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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Afrodyte" data-source="post: 5066214" data-attributes="member: 8713">A criticism I've had of most magic systems, freeform or no, is how effortless it is. I really don't mind powerful magic. I actually like it. What I do mind is magic that just happens . . . because. I guess I could blame lazy design, since so many magic systems detail what you can do rather than how it works.It'd be great to come across a magic system that really dug into the nature of magic (at least in the context of the game world). What if magic was simply raw possibility shaped through the will? What if the various symbols and rituals and practices, far from being innately magical, are just ways of focusing the will through actions, words, ideas, and symbols that have mythic, cultural, and personal resonance? What if the measure of magical power is not the scale of an effect but how close it comes to pure will-working (the most powerful form being doing something with a mere thought)? It's one thing to cause a thunderstorm by using complex rituals and incantations. It's another thing to make a tornado simply by spinning your finger in the air.What if the main difficulty of magic is not pulling it off but controlling the outcome? Maybe summoning a demon is pretty straight-forward, but the reason why people don't do it all the time is because demons are frickin' dangerous and very hard to control. Perhaps zapping your enemy with a bolt of lightning is pretty simple, but the problem is that it might cause a city-wide blackout.I'm not sure how I'd do this with D20, but with new!Mage, I'd change the system drastically. Instead of using Gnosis + Sphere the primary dice pool for casting magic, I'd make that Resolve + Sphere. Resolve measures your innate desire to make things happen while Sphere represents your understanding of a particular aspect of reality; your Sphere rating doesn't limit how you can use it. Foci such as incantations, props, symbols, etc. add to dice pools for casting spells. Given enough time, knowledge, and resources, there'd be little that a magician could not do.Which makes mages pretty scary.</blockquote>

Verification