Why is it that warriors who, either by birth or by extreme circumstances...

That depends on the setting. I mean I'm not even memeing if you don't like caster martial disparity, I don't either, there's plenty of settings and systems where it isn't a problem. Seriously just don't play DnD

Or play 4e, the edition that fixed it

'Destiny'

It's a narrative thing, mostly.

It is when you are aware of it and reject it. I guess what I'm mini raging at is seeing the same sort of topics like "how do gun and swords in same setting?" when it's kind of obvious?

I never brought up D&D as this is pervasive with any discussion about lore building that takes place on Veeky Forums. I suppose if anythign it shows how poison D&D is to imagination.

It is a common issue. Too many people, when they come to a question, try to solve it by looking to reality, rather than considering the actual setting they're dealing with.

Putting aside that guns and swords did coexist for a significant period of time IRL, of course.

>I never brought up D&D as this is pervasive with any discussion about lore building that takes place on Veeky Forums. I suppose if anythign it shows how poison D&D is to imagination.

Could you people fucking stop?

Not everyone plays caster editions of D&D
Not everyone plays RAW D&D
Not everyone cares about caster v martial balance
Liking Dungeons and Dragons does not 'poison the imagination'.

D&D is a perfectly fine game. Stop being edgy about it.

Are you just saying this wasn't the case? Why do you think so?

Most of a feudal army was levies made up of fighting-age peasantry supported by mercenaries and land-owning upper class subjects of the person in charge of the whole operation. Professional soldiers were not very common in a national context, hence the dependence on a social class + foreign mercenaries. Check any source about this, really.

He was referring to a specific case in the thread where, despite not mentioning D&D, people assumed he was talking about D&D. You're kind of proving his point, too.

Why are impossible superhuman powers more accepted in one context than in another? That's simple. One kind of magic is called magic, and the other kind of magic is specifically not called magic. People are more willing to accept the former because it's not presented as something it's not.

You can have something that exceeds what's possible in the real world without it being magic. There's plenty of mythological precedent for it. Magic is a term for a specific kind of supernatural phenomena, not literally anything outside the scope of realism.

>t. salty D&Dtard

>I guess what I'm mini raging at is seeing the same sort of topics like "how do gun and swords in same setting?" when it's kind of obvious?
It doesn't look obvious from here. What you suggest doesn't seem to be an answer to the logical questions it raises so much as simply ignoring them. People with guns would logically have a massive advantage over people with swords, because of how guns and swords work; the presence of magic in a setting doesn't change the fact that guns and swords exist in the setting, so in a well-written setting they would be internally consistent with themselves and each other.

Except guns and swords coexisted for a significant period in real life.

Also, that things worked that way in the real world does not at all necessitate that things work the same way in a fantasy world. If you're in a universe where skilled enough warriors can cleave bullets, or where magic armour can be almost impervious to them, you'll see things playing out very differently.

And that's if you even bother with that kind of thing. A more narrative oriented game or setting just says 'The guys using guns are mooks, therefore they're weaker than the hero with a sword'.

>sufficiently trained warriors can dodge bullets

there, done.

Peasant levies were a thing from the time of the Dark Age when Roland and his comrades were payed by the king to fight the Muslims. Wars didn’t make a huge dent in your farming population like diseases did. The core of most medieval armies were peasants instead of knights, mercenaries, or professionals of any kind. It wasn’t until the state started providing weapons and equipment like the Dutch you see levy troops transform to citizen soldiers with regular drilling. Before then most were part-time militia with almost no training armed with shitty spear and shield. Because they were only soldiers for 3 to maybe 6 months a year, once they go back to their farms, all of them would’ve forgotten their training the next time they would be called up again in a few years. That was also why huge armies of tens of thousands were fielded during the Renaissance, it was states with the ability to either hire mercenaries or recruit peasants into year(s) long drafts and kept them feed, where each state entered competitive military innovation unlike the Medieval Era.

[citation needed]

Because it's a common problem in D&D. You're acting surprised that people mention Africa when discussing malaria.

Only based on the modern perceptions of reality and physical ability.

People in the past believed in much more mysticism and had less understanding on how the world works, there's nothing unrealistic to them about Beowolf or Hercules. If you properly get your players and yourself into a pre-rationalist "scientific" modern brain state then it greatly increases your immersion in fantasy, including supernaturally good fighters and thieves.

>Doesn’t know how shit early guns were.
>Doesn’t know if you are either gifted, smart, or rich enough, you can enchant your armor.

>In that vain, if magic is so easy why isn't everyone in setting just a wizard?
In what setting is magic easy? Even in high fantasy setting like D&D, it's usually presented as something which takes years to even become the least bit proficient at.

Why does everything superhuman (that is, beyond the ability of our world's humans) have to be "magic"?

it's pretty inconsistent actually. xanathar's guide to everything tells the story of a young girl who teaches herself to be a wizard by reading a stolen spellbook. even if she's smart that's a low barrier for entry.

I once asked a guy on Veeky Forums about a hypothetical world where every human had the power to shoot eye lasers. Shooting eye lasers were well documented in this hypothetical world, there was an organ in the head or eyes that allowed people to shoot eye lasers, history and warfare were greatly impacted by people's ability to shoot eye lasers.

I asked him if, in that hypothetical world, if shooting eye lasers were magic. He said yes.

These are the kind of intellectually dishonest faggots you're about to get into a long winded argument with. I wouldn't even bother.

Eh, they could just be really stupid and completely misunderstand what 'magic' actually means.

Magic in The Forgotten Realms (Xanathar's setting) might actually be that simple to learn for those few with a great affinity to The Art.
With the right predisposition, it's not impossible to become an adept (/npc magic user).
Her rise to magic must be pretty unusual for the beholder to remember that.

>xanathar's guide to everything
Isn't that the one that was crowdsourced from the DM's Guild?

>I'll just repeat the same non-explanation.
Zero times two is still zero.

That is what those in the thinking business call a "logical reason". Fictional settings are generally better received when they have those, due to internal consistency. That's why the non-answer of "magic exists so logic doesn't" fails to convince so many people.

Why does everything that a human can chew and digest have to be edible?

Why does everything that lets light pass through it have to be transparent?

Why does everything that emits heat into the environment have to be exothermic?

Magic is magic. When people say "magic", you know what they're talking about. They mean that there's nothing wrong with characters who are specifically said to have supernatural powers being capable of supernatural feats, but it does strike them as questionable when a person who's specifically presented as not having supernatural powers ends up using supernatural powers anyway. You could say that In Your Setting "magic" actually means just one specific kind of magic and that other kinds of magic are not magic, but that doesn't change what people are actually saying.

I guess what it comes down to is I don't get why giants get to do structurally impossible things with meat and bone and not get pointed out as necessarily magical but warriors don't. I suppose I'll concede your point otherwise, though, because I personally am generally happy enough explaining impossible feats of ability and prowess by invoking a fundamental intertwined-ness of the natural and the supernatural.

>They mean that there's nothing wrong with characters who are specifically said to have supernatural powers being capable of supernatural feats, but it does strike them as questionable when a person who's specifically presented as not having supernatural powers ends up using supernatural powers anyway.

If everyone has supernatural powers, does it really count? Would you consider Mario to have supernatural powers because he can jump so high? Magikoopa are obviously casting magic spells, but nobody questions Mario's ability to crush goomba as magical.

Magic has to somewhat be based on aesthetics.

>I guess what it comes down to is I don't get why giants get to do structurally impossible things with meat and bone and not get pointed out as necessarily magical but warriors don't.
Presumably because they're not human, so it's easier to accept them doing something a human can't.

>If everyone has supernatural powers, does it really count?
It counts as magic. There are settings where everyone has supernatural powers, and there are settings where some people have supernatural powers and others don't. When the people who specifically don't have powers end up having powers, that's what people take issue with.

>Would you consider Mario to have supernatural powers because he can jump so high? Magikoopa are obviously casting magic spells, but nobody questions Mario's ability to crush goomba as magical.
Yes, that's another kind of superpower.

>Magic has to somewhat be based on aesthetics.
No it doesn't. You're using a different, overly narrow definition of "magic" from the people you're trying to attack.

>peasant levies
>in all but the direst circumstances

no

peasants and land are something you fight over, not with

Imagine this for a second

A lizardman is crawling on the ceiling and preparing to dive down on an adventurer. Is it supernatural that the lizardman is able to climb on walls?

A ghostly creature is climbing on a cieling, it clearly looks more like a regular human except for it's evil ghostly nature and it's head turning, it's climbing across the cieling ready to attack the adventuerer. Is that supernatural?

I tried reading this thread and I still don't understand what was the point in OP?

Was it: ´"If becoming a superhero, or a wizard is easy, why wouldn't everybody in that world be a superhero or a wizard."

Answer: Becoming a superhero or a wizard isn't easy, or indeed everyone would become one, or even both.

>When I hear something like this I would probably ask why every soldier in the army isn't receiving special forces training.

Training takes time, and time is money, both are a resource that aren't always as available as you'd like, and in war, you don't necessarily want best everything, you want the most cost effective. You also have to take into account, that not every man is equally well suited for such training, some don't have the body, some don't have the mindset, some are too old. Training tbe baddest dude also isn't necessarily that simple, like you mentioned "by birth of extreme circumstances" making them better warriors, and given that you're in a medieval society, creating these circumstances also might not be possible, or it might result in a loss of recruits that simply isn't cost effective.

Both becoming a powerful mage and a legendary warrior require skill and dedication.
Spellcasters need to spend years and years locked within libraries studying ancient tomes and complicated theories, past the point where they get headaches and their eyes start to hurt from everything they're having to assimilate.

As for warriors, they need to earnestly practice and work out every day, past the point where their whole body hurts and they feel like they can't even move anymore and all they want is to lie down and rest - and then keep at it for a few more hours.

And in both cases, they'll eventually get a few hours of sleep... just to wake up in the morning the next day, and repeat the grueling process all over.

So, I fail to see your point, OP. Unless your setting is run on some bullshitty "natural talent" logic, ascending to greatness is as difficult for magic users as it is for warrior types.
In theory, everyone can do it! It just takes some effort, right? But only 1 in every 100 or so people have the willpower required to go through that extent, and even less have both the time and dedication to actually do so.

An another way to look at it is point buy. Taking an option means commitment. If you invest in being a soldier, you aren't a good farmer, or a merchant, or whatever. Being a wizard should make you shit in martial arts.

Also combine this with Gaussian distribution of build points. The PCs belong in the top 1%.

Not to mention, you army of elite dudes who invested all their points in fightan still need to eat with out likely producing much food themselves since they gotta spend all their fightan training, meaning you're gonne need even more farmers and what not.

But it is an explanation. In that particular setting, that's how things work. The person making a fantasy world can define things to work however they like. 'Sufficient training allows you to dodge bullets' honestly isn't much of a stretch.

But magic doesn't just mean 'literally anything supernatural'. The word comes with a lot of built in assumptions and preconceptions. There are also a lot of mythologies where supernatural things occur that are, within the metaphysics present there, explicitly not magical.

...

It certainly is the world a lot of action movies take place in.

Exactly. We accept that kind of thing as a genre convention in action movies. Some people bitch about it but, as in this case, they're just missing the point.

>But magic doesn't just mean 'literally anything supernatural'.
If you say "this magic is magic and that magic is not-magic", then you're redefining the term, which changes the subject away from what others were actually using it to describe.

>The word comes with a lot of built in assumptions and preconceptions.
Not necessarily. When people complain about non-magical characters doing magical things, whatever their choice of words, what they mean is generally "feats that are impossible for a human with their supposed skills". The word "magic" might imply some more specific themes to you, but that's generally not what they're talking about.

>But it is an explanation.
It's more of a let's-not-and-say-we-did than an explanation.

It's not missing the point, but seeing the lack of one.

>a young girl who teaches herself

Imagine a world where a child prodigy teaches themselves to compose masterful music. Has happened IRL, doesn't diminish the need, or accomplishes of formal music teaching institutions.

No, you're missing the point. The creator is free to define the rules of the setting as they wish. You're free to inquire as to why, but they're not obliged to answer, and lack of an answer isn't grounds for trying to dismiss it. If the setting works that way, then the setting works that way.

But we're talking about settings where magic is often specifically defined as a particular flavour of the supernatural which obeys certain rules and has certain traits, while also including supernatural elements outside of that. The contextual definition present in the media itself disagrees with you.

It's true that some settings say "this magic is magic and that magic is not-magic", but that depends on the setting. Outside of contextual setting-specific terminology, "magic" and "supernatural" are largely the same thing. It would be easier to understand what people mean without being hung up on "laser eyes aren't magic because my setting calls them something else" semantics.

>Outside of contextual setting-specific terminology, "magic" and "supernatural" are largely the same thing.
In my experience I've seen the opposite when there's more than one instance of supernatural stuff. D&D is the only piece of fantasy that even tries to do that and a lot of it's balance issues comes from trying to force everything supernatural into the corner of "magic".

But 'magic' and 'supernatural' are different words with different definitions. They can be used in similar ways, but there are also cases when their meanings are distinctly different.

ITT: Superman must be a Wizard, Every Ghost is a Wizard, Hercules is a Wizard.

The original and more technically correct definition of "magic" refers specifically to certain kinds of rituals and practices (shamanism, augury, etc). Anthropologists have a hard time defining it exactly. The use of "magic" as a synonym for supernatural is a more recent and casual usage (nobody in ancient Greece would have associated gods like Zeus with "magic", because that would imply he would go around looking at the entrails of birds or whatever). It's not a "wrong" definition, you just have to be aware that both are in use.

Funnily enough, medieval scholars explicitly considered magic NOT supernatural, because the supernatural was the sole domain of God. They considered magic "preternatural" instead.

Anyway, in most situations, calling something "magic" does not tell you anything useful about that thing unless the setting defines what magic is exactly. Saying a dragon is "magic" means nothing by itself. If the setting defines "magic" then it might mean something. But if the setting defines magic, it can just as easily exclude dragons from that definition.