Funny Events of the "Woke" world

crimson5pheonix

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"Most Faerunians never learn to speak a spell, but magic touches their lives in ways they do not always see." Mmm.

From DM Guide 3e, page 164, explicit definition of high magic (low res but the best I could get):
View attachment 9292

Note: "Spells are used to light homes, keep people warm, and communicate. The function they serve is as commonplace as modern-day technology is in the real world"

Forgotten Realms is not a setting where most characters have a level or two of a spellcaster class, and it is a place where magic is plainly a resource sufficiently rare and expensive that the majority of the population do not use it or have ready access to it. Magic items are almost certainly not found in shops "like any other commodity", but only in very scarce and specialised outlets.

Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3e (p94):
View attachment 9293

In which it clearly states that magic is not technology, and the level of access most people have of magic is "seen magic gimmicks at some point in their lives" and uncommon even for the moderately better off upper middle classes to own a modest magical iteam.

Therefore, even in 3.0, D&D does not think FR is "high magic".
If that's the definition you're going on we have had a very deep and fundamental misunderstanding, but an absolutely understandable one. That's the rule for making your own setting and how you should distribute treasure, along with a general idea of how such a world would work. I've been keeping to talking about published settings and how they relate to each other with how common magic (whether it be items, people, or events) is. Like I said a page or two ago, there's only one published D&D setting I can think of where magic is more common than it is in FR. Therefore it is a relatively high magic setting. The 5e manual saying it's the baseline could have been referring to magic loot tables, but it was worded in such a way to make it sound like magic is relatively rare in Faerun which just sounds ridiculous when you see the setting and how it operates.

I just don't think that's necessarily true. Because I think it all ultimately comes back to the golden rule. It's your game. You can do whatever you want in your game.
Incorrect. I mean, technically correct, but wrong attitude. It's the group's game, I only said this like 8 pages ago but D&D is collaborative storytelling so you shouldn't just "do whatever you want", that's how you get GMs who just shut down the idea of a disabled PC without a thought.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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Actually, yes. You get up to some weird shit when you grew up in the rural Midwest before the days of the internet. Boffer and Nerf fighting on the back of ATV's, dirt bikes, and tractors was the tip of the fuckin' iceberg on that one.

It's surprisingly easy to knock someone off one, especially if they aren't prepared for it.
Easier or harder than just, like, shoving some one, especially if they aren't prepared for it?

(The actual answer is purely game balance, as the character getting knocked Prone in this instance is unable to just spend a bit of their move action to remove that otherwise *very* potent status effect, taking it as a near-permanent debuff. And that sucks)
 

Asita

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Or that it grants resistance to trip, bull rush, and other effects which knock the user prone or off of it.
I fear you misunderstand me. I'm saying that it was given those resistances to mechanically represent the fact that as a low to the ground mount that would logically be resistant to something like being knocked prone. And even so, I acknowledged that the incarnation you cited went overboard on the mechanics.

Well, no, that's just how spells scaled in 3rd edition and in Pathfinder (as it's based off the 3.0 d20 system): by caster level. As a 5th level spell, the earliest a full caster could get it is 9th level regardless. This particular spell is no different mechanically than any other with scaling mechanics. 5e spell scaling works off the level of spell slot used to cast the spell.
...Isn't that what I just said about why I chose that specific example (system and scaling included)? I know this is going to sound hypocritical after what I just said about assuming good faith, but at the way you're choosing to argue this is starting to sound like you're just nitpicking because you want to have the last word. For goodness sake, you're calling foul on me using assumptions and mechanics that are either irrelevant to the point or actually generous to your position! Whereas caster level scaling would mean that the spell would become equivalent to flying broom by the time you reached level 9, scaling by spell slot level would mean that you wouldn't be able to replicate the ability's duration until level 17 (and you would certainly have called foul on representing it that way). Even if we assumed that it had the same duration from the get-go, by your own count the spell would have still taken a 5th level spell slot...which is not available until level 9, which is the same level I referenced in the first place.

So what exactly is the point you think you are making here? Because for the life of me, I can't see the upshot of this nitpicking.

Overland Flight is frankly a dogshit-tier spell: Teleport is also 5th level, completely obviating the need for conventional overland travel in the first place. Plane Shift is a 5th level spell for clerics and summoners, allowing for the Rope Trick trick which is the equivalent to Teleport Without Error/Greater Teleport. Even if it were published in a 5e book, it would still be useless: Teleportation Circle was moved to 5th level, albeit in a slightly nerfed form from earlier editions.

Either way, Phantom Steed is still the gold standard for overland travel spells until a caster gets Teleportation Circle. Being able to ritual cast it destroys any balancing factor.
Bluntly, your focus feels like it misses the point. You're looking at this and thinking long distance travel, which is not the subject of discussion. I'm looking at this and seeing that you have hours of being Peter Pan every day and thinking of the practical implications of that, not about your ability to travel from Neverwinter to Waterdeep.

For instance, if the rogue who's running through the streets to juke the guards can break line of sight, he can completely eliminate his physical trail by silently zipping up to the roof and flying low as against the rooftops as he doubles back, without even the sound of his footsteps to give him away. If the paladin is told that the princess's prison tower is on the other side of the fire swamp, she can just fly over the damn swamp and up to the lady's window. If the gunner finds himself facing a pack of wolves, he can take to the air and hover outside of their reach as he rains death on them. The threat of the acid that the villain is filling the room with is greatly reduced by your ability to hover safely near the top of the room while you look for a solution. Etc.

Aside from a bit of snark about how the rarity of flying magic items in the DMG/PHB's not being well reflected in the world, my focus has been on how powerful access to flight is, particularly at an early level. Fly, the Potion of Flying, and the Wings of Flying largely get around this by being only usable for short bursts, meaning that you'll have to weigh whether or not it's best used for a given encounter, saved for a figurative rainy day, or whether or not that dilemma is even worth it. This is not the case with things like the Broom of Flying or the Boots of Flying, which are designed with a more "set it and forget it" mindset, much like Overland Flight was. You don't have to worry about choosing your battles with them because their duration is so long that they functionally last as long as you need them to. For most practical purposes, they act as the ability to Fly "at will". That's why I've been saying that it's utterly bizarre that you cite these items as more balanced alternatives available for low level play.
 
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Terminal Blue

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You seem remarkably invested in pedagogical theory. Kind of a weird thing to be into, but I'm hardly one to talk.

But let me play devil's advocate here. Why mathematics? Why is it unacceptable to apply the same logic to mathematics as is applied to virtually every other subject? Every subject has countless important and fundamental pieces of knowledge or academic skills that are not taught to children, even though gifted children would be entirely capable of understanding them, because they might be demoralizing or difficult for less able children.

Because you might think it's fine if children struggle. You might think it's okay if less able students have difficulty with material aimed at more gifted students because that's meritocracy, but the problem is that children are not passive consumers of education. They have a dialectical relationship with the institutions that are teaching them, and if they don't feel accommodated within those institutions they will develop a hostile culture.

Like, educationally, you are part of an under-achieving minority. You might think a lack of equity will reward those people whom society traditionally considered most deserving (namely, white men) but a lot has actually changed. Committing to a society in which education is explicitly tailored towards rewarding the gifted rather than supporting the underachieving is, at this point, committing to a society whose education system is incredibly female dominated. You're not going to be at the top of this system, you are going to end up in a world where people like you go into school under the expectation that they are less able than girls and thus less deserving of the time and effort to try and educate them.

Incorrect. I mean, technically correct, but wrong attitude. It's the group's game, I only said this like 8 pages ago but D&D is collaborative storytelling so you shouldn't just "do whatever you want", that's how you get GMs who just shut down the idea of a disabled PC without a thought.
The golden rule in 5th edition appears in the Dungeon Masters Guide. In that context it applies quite explicitly to the DM in regards to the game setting. It's meant to convey that you shouldn't feel bound by the "canon" of an established setting or, for that matter, by the basic concepts implied by the rules. If you want to play a game where there are no Gods and divine magic doesn't exist, you can. It doesn't matter that clerics are written into the rules, just ignore the rules you don't like.

Personally though, on a more general level I feel that this idea of collaborative storytelling, while true, is also kind of missing something. It's a collaborative story in which one player takes the role of the entire universe. The DM has more responsibility for ensuring everyone else enjoys themselves because they have far more power within the storytelling process. They probably also want to have fun, and it's important that they do, but ideally that enjoyment comes in part from facilitating other people's fun. So sure, I don't think you should let players play disabled characters because you're obligated to let them do whatever they want regardless of whether it's going to mess with your carefully crafted adventure. You should do it if you think it's sufficiently important to them and to their enjoyment to warrant having to work your own plans around it. If they are a disabled person themselves and want to play a character who reflects their experience, then I think that's a very good reason, but because of that I think the responsibility in that case goes beyond simply letting them play a disabled character and into actually ensuring that the game will be enjoyable for that player, rather than just a reminder of what you think their limitations are. If that means not really worrying about how a wheelchair bound character gets into the places where cool adventures happen, so be it.

So yeah, what I mean here is not some inherent right to absolute authority and domination over your game. It is indeed the group's game, at least to the extent that it has to be fun for everyone or they're not going to want to keep playing. But for that reason, the subjective experience people have matters, and if something is very important to someone, maybe it's worth just going with it.
 
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crimson5pheonix

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The golden rule in 5th edition appears in the Dungeon Masters Guide. In that context it applies quite explicitly to the DM in regards to the game setting. It's meant to convey that you shouldn't feel bound by the "canon" of an established setting or, for that matter, by the basic concepts implied by the rules. If you want to play a game where there are no Gods and divine magic doesn't exist, you can. It doesn't matter that clerics are written into the rules, just ignore the rules you don't like.

Personally though, on a more general level I feel that this idea of collaborative storytelling, while true, is also kind of missing something. It's a collaborative story in which one player takes the role of the entire universe. The DM has more responsibility for ensuring everyone else enjoys themselves because they have far more power within the storytelling process. They probably also want to have fun, and it's important that they do, but ideally that enjoyment comes in part from facilitating other people's fun. So sure, I don't think you should let players play disabled characters because you're obligated to let them do whatever they want regardless of whether it's going to mess with your carefully crafted adventure. You should do it if you think it's sufficiently important to them and to their enjoyment to warrant having to work your own plans around it. If they are a disabled person themselves and want to play a character who reflects their experience, then I think that's a very good reason, but because of that I think the responsibility in that case goes beyond simply letting them play a disabled character and into actually ensuring that the game will be enjoyable for that player, rather than just a reminder of what you think their limitations are. If that means not really worrying about how a wheelchair bound character gets into the places where cool adventures happen, so be it.

So yeah, what I mean here is not some inherent right to absolute authority and domination over your game. It is indeed the group's game, at least to the extent that it has to be fun for everyone or they're not going to want to keep playing. But for that reason, the subjective experience people have matters, and if something is very important to someone, maybe it's worth just going with it.
I don't think I'd ever shut down a player's desire to play what they want. What I would use editorial control over is the means by which it's done. If a player wanted to play a disabled character I would never say no. I might say it'll make the game hard, if they're okay with that. But if they showed me the specific wheelchair that this whole argument was over... I'd say they'd get something like that around level 10, not starting out with it. And probably with a couple of nerfs to it.
 

Ag3ma

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If that's the definition you're going on we have had a very deep and fundamental misunderstanding, but an absolutely understandable one. That's the rule for making your own setting and how you should distribute treasure, along with a general idea of how such a world would work. I've been keeping to talking about published settings and how they relate to each other with how common magic (whether it be items, people, or events) is. Like I said a page or two ago, there's only one published D&D setting I can think of where magic is more common than it is in FR. Therefore it is a relatively high magic setting.
Going outside RPGs into wider (non-D&D) fantasy, Forgotten Realms is possibly slightly magic heavy. However, the basic setting of a fantasy land where magic users are a small minority of the population, impactful but unusual, whose services are generally a "luxury" for the rich and powerful or equivalent is an extraordinarily common fantasy setting. I could pick a load of books / series off my shelf like that right now, plus however many I could remember that have gone to the charity shop. The Wheel of Time fits this area, as does the Malazan Book of The Fallen, The Witcher, Mistborn, and a vast host of others. So when I say slightly magic heavy, I mean at best the upper half of a normal range.

Where FR often seems to exceed them is magic items (often little remarked upon in literature), but I think that more reflects D&D being a game that needs loot and conveniences to reward players, plus it being an ongoing work with a lot of creators getting involved who keep making shit up to keep the dollars rolling in. Nevertheless, even (as above) the books clearly state these things are not everyday items for the mass populace.

However, there clearly are settings where magic is vastly more hardwired into the world. Examples might be China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, or Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt, or most Steampunk (where the "technology" is magic really, despite any cod-scientific justifications). I very strongly suggest that this is what we're supposed to be thinking about with "high magic". It's not just a bunch of elites occasionally cropping up and providing fireworks to the commoner's surprise or suspicion, it's where magic is a natural and daily occurrence for most people.

The 5e manual saying it's the baseline could have been referring to magic loot tables, but it was worded in such a way to make it sound like magic is relatively rare in Faerun which just sounds ridiculous when you see the setting and how it operates.
It is uncommon: it explicitly tells you so.

I can see why you might feel a sense of dissonance about how a lot of campaigns pan out. But the nature of you playing a party of adventurers doing stuff means they should have exposure to magic far above the norm. A party are not "normal people", they are exceptional. They have (or will have) lots more money, opportunities, will interact with the rich and powerful and they're going out and exploring ruins with the magical relics of past eras. Few people want medieval peasant simulator as RPG.
 

crimson5pheonix

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Going outside RPGs into wider (non-D&D) fantasy, Forgotten Realms is possibly slightly magic heavy. However, the basic setting of a fantasy land where magic users are a small minority of the population, impactful but unusual, whose services are generally a "luxury" for the rich and powerful or equivalent is an extraordinarily common fantasy setting. I could pick a load of books / series off my shelf like that right now, plus however many I could remember that have gone to the charity shop. The Wheel of Time fits this area, as does the Malazan Book of The Fallen, The Witcher, Mistborn, and a vast host of others. So when I say slightly magic heavy, I mean at best the upper half of a normal range.

Where FR often seems to exceed them is magic items (often little remarked upon in literature), but I think that more reflects D&D being a game that needs loot and conveniences to reward players, plus it being an ongoing work with a lot of creators getting involved who keep making shit up to keep the dollars rolling in. Nevertheless, even (as above) the books clearly state these things are not everyday items for the mass populace.

However, there clearly are settings where magic is vastly more hardwired into the world. Examples might be China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, or Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt, or most Steampunk (where the "technology" is magic really, despite any cod-scientific justifications). I very strongly suggest that this is what we're supposed to be thinking about with "high magic". It's not just a bunch of elites occasionally cropping up and providing fireworks to the commoner's surprise or suspicion, it's where magic is a natural and daily occurrence for most people.
But magic is a common and daily occurrence for most people. The book can put up the shield of "oh no, it's actually rare and mystical and unknown!", but all the published material paints a different story. Like the quote I posted or indeed going back to the movie (okayed by WOTC and Ed Greenwood directly) which has tons of magic everywhere, to the point where commoners heckle a mage showing off cantrips. The "magic is rare here" lines are fig leaves.

It is uncommon: it explicitly tells you so.
I get that, it just comes across as they doth protest too much. That is explicitly what they want, but it doesn't fit with what's written, and I'm pretty sure there's more pages of FR fluff than there are pages of US tax code showing off all the ridiculous magic of the setting.

I can see why you might feel a sense of dissonance about how a lot of campaigns pan out. But the nature of you playing a party of adventurers doing stuff means they should have exposure to magic far above the norm. A party are not "normal people", they are exceptional. They have (or will have) lots more money, opportunities, will interact with the rich and powerful and they're going out and exploring ruins with the magical relics of past eras. Few people want medieval peasant simulator as RPG.
Clearly you have never played the Warhammer Fantasy RPG.

Actually there are several fun RPGs that play a far more mundane than D&D. Granted apart from WFR I mentioned, very rarely are you playing just a peasant doing peasant things. I think the closest to that kind of experience if you wanted it would be Ironclaw.

Anyway, again, I get that, it's just not what you see with any of the actual writing for the setting. Every city is swimming in magic items, magic guards, magic portals, magic shops, magic people. Even going out into the countryside people will get exposed to magic things constantly. Caravans, monsters, artifacts, armies. This is another clash of gameplay and verisimilitude. It's a world of adventure, so there are no peasants living normal peasant lives really, they're constantly being assaulted by something for the PCs to do, statistically to the point where villages shouldn't exist, but then it'd make things weird.
 

Kae

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Okay, but that really depends on what kind of setting it is, isn't it?

If I wanted to write a story about a dwarf with a cybernetic arm (which is a weird starting point, but okay), I'd have to narrow down settings which have dwarfs in them, then narrow it further down to settings where cybernetic-armed dwarfs are feasible. I don't have time to check my homepage for an IP list, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that cybernetic-armed dwarfs aren't that common in fiction. For instance, it would be far easier to get away with a cybernetic dwarf in, say, Warhammer 40,000 (via squats/Leagues of Votann, who aren't really dwarfs, I know) as opposed to Lord of the Rings.
Man this is stupid, the rules allow it, therefore by default it's assumed that the setting is one that allows it if it's D&D, of course the DM can rule it doesn't and veto those options but that's literally the case for everything, point is that the base D&D rules support a game world in which very obviously people are so concerned about disabilities that they literally have robot arms and legs and lots of other stuff, so it's you people being weird when you say that accommodations for wheelchairs wouldn't make sense.

TBH I'm done with this, I do mean to offend but you people are absolute morons, "what about Lord of the Rings" is such a dumb way to respond when I wasn't talking about Lord of the Rings, I was talking very specifically about the game with robots, cyborg dwarves and tanks that is D&D.
 

Eacaraxe

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Easier or harder than just, like, shoving some one, especially if they aren't prepared for it?
Easier, actually. The most you can do is grasp the seat between your thighs, and the seat creates an absolute limit to how low you can move your center of mass; you can't plant your feet, widen your stance, and hunker down. The best you can actually do is sit up and lean in.

This is why wheelchairs in the real world have cambered wheels, even if the angle of camber is so slight it may not be readily apparent.

I fear you misunderstand me. I'm saying that it was given those resistances to mechanically represent the fact that as a low to the ground mount that would logically be resistant to something like being knocked prone. And even so, I acknowledged that the incarnation you cited went overboard on the mechanics.
You mentioned it as a weakness, I pointed out it has mechanics specifically to counter that which means it isn't a weakness at all.

Bluntly, your focus feels like it misses the point. You're looking at this and thinking long distance travel, which is not the subject of discussion. I'm looking at this and seeing that you have hours of being Peter Pan every day and thinking of the practical implications of that, not about your ability to travel from Neverwinter to Waterdeep.
Yes, long distance travel very much is part of the topic. D&D has three pillars of play: combat, social interaction, and exploration. Overland travel is indeed part of the exploration pillar, and the only time in which long-duration flight significantly impacts play, is during play involving that pillar. This is a point you, yourself, cannot avoid in your own examples:

...If the paladin is told that the princess's prison tower is on the other side of the fire swamp, she can just fly over the damn swamp and up to the lady's window...
Now the question is, if the DM knows PC's are capable of flight, why did they plan and design a "fire swamp" and a bunch of encounters for it in the first place. At least, encounters that don't involve flying monsters, or monsters with ranged attacks, anyhow. Instead of, you know, designing the destination with consideration of how one might actually assault it in a fantasy setting replete with magic, including magical flight.

That's not redesigning the entire campaign to accommodate flight, that's making a stupid-ass campaign you didn't really think through in the first place. Like I said, it's exactly the same as a DM planning a "brutal survivalist" campaign, and then having their entire campaign wrecked by a druid or ranger PC and a single first-level spell.

If the gunner finds himself facing a pack of wolves, he can take to the air and hover outside of their reach as he rains death on them.
Wolves are the definitive example of how a DM might run an encounter poorly. Why are the wolves not stalking the gunner and awaiting an opportunity to attack safety, or better yet, not fucking off to find easier prey when the gunner proves themselves a risky target?

The threat of the acid that the villain is filling the room with is greatly reduced by your ability to hover safely near the top of the room while you look for a solution.
Which is why you do as Matt Mercer did, and make the focus of the acid pit trap not the acid itself but the time pressure put on the players to find and execute a solution, which involved the characters' ability to fly and navigate the acid pit trap room despite filling with acid.

Again, that's not redesigning an encounter to accommodate flight. That's designing an encounter from the outset to account for one of the most common abilities in the game.

This is not the case with things like the Broom of Flying or the Boots of Flying, which are designed with a more "set it and forget it" mindset, much like Overland Flight was. You don't have to worry about choosing your battles with them because their duration is so long that they functionally last as long as you need them to. For most practical purposes, they act as the ability to Fly "at will". That's why I've been saying that it's utterly bizarre that you cite these items as more balanced alternatives available for low level play.
They are balanced alternatives available for low level play. There's no better example of this than the multiple playable races which now exist in the game that get innate flight. It is a core part of the game, not a potentially game-breaking bonus or alternative feature to be "unlocked" or used only in emergencies. This is not, conceptually or mechanically, like a vorpal weapon acting as a game balance bell that can't be unrung without brazen DM fiat.

As far as "dungeon crawls" go, a ten-minute duration Fly spell really is all you need. Most powerful spells or class abilities have a one-minute duration for a reason: the average combat only lasts three rounds (18 seconds), and players are expected to complete 2-3 encounters in rapid succession, then search the environs they just cleared and short rest. Most classes, spellcasters included, get core class abilities (and limited spell slots) back on short rest, specifically to accommodate this style of play. Fly, like most exploration-pillar spells (see, levitate, detect magic, locate object, clairvoyance), has that ten-minute duration to account for movement, search, and investigation times.

Anyway, again, I get that, it's just not what you see with any of the actual writing for the setting. Every city is swimming in magic items, magic guards, magic portals, magic shops, magic people. Even going out into the countryside people will get exposed to magic things constantly. Caravans, monsters, artifacts, armies. This is another clash of gameplay and verisimilitude. It's a world of adventure, so there are no peasants living normal peasant lives really, they're constantly being assaulted by something for the PCs to do, statistically to the point where villages shouldn't exist, but then it'd make things weird.
My personal favorite part of FR is how trade routes often go without maintenance or patrol, specifically because large trade companies and caravans so extensively use teleportation circle networks and magical travel, smaller realms can't sustain the infrastructure via taxes and tolling revenue.

All the same, don't forget that part I mentioned where whole-ass nations have expressly magical military forces, and/or spellcaster militias. Or as I joked once to a friend, Silverymoon is to the evocation school what Vermont is to guns.

Okay, but that really depends on what kind of setting it is, isn't it?

If I wanted to write a story about a dwarf with a cybernetic arm (which is a weird starting point, but okay), I'd have to narrow down settings which have dwarfs in them, then narrow it further down to settings where cybernetic-armed dwarfs are feasible. I don't have time to check my homepage for an IP list, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that cybernetic-armed dwarfs aren't that common in fiction. For instance, it would be far easier to get away with a cybernetic dwarf in, say, Warhammer 40,000 (via squats/Leagues of Votann, who aren't really dwarfs, I know) as opposed to Lord of the Rings.
They're literally just describing an artillerist subclass artificer in D&D, my dude. Incorporating the subclass' eldritch cannon feature into a prosthetic arm is entirely fine and permissible within the rules; this is very much a matter of "flavor is free". Frankly, artificers can do a hell of a lot more than just that with a prosthetic, especially post level 10 and 11 once they acquire the magic item adept and spell-storing item class features.

This is exactly why artificer (along with druid) are favorite classes for players who want to play characters with disabilities.
 
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Ag3ma

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But magic is a common and daily occurrence for most people. The book can put up the shield of "oh no, it's actually rare and mystical and unknown!", but all the published material paints a different story.
No, it really isn't a daily occurrence for most people. See end of post.

Like the quote I posted or indeed going back to the movie (okayed by WOTC and Ed Greenwood directly)
The movie barely means a thing.

Clearly you have never played the Warhammer Fantasy RPG.
I distinctly remember playing a dwarf engineer, and being the sole survivor of the party to limp out of some evil magician's castle, quest unfinished. (I don't honestly think the GM did a good job: massacring nearly all the PCs despite them not really doing anything wrong is not best practice.)

Even going out into the countryside people will get exposed to magic things constantly. Caravans, monsters, artifacts, armies.
No, your PCs are exposed to magic things constantly, because that's what the game, questing and looting dungeons, is about. In the medieval era, over 90% of the population was rural - small towns and villages. Your PCs don't hang around in the boring minor cities, towns and villages which constitute most of the world, where almost nothing is going on. Like I said, you're not there to roleplay medieval peasants. Chances are your GM skips through a lot when you adventure - you travel from city A to city B, it takes eleven days, and you just cutscene straight into the new location. Yet you've passed far more people in those boring towns and villages along the way than inhabit the major cities at either end of the journey.

It seems magical because you're off out into the wilderness looting ancient artefacts, or you're sent into big cities where loads of exciting stuff is going on and make you feel important. Two countries might go to war and you'll be thrust into the centre of the intrigue and combat, but the reality is that they'd been at peace for 40 years before that and won't go to war again for another 40 after: that peace is the norm, which you don't do in the campaign because it's not the interesting bit. It's all well and good the realm of Suchandsuch being ruled by a mage council, but most of the people of that realm may as well be ruled by the most boringly mundane of kings for all the difference it makes to their lives. When you do actually go to a village, it's because some mysterious problem has beset it: but you don't go to or see the other four hundred villages which haven't been troubled by anything more than a bar fight in a generation.

And thus you have a world where magic is woven deep in, where great archmages toy with societies, where great wonders exist... and yet actually most people just get on with their lives not really experiencing any of it. They've got a field to till and a thatched roof to fix, and that'll keep them busy.
 

crimson5pheonix

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No, it really isn't a daily occurrence for most people. See end of post.
See a lot of other posts, the point here is that the written rules and fluff are conflicting.

The movie barely means a thing.
Well no, it's an official representation of what the world is like. Actually seeing it in action instead of a single sentence denying it's existence.

I distinctly remember playing a dwarf engineer, and being the sole survivor of the party to limp out of some evil magician's castle, quest unfinished. (I don't honestly think the GM did a good job: massacring nearly all the PCs despite them not really doing anything wrong is not best practice.)
I won't say the GM is correct, but that could just as well be the average end to a WFRP session.

No, your PCs are exposed to magic things constantly, because that's what the game, questing and looting dungeons, is about. In the medieval era, over 90% of the population was rural - small towns and villages. Your PCs don't hang around in the boring minor cities, towns and villages which constitute most of the world, where almost nothing is going on. Like I said, you're not there to roleplay medieval peasants. Chances are your GM skips through a lot when you adventure - you travel from city A to city B, it takes eleven days, and you just cutscene straight into the new location. Yet you've passed far more people in those boring towns and villages along the way than inhabit the major cities at either end of the journey.

It seems magical because you're off out into the wilderness looting ancient artefacts, or you're sent into big cities where loads of exciting stuff is going on and make you feel important. Two countries might go to war and you'll be thrust into the centre of the intrigue and combat, but the reality is that they'd been at peace for 40 years before that and won't go to war again for another 40 after: that peace is the norm, which you don't do in the campaign because it's not the interesting bit. It's all well and good the realm of Suchandsuch being ruled by a mage council, but most of the people of that realm may as well be ruled by the most boringly mundane of kings for all the difference it makes to their lives. When you do actually go to a village, it's because some mysterious problem has beset it: but you don't go to or see the other four hundred villages which haven't been troubled by anything more than a bar fight in a generation.

And thus you have a world where magic is woven deep in, where great archmages toy with societies, where great wonders exist... and yet actually most people just get on with their lives not really experiencing any of it. They've got a field to till and a thatched roof to fix, and that'll keep them busy.
No I mean those sleepy hamlets are also always under siege, or have a weird artifact, or are in the way of a magical army, because it is indeed a world of adventure and FR is a particularly high magic world. So your average commoner sees a wizard doing their job and critique them for being bad at their job despite not being able to do it all themselves, because it's mundane to them.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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Easier, actually. The most you can do is grasp the seat between your thighs, and the seat creates an absolute limit to how low you can move your center of mass; you can't plant your feet, widen your stance, and hunker down. The best you can actually do is sit up and lean in.

This is why wheelchairs in the real world have cambered wheels, even if the angle of camber is so slight it may not be readily apparent.
Just gonna completely ignore the game balance portion, huh

Not that it really matters: this isn't about an unbalanced, fan made, custom magic item; it's about said item's basic premise becoming popular. And how so many people hate the sheer idea of it, regardless of rules balance
 

Asita

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You mentioned it as a weakness, I pointed out it has mechanics specifically to counter that which means it isn't a weakness at all.
I what? I have not, to the best of my memory, brought up anything in the course of this conversation as a balancing weakness. What I said was that your complaint about the wheelchair being able to ignore difficult terrain rang hollow considering that the broom you were championing as a cheap and readily available low-level alternative had the same feature to an even greater degree. You then tried to defend that preference for the broom by saying that the broom came with the risk of being "potentially knocked off" and "taking fall damage" and switching your complaint to the fact that the wheelchair resisted that. I countered that those resistances made logical sense considering that it was a low to the ground mount. And yet again: I conceded that it had too many features! How on earth did you interpret that I "mentioned that as a weakness"?

Yes, long distance travel very much is part of the topic. D&D has three pillars of play: combat, social interaction, and exploration. Overland travel is indeed part of the exploration pillar, and the only time in which long-duration flight significantly impacts play, is during play involving that pillar. This is a point you, yourself, cannot avoid in your own examples:
Which is in the context of several examples illustrating how the broom let you bypass problems and dangerous obstacles in a variety of circumstances rather than your capacity to travel long distances. It was your angle to try and reduce flight's utility to simple travel, when you tried to argue that Phantom Steed was necessarily superior because of its capacity for overland travel despite the fact that the subject of discussion was that it was weird for you to be complaining about a mount ignoring terrain restrictions and then championing flying items practically in the next breath considering that their flight does the same and more.

It strains credulity that you can read that conversation and think that my argument was somehow centered on the simple ability to use it to travel long distances, and insist that that must have been my point even after I provide a series of examples wherein flight is used to escape from or otherwise bypass danger simply because one of those examples was represented as a dangerous forest.

You know what? No. I'm done. I tried to dial it back and find a point where we could at worst agree to disagree, but that's not worth pursuing when you're giving every indication that you're more interested in being adversarial and trying to put me in my place - so to speak - than in reaching an understanding. Good day to you.
 
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davidmc1158

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No, your PCs are exposed to magic things constantly, because that's what the game, questing and looting dungeons, is about. In the medieval era, over 90% of the population was rural - small towns and villages. Your PCs don't hang around in the boring minor cities, towns and villages which constitute most of the world, where almost nothing is going on. Like I said, you're not there to roleplay medieval peasants. Chances are your GM skips through a lot when you adventure - you travel from city A to city B, it takes eleven days, and you just cutscene straight into the new location. Yet you've passed far more people in those boring towns and villages along the way than inhabit the major cities at either end of the journey.

It seems magical because you're off out into the wilderness looting ancient artefacts, or you're sent into big cities where loads of exciting stuff is going on and make you feel important. Two countries might go to war and you'll be thrust into the centre of the intrigue and combat, but the reality is that they'd been at peace for 40 years before that and won't go to war again for another 40 after: that peace is the norm, which you don't do in the campaign because it's not the interesting bit. It's all well and good the realm of Suchandsuch being ruled by a mage council, but most of the people of that realm may as well be ruled by the most boringly mundane of kings for all the difference it makes to their lives. When you do actually go to a village, it's because some mysterious problem has beset it: but you don't go to or see the other four hundred villages which haven't been troubled by anything more than a bar fight in a generation.

And thus you have a world where magic is woven deep in, where great archmages toy with societies, where great wonders exist... and yet actually most people just get on with their lives not really experiencing any of it. They've got a field to till and a thatched roof to fix, and that'll keep them busy.
My apologies for butting in, but part of the issue in trying to determine if the Forgotten Realms if high or low magic is that the rules in the books dial back what is found in the official novels.

Just as an example, in one of the novels a minor plot point is that, while the protagonists are in a small city/large town, they observe a local barkeep hiring a mage to magically levitate dishes/pottery directly up to the second floor as a basic and easily hired service. It was a completely normal, everyday event.

In the Salvatore novels, the city-state of Silverymoon has magical climate control (for the city's area to stave off the worst of the northern winters), magical street lights, and even magical sewer systems. Ed Greenwood went hog wild with the magic in his setting and the novelists followed suit.

And this was back in the days of AD&D/2nd ed (I haven't played 5th ed, or any D&D for a looooooong time). The power creep in the sourcebooks in-game was already creeping in and it sounds like the creeping went into a full trot by 5th ed.

By rules, yeah the setting should be a relatively lower magical level. By the novels and the sourcebooks, the ration of mages and clerics to the general population seems to be about 1 per every 1000 in magically deprived areas and 1 to 100 in a majority of the population centers.

At any rate, I'll see both myself and my well axtsually foolishness out.
 
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Ag3ma

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My apologies for butting in, but part of the issue in trying to determine if the Forgotten Realms if high or low magic is that the rules in the books dial back what is found in the official novels.
Or more strictly, the novels exaggerate what's in the rule books, because the rule books are the source material.

Artistic licence, they call it.

But even then...

In the Salvatore novels, the city-state of Silverymoon has magical climate control (for the city's area to stave off the worst of the northern winters), magical street lights, and even magical sewer systems. Ed Greenwood went hog wild with the magic in his setting and the novelists followed suit.
Sure. And in Salvatore's Icewind Dale, there's barely a mage to be found. This is what most of the world is like, because most of the population is rural (remember: >90% of the population will be rural). Even where there is a mage in such places, it's likely little more than a level 1 dabbler who can mostly just show off some tricks. If you are a mage who can earn $$$ making magic scrolls for rich clients, why are you in a hamlet or small town with nothing but peasants who have barely two silver pieces to rub together? You'll then have cities where mages are more common, and then some cities which specialise in magic like Silverymoon. They are not representative.

This is just how things such as industry distributes across a geographical area: the varied historical, economic, social, and political circumstances drive localised concentrations, and the difference between a focal point for that industry and the norm may be huge. Think Silicon Valley for IT, Detroit for cars, 19th C. Lancashire for cotton, medieval Toledo steel. But you don't think because 1960s Detroit existed the whole USA was a mass of car factories.
 

Hawki

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