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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dbm" data-source="post: 8097355" data-attributes="member: 8014">I’ve played many different non-D&D fantasy RPGs and campaigns over the years. One of the great things about magic is there is no way to ‘fact check’ how it works, and so when you are creating a campaign world you can have magic work however best suits your needs! D&D began with very differentiated classes of characters, so it made sense to have magic-users and clerics have very different powers. The ideas of ‘good magic’ and ‘bad magic’ are pretty entrenched in real-world belief systems, though since no one actually goes around in reality casting Cure Wounds or Fireball it’s all moot from that perspective.So, if you are creating a campaign world where you want magic to have a specific feel and promote a certain way for the world to function / look then I suggest you approach your system decisions from that perspective. In Harry Potter magic is learned, though someone needs to have talent. An individual might be better at spells, or potions, or so on, but they are all still using the same ‘kind’ of magic as far as I understand it (watched the films, haven’t read the books). Wizard of Earthsea is another good example of this, where there are different facets of magic that can be learned but all the Wizards of Roke are members of the same magical tradition covering both healing and destructive arts (and more besides).I’m a fan of Savage Worlds, and their magic system is fairly light-weight at its core but you can add in tonnes of detail and flavour as you want to. The base question here is whether you want to have separate Arcane Backgrounds available? For people not familiar, in SW these are different sources of power, and in the core book there are five presented. They govern four or five key things: starting number of powers, starting number of power points, what happens on a crit fail, what special Edges you have available to you and sometimes they have mandatory ‘trappings‘ that need to be applied to your abilities. Many of the developed settings flesh out these backgrounds further, or add completely new ones. If you want your world to have several magical traditions then Arcane Backgrounds are a good way of implementing this, along with related Edges that are restricted to specific Backgrounds.When I’m not playing D&D (or a game derived from it) then I rarely find the Arcane / Divine split so hard-coded in, and the games tend to run fine as long as they are supporting what the GM and game-world needs. There are lots of other ways to classify magic, like in Ars Magica with verb / noun system of magic (Fireball would be a Creo Ignem spell there). GURPS base magic system is a highly scholastic system (e.g. before you learn to cast fireball you need to learn to both create fire and control fire which are separate spells in their own right). Some system give every defined class their own set of powers and spells without grouping them under an arcane / divine grouping; Dragon Warriors had sorcerors, mystics, elementalists and warlocks each with their own list of powers but all, ultimately, just using ‘magic’ to fuel these powers.They were all good at what they were doing and produced fun (and different) magic to play.</blockquote>

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