Magic-tech - A Story of Love and Hate

Magic-tech - love it or loath it?

  • Love it!

    Votes: 78 40.8%
  • Meh - couldn't care really

    Votes: 58 30.4%
  • Loath it!

    Votes: 38 19.9%
  • Magic-what?

    Votes: 17 8.9%

Daniel Knight

First Post
Magic-tech. Love it or loath it?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, after having had a chat with one of my players and seeing a couple of threads on the boards. It seems to be a topic that people have a very strong opinion about.

And I’d love to hear yours. :)
 

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Ah! Ah! I am the first to vote!!

I voted "I love it", but need to explain what I love, because I could also have written "I loath it".

1) I loath Dragonstar which basically is the D&D classes plus laserguns and starships. That is, I loath when you simply add high technology to D&D basic heroic fantasy.

2) I love the idea of a world with contemporary or futuristic technology, but where magic would also exist. However, in this case, magic would be a dark and unreliable things that few people know about and more rarely use. Something more akin to Call of Cthulhu magic / horror. So in terms of game rules, a Grim Tales game (I even don't like very much d20 modern magic which is too D&D for my taste).

Another stuff I like, is when magic opposes technology and the two are incompatible, as in the game below (Amethyst).

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Edit: unless you are speaking of a world where technology is based on magic instead of science (i.e.: cars propelled by magic instead of engines), which I loath...
 
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Daniel Knight said:
Magic-tech. Love it or loath it?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, after having had a chat with one of my players and seeing a couple of threads on the boards. It seems to be a topic that people have a very strong opinion about.

And I’d love to hear yours. :)
Oh bloody, have you been in my notes again?

In my new homebrew setting the Anceint Civilization had gotten magic and technolodgy so advanced they had factories that could create iron golems for as little as 50gp. This was seen as the high point of their era, after they completed these factories they started to wage war with each other. Soon after they unleasehed a magical plauge upon the world. The orginal poeple of it were long gone by the time the heros and the remaining few people from my old setting arrived on this world. It had been 4,000 years since the Magi-Tech factories had been used but several still work, and one travleing wizard already found out how to use it.
 

Cerubus Dark said:
In my new homebrew setting the Anceint Civilization had gotten magic and technolodgy so advanced they had factories that could create iron golems for as little as 50gp. This was seen as the high point of their era, after they completed these factories they started to wage war with each other. Soon after they unleasehed a magical plauge upon the world. The orginal poeple of it were long gone by the time the heros and the remaining few people from my old setting arrived on this world. It had been 4,000 years since the Magi-Tech factories had been used but several still work, and one travleing wizard already found out how to use it.

I suppose that this sort of idea really comes in handy when running epic level PCs beyond the 40th level...
 

I voted "loathe it".

I love a campaign setting where magic accomplishes what would otherwise be accomplished by technology. I loathe when a magic-based world still uses technology to accomplish with machines and tools what mages can do more easily.

I have no problem with a magic-tech future world, like that depicted in Shadowrun. And I have no problem with a sci-fi game. But my medieval-feel-fantasy game (D&D) has no magic-tech.
 


I had to go with "love it," but it's not a deep and abiding love. It's more of a "Hey, that's usually pretty cool" feeling.

I don't have one big reason for feeling this way, though; just a lot of little reasons. For one thing, I've never really been all that fond of traditional fantasy settings to begin with; I don't "get" them, I suppose. I wouldn't want to live in a world like that, so I find it hard to empathize with characters who do. Adding tech (whether magic-based, magic-separate, or magic-opposed) does tend to make the setting less depressingly standard and blah and more like a modern society (which I can understand and enoy), so I kinda like it.

Then there's the issue of magic itself. I still don't get it when people talk about "keeping magic mysterious" to explain why they don't like magic-tech; was it ever mysterious? There are extensive rules for magic, the mechanics of spellcasting work the same way every time (and any exception you find has been written up as a one-time "hey, look how weird this is, spells aren't behaving the way you'd expect them to, isn't that unusual?" thing), and about the only mystery older editions had in their magic systems that 3.0/3.5 doesn't is that the older editions didn't let PCs have any obvious, built-in way to do things like design spells or build magical items. And that really wasn't making magic mysterious, it was just making new spells and item creation a GM-only playground. So since I've always had the impression that D&D-style magic is a very orderly, predictable thing, mixing it with technology doesn't faze me at all. In fact, it usually adds new complications and possibilities to the generally-predictable magic system, and that can be fun.

Also, I like tech. I like it better than magic, and I like it better than powers. I've always preferred playing skill whore characters (PCs who know how to do a lot of mundane things, some of them extremely well) to playing powered characters (PCs with weird, beyond-human powers). Technology tends to favor the skilled over the powered, and I'm just selfish enough to enjoy that.

I even like the way most magic-tech settings state or imply that civilization is improving itself, discovering new things, setting higher goals, and generally making the world better than it was before. I get so sick of the tired old genre convention that says "a long time ago, there was the ultimate Golden Age of magic and enlightenment, with flying cities and no sickness and everything was great but then disaster struck and now all that's left are the uncanny and inexplicable artifacts of our great and powerful ancestors and we're just rebuilding our little shantytown of a civilization in the shadows of their mega-cool ruins, and isn't it sad how lame we are now compared to back then?" I think there's more than enough room for settings that say the best works of civilization are ahead of it rather than far, far behind it. And I admit that's a snobby and petty attitude, but I did say that all of my reasons for kind of liking magic-tech were little ones.

I dislike some stuff about magic-tech, too. For example, I don't like how difficult it seems to be to build a good, solid system for it that is both easy to use and actually fun. Many times, you seem to get only one or the other; either the rules are straightforward but have all the excitement and color of a tax form, or the setting describes really cool magic-tech things but the rules are so weird or so broken or so nonexistent that trying to work with them gives you a headache. I need magic-tech to be both playable AND cool for me to really get behind it.

So in the end, I just decide whether I like a particular magic-tech setting on a case-by-case basis. But I've liked enough magic-tech settings well enough to say that I generally like the concept of magic-tech, so it takes a shoddy execution of that concept to drive me away.

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i think i would've liked the old weg game 'bloodshadows' more with a better ruleset
ryan
 

I voted 'I love it', but I want to qualify that. The tech-magic I like best is what I would call practical magic, those sensible applications of magic that are never written up into adventurer rules, that let societies take advantage of magic to advance themselves. Like Herpes Cineplex has said, it's nice to play in a game where societies are advancing rather than descending, or just enduring from a Golden Age. That has a nice resonance that makes a refreshing change from a Tolkienian worldview.

I don't enjoy settings where magic is made to simply replicate a technological solution. Magic and technology have different 'rules', so I want that reflected in the design.
 

Turanil said:
I suppose that this sort of idea really comes in handy when running epic level PCs beyond the 40th level...
Well, yea.

But I don't see this current party living to enjoy that status at the rate they are cheesing NPC's off.
 

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