Here there be dragons
-
This is exactly what I mean. The stairs thing seems to be a common joke.
βRoll to ascend the stairs.β was a common joke in our group.
I remember all the spells being overly specific to the point of uselessness. βYou can conjure a cat. Itβs just a regular cat and will probably flee from you. You can do this once a month and it costs a billion dollars.β
DSA (aka The Dark Eye, as itβs international release is called) does tend towards a low power level so magic is severely limited compared to e.g. D&D. You can throw fireballs but not as frequently. High-level magic can take days to recover from. I have my own criticisms of how the magic system works but it does work if you accept that a high-level TDE caster is at a lower power level than a mid-level D&D caster.
The overall complexity was insane in the 4th edition; 5th ed did a lot to fix that. There are still a lot of skills but it actually feels manageable now.
I actually like that the system can model mundane professions; it can be pretty cool to play a regular person who gets forced into adventure but is still competent at something, even if that something is not generally applicable to adventuring.
