Sending Magic Back to School (Long)

[pemerton]

Can you elaborate on this? I'm confused as to what you mean. I don't think the mechanics establish any constraints.

Here's a quote from Ron Edwards that I had in mind when I posted:

Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se​

By "exploration" here is meant "establishing the content of the shared fiction" - in this context, a coherent account of how magic works and its place in the world. In a strongly simulationist system, the fiction can just be read off the fiction - eg in 3E, we can tell that from the spell failure rules that wizardly magic often requires gestures that heavy armour impedes.

In 4e, there aren't those sorts of mechanics (as you said in the post I responded to). But the mechanics do establish certain constraints/paremeters/inputs which help tell us about magic: you can learn it from books (wizards); you can get if from making a pact with a devil, a fey lord, a horror from beyond the stars, a lurking power of the underdark, a vestige, etc; you can get it from being imbued with the power of a dragon, or of the cosmos, or chaos; this latter possibility takes us to the "chaos currents" described in accounts of the Elemental Chaos (Plane Below, MotP) and reminds us that there is an inherent magical power of chaos that the Elemental Chaos contains and that the primordials drew on to create the world; etc, etc.

On the basis of this stuff that we get from the mechanics, a group can jointly establish a coherent account of how magic works in their gameworld, in the course of play.

Here are two self-quotes from other threads illustrating a little of how this has happened in my game:

the drow sorcerer-Demonskin Adept got onto the PCs' newly-acquired flying carpet, and headed off to town

<snip>

As he was flying away from the Bloodtower, though, he noticed signals being sent to him (via lanterns being shaded/revealed) from the foothills around the tower.

<snip>

The drow did not understand the signals, and in any event had no light source of his own to use to try and send a response, so he just kept going. But the suspicious hobgoblins sent up a flight of wyvern riders to check him out

<snip>

The wyvern's, with their fly speeds of 8, were clearly closing on the carpet with its fly speed of 6, and the drow decided he would be better off trying to turn around and return to the rest of the party at the Bloodtower, rather than get chased down before he could make it to town. (In mechanical terms, I offered him two options: a 6/3 skill challenge to make it to town before the wyverns caught up, or a 4/3 skil challenge to make it back to the tower.)

The skill challenge was fairly quick and quite a bit of fun. The player tried the standard sort of stuff you would expect: Acrobatics for clever manouevring, Stealth to try and remain hidden from them after his clever manoeuvre, etc. But his rolling was poor (I remember multiple 3s and maybe a 1 as well). While on the Elemental Chaos he had managed to bottle some pure elemental fire, and as a final attempt to get away from the wyvern riders he pulled that out, used his paragon path feature to change his resistance to fire resistance, and then tried to absorb the chaotic energy of the fire to enhance the speed of his carpet. The Arcana check was another failure, however, and the elemental fire escaped (causing damage to him but as best I can recall not to any of his pursuers) and his carpet crashed to the ground (this was the 3rd failure of the challenge, and he had achieved only 1 success).

<snip account of subsequent battle, and how Calastryx turned up>

So in the end the PCs hung on, and Calastryx was defeated.

<snip>

After the combat finished, the PCs took a short rest.

<snip>

The sorcerer did some sort of awareness check (I can't remember exactly what) and I told him that he could feel chaos energies in the area, coming out of the Bloodtower (leaking through the teleportation portal) and also leeching out of the dead body of the dragon. The PCs decided to try and harness this energy, and channel into an item so as to enchant it. There was then some discussion about what items they might try for, and how they might go about it. I had brought my recently acquired copy of Heroes of the Elemental Chaos to the session, and showed the player of the sorcerer the Gift of Flame alternative reward. He liked the look of it, and without consulting the other players had his PC leap up onto Calastryx's body and cast a Cyclonic Vortex (? 13th level sorcerer encounter power) to summon the chaotic energies to him.

The two other PCs - the wizard and the ranger - just looked on with shock and a degree of dismay, as he had done something similar earlier that day on the Elemental Chaos which had caused a bit of mayhem, and the player weren't very surprised when I mentioned they could see something flying from the hills towards them. At first they looked like bats, but as they got closer it was clear they were too big to be bats - they were actually 4 mooncalves (3 large, 1 huge - the large stepped up from 10th level in MV2 to 14th, and the Huge unchanged from its MV2 stats).

The PCs had plenty of time to position themselves, and the ranger took cover behind some rocks while the wizard got read to Magic Missile them at range as the sorcerer continued to try and control the chaotic energies. (In the circumstances, his Cyclonic Vortex has become a zone dealing 10 damage plus 10 fire damage to any other creature that enters it - sustain move, but if he spends a standard action then he also has to make an Arcana check - what happens if the Arcana check fails isn't entirely clear, as he hasn't failed one yet!) Only the wizard knows Deep Speech, so only he can understand the telepathic ravings of the mooncalves, as they signal their irritation at being robbed of a chimera to hunt, and their desire to use the focused chaotic energies to open a doorway to the Far Realm to permit more mooncalves through.

In the end, not only did the PCs defeat the mooncalves, but the drow sorcerer imbued himself with a Gift of Flame, and turned the party's Elven silver horn (60 gp piece of jewelery) in to a Horn of Fire.

Another thing that had been planned for some time, by the player of the dwarf fighter-cleric, was to have his dwarven smiths reforge Whelm - a dwarven thrower warhammer artefact (originally from White Plume Mountain) - into Overwhelm, the same thing but as a morenkrad (the character is a two-hander specialist).

<snip>

I adjudicated it as a complexity 1 (4 before 3) skill challenge. The fighter-cleric had succeeded at Dungeoneering (the closest in 4e to an engineering skill) and Diplomacy (to keep his dwarven artificers at the forge as the temperature and magical energies rise to unprecedented heights). The wizard had succeeded at Arcana (to keep the magical forces in check). But the fighter-cleric failed his Religion check - he was praying to Moradin to help with the process, but it wasn't enough. So he shoved his hands into the forge and held down the hammer with brute strength! (Successful Endurance against a Hard DC.) His hands were burned and scarred, but the dwarven smiths were finally able to grab the hammer head with their tongs, and then beat and pull it into its new shape.

The wizard then healed the dwarf PC with a Remove Affliction (using Fundamental Ice as the material component), and over the course of a few weeks the burns healed. (Had the Endurance check failed, things would have played out much the same, but I'd decided that the character would feel the pang of the burns again whenever he picked up Overwhelm.)

<snip>

Our most recent session ended on another one of these small skill challenges. The PCs had recovered an enemy wizard's spellbook, and it had Leomund's Secret Chest in it. Which immediately prompted them to try and recover the enemy's chest! (Which I should have foreseen, but hadn't.)

The wizard PC performed the ritual, but with the very Bluff-y sorcerer PC pretending to be the other wizard (wearing his robe, sitting on his flying carpet, reading from his spellbook, gazing into his crystal ball, etc). I can't remember the precise sequence of checks - Arcana and Bluff were both involved - there were failures, and so the PCs found themselves talking to a sphinx through the crystal ball, posing a riddle which (it said) they would be able to answer were they the wizard they were claiming to be. (I went with the sphinx because (i) I'd already been thinking about trying to bring in a sphinx somehow, and had even brought a riddle book to the session, and (ii) it seemed to fit as a guardian for a powerful Vecna-cultist wizard's secret chest.)

After puzzlilng over the riddle for a bit, I mentioned to the player of the sorcerer that he could probably use Slaad's Gambit to teleport himself and the wizard through the crystal ball to just fight the sphinx. The sorcerer player leapt at this opportunity - and we will run the combat next session.

I hope these quotes give a sense of how magic works in my gameworld - unpredictable, hard to tame, chaotic, energy; but able to be harnessed by those who have the craft and daring to do so. And it works by affinities and opposites, too - Fundamental Ice can be used to relieve burns, and the chaos emanations of a dead fire drake can be used to imbue a person or an object with the Gift of Flame.

The 4e mechanics didn't dictate this picture. But they set up inputs and constraints which at least suggested it, and certainly permitted it, and have allowed it to emerge at our table via the course of play.