman and a Brian Azzarello Batman and a Grant Morrison Batman but perhaps the two shouldn't exist in the same series/continuity.

The Marvel and DC universes also have so much stuff crammed into them that editorial would never get rid of that you have to go for at least some internal consistency or reading the comics will hurt your brain as much as watching Shia LaBeouf in Eagle Eye.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
The secret to warding off grognardism is to realize you are a big nerd and love it.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Actually, Candyland's system is based entirely on luck. It's a very bleak, Vancian children's board game.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Dominion posted:

How is it Vancian? Do people in candyland memorize things and then forget them when they are cast?

Or do you just mean "fucks over the players randomly?" Because I would call that Gygaxian.
There are good guys and bad guys, but dumb luck fucks them all over more or less equally.

Dominion posted:

I dunno, that sounds a bit too nuanced and mature. Shouldn't we just throw our hands up and say they were all killed for being evil space wizards in a kid's movie? Trying to stick complex themes onto kid's stories is folly, after all.
Children's lit often contains grand themes and characters with melodramatic tragic-heroic flaws; Star Wars does that. The nitty-gritty of how Vader gets intelligence reports from his espionage agents or the economy of a moisture farm and whatnot, not so much.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jun 4, 2010

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Ansob. posted:

Vancian doesn't just refer to spellcasting. There's sort of this whole book he wrote, from which the expression "Vancian spellcasting" comes from, but which also contains other things, such as a crapsack world.
I've actually been thinking about writing my own dungeon-crawling RPG with magic that is more freeform in terms of spell-selection while simultaneously being more Vancian than D&D's "Vancian spellcasting" if anyone gives a crap.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
"Like literature" and literature are worlds apart. That's why Infra-Man is a much better film that films that tried to be grand drama.

Ansob. posted:

Setting or system? I'm not sure we need any more systems since we've got stuff like ORE and Wushu and a few other generic systems that can be adapted for pretty much anything, but as a setting that sounds interesting. I've always thought Vancian casting is sort of a rubbish way to represent something which is meant to be inherently anathema to laws and rules.
Actually, it would just use simplified old-school D&D rules a lot like Swords & Wizardry.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jun 4, 2010

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
This is hovering dangerously close to a debate on what counts as "real literature," a great debate about which I give no gently caress.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

rex monday posted:

Why don't you use the Dying Earth RPG, the literally Vancian game?
I'm not trying to run a Dying Earth RPG. It's basically a dungeon-crawling game made by looking at all the available retroclones out there and hacking them to hell and back because I'm so particular that none of them appeal to me exactly.

Drox posted:

Can you tell us any more about your system?
*Class/level system with 4 very broad classes (Warrior, Rogue, Mystic Warrior, Mystic)

*Classes are intended to be balanced at all levels of play

*No skill system; ability score checks handle anything you want to attempt

*Every roll is based on a d20 (attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks) or d6 (weapon damage, spell effects, random stuff you find, etc.)

*Magic is based on a pool of points; you can cast spontaneously but you get a "discount" on point cost if you prepare ahead of time

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jun 4, 2010

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
This is a really grognardy thing to have as a pet peeve, but I hate terribly done motivational poster parodies. Picture, concept in big letters, descriptive sentence underneath, it's not a hard concept to grasp. Instead you usually get some indecipherable animu bullshit and the title and the sentence are part of one big indecipherable animu catchphrase run-on sentence.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Mikan posted:

Not only does the thread still exist, but it grew so huge that it caused a lot of problems with their board software and was mostly full of people arguing about whether things were offensive or if something was funny or not. It was one of the worst threads on the internet, had absolutely everything you've ever hated about the internet all in one place.

The majority of rpgnet posters consider it to be one of the board's finest moments.
I love the RPGnet forums and still post there but they really need the [timg] in quoted posts that we have as a matter of course. I tried following those threads for the stuff that was actually good but no one could grasp that even on a high speed connection it's really slow (and really cluttered) if you quote someone's image just to say "haha that's funny."

Moment of truth: Do I suck as much as the people I criticize?



Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I would've screencapped a higher-quality image, but I have it on VHS.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Someone buy me this avatar:


Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Stuntman Mike posted:

I always maintained that the worst thing about post-2e D&D is the lack of a Demiplane of Salt :colbert:
And what about a Plane of Ooze? Where will the poor Ooze Mephits go? :smith:

lighttigersoul posted:

I have to admit I'm rather taken with this illustration. It has all the hallmarks of the kind of Gygaxian comprehensiveness AD&D had in abundance but moreso -- an awesomely baroque vision of the supernatural world, one that includes a variety of planes and influences. It's complex but evocatively so and reminds me of one of Gygax's greatest gifts, his ability to present a synthesis of a variety of sources and ideas that's somehow more than the sum of its parts. This cosmological diagram is a good example of what I'm talking about and certainly piques my interest about Mythus.
As much as lots of people hate D&D's alignment system, I got very attached to it because prompted a lot of inventiveness on my part. If there are different evil alignments, then that gives rise to different kinds of fiends. (The published settings already have demons and devils.) But what about some neutral evil fiends, and what kind of plane do they call home? What about dividing up the angels similarly, and having divine beings of neutrality, and realms of Neutrality in the Astral Sea which PCs can visit? Etcetera, etcetera.

OtspIII posted:

gently caress me, the guy who writes those loving Gor novels teaches for CUNY? The way my life is aimed these days it looks like he might be my future coworker. I don't know if I can deal with this.
Dude's pushing 80. How soon do you think you might be getting the job?

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Jun 7, 2010

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
That's not LARPing, that's, y'know, improv acting. Unless they have rules, I guess?

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Angry Diplomat posted:

even in an adversarial game like paranoia I can't figure out the draw of just going for maximum pc deaths. how can you even be that poo poo. how is it possible
Well, there are the games where the players are going for maximum character deaths. I remember reading an anecdote from a guy in a Paranoia LARP, who got himself killed by some kind of giant moving static charge thing that killed people while also sticking them to itself. Because he set it off, it literally snowballed through the playing area, becoming a gigantic Katamari of dead bodies. As long as everyone's in on it, that kind of thing is a blast.

Dungeons like the one mentioned above are fun if the players know that it's the ultimate ridiculous death challenge and they're not sending their precious played-for-two-years-of-real-time PCs there. The Tomb of Horrors is vicious because it was a tournament module, after all.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Roleplaying is less fun because I have seen that.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Mystic Mongol posted:

I would think in a primitive world with no rapid communication and no printing press, between members of a trade that are rare, known for preferring solitude, and prone to being eaten by summoned demons, the vast majority of these researched spells would be endless rewrites and slight variations on existing spells, rather than millions and millions of completely original, unique spells.

Plus, there's the incredible cost of spellbooks (If nothing else), so a publicly accessable library of, say, one thousand second level spells would be worth millions of gold. There's no way it wouldn't be rapidly destroyed by thieves, marauding armies, power-hungry necromancers, and rear end in a top hat adventurers.

And yet somehow there's supposed to be a huge accumulation of magical knowledge?

Riidi WW posted:

he's not saying there's a huge centralized accumulation of magical knowledge. just that there are a bunch of different spells floating around "out there" - this wizard knows 5 or 6, this one knows 3 or 4 different ones, this one knows 8 but 7 are repeats, and so on. With half a million wizards in the world at the low end, that's a whole lot of spells!
Jack Vance had a way of handling this in The Dying Earth. It was stated outright that while magic is ultimately based on scientific principles, the most powerful wizards throughout history have realized that you can get the same effect through a variety of means, so almost every single one of them treat magic like a craft aimed at getting a practical result. Also, magic is fundamentally based on mundane sciences like advanced mathematics, but almost no one gets an education in mathematics in the barbaric Dying Earth.

Gygax was certainly aware of this and while a lot of D&D spells were based on some specific thing he and his friends had read or made up and thought was cool, a lot of them were certainly generic heads for things like "killing blast of magic." So yeah, a dozen wizards each composed a new spell last year; they were all "Magic Missile."

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Speleothing posted:

My wizard knows six different magic missiles. He can cast each of them once per day. Vancian spellcasting explained.
That's actually how I run D&D; no two magic missiles (or fireballs or cloudkills for that matter) have to look exactly alike.

Drox posted:

Six magic missiles, enough to annoy anything that moves. I love to memorize during a battle! There's nothing like the feeling of slamming a long silver spell component into a well greased wand. :ocelot:
From a PC's perspective it's a dinky spell, but to a 1st level commoner it's something that can tear you to shreds and kill you.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
Magic Missile might've been based on The Excellent Prismatic Spray--does enough damage to kill a normal person, and it doesn't miss.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Gerund posted:

I mean, seriously, this is the way we should look back at poo poo like NE evil outsiders and demiplane of Salt.
Which ones were those, the yuguloths? They make sense and fit into a campaign world, but I can never tell what they're supposed to look like. All the groups of evil outsiders are confusing like that; baatezu and tana'ari don't make sense as "species" as they include a bunch of different monsters that look nothing like each other at all.

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Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Riidi WW posted:

They don't "make sense", they were literally written up because they needed to fill in the last slot on a grid. "We need some neutral evil outsiders. I know! They'll be the super secret puppet masters controlling all the other fiends. They're ULTRA EVIL, because Neutral Evil is the evilest alignment! Also, let's have them look kinda like dogs."
Huh. I ignored yuguloths completely and created my own group of evil outsiders anyway. Probably because the yuguloth are very forgettable.