Magic by design

[TonyLB]

In Incoherence...

How would a ruleset put "magic" in magic and "spirituality" in religion?

I'm curious how that would happen.

I'm going to duck spirituality (a harder issue) and handle magic.

Magic is, as Frazer and other anthropologists aptly explain, a structure of thought as much as it is a belief in the supernatural.  Indeed, to most people who believe in magic, it is natural, part of the structure of the universe.

If you produce a system that evokes the same mindset then it will produce results that consistently appeal to many people's sense of what is "magical".

For instance, Frazer proposes two fundamental laws:  Similarity (e.g. making a doll-sized likeness of someone and sticking pins into it will hurt them) and Contagion (e.g. taking clippings of someone's hair and burning them can do harm to the person it was once connected to).  If a system consistently encourages those sort of considerations, won't it increase people's sense of the magical?

e.g.:  A wizard wishes to create a vast snowstorm over the golden city of Gothilien.  His first action is to cunningly craft a tiny replica of Gothilien.  Then he buries it, bit by bit, in the shavings of ice transported painstakingly from the Gorash mountains, to the north of that city.  All the rest of the spell is details, as far as the rules system is concerned.

[timfire]

There have been some great discussions on magic in the past... <does some quick searches>... My search-fu needs some work, I can't find the thread I was looking for.

Anyway, search around for "mysterious magic" or "myth AND magic" or "non-scientific magic" or "natural magic" and you should find some old threads that discuss this idea (indirectly at least if not directly).

[Sydney Freedberg]

e.g.:  A wizard wishes to create a vast snowstorm over the golden city of Gothilien.  His first action is to cunningly craft a tiny replica of Gothilien.  Then he buries it, bit by bit, in the shavings of ice transported painstakingly from the Gorash mountains....

This is one thing the rules* for Unknown Armies do really, really well: They evoke a crazily post-modernist assemble-your-own-symbolism approach to magic, particularly in the section on Tilts. (Dare I compare it to bricolage? Errr, no). I could see players getting really intensely into the details of, say, getting your enemy's toenail clippings and embarassing high school yearbook photo and then burning them together at midnight while chanting "You're the One that I Want" from Grease.

But post-modernism, irony, and cultural mix-and-match are indigenous to modern Western culture, which is presumably where your players are from. How you evoke a radically different mentality, e.g. a medieval one, I have no idea. Arguably even expressing truly magical magic in standard RPG mechanics is so alien to its nature as to defeat the point.

* Only read it, never played it.

[TonyLB]

I have this notion that you need to have the mechanics, but have them be so thoroughly obfuscated that the players only grip them on a subconscious level.  Then they become proficient in gaming the magic system, and can recognize and create things that clearly fall into it, but have little or no ability to consciously describe why it is that they do what they do.

Of course, the notion of deliberately hiding your design intentions from your target audience is a whole ball of wax.  But what the hey....

EDIT:  I almost certainly need to put more thought into what question I am asking here, rather than just rambling on about ideas.  I'm letting the community down.

Okay:  Can a system that (on some level) simulates and rewards the observed anthropological patterns of magic evoke the uncanny feeling of the wondrous and magical?  Will it necessarily do so if it follows those patterns?  If not necessarily, will the patterns help and in what ways?

[John Kim]

If you produce a system that evokes the same mindset then it will produce results that consistently appeal to many people's sense of what is "magical".

I have a couple articles on magic systems, in particular my essay "Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems".  cf. my page at

http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/magic/

I'd like to work out some sort of follow-on to this, but I doubt that I'll get around to it for a little while.

[Vaxalon]

Can a system that (on some level) simulates and rewards the observed anthropological patterns of magic evoke the uncanny feeling of the wondrous and magical?  Will it necessarily do so if it follows those patterns?  If not necessarily, will the patterns help and in what ways?

This drives to the core of my question.

I've been reading John Kim's article on magic, and while it has lots of suggestions on how the magic systems we tend to see in RPG's are contrary to historical magical thought, I don't see much detail when it comes to techniques for bringing magical thinking into magical rulesets.  In fact, the article appears unfinished in at least one place.

Beyond game balance, though, there is the mere concept that energy does not need to be conserved. This is a very ingrained to scientific thinking, so deliberately breaking it by itself can give a system a less scientific feel. A good example (detailed in the next section) is interaction of the metaphysical and the physical.

        Another part of the

In his final paragraph,

The point of this article is not to say what magic should be.

Indeed.

So...

How DOES one put the "magic" back in gaming magic?

I'd really like to see how it's done.

[Callan S.]

*snip*
For instance, Frazer proposes two fundamental laws:  Similarity (e.g. making a doll-sized likeness of someone and sticking pins into it will hurt them) and Contagion (e.g. taking clippings of someone's hair and burning them can do harm to the person it was once connected to).  If a system consistently encourages those sort of considerations, won't it increase people's sense of the magical?

Okay, I think if you want to tickle the sense of magic in a game user, you need to look at what purpose it serves to begin with.

I would suggest that the idea and sense of 'magic' is instinctual scientific impule in humans. In modern terms, it's the same idea as a hypothetical black box. You put something in one end of the black box and you get something else out at the other end. The actual observation of a strange phenomina suggests some black box/magic was involved, to the observer. The black box/idea of magic is a placeholder until you can actually find out what happened (as a place holder it's extremely important, for a mind which in past days could easily otherwise forget such an event and thus never learn anything to gain the upper hand).

I think that similarity/contageon idea doesn't invoke the presence of magic...it suggests the investigation of magic/the inner workings of the black box. In turn, any investigation of magic suggests magic is around...but it's a side effect of the scientific exploration, and to do so some of that scientific exploration has already been done (and wont need to be done by players).

What I'd suggest is a sytem by which the players explore how magic works, with a learning curve which get's quite difficult after a time. I'd suggest starting by having magic phenomina occur from completely random tables...just roll on several tables and clump the results together. Now the players, rewarded by the system for doing so, postulate theories as to how the magic works.

I'm sure it'd be quite easy to slip out of the mindframe that 'were just making this up' to 'this...this wierd, unnatural thing happened....how the hell does that work???'

Almost sounds enough for a game by itself. Never mind dungeon crawling...it'd just be a game about observing magic and making notes on how it works, then trying to duplicate the results (and probably being flummoxed by ones own, new results). Though it'd probably be very fun, once you worked out some rules, to go blast some orcs with it (blast or do whatever the hell the magic does).

[Vaxalon]

I would suggest that the idea and sense of 'magic' is instinctual scientific impule in humans.

Actually, no, it's just the reverse.  The magical mode of thinking is about as unscientific as it comes.

[lev_lafayette]

Indeed, to most people who believe in magic, it is natural, part of the structure of the universe.

Indeed. Having lived among people in grass and bamboo huts who worship crocodiles, I know exactly what you mean.. Heck, I was even making blessings to the crocodile gods by the end of it...

For instance, Frazer proposes two fundamental laws:  Similarity (e.g. making a doll-sized likeness of someone and sticking pins into it will hurt them) and Contagion (e.g. taking clippings of someone's hair and burning them can do harm to the person it was once connected to).  If a system consistently encourages those sort of considerations, won't it increase people's sense of the magical?

Yep, I've been thinking along these lines myself recently. Evans-Pritchard, Malinkowski and Levi-Strauss are three other anthropologists who you should look at for this as well (especially the latter's "The Raw and the Cooked").

Some ideas that I had on the matter, many years ago, can be found in an article: http://au.geocities.com/lev_lafayette/9603magic.html">Magic in Roleplaying and Reality

Keep this thread going there's some worthwile ideas to explored here!

[Doug Ruff]

I would suggest that the idea and sense of 'magic' is instinctual scientific impule in humans.

Actually, no, it's just the reverse.  The magical mode of thinking is about as unscientific as it comes.

Depends on your definition of "scientific".

Magic has quite heavy roots in inductive reasoning - if I pray to the rain god and it rains the next day, then hey! Maybe the prayer is the reason it rained.

Then the next time I pray, and it doesn't rain for a week. Hmm, maybe I've made the rain god angry - perhaps I should dance a bit when I pray, or sacrifice a couple of chickens...

Over time, a whole series of explanations for why it does or doesn't rain when I pray/dance/sacrifice comes into play, and becomes ritualised.

However, because I can always come up with a reason why the magic ritual doesn't work ("the rain god is angry") then there is no way of disproving my magical theory. So, according to some schools of philosophy of science (especially those in the Popperian tradition) this isn't science, because it cannot be falsified by experimental evidence.

Notice that this is drifting towards "religion" and away from "classical RPG magic". In most RPG,  the "black box" is fairly simple: cast fireball do 7d6 damage... you know (allowing for the randomness introduces by dice-rolling) what's going to come out of the other side. If the spell fails, it's due to a lack of mastery, or because the target resists...

So, there's no sense of scientific (or pseudoscientific) discovery - the players already know how the magic system works, and I suggest that this is completely out of whack with the sort of "magic" we are looking for here.

So, how to put it back in? Tony's obfuscation idea can work - the characters know some of the rules (which is why they can use magic) but don't know all of them, or even most of them. This works especially well if  knowledge about how magic works is a closely guarded secret in the game world.

Callan's idea for randomising the results of magic has some legs too, but this sort of presupposes that there are no underlying rules for magic (unless the idea is to decide in play what the rules are, and slowly drop the random table?)

I think the most important questions to ask before designing this type of magic for your game are:

- How random/capricious is magic itself? How many (or few) rules are there, and what are they?
- How many of the rules are "common" knowledge, and what rules do the players know?

Now, this pretty much presupposes a GM who knows what's going on, and players who don't. A much bigger challenge would be to make the rules emergent during play, with no-one knowing what the rules are in advance. This may be where the random table could come into play.

[Callan S.]

I would suggest that the idea and sense of 'magic' is instinctual scientific impule in humans.

Actually, no, it's just the reverse.  The magical mode of thinking is about as unscientific as it comes.

So paying tribute to the crocodiles in the anticipation of result X means a procedure hasn't been hypothesized, to get result X?

It sounds scientific enough to me. You don't need to work out the contents of the black box, to work up a science based on it. Just like you don't need to do quantum physics before you work out the science of chemistry...which relies on the quantum 'black box' to work out, of course. Who knows how that box works...but when you pay the right tribute to it, it gives you result X.

The idea behind magic is that there's some point where the learning curve becomes incredibly steep...it's always mysterious. That doesn't mean you can't learn a damn thing about it...instead the typical idea is that after a certain amount of investigation you just can't seem to learn any more on it. Being defeated by the magnitude of the subject (or letting yourself be defeated), doesn't change anything about the principles you've already worked out.

As it is, weve seen and will see more of categorisation of magic in this thread...with the goal of pinning it down entirely for book use. That really aught to be the players job. They should try and pin it down, as play (rather than the designer enjoying this as design that is more like play than design). And for it to have the air of magic, at some point in the investigation, it should become too difficult a subject to do this any more. That'll either be the end point of the game (you've gleaned as much as you can), or where you start a new game using what rules you could glean. That's why you can't pin it down as the author...the idea is that one must fail at some point in the investigation of magic, for it to have the mystical qualities of magic. Setting it all up neatly wont help the player do that.


Doug,

Callan's idea for randomising the results of magic has some legs too, but this sort of presupposes that there are no underlying rules for magic (unless the idea is to decide in play what the rules are, and slowly drop the random table?)

Yeah, that's what I mean. You have random results...but as the players 'discover'/invent the rules for magic (based on the (random) phenomana they saw), the random tables are used less and less.

It'd sort of like some random effects tables, then using universalis style negotiation to 'discover' the rules behind magic. Of course your actually inventing the rules, but I'm sure it's easy to slip into the mindset that your discovering them.

[Vaxalon]

So paying tribute to the crocodiles in the anticipation of result X means a procedure hasn't been hypothesized, to get result X?

Someone who is thinking magically, isn't thinking, "I do this, and this, and this, and get that result."  The candy machine logic is alien to the mythic imagination.

[lev_lafayette]

So paying tribute to the crocodiles in the anticipation of result X means a procedure hasn't been hypothesized, to get result X?

How appropriate. Among people I used to live with, if you encountered a crocodile one would say "Lafaek, favor-ida la han hau. Ita-bot hau-nia abo mane. Hau Ita-nia beioan."

(Or, roughly translated, "Mr Crodile, please don't eat me. You are my grandfather. I am your grandchild").

Damned if I wasn't saying it everytime I came across one of those reptiles. None of them ate me either, so they were obviously listening.

[Vaxalon]

It is important to note that we, scientific people, "know" that talking to a crocodile won't make it refrain from eating you.  A scientific experiment could easily refute this idea.

Someone who thinks magically would never think to DO such an experiment, and if it were explained to him, would be unlikely to put much weight on it.

[lumpley]

Can I suggest that the place to design and look for a sense of magic, wonder and irrationality is in the whole game, not in its magic rules?

-Vincent