Mysterious magic

Long time no post, but this one caught my eye.

One thing I've been working on for a while now is a magic system in which there is in fact a deliberate analogy formulated between players and characters with respect to magic. That is, neither really know what it is or why or how it works. And yet, of course, they do it anyway, because they want the effects (or power, or whatever).

See, my notion is that in a lot of gaming, or all of it at some level or another, we're really making a lot of stuff up on the basis of a general "feel" for what's reasonable and proper. Lots of things affect this, of course, but we decide what our characters do, or how the world works, or whatever, based on a feeling. Rules guide this, obviously-- system does matter.

Now suppose you have a system in which magic works exactly the same way, i.e. in which the players make it up as they go along, guided by some general principles of feel. And suppose further -- this is essential -- that the GM doesn't have absolute knowledge of how it works either, but also goes with the flow more or less.

My theory is that what happens is this: the PC's go along trying to figure out magic, just as the players do. The PC's do magic by strange, elliptical, and utlimately rather personal means; the players, similarly, go with what seems to work and what makes sense to them. In the process, over time, the whole group develops an increasing "feel" for what should work, and very roughly why. The more the players (including GM) gain confidence with working on a feel system, the more the PC's of course can manipulate magic to their ends, because to put it simply if the player has a better idea what will happen when she does X, she is more likely to do it at an appropriate time, and thus the PC will use X sort of magic more often. Thus player confidence with a system that they know isn't really consistent leads to PC confidence with a magic that they at least suspect isn't really consistent.

The other factor that gets thrown into this is that events happening in the game-world, not to mention NPC's and whatnot, are all grist for the mill, and what's more do magic their own selves. This adds apparent "data", and the very human tendency (in players and PC's) to find some sort of explanation for incoherent data (cf. conspiracy theory) will provide highly personal but equally workable partial theories of what magic is and why it works.

In the final analysis, you have a magic system that isn't a system at all, that isn't consistent or predictable at any level, and which no two players in the same game would explain the same way. But the group playing this particular game right here, right now, would have developed a way of manipulating what amounts to meaning and their group memory of events that would be perfectly satisfying and seem entirely logical in some way.

This does work, incidentally, but it's a long-term process. I've never found a way to speed it up, which points to at least one major limitation. When I have done it, I used Tarot cards, but ditched all but the most surface meanings, and used stock ones for that. To do magic, you throw down a Trump and interpret the situation, explaining how this magical force represented by the Trump is going to change things somehow. And then everyone sort of muddles along seeing what happens. Eventually certain sorts of events are "obviously" Hermit events, and certain characters become "obviously" The Lovers, and so forth. But it's never exactly clear why, or what that connection means, nor most especially what you can do about it. You just sort of make it up as you go along. The PC's, in turn, are making it up based on personal magical perspectives, such as ritual demonology, or alchemy, or astrology, or whatever, and so while the analogy of player to PC is not absolute it's at least parallel.

Anyway, just a thought.

Chris Lehrich
[back from the dead]