Question on pathfinder

[Duke Bushido]

Is pathfinder D&D or is it not D&D? 

 

When I look elsewhere for the answer, it seems to depend entirely on whether or not you play D&D,  as in:

 

D&D players 4e and up (and a portion of 3.5 players) tell me "yes; it's D&D with softened edges and a more White Wolf feel (not sure what that means: angsty?  I don't know). 

 

Pathfinder players: a minority tell me it's D&D, while the vast majority tell me that it is absolutely not D&D. 

 

No one in either camp can defend their position in a convincing way. 

 

I tend to filter everything through HERO, a habit I picked up back when it was just Champions, and simple enough to make conversions almost on the fly while still having the ability to do almost anything. 

 

I know factually that I am not the only person who does that-- I mean converts everything to a favorite system.  Steve Jackson rebuilt his entire company around doing that very thing.  In fact, I've noticed that Savage Worlds is rapidly becoming the drug of choice for conversions, presumably because it harken back to less complex systems like HERO and GURPS used to be, but until I get my hands on the full rules (I only have test drive at the moment), I really can't for a valid opinion. 

 

But I digress. 

 

My question, posed to the people I should have asked the first time: the people most likely to analyze something with an eye toward the elements of the game separated into style, theme, and mechanics:

 

Is Pathfinder D&D, or is it not? 

 

 

Thanks to any who take the time to reply. 

 

Duke

[zslane]

Pathfinder is D&D 3.5 given further development. It is a D20 system that began as a D&D 3.5 me-too game and then evolved into a distinct product line with its own additions to the core game. Its 2nd edition is about to emerge from beta testing and it will be as different from its 1st edition as its 1st edition was from the D&D game it was spawned from. Which is to say, further development and refinement, more additions and changes, but nothing that fundamentally alters the fact that at its heart it is D&D 3.5 for those who regarded D&D 4e as a complete jumping of the proverbial RPG shark.

[IndianaJoe3]

4 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Is Pathfinder D&D, or is it not? 

 

Pathfinder is not D&D, but they're related closely enough to make any relationship between them downright creepy.

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

3 hours ago, zslane said:

Pathfinder is D&D 3.5 given further development. It is a D20 system that began as a D&D 3.5 me-too game and then evolved into a distinct product line with its own additions to the core game. Its 2nd edition is about to emerge from beta testing and it will be as different from its 1st edition as its 1st edition was from the D&D game it was spawned from. Which is to say, further development and refinement, more additions and changes, but nothing that fundamentally alters the fact that at its heart it is D&D 3.5 for those who regarded D&D 4e as a complete jumping of the proverbial RPG shark.

 

 

I see.

Thanks to both of you.

 

So would it be fair to say that Pathfinder, then, is sort of an "alternate direction" for D&D?  As if 3.5 split in half, half of it went to 4.) and half of it went to Pathfinder, which is developing into it's own distinct thing?   (Not for argument purposes; I simply want assure that I have a grasp on what's going on here).

 

I don't keep up with (mostly because I don't care for) D&D, so I have no idea what could qualify as "jumping the shark" that hasn't been there from the beginning.

 

What drew me to find this answer is the number of people who lately have been telling me that Pathfinder is big step away from the murder hobo mold and toward characters as individuals.  Personally, I think that's a matter of the group involved, but I really didn't know for sure, so I started asking around.

 

Thank you, Gentlemen.

 

[Lucius]

I have played D&D. I have played Pathfinder.

 

Pathfinder is D&D.

 

It is more like D&D edition. 3.5 than D&D edition 4 is. So if you want to claim that both D&D 3,5 and D&D 4 are D&D, I don't know how you can do so and not call Pathfinder D&D.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary finds the path to the dragon's dungeon....

[pinecone]

Pathfinder started out as D&D 3.75 but since then it has grown in it's own direction. Totally familiar, yet somehow strange in relation to D&D.

[Duke Bushido]

To those stating that it is different from D&D:

 

Would someone be kind enough to give me one or two significant differences?

 

Thank you all again.

 

Duke

 

[Scott Ruggels]

Currently being in a Pathfinder 1, and a D&D campaign on Rioll20.net. The differences are enough to distinguish the two. Combat wise, they are pretty much the same, though "attack of Opportunity" is no longer in D&D 5e, but other than that, combat is nearly identical.  Where the maerked differences are  reside in character creation.  D&D puts out characters that are  the usual. Pathfinder relies more on FEATS, and lots of them to allow for more character customization, and character advancement is pretty generous with the feats. This results in characters above 10- or 12th level in pathfinder to become Superheroes, compared to their D&D Bretheren.  Also Pathfinder has a lot more customer involvement in the system, and there is more cross polinization. so you see many Homebrew races and magic items becoming incorporated into "Official  Pathfinder" materials. In play, at least with the same GM running both games as a control, The feel similar enough that familiarity with one, gives you familiarity, though less so than the other.  If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.

 

[Killer Shrike]

It is absolutely "D&D" 3.x down to its very bones. However, you tend to get a sectarian answer from people based upon what sect of "D&D" they personally think is "the one true D&D". Is the Lutheran church "christian"? Ask a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Baptist, one or more atheists, and your choice of adherents to non-Abrahamic traditions and you'll experience the same effect ("narcissism of small differences") ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality ) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law ).

 

Pathfinder unquestionably started as Jason Bulmahn's house ruled D&D 3.5 game, that happened to get professionally published by a group of people with professional publishing experience. The history of paizo the company and the game is well established. When WotC didn't renew paizo's license to produce and publish Dragon magazine, Dungeon magazine, (the official D&D gaming periodicals of yesteryear and fond memory) etc, they were left in a jam and faced their company going under. Scrambling to survive, they started publishing "Adventure Paths" in a periodical fashion with Rise of the Runelords, using the Open Gaming License, as a 3.x compatible supplement. They were already set up to do this because they originated the concept with Adventure Paths published in Dungeon magazine (which they produced at the time), large episodic adventure campaigns loosely set in the World of Greyhawk. Erik Mona in particular was a die hard Greyhawk fan and had started from there on the GreyTalk mailing list back in the day (which I lurked on and occasionally posted on as well, coincidentally) as a super-fan and then eventually managed to go pro...and during his time working on the magazines there was a noticeable uptick in Greyhawk related material, though it was mostly presented in a somewhat generic / loose form. Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide were the original three Adventure Paths published during this time for 3.x in Dungeon, nominally set in Greyhawk but not very anchored and easily portable to  other settings.

 

Shannon Appelcline's "brief history" from all the way back in 2006 when paizo was first emerging is still up on rpg.net ( https://www.rpg.net/columns/briefhistory/briefhistory2.phtml ) and is worth a read as his historicals typically are (many of them were published by Evil Hat as Designers & Dragons https://www.evilhat.com/home/designers-dragons/  which is a great read if you are interested in the history of rpg's and the companies that make them). You can also find various accounts from some of the core early group of paizo, though I think you'll find going back to sources from the mid-2000's you'll get a much more unfiltered version of things as they were when they were happening rather than the more marketing driven corporate spin doctored version you'll tend to find after over a decade of independent aggrandizement.

 

They needed a setting, so they hacked together Golarion from bits, and shipped. I don't have perfect recall, but I was an original subscriber to the Adventure Path; my existing subscriptions to Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazine rolled over. I wasn't interested in Golarion at the time as I was still running an off again / on again Greyhawk based campaign with a continuity I maintained across gaming groups and years, starting back in the late 80's, but I liked paizo at the time largely due to my appreciation for Erik Mona's Greyhawk torch bearing. So I have a lot of the early Pathfinder material from the first couple of years in storage, modules, rulebooks, settings, etc. It absolutely was D&D, and there was a relative glut of 3rd party OGL D&D compatible material at that time of which they were just the latest iteration of. However, they published the Advanced Players Guide about a year later, and started to really differentiate themselves from the rather packed field of OGL D&D 3.x successors. And it just snowballed from there.

 

Anyway, the point stands that historically, Pathfinder is without a doubt an D&D successor, and it really can't be factually disputed.

 

....I'm going to break this into separate posts for readability, I accidentally cast "Wall of Text", Maximized, as an involuntary action.

 

 

 

[Killer Shrike]

So, I had no real interest in Golarion myself. When I did D&D, I did Greyhawk D&D...though after over two decades of house ruling and continuity retention my home version of "GH" was not a purists form. Like a lot of long running campaigns, the lore and practice of playing within had grown to the point that it was difficult to incorporate new players. Also Greyhawk itself had been cast aside by TSR in favor of Forgotten Realms and other later settings, so it was difficult to get material for it, and only players of a certain age were still into it. After I got out of the military, my gaming group of the time dissipated over time as players, who were mostly military, also got out and went back to wherever they were from or were redeployed elsewhere. At some point, I had gotten fed up with AD&D 2e and moved the game into the Hero System and that had been very successful. I did that for several years with an expanding an contracting pool of players as a large group of people came and went or were back from deployment, or whatever. 

 

So, I needed new players, and it was just too difficult to lure people in with the bizarre cocktail of a mostly defunct D&D setting using a homebrewed hack of the Hero System (4e) which we referred to as GreyHERO and over 20 years of a shared continuity over something like a dozen different campaigns, which had seen somewhere approaching 50 players and a few hundred PC's over the years traipsing thru it; those of you who have run or played in large, long running continuities know how hairy and difficult to relate that kind of shared lore can become. Not a very elevator pitchable game.

 

About this time D&D 3e hit the shelves; it was a big deal. I remember leaving work early that day to drive down to a game store with a co-worker who was also one of my last remaining former military buddies and players in my games who had stayed in the area. We cracked open the PHB over really good food at a Chinese place in the mini mall the game store in, and we decided that we should try it out. So me and the last couple of holdovers from my last group accumulated new players interested in trying out the new D&D rules and started a new Greyhawk campaign set within my shared continuity, but in a different part of the setting and we just sort of alluded to / had callbacks to earlier events as sort of easter eggs or references that the old hands understood. That started a string of followup campaigns over the next few years. During this time, D&D 3x was getting created in front of us. Splatbooks and rules supplements and then a trickle and then a flood of 3rd party material was descending upon us as it was published. At first it was cool, hey look interesting new stuff! But all too soon it turned into a glut, a feast, a veritable typhoon of content. Way too much.

 

After having run a few campaigns, I had come to the opinion that the core game was broken at higher levels; it worked ok from somewhere around 5th level and stayed basically stable into the early teens, but the low level play experience sucked (as it always has in D&D based games unless you just really like XP grubbing to level up to the point you can actually do something interesting), and the high end was off the rails with very brittle rock paper scissor characters (save or die was still a thing) and a top-heavy pile of stacked bonuses and class features that gets more ponderous with each level. And as supplements started to rain down, the quality and power level were all over the place. And there was just so much of it. It got harder and harder to keep up with and commensurately more difficult to run the game as the GM. I finally got fed up with it, and had curated a good group of players, culled from the bones of other campaigns, whom would stick with it out of love for the evolving narrative rather than attachment to the game mechanics. So I converted that group over to the Hero System (5e) and resumed running the campaign using the Hero System which I greatly preferred. We lost a player who just did not care for HS, but the rest stuck and we were able to get several more years of games set in my weird Greyhawk variant using HS 5e. 

 

Meanwhile Wotc and the D&D bubble had burst. Hasbro happened. D&D 4e happened. Paizo's entre as a OGL 3x spin off was a side effect of that. Disgruntled 3.x players and GM's reaction against the vicissitudes of WotC post-Hasbro and eventual dissatisfaction with 4e drew many to Pathfinder which people started to un-ironically refer to as D&D 3.75. Paizo was able to hold on to the tiger and parley initial interest into a successful brand, and eventually grew to first compete with WotC, and for a good stretch of years dominate that sector of the market. I don't pay attention to these things the way I used to, but I have the impression that WotC has made some kind of inroads in retaking some of the market share with 5e, and now paizo is responding with a revision of Pathfinder, but I've lost interest in that space and tuned it all out.

 

 

[Killer Shrike]

Today, depending on who you are talking to, "Pathfinder" can mean various things.

 

There's the rules themselves, which are basically settingless in the same way that D&D rules have always been settingless. You can use them to run a D&D-esque game in a setting of your own making. The default setting of Golarion may be referred to as idea anchors or examples, but the core classes and monsters and what not are pure D&D. Anything that they were able to repackage, legally speaking, got repackaged. In some places where something was explicitly not OGL permissible such as Illithid some other thing takes the place of that (broadly, aboleths or cthonians fill a similar niche) or a wink wink nudge nudge SRD equivalent is available (for instance, paizo can't publish stuff with Beholders, but if you wanted to run an old D&D module using Pathfinder rules you could easily drop in an SRD "Evil Eye"). It is d20 compatible, and while there are some idiomatic differences between them, it takes very little experience with either variant to translate between them.

 

Pathfinder offers variant implementations for D&D core classes, and then a whole bunch of other additional classes riffing on the same ideas in various ways. So, a D&D 3.x Wizard and a Pathfinder Wizard are not 100% line by line identical, but they are clearly "the same". Overall, the Pathfinder classes are famously more powerful than their D&D 3.x equivalents. Power creep across the board is a common theme. Of course the monsters also tend to be a bit powered up, so it's basically a wash. A rising tide lifts all boats. Some classes of course benefit more than others, and disparity in class power balances are rife. There are rather famously issues such as "Multiple Ability Dependent (MAD) vs Single Ability Dependent (SAD)", "Martial - Caster Disparity", "Wealth Per Level issues" and so on which are relevant to all of D&D 3e, D&D 3.5, and Pathfinder.

 

They differ in details, but the broad strokes are clearly the same. D&D 3.x has far more in common with Pathfinder than it does with either AD&D 2e or D&D 4e. 

 

Aside from the rules, you have the setting of Golarion and the adventures set within it...most notably the Adventure Path's themselves which are 6 issue adventure arcs with a theme which usually but not always start at level 1 and end around level 20 and present themselves as a thing where you in theory start running the campaign when the first book drops, and keep pace with them so that your group is ready for the next part of the adventure just as paizo is releasing the next book in the cycle. That's a conceit which is held over from the early desperate days of paizo trying to leverage their periodical publishing model to get some product out the door to keep making payroll; I don't know of anyone who actually starts a new Adventure Path on release and tries to keep up with the release schedule. In reality, the Adventure Paths remain available the same as any other gaming book, and it is much more common to buy into a past published Adventure Path and run it. None of the Adventure Paths are 100% perfect, some of them are highly regarded while others are not, but somewhat similar to how Magic the Gathering themed blocks roll out year after year, basically two themed Adventure Paths roll out year after year. If you don't like the current one, just wait six months and maybe you'll like the next one. There's a subgroup of players who just play Adventure Paths, and that's what they think of when you say "Pathfinder".  In some cases, there are players who do exist who have only ever played in Pathfinder Adventure Paths and don't really know much about gaming beyond that...asking such a player if "Pathfinder is D&D" may well draw a blank stare. 

 

Then there's Pathfinder Society, which is a thing unto itself. It's an "organized play" model, and the bookkeeping involved to keep things "fair" and allow characters to be portable is quite tedious but makes sense if you understand what its trying to prevent. It evolved into its own sort of ecosystem, and for some players PFS play is all they know and this is "Pathfinder" to them.

 

So, Pathfinder is a D&D variant. Mechanically it is of the 3.x era and thus is dissimilar to the current rules system that bears the D&D brand, but that doesn't invalidate it's D&D pedigree. Conceptually, the ideas of the Pathfinder setting and the metaplots within that setting and the expressions of protagonists / antagonists within the race / class / level semantics intrinsic to D&D and its successors are purely "D&D" and only make sense in that odd niche of fantasy fiction spawned by D&D. However, if your first experience with D&D was 4e or 5e, then Pathfinder may not seem like D&D to you...maybe. Many people can't separate a game mechanic from the fluff draped around out, or the content of a fictional setting from its mechanical underpinnings. That speaks more to their own imprecision of thought than to the actual facts of the matter however.

[Killer Shrike]

At some point in the last few years my son happened to get into my boxes of Pathfinder stuff and became fascinated by it, particularly the art. About the same time, I was getting into Fate. Of those two contemporaneous occurrences was born my Pathfinder Fate Accelerated hack ( http://www.killershrike.com/Fate/Fae/Pathfinder/Menu.aspx ) and over the years I've run a few adventures set in Golarion using my hacked Fate Accelerated rules. We played yesterday, as a matter of fact.

 

I don't particularly love Golarion. It's ok, for me. But the maps and art and material is copious and well done. I'm not whipping out difficult to replace Darlene Greyhawk maps or trying to scrounge player copies of resources that exist only in out of print books. It works out because its convenient and I happen to have a pile of content and pdfs for it and can easily acquire anything I happen to be missing if I decide I want it. For instance, when we played yesterday the binding gave out on my physical copy of "Magnimar, City of Monuments"; if that had happened to my nearly 30 year old physical copy of "The City of Greyhawk" I would have been quite incensed. But, whatever, if I care I can get another copy of Magnimar, City of Monuments, and if not I've got the pdf in cloud storage.

I crib the main bits from Adventure Paths and modules set in the Varisia region, and we go. It is a Pathfinder game in the setting and metaplot sense, and very much not a Pathfinder game in a mechanical sense. Does it also qualify as a D&D game? Sort of. In an existential sense, it is. In a historical sense, it wouldn't exist in a vacuum as it is entirely a derivative. In a practical sense, it isn't really as you would not be able as a player to drop into a D&D game of any edition and apply any of the mechanical knowledge attained from playing in my game.

 

I think that's the crux of it...is D&D a set of mechanics or is D&D a set of ideas or is it the combination of both that constitutes D&D? I'm of the opinion that the essence of D&D is the set of ideas, and the mechanics are largely irrelevant. People who agree will probably agree that Pathfinder is D&D, and those who don't won't. 

[Duke Bushido]

Thank you, Sir.

 

Thank you very much.

 

This answer is far and away beyond what I was even hoping for.  I feel quite confident, then, that I can consider Pathfinder to very much be D&D, in a new setting, with changes being more semantic or re-coloring for legal reasons.

 

Thanks, Shrike.  That was amazing.
 

[Hugh Neilson]

The question of "what is D&D" occurs.  I would suggest that Pathfinder has more in common with 3rd Edition D&D than 3rd Ed has in common with 2nd Ed or 4th Ed. After 1e/2e, each edition of D&D has been more like a different game than a different edition.

[zslane]

3 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

I would suggest that Pathfinder has more in common with 3rd Edition D&D

 

I think pretty much everyone is suggesting the same thing, yes?

[Duke Bushido]

it's only right to address Hugh's question, however.

 

On the basis of "what is D&D," I must decline to answer as I have not all the facts.  It's well-known that I don't care for fantasy in general, and D&D in specific.  An interesting off-shoot of that is that I don't keep up with D&D much, either.  So, for myself, "D&D is" 3.5, 2 (I missed three entirely), AD&D, and the little boxed set with the blue-and-white cover art on the rules book that stopped at level 3.

 

I say that because after 3.5, people realized that no matter how badly I needed a gaming fix, I was not going to be a good addition to their D&D party.  Not because I'm belligerent or undo-operative in any way, but because I don't really appreciate the setting or the lore, and don't even _know_ half of it, and it becomes clear if the session drags on too long that I'm not at all having a good time.

 

I have only been researching Pathfinder a few weeks, as I have been invited to join a Pathfinder game when my youth group campaign is over.  As a potential player, it seemed only right that try to find out as much as I can before accepting and bowing out.

 

Everyone above, and Shrike in particular, have confirmed my fears:  Pathfinder _is_ D&D.  I will politely decline sometime in the week, I think.

 

Thanks again to everyone.

 

Duke

 

[Scott Ruggels]

18 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

Everyone above, and Shrike in particular, have confirmed my fears:  Pathfinder _is_ D&D.  I will politely decline sometime in the week, I think.

 

 

So, then waiting for that hard SF campaign, then?

[Duke Bushido]

Be a while, I think.  Life is happening really fast for the next six months, at least.  When the youth group game runs its course, I'm not going to move to another game at all.  When the current arc on the monthly concludes, I'm going to bow out and let the other two gms handle it for-- well, for the foreseeable future.  May have to move the weekly to a biweekly, as well. 

 

Just too much dumped on me out of the blue, so it looks like it's supers with a periodic dabble into starrigger for at least the next year. 

[zslane]

14 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Pathfinder _is_ D&D.

 

It is. For a certain subset of D&D, namely the D20 incarnation. I don't think we need to get all philosophical about what D&D "is", so long as we're clear about which edition of D&D a game like Pathfinder descends from.

[archer]

My daughter has played both D&D and Pathfinder while I've only done D&D. From talking to her:

 

Character creation is more difficult and involved in Pathfinder. The other players in the game, if they are casual players, might not even have heard of the book where you got your character class from, much less know what your character class does.

 

As Pathfinder characters progress in levels, they get an increasing blizzard of abilities so much so that the player has trouble keeping track of what her character can do, much less the DM be able to keep track of and anticipate what the characters might be able to do in a particular situation.

 

For example, this Pathfinder wiki shows 48 regular classes and 107 prestige classes. https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Category:Character_options

 

After character creation and forming an adventuring group with players using classes that you've never played with before, the adventure plays out mostly like D&D from a player's perspective.

[Asperion]

The original concept of Pathfinder was simply to correct problems with D&D.  This makes the original edition to be D&D.  However, as with two brothers will form distinct personalities, each game has over time taken on its own life and is now a different game that is different from each other.

[Hugh Neilson]

To the initial question, I would say that, if you did not enjoy D&D 3rd Ed (3.0 and 3.5 are not different enough to classify them separately), I would not expect you will enjoy Pathfinder.  It is definitely not different enough from 3e D&D to overcome an overall dislike of fantasy games.   We don't need to define what D&D is (genre vs mechanics vs playstyle vs whatever) to figure that out!

[pinecone]

You could look at Starfinder the sci fi Fantasy in Spaaace version...?

[Duke Bushido]

Thanks, PC--

 

but let me clarify something a bit:

 

I don't generally care for Fantasy. I will play it; I may even enjoy it.  It is more about the playing and the people I'm playing with.  I still won't be having all the joy my friends are, because I can't make myself invest in Fantasy: for reasons absolutely cannot explain, I have a distaste for the genre as a whole.  It's not insurmountable, but it's there.  I know I can have a good time under the right combination of system (I have enjoyed about half the Fantasy HERO games I've been involved in), GM (anyone not trying to re-invent D&D in his pet system), and setting (anything that isn't trying to be like D&D).

 

Alas, there are too few fantasy games and GMs who aren't simply looking to repackage D&D.  I was fearful (rightfully, it turns out) that Pathfinder was simply a new package for D&D to sneak out in.

 

My serious and active contempt for D&D (as I've encountered it, anyway, being as how there are so many versions of it now) is that for me, D&D is a pickle fork  irritation:

 

On one pointy bit, it's Fantasy.  On the other pointy bit, the D&D mechanics grate on me, from randomly generated stats to wandering monsters to character classes and alignments to the way armor doesn't work to-- well, I didn't pop up to write a dissertation.  There is no part of D&D that I like, period.  While I _do_ love Sci-Fi, I can't see myself trying to play it using the D&D mechanics.  

 

The handle is likely pointed as well, because I don't like the tropes common to D&D and their distinctive call to Tolkien), and pickle forks only have two tines.

[zslane]

I feel very much the same as you, Duke. The major way in which we differ, I would say, is that I don't have contempt for D&D (I still have too many good memories of it), but rather I just feel I've outgrown its design and its game design tropes. In fact, I outgrew it the moment I fell in love with Champions back in 1982.

 

I too don't care for fantasy much, mostly because I am so burned out on it after all the books and games I've played in that genre. I still hunger for sci-fi and superhero stuff, whereas if I never saw another fantasy movie, read another fantasy novel, or played another fantasy game, I think I'd be just fine. For someone like us, I can't really recommend Starfinder because it really does feel like "D&D in Space" to me, despite all the protestations of its designers (and fans) that it doesn't. But as I see it, there's just no denying it when you have everything from fantasy magic (still called "spellcasting", BTW) to fantasy classes merely reskinned with vaguely futuristic sounding names (e.g., Operative instead of Rogue, Soldier instead of Fighter, Envoy instead of Bard, etc.). A major reason they kept fantasy magic in Starfinder was so that they could place the game in the same campaign setting as Pathfinder, projected far into the future, where there is technology and alien races, but also magical energies and "divine" powers, all of which make characters from one game usable in the other. That's simply not what I'm looking for in my science fiction. Even Star Wars had the good sense to call their magic "the Force", make it a simple bio-energy field, and make manipulating it more like psionics than fantasy spellcasting.