Magic is Not the Answer to Every Game Design Problem

I am on the 2024 fighter page again. Level three. Four names. Two of them cast. The rogue book is the same habit in a leather jerkin: if the class feels thin, somebody opens the spell chapter and bolts a few slots onto the sheet, and that's where the fun went.

I keep looking at that and thinking they did not write the job. They wrote the thing they already had.

DCC does not do that with the warrior. Mighty Deeds is one die. You say you are kicking the lantern, pinning the spear, putting the shield in someone’s teeth, and the judge answers you. That is the whole engine. No pamphlet. No list you have to finish before you are allowed to be interesting. The move can be stupid and it can still be the fighter’s move.

A5E is sitting on the other shelf, and it is not the same answer, which is the point. Combat maneuvers, traditions, exertion you actually spend. You train the thing. You pick it. It costs you. It is not a cantrip with extra steps, and it is not a tag hanging off the longsword that you swap after a long rest. They built a little machine for people who hit things, and it does not pretend to be Vancian magic with a better armor class.

2024 still wanders off into the subclass pamphlet, or it shrugs and makes them a caster. Weapon tricks, a rider on the steel, a recommendation thread that points at the Eldritch Knight because at least that one has verbs with names. The Deed die and the maneuver tradition sit there. Different tools. Neither one needed the spell list to make the turn belong to somebody.

The spell chapter is the chapter every game comes with and never answers the question.

It is not D&D, the art, or the worlds that really bug me about D&D these days. It is the pedestrian habit of answering the hole in a class by adding a spell list and calling it a day.