How to keep magic magical?

[dindenver]

Hi!
  For me, the design process is to define things in a sort of narrative, analog or non-mechanical way. And then find mechanics that do that.
  I don't think I am alone. I don't think Sorcerer came about because Ron wanted to make a different magic mechanc, I think he had an idea for a different reality/game world andthen came up with mechanics to match. Of course, that is conjecture, I don't know what Ron did, but I can guess that he didn't start with the mechanics.
  So, the question is, how does magic work in the world you are building? The ideas of different genres is a good start, what inspired you to put magic in your game?

[Knucklebones]

Treat your game like a boardgame for a moment instead of this fuzzy-concept set of different games that have collectively been called "role playing games" where supposedly "you can do anything", and think about you game in terms of players and rules and game pieces. With that in mind, here's the question: how do you make the situation in question (role-playing out magical rituals) interesting and important to playing such that players would want to play it out and describe it rather than handwave it as background? That is, how do you make it FUN and REWARDING to do in the context of the game? (Punishments are easy -- such as "I dock XP if you don't role-play" -- but incentives are hard, because they require a game to work as a whole game -- such as "If you describe the ritual and get a reaction at the table, you get bonus dice, and you'll need them because you probably won't have enough without them.")

I suppose the players reward for role-playing out an interesting magical ritual would be to add flavor to the scene the characters are currently in. In the different games I've played or ran, the situations which stuck out most in my mind were those where strange or interesting actions were taking place rather than repeated dice contests. In my mind the purpose of a roleplaying game has always been the collective creativity that the situation fosters, and providing the players with a way to create impossible/interesting effects in the game through magic seemed like a good way of helping to bolster this creative spirit. Rules such as XP docking seem to be a bit draconian, and unnecessary as well since power-gamers and dice-players most likely wouldn't be attracted to an RP heavy system with largely undefined limitations on player creativity rather than a stats game.

How does magic support the play-concepts of exploration and mystery, how does it contribute to those goals in terms of what it does in play?

I see magic coming up in the game, not as the main focus (because it isn't), but as a fascinating or unusual set of actions that can either greatly benefit or harm the players who attempt it. The purpose of the game is to give the players a world to explore, some of which may involve the supernatural/occult -- and in instances where players come across such things it is intended to add an air of the strange to the table. The exploration and mystery of magic would come from the actual use of magic itself, and of the consequences and effects that magic would have on the situation and on the characters in the game who were involved with the magic.

If that isn't the answer, and you're thinking, "That stuff will add to play, because they'll be doing this thing to make this happen, and devising rituals to make themselves more effective at that," and so forth, then you're well on your way to making magic work in your game as a vital and interesting part of the process of play.

Thats what I'm hoping anyway. The idea really amounts to magic not being simply a player action but the focus of a quest, and of directed effort by the player is really what I was trying to get across. The whole point of the long ritual isn't to force the player to act out a 6-hour rain dance in real-time, but to perhaps interest the player in the possibility of whether or not it works and to send the characters off in new directions of exploration to see what is/isn't possible.

This seems like a social contract issue, not a rules issue: why do you distrust your players so much that you need to make sure they don't screw up the shared game world? Isn't this a case of "only ruining their own fun"? There are numerous discussions here on the Forge about these sorts of issues at the table and about trusting your players and not playing with people you don't trust: who need to be controlled "for their own good" that can be found by digging through the archives.

That isn't to say "anything goes" is the virtue being extolled, but I sense there's some unconscious hobby social attitudes coming into play -- GM-as-emperor, players-as-plebeians or some other sort of subtle adversarial player-GM concept -- that aren't being confronted up front. I may be wrong, of course.

Its not that I see the GM as an emperor -- I see him as a referee. The only reason roleplaying games have rules is to give the players ideas about how to accomplish actions in the game world, what their limits are, etc. I've always seen it as the GM's job to clarify the rules of the game-world specific to his own play group. In most games it is the GM's job to design the world (or at least the parts of it the players see), the NPC's, the encounters, the rewards, and the quests which the players are pursuing. Keeping in mind that the GM has to define the limits of the world and of the particular rules of the game, then it should also follow that he should at least be forewarned of a player idea that may prove disastrous ahead of time instead of just declaring in the middle of the game that it doesn't work (which seems much more petty). It's not the GM's job to antagonize or lord over the players, but to make sure that everyone has a good time playing the game.

With that said I've been doing more work on the system lately and have been moving toward a new direction for defining magic in the rule set lately since the old ideas have seemed to be fairly unsatisfactory.