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Comments
that's because they're games that are meant to be played
OOTS is a story meant to be read
xykon is still fun though
u mad bro
So I've come to believe that Alex and I have opposite opinions on nearly everything fiction-related.
^that depends. how do you like fucking swords?
Nice enough, but ultimately overused, and I ultimately think that their status as the default "hero weapon" is silly.
Aw man you are asking for it man I hope you have put on your armour and readied your lance 'cause I am coming in at full gallop hurrah!
The sword's status as a heroic weapon is based on three major factors:
Points 1 and 3 are closely related; the sword appears in almost every human culture (and certainly every culture that reached the Iron Age) because of its efficiency in making unarmoured or lightly armoured targets perish. A lot. One of the unique factors of a sword is a lengthy blade tipped by a point; this point functions much like a spear's, but unlike a spear, a sword has an edge. This edge prevents an adversary from getting past its point and becoming safer as a result, meaning a sword is an excellent weapon for both fighting at and controlling multiple distances. And as robust as the human body is, 1.5kg of sharp metal slamming down on it is going to ruin someone's day, meaning that against adversaries in light or no armour, heavier weapons overcommit to power at the expense of versatility and speed. This ensures that up until recently (the past 100 years or so), the sword has remained at least relevant to civilian self-defense, and before that, consistently relevant to warfare.
Point 2 is self-explanatory; if you're carrying around a polearm, people are going to look at you like you're crazy. But a sword sheathed at your side would be considered an appropriate measure of self-defense, since you have to draw the weapon for it to become "active". A naked weapon is always a threat, but one at rest, in some kind of container, is merely a precaution.
Swords are both heavily underrated and overrated, because people who don't understand their actual function often think of them as super-weapons of a premodern era. At the same time, though, they don't understand the qualities that actually made them survivable and good to have, despite the fact that other weapons did some or many things better than they did. All that said, though, weapons are not mutually exclusive. Most medieval combatants went into battle with multiple weapons on their person; usually, this includes a dagger and a polearm at the very least. Swords were usually a staple part of the combat outfit due to their versatility, and after that, a secondary hand weapon with a different purpose was often included. For instance, a late medieval footknight would be carrying a poleaxe, a longsword, a mace or hammer, and a dagger. In this case, the longsword is important because it's a secondary two-handed weapon and more agile than the poleaxe, even though the poleaxe is likely to be the knight's first choice when he meets an adversary on the battlefield.
...
I actually did read it, I just don't care about any of the points you raised since they're pretty immaterial to me.
You can decide for yourself whether that is worthy of more or less internet knights.
I prefer magic users anyway.
We all know that Mages are sexy beasts that get all tha bitchez, right guys.
Yeah I'm just going to be a Jedi fanboy and tut tut at both of your nonsense.
I am Eelektross and I endorse this post.
Character: Borlof
Race: Dwarf
Class: Wizard
About: in it 4 da bitchz
Maaan, I gotta wonder, is the whole caster superiority thing just the whole nerds vs jocks thing writ large by some angry nerds? I mean think about the type of people who thought up D&D and play it. NEEEEEERRRDS. And not today's popular to imitate and ape shit nerds. I mean back when nerds were treated as subhuman fuck ups for liking weird shit. Of course they would build it into their game that the guy who spends all day talking with big words and reading bullshit books ends up as the most powerful guy around. D&D wizards are the epitome of a nerdy power fantasy of being able to know the secrets of the world and shout big words until it all makes sense and does what you want.
It also explains the night constant disdain for the Charisma stat and social skills. People who get along with others are just manipulative or sheep right? Not paragons of high intelligence and wisdom, but flighty idiots who have stumbled into the path of making friends the nerd so desperately craves. And since character design typical forces wizards to max int and some secondary stat, they are rarely sexy beasts who get laid a lot. Too busy with their studies and arcane shibboleths of power.
Fun fact:
In actual fact, the medieval combat manuals I draw from make up the first example of consistent secular literature in the West, and the combat masters of the time considered study of these arts just as important as physical practise. Furthermore, combat is little more than applied geometry in the end, which is noted in some of the manuals, especially as the sciences advance in the Renaissance.
So an actual medieval combat master probably spends just as much time flicking the pages of hand-written tomes as he spends swinging a sword about. And the same masters popularised the idea of literature that was not directly linked to established folklore or theocratic discussion.
tl;dr they were nerdier than any of us, still managed to be the most revered, respected and sometimes feared warriors of their time
You know what they say about hammers and nails, Alkthash.
Theeeeeere's your problem. DnD nerds rarely care about accuracy to real-life events.
^^^I was actually with you up until the Charisma bit. Bear in mind, some D&D classes cast spells from Charisma.
It's a game. A fantasy game at that. Accuracy to real life is just about the least important thing.
guys guys guys
if you apply the jock-geek dynamic to everything, pretty soon everyone will start to look like jocks and/or geeks
Pretty much.
I mean, back in the day swordpeople might have been super nerdy and shit, but back in the day I'm sure people couldn't cast negative energy bolts and ice beams.
ClockworkUniverse - true, and they are always mechanically inferior to casters that run off Int or Wisdom. Granted it has more to do with D&D designers having no idea how to deal with spontaneous casting compared to the bullshit and tedium that is Vancian casting than some nerdy hatred of folks who can easily relate to people.
And by and large, Charisma is still the easiest stat to declare a dump stat in D&D.
The entire conceptualisation and understanding of magic back then was entirely different, though; the term "wizard" literally means "wise man". People who could use magic, and do so while understanding it, were less considered bearers of special knowledge and more masters of natural and divine observation. The only exception was black magic, which was considered unnatural (most "black magicians", by the way, were in fact priests who got bored with clergy life). The understanding of magic that comes through D&D is one where it defies nature. In the minds of medieval people, though, magic was a poorly-understood fact of the world, entirely in tune and a part of nature. Magic could bend the rules, not break them; if it could, and if the natural world is partially a result of magic, why is the natural world the way it is? So goes medieval logic, and it's not bad from the perspective of the assumptions it takes.
One of the ways in which modern nerdisms and the medieval eras don't get along is the role of scholasticism. Today, learning is often considered a barrier towards getting what we want. In the medieval periods, students and scholars rightly considered themselves on the verge of many important advancements. Furthermore, there was no nerd/jock dichotomy, as both physical fitness and a sound academic mind were considered necessary factors of a well-rounded person.
I feel this is contradicted by the fact that D&D is largely considered medieval. Obviously, there are patterns drawn from the real world that people like to follow. I suppose my issue is that in doing so, D&D and its ilk pretty much do it wrong and spread wrong information about the reality in the process. In that respect, I suppose D&D is the anti-education of modern medieval studies. It's also to blame for the term "plate-mail", for which I will never forgive it.
...That's not your fault.
But it's not their fault either.
Going to DnD for accurate medieval history is like going to Pokemon for zoology tips: only idiots do that.
That's not the point. Although in some cases, earlier versions of D&D clearly thought they were being accurate.
The point of that sentence was that some attention is paid to reality via at least some aesthetic elements, but also setting elements. D&D clearly uses the medieval periods as a backdrop for itself, so accuracy isn't necessarily the least important thing. 'Cause if you, say, released 5th ed and everything was themed around mexican hats, there would be a bit of an uproar.
That is, when someone plays D&D, they're after at least the facsimile of a medieval setting. It being fantasy, and a game, does nothing to change that. And D&D is just kind of bad at that, because through its inaccuracies, there's a lot of stuff it can't do. I'm not claiming inaccuracies are inherently bad or anything, but there's a line between "medieval fantasy" and the superficial backdrop D&D puts up. But consider this: in medieval lore, necromancy primarily dealt with speaking with the dead and interacting with the afterlife, rather than actually raising the dead. This meant that a necromancer wasn't the general of an undead army, but a powerful informant. This is an interesting avenue of both narrative and gameplay absent from D&D because of its commitment to excess. Nothing particularly wrong with being able to raise the dead and calling yourself a necromancer, mind, but when everyone and their grandmother can make a zombie dance, it kind of loses any sense of mysticism.
Which ties into linguistical misunderstandings.
"-mance" means "to see, speak, perceive." Necromancers spoke to the dead and pyromancers saw tomorrow in the flame.
"-urgy" means "to work." Theurgists made manifest the hand of the divine, whilst thaumaturgy was the ability to work wonders.
Also have you and Alk considered that you might be taking this just a tad too seriously.
I sincerely doubt any actual thought went into accurate representation of anything historical as soon as Basic D&D was first separated from....Chainmail, I think its less fantastic predecessor was called.
I certainly don't tend to play spellcasters out of any desire to "stick it to jocks" or what have you. I do it because I like shooting sparkly things that make objects explode, and/or having lots of little minions to run about and bite things for me. Spellcasters are good at having one or both of those.
It's not profound psychology. It's Magic The Gathering style player demographics at its absolute deepest.
Finally, I kind of have a hard time believing your annoyance here isn't directly tied to your love of swords.
This isn't my contention here, mind. You don't have to defend yourself along those lines.
The funny thing about Magic is that it's one of few games that actually has a very strong understanding of magic itself. It understands that magic ultimately relies on our own ignorance, so while it's based around a system dedicated to the manipulation of magical forces, it's also random and unpredictable, based on a set of esoteric principles with only the vaguest semblance of consistency. And most of all, it's interpretive; there's no objective interpretation of the events that are unfolding due to the actions of the cards, so the same game of Magic could tell a variety of different stories. All simple and threadbare, but all differently interpreted. It captures the essence of folklore, despite its superficial similarities to the likes of D&D.
It's more complex than that. I got into medieval history and medieval fencing through a love of fantasy, first and foremost, and ended up finding the reality much more appealing than the fiction. Everything that was appealing about magic I found multiplied tenfold by folklore and swordsmanship. 'Cause it isn't about the sword itself -- anyone can swing a chunk of sharp metal around. It's about the system that underpins it, and the fact that swordsmanship at the time was linked to both science and the psuedoscience of alchemy. A sword is a meaningless object until someone turns it into an object of relevance with their own skills.
Then there's my awareness of how many good things have been hamstrung by demystification. I consider fantasy fiction to be one of them, including Star Wars, and also horror works like Alien. My frustration here isn't based around getting the short end of the stick -- I didn't, in any case, because the original folklore runs along my preferred lines anyway and is likely to outlast D&D many times over -- but around the way media consumption patterns are rendering magic unmagical. I like magic. But I don't like the way it's been made into comic-book style superpowers rather than an esoteric understanding and manipulation of the world, where the line between the natural and the unnatural blurs.
D&D is US fantasy, and that's extremely relevant because the USA, obviously, does not have a medieval period for its currently dominant culture, nor does it have an equivalent for its native culture. But what the USA replaced its missing folk heroes with was superheroes, and superheroes are the result of scientific fantasy courtesy of an enlightenment philosophy. Essentially, the science is bogus, but the idea is that there's definitely a solid explanation for what these superheroes do. If you know the right things, everything makes perfect sense. So fantasy from the USA tends to wear an aesthetic of the medieval periods, and perhaps provide some other surface-level elements, while essentially following the patterns of superhero stories. And there's nothing wrong with superhero stories, but they're far removed from the ones that match the aesthetic and other content.
I feel this kind of enlightenment philosophy doesn't really mix with magic, because magic that doesn't thrive on the ignorance of its audience isn't really very magical. So many fantasy stories today ensure that we know how and why the magic works. But that's besides the point for me. In the Earthsea books, magic is based around knowing the true name of something. That's it. And it makes a very visceral kind of sense without being very logical at all. Likewise, The Lord of the Rings has little consistency; sometimes magic is using a chunk of your soul to forge a magic ring, or knowing a dead language, or waving a stick in the right pattern and shouting like a loony. The elves are even confused that the hobbits consider what they do "magic", and use the same term of the sorceries of Sauron.
Magic that becomes too familiar is less magic and more elseworld science, and plenty of science fiction is already so far removed from realistic potential that the difference between much fantasy and science fiction is purely cosmetic. I suppose it's about how we struggle against ignorance; in enlightenment works, ignorance can be overcome by being washed away, but in romanticist works, ignorance is a sad fact of life, and has to be countered by other virtues.
That's really splitting hairs, IMO.
But, whatever works for you, I suppose.
Dude, if magic was as "vaguely-defined" as you want it to be, no-one would be able to play a caster class.
That is what I meant by hairsplitting.
What it took Alex all of that text to say was that he basically doesn't consider sufficiently explained magic to be real magic.
I guess you could make the case that no it's technically "not", but at that point you are arguing about semantics rather than magic, and language wizards have a boring enough job as is.
Various periods of history and social movements disagree with you, from the ancient tribes to 19th century occultism. In fact, most of them do. The way magic is understood today owes itself much to the influence of D&D, which in turn has had a massive effect on fantasy media of all kinds.
I'm not arguing that fantasy should always act along my preferred lines. My frustration is to do with how little our preconceived and entirely modern notions of magic are questioned. I'm happy for people to enjoy what they want to enjoy, but enlightenment fantasy is so widespread and dominant at the moment that I find it difficult to find works in any medium that handle things in a way I find interesting or engaging.
That said, Warhammer Fantasy has a simple and elegant "fix" to this. In that game, a wizard has a certain amount of casting d6. To cast a spell, they simply choose an amount of casting dice from their pool and roll them, trying to match or exceed the casting requirement. There are two catches, however; if you roll two or more sixes, the spell is cast with "irresistible force", meaning that it can't be dispelled. If you roll two or more ones, however, the spell is miscast and you have to roll on a random penalty table. This can mean anything from withering into nothingness to tearing a path for demons to enter into our plane of existence. But irresistible force and a miscast aren't mutually-exclusive, so you can cast a spell perfectly and still have something bad happen.
So the more power you use to cast a spell, the better your chances of a perfect casting -- but likewise, the higher your chances of a miscast. It means that, as the commander of a wizard, you have to be cautious of how you use the magical energies at your disposal, and you can never predict exactly what will happen. You always, always have to fear the magic to some degree. And to me, that makes it fantastic.