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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7635156" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>No. </p><p></p><p>The problem with an idea that isn't an implementation is that it can hide its complexity behind vagueness. It can make reasonable sounding suggestions which, when you unpack them, have a ton of complexity. "Speak With Animals" is a lesser version of the Tongues spells that just let's you speak in the languages of animals, and you could learn animal languages in a non-magical manner (as say Tarzan does) or as a result of magical gifts (as in the fairy tale "The White Snake). Fine, I'm way ahead of that. </p><p></p><p>But I'm also way ahead of that on realistic languages as well and one thing I've discovered is that realistic language is bad for gaming, because realistic languages create communication barriers that limit RP - and ultimately RP is good for an RPG. In the real world you have thousands of languages occurring in a pathwork quilt. In a fantasy world you tend to have a few dozen languages and most people (and most beings) speak some sort of Common tongue. Turns out that the fantasy world however implausible it is (and I admit you can make a back story for it) is better for the game. (See also magic like 'universal translators' in sci-fi settings.)</p><p></p><p>So now throw into this the languages of animals. Now you are throwing into the game yet more languages for characters to spend their limited resources on. Well, to begin with, to even make this enticing you probably need to make this 'The Language of Birds' rather than 'The Language of Ravens', 'The Languages of Pigeons', etc. So now you need to define which animals speak what. In short, just implementing this one small idea involves a lot of rules needing to be outlined and still probably means that investment in 'Speak with Languages' as a spell is better than investing in multiple animal languages to gain fluency. And critically, overturning that to make the two approaches more balanced, tends to limit the ability to speak with animals which turns out to be bad for the game by again limiting RP ability.</p><p></p><p>And that's just a tiny example. If you want, I can extend this to every thing he's talking about and show that its much more complex than the idea presents.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>With apologies, according to the foremost scholar of RPGs Jon Peterson, the original impetus of an RPG was exactly to simulate a living world - that is 'to play at the world'. I'd argue that the further you depart from the goal of 'playing at the world', the more you are departing from a classic RPG and the more you are creating something subtly but importantly differently. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Well, we do keep strict track of time. Or at least, I try. Remember to check of the dates consistently is something I need to do better, probably by printing out a calendar and remembering to check off the days. Writers ought to do math. Tolkien for example kept very strict track of time and distance in his stories so that movement around the map would be plausible, for example. But RPG GMs should definitely do math.</p><p></p><p>Anyway, the ultimate problem is trying to make magic feel magical. We would like magic to be more numinous. And the problem with that goal is that runs contrary to the games goal of playability. Numinous magic requires magic to not be understood. But one of the things D&D does is protagonize magic users, taking them out of the background as mentors and plot devices and making them protagonists. Indeed, I think that magic as something other than incomprehensible plot device is one of D&D's enduring contributions to fantasy fiction. I'm not sure that you can have a Brandon Sanderson story without that underlying idea that no matter how numinous magic seems at first, it's grounded in some sort of set of knowable laws that could be revealed over the course of the fiction.</p><p></p><p>D&D magic feels like science because it operates in a predictable manner and is readily accessible and transferable. In effect the D&D universe makes magic science by default. A wizard player can read a spell description and then confidently invoke a spell with a predictable effect on the game universe. This is packetized narrative force - the PC gets to assert some truth about the game fiction. </p><p></p><p>Turns out that tampering with that while maintaining balance, playability, and spotlight is difficult. </p><p></p><p>I've seen several simpler attempts to fix the problem by making magic weird and random but I can tell by reading the rules that they weren't well playtested and will never work in the long run. One thing some designers fail to understand is having weird and dangerous negative drawbacks on magic use even if it could be balanced by one definition (equal chance of success in solving a problem like an adventure) fails a test of balance by another definition - "Is spotlight equally distributed among all players?" The problem with magic that goes spectacularly wrong is whether or not the magic user is solving the problem or not, the game is still inherently revolving around the actions of the magic user. If even the magic users failures create campaign or adventure defining problems, then its still all about the magic user.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7635156, member: 4937"] No. The problem with an idea that isn't an implementation is that it can hide its complexity behind vagueness. It can make reasonable sounding suggestions which, when you unpack them, have a ton of complexity. "Speak With Animals" is a lesser version of the Tongues spells that just let's you speak in the languages of animals, and you could learn animal languages in a non-magical manner (as say Tarzan does) or as a result of magical gifts (as in the fairy tale "The White Snake). Fine, I'm way ahead of that. But I'm also way ahead of that on realistic languages as well and one thing I've discovered is that realistic language is bad for gaming, because realistic languages create communication barriers that limit RP - and ultimately RP is good for an RPG. In the real world you have thousands of languages occurring in a pathwork quilt. In a fantasy world you tend to have a few dozen languages and most people (and most beings) speak some sort of Common tongue. Turns out that the fantasy world however implausible it is (and I admit you can make a back story for it) is better for the game. (See also magic like 'universal translators' in sci-fi settings.) So now throw into this the languages of animals. Now you are throwing into the game yet more languages for characters to spend their limited resources on. Well, to begin with, to even make this enticing you probably need to make this 'The Language of Birds' rather than 'The Language of Ravens', 'The Languages of Pigeons', etc. So now you need to define which animals speak what. In short, just implementing this one small idea involves a lot of rules needing to be outlined and still probably means that investment in 'Speak with Languages' as a spell is better than investing in multiple animal languages to gain fluency. And critically, overturning that to make the two approaches more balanced, tends to limit the ability to speak with animals which turns out to be bad for the game by again limiting RP ability. And that's just a tiny example. If you want, I can extend this to every thing he's talking about and show that its much more complex than the idea presents. With apologies, according to the foremost scholar of RPGs Jon Peterson, the original impetus of an RPG was exactly to simulate a living world - that is 'to play at the world'. I'd argue that the further you depart from the goal of 'playing at the world', the more you are departing from a classic RPG and the more you are creating something subtly but importantly differently. Well, we do keep strict track of time. Or at least, I try. Remember to check of the dates consistently is something I need to do better, probably by printing out a calendar and remembering to check off the days. Writers ought to do math. Tolkien for example kept very strict track of time and distance in his stories so that movement around the map would be plausible, for example. But RPG GMs should definitely do math. Anyway, the ultimate problem is trying to make magic feel magical. We would like magic to be more numinous. And the problem with that goal is that runs contrary to the games goal of playability. Numinous magic requires magic to not be understood. But one of the things D&D does is protagonize magic users, taking them out of the background as mentors and plot devices and making them protagonists. Indeed, I think that magic as something other than incomprehensible plot device is one of D&D's enduring contributions to fantasy fiction. I'm not sure that you can have a Brandon Sanderson story without that underlying idea that no matter how numinous magic seems at first, it's grounded in some sort of set of knowable laws that could be revealed over the course of the fiction. D&D magic feels like science because it operates in a predictable manner and is readily accessible and transferable. In effect the D&D universe makes magic science by default. A wizard player can read a spell description and then confidently invoke a spell with a predictable effect on the game universe. This is packetized narrative force - the PC gets to assert some truth about the game fiction. Turns out that tampering with that while maintaining balance, playability, and spotlight is difficult. I've seen several simpler attempts to fix the problem by making magic weird and random but I can tell by reading the rules that they weren't well playtested and will never work in the long run. One thing some designers fail to understand is having weird and dangerous negative drawbacks on magic use even if it could be balanced by one definition (equal chance of success in solving a problem like an adventure) fails a test of balance by another definition - "Is spotlight equally distributed among all players?" The problem with magic that goes spectacularly wrong is whether or not the magic user is solving the problem or not, the game is still inherently revolving around the actions of the magic user. If even the magic users failures create campaign or adventure defining problems, then its still all about the magic user. [/QUOTE]
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