"Hmm, a thread about magic stuff would be cool,"

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Ron Edwards wrote:

"Hmm, a thread about magic stuff would be cool,"

Seems like a good idea to me.

The previous Three you never see thread got on a magic system discussion because someone pointed out that most RPG contain magic and someone else made the comment that magic is, well, more magical  (names not stated here to keep this from degenerating into a 'You said...""No I didn't" discussion)

This was an off the cuff comment but it grates on me because I would say that magic systems in many games is anything but magical.

In D&D, for example, magic is pretty much just another weapon or piece of equipment you can arm your character with.  As magical as sweat socks.

This of course begs the question of what is magical.  A version I happen to agree with can be found here and here.  

A brief quote that sums it up:

Magic isn't about spells and potions and cauldrons and familiars, its about being able to recognize a special event when it occurs. It's about "sight". It's also about learning from those experiences and using the knowledge you gain later in your life. Just because you witness an auspicious event doesn't make you a "wise woman".

Magic, that magical magic, is spontaneous and significant.  If you'll indulge me in a personal anecdote:

I was playing Yatzee with my family.  My father was rolling.  I forget his exact roll and pretty much the rules for yatzee but he needed a six and could roll one of two dice to do it.  I pointed at one of his dice and stated with complete confidence, "Hey, dad, the six is in this one."  He smirked at me and rolled the other one anyway.  He failed to get his six.  "I told you it's in this one," I said snatching up the die, giving it a quick shake and rolling it.

Six.

They all stared at me.

If fact, I was just being a smartass and planned to roll that die as many times as it took to get it to roll six.  As it happens, it came up six that first time.  For a moment, just a moment it was pure magic.  We all got that strange, light-headed feeling you get when events contain that magical feeling.  That feeling that remains until you explain it away, that is.

"Well it was a one in six chance and I was going to roll it until it came up six anyway.  It just took me one roll this time."

Applying this to an RPG is tough.  Like in the linked articles above, one inevitable question is "How do you throw a fireball with it?"

This is best answered with another question "Why are you only interested in throwing a fireball?" Creating a magic system along these lines is simply incompatable with the old school mobile artillery wizards.

I don't know.  This is odd territory to be in and the furthure I venture into it, the more my mind runs screaming back the old school way of it.

In closing, I think the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? hold an interesting insight to a magic system along these lines

(Eddie & Roger are handcuffed together.  Roger slips out of the cuffs to make a gag)

Eddie:  "You mean you could've slipped out of those cuffs at any time?"

Roger:  "Of course not.  I could only do it when it was funny."


Funny is a potent magic indeed.

[Marco]

A point I was trying to get at on the other thread (with my really off-topic post) is that magic, to the magician, may not be mysterous (at least no more than medicine to the physician).

I also agree with Mike (I think I agree with him on this) that mobile-artilery wizards can make for decent magic-gaming in the right circumstances. Playing a character who with no armor and no weapons can take on a platoon, summons giant spiders to fight for him, or walk through walls is pretty magical even if it boils down to a handful of spell points and a list of spells.

On the other hand, "real magic," I think would be something that was left in the hands of the GM a great deal. In a game we were playing our characters had unconvered a book of rituals to do things that were magical (draw our own images out of mirrors to make duplicates of us, for example). We didn't know how it worked--there was no game mechanic for it--we did the ritual substituting what we could get (and some of the ingredients we didn't even know what they were) and watched things happen.

It was *very* cool--but it wasn't a 'magic system.' If we were to play the game again with 'more established mages' we'd have to have a list of abilities, some way to determine how many we had, and what the limits of magic were.

-Marco

[hardcoremoose]

Here's something I've been wondering about.

Does the presence of overt Director's Stance enhance or detract from the "magicalness" of magic in a game.  Magic systems often are fairly "metegamey".  Give the players the power to do anything from their perspective as players (director's stance), and you may be castrating the character's same ability.

An example.

WYRD has some really powerful director's stance stuff;  it's one of the few games I've ever seen that makes solid use of Fortune at the Front.  The players can, at any time, generate some currency that they can then "buy" events into the story with.  If they want a magical sword, they will find it.  If they want a dragon to show up in the story, it'll be there.  If they want lightning to come sizzling down out of the sky and fry an enemy, it'll happen.  The only difference is in the narrative*.  In all of my examples, the players are engineering these events as plot devices on the story level; their chracters are not causing these things to happen, merely reaping the rewards from them.

Now I figured out a way around that, but it involved making up some rules to limit the players' directorial power, just so that people who played sorcerers would have something to violate.

*  The only difference is in the narrative?  For narrativists, that's a good enough reason, I think.  The tone of a story is changed drastically by moving the in-game justification for things from player currency to character resource.  So yeah, that's sort of the answer to my own question - when the concept of "magic" makes the story more interesting, go with it; when it doesn't, ignore it.  But I still think there's more to it than that...can a magic system stand on its own two feet side by side in a game with really powerful director's stance?

- Scott
(who's going back to look at Elfs right now)

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Scott,

I think it's a trade off.  It may wind up less magical for the players, especially when they use the directoral power, but it will be more magical for the GM.

I've know a couple GMs who never get a chance to play anymore so this is an acceptable trade-off IMO.


Marco,

I would disagree that

"Playing a character who with no armor and no weapons can take on a platoon, summons giant spiders to fight for him, or walk through walls is pretty magical even if it boils down to a handful of spell points and a list of spells."

I tend to see all of that as just another ability rather than "magical" in any sense.  If it is, it's because the whole role-playing experience is "magical" itself, regardless of the content.

I suppose in the end we're comparing apples to xylophones and the whole debate is going nowhere.

[mahoux]

Just posting my two cents (if it's even worth that) on the thread.

I actually have become disillusioned with the D&D style magic users because people tend to play them for practicality, ie. getting the magic missile spell, fireballs, basically doing just what has been said - making them mobile artillery.  It really doesn't do anything to make the character magical.

No one seems to try the magic user who does the illusionary spells or the divination spells.  While they may not be practical in a combat way, these kinds of mages are more my idea of a fantasy magic user.  

I understand that the D&D system does foster a tendency for artillery spells due to the spells per level systemand the expected combat, but I think the possibility is there to make a mage seem more fantastic, we just generally don't due to our mindset and the need to be more useful to our group.

On to a different game, we have been playing Jared's Broomstix, the Harry Potter RPG.  The fun thing here is that as GM, my characters are all playing adolescents who are using magic for the first time and we don't have a set spell book - I give them free reign to try to come up with their own magic.  The setting isn't so combat heavy so I think all my players are leaning a little more to the silly, wonderful fantasy thought of magic that we lost because of D&D.

Anyway, back to your regularly posted thread.  In the event of an actual emergency, you would have heard more coherent thoughts.

[contracycle]

Whats really missing from the current crop of magic systems is the social role of religion.  But there is a buncha baggage here that needs to be tackled: first off, magic = mystery.

This is often bandied about - as if the magical aspect were the not knowing, the uncertainty.  This is not true - it is only uncertain to the non-initiated; seeing it as mystery is the response of the outsider, not the insider.  In many ways the Cool part of the magician archetype is the knowing of secret knowledge; of being "wise" by virtue of understanding that which mere mortals do not understand, things which are, well, arcane.

This presents a major dilemma for RPGs.  Player knowledge: what is cool/mysterious about being a magician if everyone had to read the same chapter in order to make and informed character decision choice?  And if there is a special chapter for the wizards, what happens after you have played a wizard once?  Information control is a non-starter.  Thus, the RPG ruleset must locate something of tangible use in the magic system, whence we see the prevalence of spells and pseudo-abilities.  And this often reduces the wizard to the swiss army knife of the adventuring party.

However, I think breaking out of the march-down-corridor, pillage-kobold-nest mode opens up a lot of ground.  What do wizards do when they are not calling down unholy fire upon their foes?  Here I think we hit a part of the Secret World motif; the Cool factor of being in the know, but this is nominal knowledge shared by all the real participants and held as a bulwark against the hoi polloi of NPC's on the "outside".  This, I think, comes the closest to the sense of "the arcane"; the magician becomes, like  a lawyer or doctor, the practitioner of an art understood by few.  The major distinction, however, lies in the second missing aspect: social legitimacy and religious morality.

In a documentary on Egypt I saw recently, it was remarked that for the Egyptians their priests themselves were rather like astronauts - heroic becuase of the danger they placed themselves in, exposing themselves to the gods, and becuase of their specialised knowledge and techniques for dealing with these powers.  It was argued that the depilation of the the priests can almost be seen as "slip streaming" or putting on an space-suit; a necessary and (perceived) functional arrangement that limited the danger of exposing both the priest and godhead to impurities.

I would not go too far to defend that specific film, but the principle appears correct to me.  However, what makes the magician or priest more interesting than a mere lawyer or doctor - pretty interesting though they can be - is that magicians are dealing with the moral structure of society and the universe too.  A magician knows not merely things beyond the normal ken, but also the true whys and wherefores of the social and natural order.  The magician knows not just that there is an Emperor, but WHY there is an Emperor, why there will always be an Emperor, and why there *must* also always be an Emperor.

Thus, the magician operates at a "deeper" level of knowledge, a wisdom attained through meditiation/arcane grimoires/trial and deprivation/inheritance/McGuffin.  The wizard is Wise Man becuase of this deeper insight.  What games like D&D and the +1 sword school fail to do is provide the Wise Man with any wisdom; the ONLY impact of magic in the game world is as para-scientific balance-tipper.  

[Ranko]

There is a trend to make magic within a game equall to, say, fighting skills so that it would be more fair to non-magic using characters. And by doing that designers tend to go and formalise magic to such degree that it no longer feels magical.

I think that these reasons are why people like/dislike a system of magic; for example (& from personl experience)
D&D magic doesn't exist, you could also do the same thing just call it technology or something.
Ars Magica, OTOH, also presents a very formal system, but it fits within the setting (and it is called Hermetic for a reason). And when you look at the less main stream magic within the game you see a whole new ball park, using the same base rule set (Kabbalah leaps to mind).
Sorcerer rules that support magic, but not the 'traditional' RPG magic.
And so on.

I am running out of time so I would like to add a few links asa suggestet read on the topic:

http://www.orkworld.com">Orkworld companion, for John's Orkworld, is located on the site and I think it deals with the subject matter (a bit). Also browse through his Game Designer's Journal on http://www.gamingoutpost.com">The Gaming Outpost, for a three part column on magical magic.

http://www.tasteslikephoenix.com">Tastes Like Phoenix Has some great articles (and a too cool Harlequin reviev:)). You are looking for http://www.tasteslikephoenix.com/articles/TLPthauprol.pdf">this one in particular.

Best,
Ranko

[James V. West]

Great subject.

I struggle with this idea on every project I start. What is magical? What is mysterious?

I've been toying with a lot of system ideas that utilize player secrets. That is, players get to invent stuff which other players don't know about. I think this adds mystery in a game and also lets the GM have a bit more fun.

Zak's new game Fungeon uses some of that notion and looks like fun.

In the olden days, I used to play horrible ADnD games in which players picked spells from lists and they always picked the fire spells. There was no mystery or suspense. Then I started to get a little wiser (?). I started running campaigns in which the mages did not get to pick spells. I only let them learn spells that their teachers knew or that they discovered during adventures. And only after they identified and learned them. This made the whole wizard thing a zillion times more fun and interesting (not to mention that's how you're acutally *supposed* to do it, I guess).

Finding a balance between a system that categorizes magic and one that does not give any definition of it is difficult. Its a game, so you need a system. But its magic, so you need the kind of effect that makes everyone go "wow...cool...I didn't see that coming".

If I knew then what I know now, I'd have become a watchmaker.

James V West
http://www.geocities.com/randomordercreations/index.html