Quote:
Originally Posted by dfinlay
I have found that it is near-impossible to have magic feel mysterious and eldritch while allowing PCs to get their hands on it.
There are a few issues: if you give magic to players, you sort of have to explain it to them and that decreases some of it's mystique. Another issue is that players tend to (reasonably and realistically) start to view it as another tool in their toolbox. Even putting harsh consequences on its use doesn't seem to fix that. I ran a game with a homebrew system that was vaguely like Threshold, but with Threshold 0 (magic is volatile and dangerous and every spell can go out of control, but the more magic you've recently used, the more likely it is to go out of control). That led to two types of mage PCs that I noticed. There were those who embraced the risk and still overused magic, revelling in every backlash and there were those who internally preformed a cost-benefit analysis for each spell. While this was cool, neither was what I'm talking about. It's hard to think of magic as a primal cosmic force when performing a CBA of it vs a shovel for making a hole.
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Sanderson's Laws of Magic are some important keywords here. Cost-Benefit Analyses are just part of life, especially for humans in Anglo culture, so I don't think you can get away from them.
One simple option with Threshold Magic would be keeping the backlash table secret. Sanderson's Laws explain why there have to be clear rules governing player-accessible magic, but nothing says that the
players have to know more than "overusing magic has risks ranging from X to (in legends) Y. Track the following information and warn the GM whenever you ... he may ask you to roll more dice." Another is making plenty of magical things not be systematic, such as magic items with an assortment of cool and unique effects, individualistic monsters and spirits, etc. Nothing says that every magic sword has to be +1 to skill and able to cast Flaming Weapon from a dedicate Powerstone, or that every walking corpse has to have standardized abilities chosen from a monster manual and available in game terms on an Occultism roll.