Magic by design

[Vaxalon]

That's the point that I was working around to.

Basically, that as soon as you put "rules" on a magic system, you have, by definition, drained the magic out of it, and made it into a "system", which is by definition not a "magical" concept.

[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?

That's the point that I was working around to.

Basically, that as soon as you put "rules" on a magic system, you have, by definition, drained the magic out of it, and made it into a "system", which is by definition not a "magical" concept.

Oh no, I disagree with that. I'm saying that designing a game that reliably produces wonder, magic, startling connections and coincidences in play - that's what you want, right? - it seems impossible because you're looking for a subset of the game's rules, its magic rules, to do all the work.

You want the players to experience wonder. You want playing the game to be magical. So look to designing a wonderful game, don't limit yourself to figuring out what wizard characters can do and how.

What we're doing when we roleplay is fundamentally like what we're doing when we experience wonder - and spirituality - in non-roleplaying real life. What you're craving in roleplaying is what you're craving in religion and in your real magical practice, if you've got one. (And who doesn't, by one name or another.) (Mine's roleplaying.)

There isn't a game I can point you to, yet. But I'm convinced that the game design is possible, and that it's just a matter of time until one of us nails it. The game won't be distinguished by its magic rules, it'll be distinguished by how it provokes us, its players, to relate to one another as people.

-Vincent

[Vaxalon]

You want playing the game to be magical.

No, that's really not what I'm talking about.

Personally, I don't WANT playing a game to be "magical".  I'm not really much of a magical thinker, and as a result I probably wouldn't like a game that required me to think that way.

I'm just curious what a game would look like that was geared toward such an alien frame of mind.

[Sydney Freedberg]

{EDIT: Whoo! Major crossposting!}

I think Vincent's onto something. People who think magically don't think of "magic" as a separate thing from everything else -- it's more like an extension of the normal human spectrum of abilities and technical knowledge: Something like iron-working or sowing grain is inherently a magical activity and people would have trouble even making a distinction between the "mundane" aspect (firing up the forge, sowing the grain) and the magical (praying to the smith-deity, doing a rain dance).

(Caveat: This is my very limited understanding; I've not studied anthropology and am very open to correction/smackdowns) .

HeroQuest, which I'm currently reading, takes a stab at this with the idea that almost everyone has some kind of small "common magic" for use in their daily life, but the mechanics still feel pretty scientific and, well, mechanical to me.

You could have a system where players posited "laws of magic" which were then confirmed or discarded in play. I think the key might be to throw Occam's Razor out the window: The more complicated the explanation, the more extraneous elements (e.g. I don't just sow the grain, I have to pray and wear blue and refrain from meat during the sowing season), the more magical and the less mechanical the thought process involved.

[timfire]

What Vincent is getting at is a very important - though difficult - design principle. Games need to engage *the player*. If you want a magic system to feel magical, you need to develop a sense of magic in the player.

How do you do that? If I knew that...

[Bill_White]

The difficulty in constructing a magic system (or, following Vincent, a game more generally) that fosters a sense of wonder -- of coming face-to-face with the beautifully strange and mysteriously other, I think is meant -- is that strangeness and mystery are lost as familiarity develops:  once you know the precise workings of the "mechanics," the magic is lost.

But, paradoxically, sheer randomness won't do, either:  there has to be a method to the magic or its sheer arbitrariness will be off-putting as well, since it will preclude mastery, or the ability to know what one needs to do in order to produce a desired effect or outcome.

I agree with those who say that "magic" is not an add-on to a world that works the way we (i.e., 21st century Westerners) think it does; instead, it's an alternative model of how the world works in which the world is to some degree responsive to human desires or imaginings.

Here's my idea, inspired of all things by Michel Foucault's discussion of "resemblance" in The Order of Things

Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture.  It was resemblance that...organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.  The universe was folded in upon itself:  the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.

Foucault goes on to suggest that the "semantic web of resemblance" included four critical concepts, which I'll summarize as juxtaposition,  in which things that are adjacent have similar attributes, so that the container is also the thing, and vice versa (the body is the soul, the house is the world); emulation, in which things that are distant mirror each other's attributes, so that different domains emulate each other (as above, so below; or there as many different kinds of fish in the sea as animals on land); analogy, in which relationships between things resemble each other (the sun is to the sky as the eyes are to the face); and sympathy, which sets things in motion according to their natures, and allows properties to be transmitted or transferred from one thing to another.

To my way of thinking, these are nothing if not "laws of magic" that could be adopted wholesale to create a game-world that operated according to these laws rather than the laws of physics.

I can imagine a game intended to explore this world.  Call it Baudolino, after the title character of Umberto Eco's novel who travels through lands like those described in fanciful medieval travelogues.  The characters are wanderers from the West who are moved to journey through a fanciful Asia to find and bring back the wonders of Cathay and Hind.

Each player has a pool of resources called "Resemblances":  you play a Resemblance in order to "activate" one of the four resemblances that Foucault describes:  My character is a Venetian merchant trying to find the way to Prester John's kingdom.  The GM tells me that local guides have led me to a mountain range wherein the kingdom may lie, but have no idea how to proceed further.  I say:

"Since a kingdom is like a city [Emulation], it must have roads leading toward it [Analogy].  And since the nature of a road is to carry travelers along it to its end [Sympathy] -- and since you will stipulate that I am a traveler, since I have left my city [Juxtaposition] -- then it is clear that if I continue along my current path the road will carry me to its end [Sympathy].  And since my end is Prester John's kingdom [Juxtaposition], and as we have seen I am a traveler on a road that leads to an end, then that road's end must also be Prester John's kingdom [Analogy]."

I spend 7 Resemblances, and my character arrives in Prester John's kingdom.  Magic!

Wonder, though?  I'm not sure, but there's a sort of half-logic to it that's quaint and a little droll that could at times reach the level of the sublime (after perhaps having passed through the ridiculous).

Bill

[Sydney Freedberg]

This is cool (Umberto Ecco the RPG!). I think it may be missing one element: Magic is a way of thinking about everything, but it's not only thinking, it's also things you do -- little prayers, rituals, even casting the seed with your right hand always and never the left. So your merchant travelling to the Kingdom of Prester John needs not only to think out a justification for getting there, but also to do something that helps him do that. The nice thing about having four clearly defined but broadly applicable "laws of magic" (or 3, or 8, or whatever) is that the something you do can be any number of inventive and creative things.

[lumpley]

...once you know the precise workings of the "mechanics," the magic is lost.

Here's the answer: Ron's post to Jay's [Musha Shugyo] Honor mechanics thread.

If the game's about those four magical approaches, you make mechanics that provoke 'em, not mechanics that quantify 'em.

This isn't nothing; it's hard, real design work. But it's doable, surely.

-Vincent

[TonyLB]

And, if I may elaborate on what Vincent said:  when you make mechanics that provoke a certain pattern, the players can learn to use that pattern without ever consciously becoming aware of it.

If you're looking for a player sense of wonder and synergy, that's where you'll find it.

For instance, at Dreamation we discovered "In Dogs, lifelong relationships are most often created over the barrel of a gun".  That's wondrous.  It's also inherent in the rules.  When you play the game you feel the rightness (for that system) of that principle, even if you could never consciously apply it.

[Bill_White]

This is cool (Umberto Ecco the RPG!). I think it may be missing one element: Magic is a way of thinking about everything, but it's not only thinking, it's also things you do -- little prayers, rituals, even casting the seed with your right hand always and never the left. So your merchant travelling to the Kingdom of Prester John needs not only to think out a justification for getting there, but also to do something that helps him do that. The nice thing about having four clearly defined but broadly applicable "laws of magic" (or 3, or 8, or whatever) is that the something you do can be any number of inventive and creative things.

Yes, you're right:

"But how can you be sure that this road is the road to Prester John's kingdom, rather than the road to anywhere else?"  [A resemblance intended to confound me]

"Ah, well, as to that:  I set out at dawn from Venice, and continue to set out at dawn every day that I travel, since Prester John's kingdom rises in the east as does the sun [Analogy].  Thus I can be sure of my road."

...and so on.

Your point is well-taken:  the purpose of invoking resemblances isn't just for logic-chopping; it's to guide action.  Good call.   "Since the east is the world's right, I step off first with my right foot, and so I am advantaged."

Bill

[Sydney Freedberg]

Aaah, very nice. And the more of these little rituals you can incorporate, the better (which gets you into anti-Occam's Razo territory very fast because you're rewarded for complicating things). Maybe the GM or other players get to rate your ritual elements for effectiveness? E.g. "The dawn thing was okay, so +1 to your roll for that, but I really like the right-foot equals going-east bit, so +4 -- but expect to have some trouble if you have to figure the best foot to start on travelling north/south!"

[Bill_White]

If the game's about those four magical approaches, you make mechanics that provoke 'em, not mechanics that quantify 'em.

Yes, exactly.  I don't think that I was arguing that the game was about "resemblance," but I take the point that not every focal concept has to be quantified, and that some aspects of the game  are "emergent properties" that come out in play--and that a big part of the designer's job is to figure out how to do that.

So I think I was saying that if a game is about "wonder"--which is where this conversation started--a way to provoke that might be via mechanics of resemblance:  changing the common sense of cause-and-effect to the common sense of resemblance, and embedding that change in the mechanics of the game.

And, if I may elaborate on what Vincent said: when you make mechanics that provoke a certain pattern, the players can learn to use that pattern without ever consciously becoming aware of it.

Sydney's suggestion that that changed common sense be oriented toward action, rather than merely assertions about the world, improves my idea 100%, I think, and opens up the possibility that players can learn to forge chains of resemblance that enable fabulous actions.  This could lead to a sense of wonder on the part of players, mebbe.

This isn't nothing; it's hard, real design work. But it's doable, surely.

Yes.  I don't think I've been saying anything different than anybody else:  "Erm, sense of wonder...yeah, that's hard...but how about this?"  But the real trick is to take the idea and design the game.  I know, I know.

Bill

[Shreyas Sampat]

I think that Fred's rejection of the "if-then" mindset is doing magical thought a disservice. There is a very significant tradition of "I perform X in order to derive Y result."

The difference lies in skepticism; the magical thinker doesn't trouble with "What if X and Y are unrelated?" That simply isn't permitted by his universal axioms.

The way I see it, the modern scientific mind assumes, "Stuff happens, and it is unrelated to other stuff unless I can rigorously prove otherwise."

The various magical minds say, "That is ridiculous."

Examine animism, Nobilis-style: "All events happen because of the free-willed actions of spiritual entities. Gross reality is just a visual representation of their interactions with one another; there are no unmotivated events. Every event is the result of some being's conscious choice, which may be strongly guided by its preferences and duties, but is never a foregone conclusion."

Granted that these spiritual entities have certain properties, this world is indistinguishable from the scientific world, but what if these spirits have different properties? If all these beings have non-obvious motives and desires, then suddenly, all these seemingly physical interactions have the opportunity to become social interactions.

Or you might look at the world through a ritual mindset; "An event has no lasting effect if it is not ritually acknowledged." This is what I use for the Underworld in a game I have run; you may enter a ghost's home and eat his food, but if you do not drop a pebble into the basket at his door, then you recieve no nourishment from the meal he serves you. You can get into countless battles there at no risk of life and limb, but even a simple argument becomes a contest of life and death if someone drops a gauntlet on the floor.

So I guess what I'm saying here is analogous to Bill's suggestion; a system built on scientific presumptions, regardless of its sorcerous trappings, is going to look like a scientific system. But you have to be very careful deciding what presumptions are scientific and what are not.

[Valamir]

Aaah, very nice. And the more of these little rituals you can incorporate, the better (which gets you into anti-Occam's Razo territory very fast because you're rewarded for complicating things). Maybe the GM or other players get to rate your ritual elements for effectiveness? E.g. "The dawn thing was okay, so +1 to your roll for that, but I really like the right-foot equals going-east bit, so +4 -- but expect to have some trouble if you have to figure the best foot to start on travelling north/south!"

The old RPG Fantasy Wargaming by Bruce Galloway took this as its premise for magic.  Of course it then created a bunch of tables and lists of modifiers that robbed much of the wonder out of it, but as an example of how such a system is organized its fantastic (the game, while all but unplayable, has so many fantastic elements to learn from that I think every game designer should own a copy.  It is, to me, the original Heartbreaker).

In FW the world is organized into a system of correspondencies that link together:  The zodiac, the four elements, the seasons, days of the week, gem stones, colors, numbers, types of wood, body parts, animals, herbs, times of day, emotions, etc.  You'd get a bonus to magic based on how many of these correspondencies you could draw upon while casting.

For instance if you wanted to make a woman fall in love you'd see that the emotion of love is related to the element of fire which is related to the gemstone ruby, which is related to the spleen, which is related to the number 7, which is related to Spring, which is related to the rabbit, which is related to copper, which is related to thyme, which is related to willow wood, which is related to 3:00 AM.  So you could just try and cast the spell (and almost assuredly fail, or you could go to a grove of -7- -willows- at -3:00AM- in the -Spring- and burn a -rabbit's- -spleen- on a -copper- spit while casting the spell and get beau coup bonuses.

This system then carried on throughout the whole game.  Fighters born under the sign of the Lion would get bonuses to their -courage- and -leadership- in the month of -august- and even more on -saturdays-.  They'd want their shield to be made of horn beam and bound in silver.

Certain characters would have a bonus to swim across a stream on a thursday while for other characters wouldn't plunge into a burning building to save a child because "no way, its tuesday, and the moon is new, and its 9:00PM...I'm not going in there...that's like -35%"


I've often wanted to meld that concept to a less squirelly system.

[Callan S.]

So I think I was saying that if a game is about "wonder"--which is where this conversation started--a way to provoke that might be via mechanics of resemblance:  changing the common sense of cause-and-effect to the common sense of resemblance, and embedding that change in the mechanics of the game.

I think 'wonder' will come from the assurance there are further rules to discover, but lacking the ability to discover them.

To assure the gamer there are rules, you enable them to discover some of those rules.

That done, you then make it harder and harder to discover more.

This leads to the point where the player is satisfied there are more rules to find, since they have found some. You've already noted how you need some rules and can't be completely arbitrary. Their having some rules is compelling proof that the rest of magic must consist of rules. But the RPG mechanically makes it very hard to get them.

Thus, you can only wonder what those rules are. It's like wondering if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence...it's that sort of wonder, generated by the knowledge there is grass there, but ignorance of its properties. Magic is much the same, as I see it. You feel there are marvelous things you can do with it, but are ignorant of how to make them come about.