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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7636794" data-attributes="member: 19857">Okay, right from the start I see some problems with the article (beyond the ones that Celebrim gets into), so maybe some clarification would help me.  The author says this:So here's the problem - in myth and folklore and Tolkien and everywhere else that has magic like this, there is no "system".  The folks who came up with these stories didn't work out underlying rules of magic - magical stuff just happens because of "reasons".  The reasons will vary from story to story but because it is a story you don't have to have an underlying mechanical system - things just happen because, well, "the gods" or "demons" or "fairies" or "witches" or even just "magic".  As soon as you define a system that can be used in a game, you end up with rules - rules that either the player knows or that the GM knows.  But if there are rules, then there are people who study the rules and will figure them out.And that seems to be what the author wants (correct me if I'm off here) because they say later that there should be a pattern that is "hidden" from the players.  But that isn't how magic works in folklore - I mean it is in the sense that stories from folklore follow predictable narrative beats that lit critics and ethnologists can talk your ears off for days on end about, and the magic involved in folklore is often to underscore a lesson to be taught or a warning to be given, but that's not quite the same thing as having a "hidden system of magic".  Magicians in folklore know their magic is going to work because they're magicians and they know the rules about how their magic works - the rules are often hidden from the protagonists of the stories (and the listeners) and actual magicians are almost never the protagonists of the story (I'm sure someone will come up with folkloric examples where this is false, but I can't think of any).  It isn't like Merlin or Baba Yaga are depicted as not understanding what they're doing - far from it, the folklore has them understanding exactly what they're doing and what makes them scary and magical is that nobody else knows how they do it.  As soon as you have magic using player characters who need to have their actions codified into game rules, you have lost that aspect of folkloric magic and have turned magic into something explicable to the players (if not reliable or consistent - as the author says you can have systems that introduce randomness into the mix if you want, it just doesn't give you the feel of mythic or folkloric magic).If this is what you're going for, one way to get this kind of feel for magic in your gameworld is to remove spellcasters from it as PCs and have all of your spellcasters be mysterious NPCs whose magic works in ways that are inexplicable to the players.  Only allow PCs to access magic through magical items that have effects that don't impact the numbers on their game sheet - like a mortar and pestle that grows to a large size and lets them fly across the sky by climbing inside, or dragon teeth that sprout skeletons from the ground when tossed, climbing ropes that untie themselves when the owner wants them to, etc.</blockquote>

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