What Makes a Great Magic System?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

One of the problems with magic in games is that people want it to feel different, more art than science, or something (I think people have difficulty expressing what they want, and may not even know exactly), and codifying it into a set of usable rules tends to make it feel mechanical. This leads to a lot of magic systems that are super-vague where your only real limit may be your fast-talk GM skill, which has its own flaws, or systems where a significant chunk of magic is simply off-limits to PCs.

My experience has been that an improvisational system with guidelines can do this fairly well. Both Mage: The Ascension and Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave me good results.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

My experience has been that an improvisational system with guidelines can do this fairly well. Both Mage: The Ascension and Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave me good results.

I tend to classify those as "your only real limit is your fast-talk GM skill".

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I tend to classify those as "your only real limit is your fast-talk GM skill".

I don't think that at all. There are quite clear guidelines and worked examples.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I tend to classify those as "your only real limit is your fast-talk GM skill".

That has often been my experience, with systems based on freeform and improvisation.

Ars Magica, which I haven't tried, looks different, though. There are fairly thorough guidelines. There isn't a whole lot of wiggle room for the GM to make things easier or harder for the player's characters if he wants to. I mean, he can, but then an offended player can pick up the rule book and whack the GM over the head, and point out that the GM objectively violated the rules.

I'm also concerned about systems based on "negotiations with spirits". Very likely, those spirits will be 100% an extension of the GM's will, rather than be played by the GM as NPCs each with their own agenda.

I like magic systems - RPG systems in general - that are designed.

To design is to think. To think in a particular anticipation-based fashion.

But it seems, depressingly so (but unsprisingly) that many favour a non-design approach, a non-think approach, to handling magic in RPGs.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I'm also concerned about systems based on "negotiations with spirits". Very likely, those spirits will be 100% an extension of the GM's will, rather than be played by the GM as NPCs each with their own agenda.

No more than any NPCs are. And I don't see why you'd even suppose otherwise.

Really, Peter, this chronic suspicion of GM motives and practice gets old. It rather seems as if you put more credence in your own a priori beliefs about how GMs act than you do in anything any of us might report about our own experience—and if that's so, you're not going to learn much from those reports.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Now, what I want is to tell an interesting story about magic. And one way to do it is to conceive of magical forces as mediated by spirits that have their own personalities, their own likes and dislikes, and their own attitudes toward people who approach them, and that have to be treated with respect. So that's an approach that I like.

We seem to have a number of different ways of dealing with magic in an RPG that are getting discussed as if they were the same thing. Let's try and tease that apart a bit and coin some terms. This is not a complete categorisation.

Magic as a tool: This is the classic RPG kind of magic, reasonably reliable, versatile, and generally used as a substitute for technology in "D&D-land" fantasy worlds. There's no possibility for characters within the world of denying its existence, although their attitudes to it may be quite assorted.

Magic as an edge: Settings where magic is rare, often secret, and mostly used within games for accomplishing things that are very hard or impossible without it. It's perfectly possible for this kind of magic to exist within a magic-as-routine-tool world if it can do things that the routine sort can't. It may well not be reliable, but someone who uses it can still have a fair idea of what he'll make happen, if it works.

Magic as a character: Settings where magic has some significant degree of personality, and dealing with it is at least partly a social issue. Shamanism is an example; so is the style of game you describe above. Such magic is strongly dependent on the caster and the spirit(s) he deals with, and there's no generally predictable results, although one can be reasonably confident about a particular working, given reasons.

What other categories have we seen in games?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by johndallman

We seem to have a number of different ways of dealing with magic in an RPG that are getting discussed as if they were the same thing. Let's try and tease that apart a bit and coin some terms. This is not a complete categorisation.

Magic as a tool: This is the classic RPG kind of magic, reasonably reliable, versatile, and generally used as a substitute for technology in "D&D-land" fantasy worlds. There's no possibility for characters within the world of denying its existence, although their attitudes to it may be quite assorted.

Magic as an edge: Settings where magic is rare, often secret, and mostly used within games for accomplishing things that are very hard or impossible without it. It's perfectly possible for this kind of magic to exist within a magic-as-routine-tool world if it can do things that the routine sort can't. It may well not be reliable, but someone who uses it can still have a fair idea of what he'll make happen, if it works.

Magic as a character: Settings where magic has some significant degree of personality, and dealing with it is at least partly a social issue. Shamanism is an example; so is the style of game you describe above. Such magic is strongly dependent on the caster and the spirit(s) he deals with, and there's no generally predictable results, although one can be reasonably confident about a particular working, given reasons.

What other categories have we seen in games?

For me, there is also magic as an art. If you want, say, to build a building, there certainly are scientific principles of structural statics and strength of materials, and there are engineering/technology issues to be dealt with. But beyond that, there is the sense of design to fit the site and the function and the personality of the user, and that rests on the sensibility of the architect. And the same for the other arts. You can have inventions in music like diatonic harmony or chromatic modulation, and you can have paradigms like the classic popular song (verse, verse, bridge, verse), but exhaustive technical mastery of these doesn't ensure that you can make a tune that people will dance to or a song that they'll go away singing.

That's not quite the same as magic as a person, though it can feel that way; there's a reason writers talk about the Muse.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Magic as a tool: This is the classic RPG kind of magic, reasonably reliable, versatile, and generally used as a substitute for technology in "D&D-land" fantasy worlds. There's no possibility for characters within the world of denying its existence, although their attitudes to it may be quite assorted.

It doesn't have to be versatile.

Magic can still be a tool even if most spellcasters in the world are specialists as opposed to generalist casters. Magic can even remain a tool if some types of magic are unavailable in the world, e.g. magic to deal with nature/animals/plants/bodies/healing. Even if magic can only in fact do a fairly narrow range of things, as long as they have sufficient usefulness.

[(E)]

Originally Posted by johndallman

What other categories have we seen in games?

Magic as a mind altering experience. Users of magic are affected by using magic or at the least risk being affected.

One thing to consider is that most mages from written fiction are quite powerful. Even if magic isn't.

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

I would suggest that it's perfectly viable to have a knowable, quantifiable magic, but that it should generate a very different feel in setting to one in which magic is chaotic (by any definition).

That's interesting. But how would a chaotic magic work as a system? I think the players, the GM at the very least, need to understand the system in order for it to be fun and satisfying. So, if the system itself was chaotic, that could be tricky. But a consistent system that yielded somewhat unpredictable results could be fun, in the right setting.