What Makes a Great Magic System?

[vicky_molokh]

Ability to be applied intelligently, logically, and innovatively. This probably, but not necessarily, encourages picking MtA-like or Realm Magic-like systems, as they're very flexible. And being flexible encourages intelligent and innovative applications of your ability, and usually requires doing logical extrapolations. It's the sort of magic where being able to separate H20 into 2H2 and O2 can be used both for creating a large boom as a diversion, and for breathing underwater, as long as one analyzes the risks of both.

[The Colonel]

Expectations are going to play a part as well - players that expect wizards to shoot fireballs out of their fingers and generally act as self-propelled artillery are going to be narked by a system which requires hours of ritual to do anything. On the flip side, a wainscot fantasy campaign with flashy magic leaves everyone suspending their disbelief with a block and tackle.

Some people are going to enjoy a deep, complicated system with flavour, others just want to blow (stuff) up.

[robertsconley]

The magic system in the Dungeon Crawl Classic RPG is brilliant in how it makes magic dangerous and unpredictable to the practitioner. It achieves this by using a handful of charts. Only downside is that every spell has it own chart of results. But from playing it and hearing others play it, it doses this better than any other RPG out there.

I consider GURPS Magic is one of the most comprehensive and ready to run magic system out there.

Ars Magica is excellent at integrating magic into playing the life a mage character. The main downside is that while they provide ready made spells to use, it is nothing like GURPS Magic in terms of ready to run out of the box.

The same for GURPS Ritual Path Magic, good system but not a lot of ready made spells for the time-pressed.

Hero System and Fantasy Hero is the best for making novel magic system that have full set of mechanics that interacts well with the rest of the system. It is the most flexible system for magic out there. The downside it feels a lot like homework.

Classic D&D with it's vancian magic system is very easily grasped by the by the beginner. D&D 5e modifications to the basic ideas addresses a lot of the complaints about it. D&D 3.X version has list upon lists of spells to choose from and it is one of the few systems that exceeds the variety of GURPS Magic. So much that by choosing a selected subset of allowed spells you can alter the feel of magic for a campaign.

I personally was able to make several different system of magic out of classic D&D for my Majestic Wilderlands that felt very different from each other despite leaving the spells themselves untouched. Mostly by changing how spells are casted and memorized.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Shostak

It would be nice to read what you folks have found are the elements which make a magic system a joy to use for both GMs and players. For me, the extreme variety offered by GURPS Thaumatology is compelling, and even GURPS Magic 4e by itself seems wonderful. They are adaptable to any setting I've been able to imagine, and any of the spells thought to be unbalanced can simply be made unavailable by a discriminating GM. But, I don't have a particularly wide range of experience with systems (AD&D, and the GURPS precursor of sorts, TFT, decades ago) to compare.

The magic system for The Fantasy Trip [TFT] had three elements that I would think make a magic system a joy to use. The first is that it was playtested to remove ambiguities from the write-up of the individual spells. Can you cast an illusion on the other side of a locked door and then use it to tell what's on the other side? No, and that's not something the GM has to think about, it was baked into the spell description. As Steve Jackson said in an article, you know you've got a good system when it can be played solitaire.

Second, the spells available should let a wizard be tricky. Steve Jackson's classic example was Image/Illusion/Create. If a Warrior steps out of a hex of Darkness, the subject doesn't know if he's dealing with an image, an illusion or a creation. Disbelief was a maneuver that you had to declare in TFT and it was only effective against illusions, not images or creations. An image would dissipate if attacked but then you couldn't claim disbelief and a creation was like a character, it went away when it ran out of hit points and not before. The subject had an interesting set of choices and unless he knew more than a little about the spell-casting psychology of the particular wizard, not much choice but pick one and hope for the best.

The third effect was that the interactions of stacking one spell effect on another had been considered in playtesting as well.

One thing about the GURPS spells as powers system is that, like Fantasy Hero, you can build any spell but it sometimes seems like more bother than it's worth. Another thing that applies more to Fantasy Hero than GURPS was that analysing what effects were appropriate to a spell of a particular type was a bigger pain in the rump than it was in GURPS 3e as you had to decide that a fireball should have an energy blast effect linked to darkness for the accompanying smoke and maybe a flash effect for singed eyelashes temporarily blinding you.

A good thing about GURPS 3e Magic as skills was that it had a good set of rules for creating magic items, and improvising magic grafted onto the spells as skills system quite nicely, which gave you a framework that allowed considerable versatility.

One element I don't like is the chart heavy, overly particular style of Rolemaster's Spell Law. Magic, both in folklore and literature doesn't require separate spells for healing bones, bleeding, and tissue, so I don't expect it in a role-playing magic system.

I'm not recommending a system as such but those are key elements I'd look for.

[simply Nathan]

Things I should be able to do with magic:

- Throw a ball of flaming HP reduction at my enemies. One combat turn.

- Throw non-fire projectiles of HP reduction at my enemies. One combat turn.

- Put enemies to sleep without wounding them. One combat turn or maybe two, but that's really pushing its utility down.

- Heal wounds. One combat turn.

- Teleport myself (and in group games, the party) in a manner that skips the boring wilderness travel from Dungeon to Town so we can go back to Town and sell loot and rest up for the next adventure.

- Teleport myself (and in group games, the party) from where we are in the dungeon back to the surface in an emergency situation, even if it means leaving a bunch of loot behind.

- Teleport myself (and in group games, the party) from the dungeon's entrance to the deepest area we've been to so we don't have to wade through mountains of kobolds every time we want to slay a dragon.

It should work like this:

I declare the spell I want to cast and the subject. I pay an energy cost from a pre-determined pool (MP, ER, FP, whatever you want to call it). Optionally roll for skill/success/failure. Spell takes its effects as stated in the book; if this derails "plot", then "plot" was dumb and it's a good thing we skipped it.



TFT is missing healing because spells are cast from a pool that bleeds into Hit Points. GURPS DF is missing the teleportation variants. Most of my favorite videogames with any sort of magic in them contained the majority of these effects.

And yeah, I'm being at least partly tongue-in-cheek. I just really prefer systems that let me do these things on this timescale without hassle.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by simply Nathan

I just really prefer systems that let me do these things on this timescale without hassle.

I, on the other hand, have become quite tired of magic systems like you describe. My fantasy setting is very limited on direct damage options, and has no instant "have some HP back" style healing, and casting times are typically measured in minutes.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by RyanW

I, on the other hand, have become quite tired of magic systems like you describe. My fantasy setting is very limited on direct damage options, and has no instant "have some HP back" style healing, and casting times are typically measured in minutes.

The only reason Sagatafl and my Ärth setting has direct damage spells is because of legacy, since the Ärth world was originally based on someone else's RPG system, Quest FRP, which had such spells.

By the time I gave up trying to GURPSify Quest FRP, and instead decided to resume development of what was then called FFRE, there was more than enough backstory legacy for the Ärth NPCs to make it impossible to surgically remove the combat time-scale direct damage spells.

I don't mind those spells being there.

They're not as crazy as AD&D and D&D3 having a low-level area-of-effect damage spell. Fireball is a 3rd level spell, on a scale from 0th or 1st up through 9th level, and with a huge area. Sagatafl's spell scale goes from 1st to 6th level, and the only area-of-effect damage spells you get are puny-area 5th level ones and somewhat-larger-area 6th level ones (but still not the hundreds of square feet of AD&D's Fireball), although they are still combat time-scale (with a Casting Time Increment of 1 Round, meaning you usually cast them in 2-10 Rounds depending on your skill and on how strong your Focus item is, and of course whether you want to take the risk of trying to cast a 6th level spell at all; best case scenario is you turn your familiar into a horny catgirl, but most casting Fumbles, especially of 6th level spells, are actually unpleasant).

But if I were to start over from scratch, those spells wouldn't have been there.

(I've also seriously thought about making parts of the Ärth setting the equivalent of a "Low Mana" area, specifically for spells from the Element category, but ultimately decided against it, since that would boil down to screwing the players depending on which area the campaign started in, and I'm against GMs having sex with players.)

Instant healing isn't available as learnable spells. There I did put my foot down, relative to Quest FRP.

You get the equivalent of some characters being able to learn and cast spells to temporarily give others Rapid Healing or even slow Regeneration (such spells aren't CTI 1 round, nor do they need to be), and things like that, but insta-healing is only for inborn Powers, such as Virgin Powers, Divine Powers and Royal Powers (think unicorn-riding maidens, Abrahamic prophets with healing hands, and dudes like Aragorn, respectively), which are explicitly rare in in-world demographics terms.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Ability to be applied intelligently, logically, and innovatively. This probably, but not necessarily, encourages picking MtA-like or Realm Magic-like systems, as they're very flexible. And being flexible encourages intelligent and innovative applications of your ability, and usually requires doing logical extrapolations. It's the sort of magic where being able to separate H20 into 2H2 and O2 can be used both for creating a large boom as a diversion, and for breathing underwater, as long as one analyzes the risks of both.

I don't agree with this. First of all, it tends to make the mage master-of-all-situations, and so there's no need to have a party. Secondly, I think that it's the restrictions more than the flexibility of the system that channel intelligence and innovations. And your example points to this - a restricted ability (being able to split water) is used for two very different applications. In a very flexible system you can just improvise "Create Explosion" and "Breathe Underwater" spells.

But that's just me.

[Michael Cule]

What I want is something that allows me to build new spells from first principles and is so detailed and supported that I don't have to very often.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anders

I don't agree with this. First of all, it tends to make the mage master-of-all-situations, and so there's no need to have a party. Secondly, I think that it's the restrictions more than the flexibility of the system that channel intelligence and innovations. And your example points to this - a restricted ability (being able to split water) is used for two very different applications. In a very flexible system you can just improvise "Create Explosion" and "Breathe Underwater" spells.

But that's just me.

Oh, restrictions are certainly important. But the sort of restrictions there are makes a system flexible or rigid. Usually it's a difference between a tool-spell and an outcome-spell*. The former is being like 'split water' and the latter being like 'remove penalty for not being able to breathe'. GURPS traits are generally closer to the latter type - they grant specific narrow effects, no matter how they're achieved; Doesn't Breathe can represent an anaerobic metabolism, or an air-creating spell, or an internal superdimensional supply of air so large that it is unlikely to ever end throughout the campaign.

* == Note that this is a simplistic explanation of a spectrum on which spells only have relative, not absolute, positions.