Designing holistic versus gamist magic systems?

Tony Vargas said:

IDK, I read the article and the original thread and this one, and I feel like a very simple cogent point being made by said article is missed or ignored or bulldozed or something:


Magic in traditional TTRPGs like D&D fails to model or evoke magic in the sources of inspiration they nominally draw from.

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There is no model that encapsulates the magic shown in the sources of inspiration. It's hard for rules to model something that has no predictable pattern to start with. We've built rules in the past that model some subset of sources combined with out own biases/expectations though. A Lord Darcy style campaign gave particular attention to sympathy and contagion correspondences, for example, and required time and preparation to pull off anything but simple tricks.

But spinning straw to gold, preaching so well even the birds listen, or casting curses only broken by the kiss from the right person, are difficult to model holistically in a way where the practitioners are in any way comparable to (and thus playable with) more normal folk.

Nagol said:

There have been less mechanistic systems but they tend to be more free narrative Mage: the Ascension sort of tried to cross Ars Magica with a narrative system. FATE, using magics as aspects, tends this way strongly.

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Nagol said:

There is no model that encapsulates the magic shown in the sources of inspiration. It's hard for rules to model something that has no predictable pattern to start with.

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Except magic in the source material /does/ follow patterns, they're just patterns in the unfolding drama of the narrative, not in the (non-existent) underlying reality of the implied 'magic system.'

But spinning straw to gold, preaching so well even the birds listen, or casting curses only broken by the kiss from the right person, are difficult to model holistically in a way where the practitioners are in any way comparable to (and thus playable with) more normal folk.

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A gnome who can spin straw into gold - but not mind-control people, render himself invulnerable with shields of force, throw balls of fire, etc, etc, etc (so, y'know, not as powerful as a 5th level MU ...if you take the straw-into-gold thing as a trick, like Fool's Gold) - though, not so unplayable along side normal (or, heroic) folk. In fact, he's more likely a McGuffin, a plot device, than a character. Same with the cursor ...er… being inflicting the curse.
The middle one, could be a poetic flourish, or it could be literal, but still not necessarily problematic - indeed, more than the other two, might not even need to be 'magic' ..ahem.. in the traditional sense.

Designing a magic system that feels magical may be impossible. Personally, I’ve NEVER seen an RPG magic system that felt numinous, largely because they all have to fit into the RPG system and be understood by the players.

Dannyalcatraz said:

Designing a magic system that feels magical may be impossible. Personally, I’ve NEVER seen an RPG magic system that felt numinous, largely because they all have to fit into the RPG system and be understood by the players.

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Numinous magic is in a war with playability, and bookkeeping tends to win because if the system is fiddly then it won't "feel" numinous. It is after all a feeling we are going for here.

The system doesn't have to be understood by the players, but if the system isn't understood by the players then the amount of things the GM is keeping track of increases beyond the level they can handle.

Plus, if you are entirely relying on the players not understanding the system, then in the long run its going to fail if only because at some point players will read the GM's rules.

If you want a magic system that has the kinds of things that might be historically relevant you should find a copy of Bruce Galloway's Fantasy Wargaming. There were not spells per se but instead of you defined what you wanted to do, then the GM looked all all the related modifiers (materials, time of day, aspect of moon, and more) and then the player made a roll against it.

It seemed terribly complicated and I definitely would see players building spells any way much like if you use a cosmic power pool in HERO system you build common powers you want to normally use but then might build a special power if you needed to.

I include the GM as a player for these purposes. If even that person is sitting there looking at the game and not able to understand the magic, that person won’t run the game.

People have been throwing around quantum mechanics ideas in this thread, so let me join in. There is an observer effect going on. The act of making a system of magic that works in a game invariably makes the magic seem less magical. Why? Because we’re observing the way things actually work within that described game world, which demystifies what we’re observing.

If only the GM can look under the hood, the other players might feel the magic in the magic system, but they might perceive something else entirely.

If, for example Amy’s PC and Bob’s PC can both cast a “Fireball” spell, but they have different effects, one or both may think Carl the GM is playing favorites. Or that Carl doesn’t understand how “Fireball” works.

Tony Vargas said:

IDK, I read the article and the original thread and this one, and I feel like a very simple cogent point being made by said article is missed or ignored or bulldozed or something:


Magic in traditional TTRPGs like D&D fails to model or evoke magic in the sources of inspiration they nominally draw from.

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That's only because games need rules to play, "magic" in folk lore is literally anything the people of the time didn't understand sufficiently to explain in more cogent and detailed terms. Arthur C. Clarke isn't wrong about sufficiently advanced technology in the view of a Weyland the Smith making "magic" swords that are just exceptionally well made and hardened. Take the idea that a really Weyland did have a way to make really awesome swords, not like Vorpal Swords or sharped using sunshine awesome, but exceptionally well crafted and a century or two later we get Weyland forged magical blades.

On the basis that knowning something will happen and using math to show that thing did happen, and understanding why that thing happened are very different beasts. For example there's a great deal of things in physics that we know happen, can use math to demonstrate will continue to happen, and then when observed happen like the math says. However, when questioned about why that thing happened physicists have to shrug and say, "Don't know, just does, working on it."

Additional replies on a fiction stand point versus game stand point. I'm going to borrow Brandon Sanderson's essays on magic. This applies as much to superpowers in comics to magic in D&D. Magic is effectively anything that is impossible by today's standards. Just to get that out of the way. I'm aware Sanderon is offering advice for prospective authors, but since a game designer is authoring rules I figure the advice is still pretty solid.

Magic can be a sliding scale from do anything we need as needed, no rules, it does what the author/game designer wants whenever we want as needed to achieve or our intended results. Howard and Tolkien are towards this end of the scale (Howard in particular). We'll call this 0% Rules. At the other end we have rules based magic where we know exactly what it can do, how much it can do it, under what circumstances, what the limits of the magic are, and what any drawbacks it might have include. In effect we know exactly the full scope of the magic and can use it to describe all possible effects with the magic. We'll call this 100% Rules. Newtonian Physics basically works like this, D&D magic is pretty darn close to this as well. In essence in a 100% Rules system the fun is playing with the buttons and seeing what happens, but you're limited to what the buttons do.

0% Rules magic systems aren't that common in fiction, even less so in games. Tolkien for example is not a full 0% Rules, although Howard is darn close. This type of magic tends to leave the reader/viewer/player in awe never knowing exactly what it can do. This is the place where Sam's astonishment at the elf rope comes in because it is magic (from our previous definition), but to an elf it's just well made rope. This also the place where Thulsa Doom turns into snake, or that evil sorcerer summons a demon, or whatever, and Conan stabs it in the face. The important part is the heroes never know what to expect, at least not fully. This is a great system where magic creates trouble for our erstwhile heroes, it is not a great system for our heroes to engage themselves with because 1) in a game the players need to know what they're doing, 2) the GM needs to be able to adjudicate the effects on the game and 3) the GM needs to either have rules they know and the players don't to be able to decide what happens, otherwise the GM just makes it up on the spot to facilitate the game's fiction at that moment.

The 100% rules more or less like real world physics. They describe every possible action/interaction, again I can't think of anything that is 100% Rules in either fiction or games. Asimov's Three Laws are the closest I can think of, he got a ton of leverage from three very simple rules. That's not the kind of magic we want though.

Most systems operate somewhere in the middle, some closer to one end of the spectrum or the other. D&D is closer to the 100% side, I'd say 70% to 80% solid rules. Its not higher because the game just lets the authors randomly add whatever they want, but once we do it works that way all of the time. FATE is close to the 0% Rule, maybe 20% to 30% rules depending on the setting and GM/player world choices, using FATE for a Sanderson setting is pushing you into the 80% to 90% range just because its Sanderson and that's what he likes. All you need to establish is Magic Can Do Things That Are Impossible as an Aspect for the game and bingo, that's your rules.

I'd also say some of the issues are functions of presentation for game play. For example the magic sword is in fiction such Cortana or Excalibur need a game function in the game to differentiate them from say that random guy's sword over there. So we have a rule in the game about what a regular old sword do, and then we have a rule about what a magic sword does. Clearly the magic sword is different (usually "better" in some way) than a regular sword, otherwise why bother having different rules? And lets be honest, folklore differentiates between Mjolnir and a regular hammer. The dwarves that forge it are supernaturally skilled smiths.

As another example from the article we seem to keep talking about: Antimagic zones in D&D. Most European folklore doesn't have a place where all magical things and doodads stop being magic temporarily for sure. But the idea is mostly a D&Dism anyways to make the game work a particular way. Its an intrinsic part of D&D.

Dannyalcatraz said:

Designing a magic system that feels magical may be impossible. Personally, I’ve NEVER seen an RPG magic system that felt numinous, largely because they all have to fit into the RPG system and be understood by the players.

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I think that's the issue right there. "System" and "numinous" are at cross purposes.

I have had RPG moments that have felt numinous, but they have typically had little to do with "system", and more to do with atmosphere and immersion.

Beleriphon said:

Magic can be a sliding scale from do anything we need as needed, no rules, it does what the author/game designer wants whenever we want as needed to achieve or our intended results. Howard and Tolkien are towards this end of the scale (Howard in particular). We'll call this 0% Rules. At the other end we have rules based magic where we know exactly what it can do, how much it can do it, under what circumstances, what the limits of the magic are, and what any drawbacks it might have include. In effect we know exactly the full scope of the magic and can use it to describe all possible effects with the magic. We'll call this 100% Rules. Newtonian Physics basically works like this, D&D magic is pretty darn close to this as well.

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It is and it isn't. Let me return to that point about the fact that D&D has always looked at magic from two points of view. The first viewpoint is what can PC's do with magic, and it tends to toward 100% rules with magic as a sort of technology that is available to the PCs for them to use to solve problems in comparatively tightly defined ways. So a PC in D&D is used to being able to cast fireball, tightly define where the fireball is targeted, and then essentially know the stakes of the proposition before hand because they know precisely how fireball works.

But at the exact same time, D&D in the larger sense of the imagined game world that D&D takes place in and not just a rules set is largely a product of Gygaxian fiction, and Gygaxian fiction is heavily a product of pulp fantasy authors like Howard who have a fiction closer to 0% rules. And Gygaxian fiction has always assumed that for the purposes of creating fiction, magic as a system and as is available to the PC need not apply. So Gygaxian fiction, and by extension D&D fiction, has always validated having magic as this weird inexplicable force capable of doing whatever the narrative needs when it is outside of the control of the PCs. This is the world of D&D were you have gems growing on trees, magic fountains that bring strange blessings on the drinker, and magical "slot machines" that impose weird effects on those that dare play them. It's the world where a curse takes a sentient form and has fairy tale powers, where ghosts rise from the dead because of the gruesome circumstances of their death, and demiplanes were time and the laws of space are weird, and artifacts break the laws of the game with respect to magic. This is that part of Gygaxian dungeon design where he wants you to invent and put a "Special" in the dungeon.

All of that is going on at the same time as the "magic as science" system that the PC's have access to. What's never actually been done in D&D is any really extensive functional attempt to let PC's step over that line and get into the weirdness. In other words, very rarely and only in limited ways has D&D ever validated that the PC can grow to be more than a practitioner of magic, into a master of the esoteric and arcane arts. I think Gygax had some vague ideas in mind about this, and we can see it in the 1e AD&D DMG in what Gygax had in mind about PC magic users researching their own spells, making their own scrolls, brewing their own potions, and generally stepping off into the weird. But because Gygax always left this up to the imagination of the DM and put such hard restrictions on it, in practice nothing really came off it. There was never a supplement for generating the rules implied by Gygax's suggestions, and because it was so burdensome for everyone involved and so entirely the purview of the DM, little ever came of it.

When 3e tried to reconcile the PC world with the NPC world by giving PC's and NPC's a unified rules system, the problem was that it was far easier to stick to a simple mechanistic system to describe making a magic item than it was to get into the details that Gygax wanted to push the game towards. And without the fluff and esoteric ingredients lists and creation processes, instead of letting PC's step off into the weird it just broadened the scope of what was in the PC's engineering training. You mention presentation for game play, and I think that you are exactly right that this is a big part of it. Compare the feel of outlaying 12000 g.p. to the requirement to discover and assemble an esoteric ingredient list. The former not only doesn't feel like anything but a game move, but it implies the existence of some Magic Mart out there with off the shelf components for making a DIY Staff of Power. And again, without doing the heavy lifting for the DMs, your going to have games that just handwave all of the numinous weirdness away until you get to something that feels entirely game-y in nature.

Umbran said:

I think that's the issue right there. "System" and "numinous" are at cross purposes

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I think this really is the heart of it; as soon as there are rules by which something can be understood, it fails the sense-of-wonder check. In fact, this has been demonstrated in the thread; those of us who have physics training see nothing numinous in the slit experiment or collapse of probabilities. It's math, it's predictable and explicable and we don't feel a sense fo the divine behind it happening. The fact that we cannot exactly tell something's position and velocity is likewise just a consequence of the known rules which we understand and use naturally. For those who have passing's acquaintance with the rules of physics, or even no knowledge of them, it's much more magical.

Magic in D&D is likewise predictable and rule-driven. It's designed that way and it's fun to play the rules to best effect. Dave has fire-resistance up, so I can throw a fireball into the pool knowing that 6d6 will average 21 points and with his 20 points of fire resistance and 80 hits, he's unlikely to take more than 10-20% of his available damage and has a 50-50 chance of being unscathed. Mechanical, rules-based, fun to work out, no sense of wonder.

Contrast that to a magic system such as a loose FATE based system. I am going to summon fire into the room. Dave has the aspect "skin of ice". What's going to happen? It's much, much less clear. A reasonable possibility is that I "create a hazard" and roll for how dangerous it is (say on the scale of -1 to +6) and then Dave tried to overcome it with endurance, tagging his skin for a +2 bonus. That might be the usual effect, but today the GM offers a compel on my aspect of "elemental summoner" and it turns out we have summoned an actual fire elemental. Or the house collapses. Or the latrines explode. Magic is much less knowable.

I run a classic deadlands campaign, and there, when a magician draws a black joker, all kinds of badness might occur. There are a fair number of player-facing rules, so most of the time the player will see two pairs, reach for 3d6 and roll damage, but occasionally he'll roll a black joker and the GM will flick to unknown pages, roll a dice and say random things to him, such as "nothing seems to happen, right now" or "the spell targets you; roll damage" or "the manitou jumps out of you and attacks your friends".

For me, a "numinous" magical feel needs to allow the GM to essentially make up random and have it happen. It requires trust, but if the player knows the rules by which the magic works fully, it just won;'t have a sense of wonder.