Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deadguy" data-source="post: 1331493" data-attributes="member: 2480">'Sense of wonder' and 'magic' rarely go together in an adventuring-style RPG. Generally because most of the ideas bandied about to introduce a sense of wonder are really means to introduce a greater sense of uncertainty about the effects and effectiveness of magic. When your character is relying on this magic to survive it's a lot to ask of the player that his best ability is really hit-and-miss, and likley open to DM fiat.   (To put it in context, I have played Mage, both the modern day and Sorcerers Crusade varieties. This system comes the closest to potentially having wondrous magic. We make it work in the renaissance game by agreeing to always adjudicate magic in the group, and not leave it to the Storyteller alone. But even here we have settled on various paradigms that give a fairly clear indication of what can be achieved. Without it the game feels too arbitrary.)  I would say rather that what we need to strive for is a sense of the fantastical in magic. It's the keystone of a fantasy campaign, and often the major factor that colours the feeling of the setting. Yet too often the magic used feels very 'ordinary', very much analagous to technological solutions, or derived from a 'scientific' outlook. Spells that do things based on the principles of magic and the design of the world (e.g. conjuring tiny demons to infect your target with a plague) are more flavourful and interesting. In my opinion, of course! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification