D&D General Should magic be "mystical," unknowable, etc.? [Pick 2, no takebacks!]

[EzekielRaiden]

Warning: you cannot change your vote(s). Pick one or two responses. Make sure you're confident about your choice(s) before submitting.

As stated in the question: Should there be something mystical, beyond the true understanding of mortals? I have seen a great many statements over the past decade (...which makes me feel old) that intimate something like this, and I'd like to hear what ENWorld has to say.

You may, of course, use your own definitions of "mystical," "unknowable," etc. But if you would like a guideline for the kind of thing I'm thinking of, it seems that most people who want this feel magic should be at least a little bit beyond human(oid) control, something with mysteries that can never be truly resolved or questions that cannot even in principle get objective answers. That "magic" might sometimes be studied with an empirical (aka "scientific") mindset, but ultimately empirical study will fail to truly capture what it is, how it works, and what it can do. That the rules of magic, if they even exist, are partially or wholly unknowable to mortal-kind.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

To me, very physical magica like a fireball should be scientific. Down to wizards needing to understand thermodynamics to even cast Firebolt.

Spirit magic, what the occultists call invocation and evocation, should be mystical, but have ritual forms that are understandable. But no one knows why spirits of air are happy to answer summons that call them by the west wind, but not if called by the east wind.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think the thing for me is that I want my magic use to be ritualistic, to involve sympathetic associations, and to lead to things like the attached image, to magicians having to order thier lives and homes in idiosyncratic ways to facilitate thier work, like balancing the salt and sugar they eat because some spirit won’t talk to someone who has too much sugar in thier diet, and wearing clothes that are easy to remove so they can bathe with running water before and after a working.

I want the battle mage to have to inscribe runes or other magical symbols onto themselves and their tools and perform spells ahead of time to gather power.

I want magic to be part scientific and part awesomely strange.

The Dresden Files books do this fairly well, as an example. Harry can throw fire because he is quite powerful, but he is truly terrifying when he has time and knowledge.

 

[RangerWickett]

I ran a modern fantasy game with the premise that magic only worked if you didn't try to understand it. You had to be a bit willfully in awe of it, to let it mystify you, to bathe in the wonder. If you insisted on digging for answers, the magic would slip away.

I also have in my homebrew setting a very robust rationale for why magic works, based on the world having a sort of physics where thoughts and ideas can cause things that are thematically adjacent to operate as if they're physically adjacent. A lot of magic is just different ways of using your own thoughts or mass social movements to let energy flow from one thing to something else without going through the space between. But since nobody's got brain imaging devices, it's still very ephemeral, and -- again -- having wonder and awe at the mystical can actually help you be better at magic.

 

[Kurotowa]

I put down a couple of the "Maybe" choices as my closest picks. As with many things, the format of a TTRPG shapes many choices. Just like there are a lot of character archetypes that work in novels or comics but not for a PC, vague mystical magic is something that sounds cool but is kind of dreadful in practice. PC abilities need to be known, quantified, and reliable. Otherwise you're just playing a game of "DM may I?"

Now is there room to make magic a bit less sciencey? Sure, and the books have already given plenty of examples of those. Magic item creation that depends on rare symbolic components and esoteric conditions. Zones of high magic or planar alignment with special localized effects. Big plot device rituals and artifacts that have all sorts of mystical requirements. If your DM isn't using any of those it's not because they're unprecedented, but because the DM is defaulting to simplistic adventure design. And that's a different issue entirely.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'm a big fan of Brandon Sanderson style magic systems with clear rules that the people of the world have studied and refined over their time in the world. I especially like it that magic is actually part of the world and people have interacted with it like people rather than just a veneer painted over the world that people apparently never think to observe like we've done with literally all of existence.

I'm not fan of completely esoteric, non-reproducible 'chaos' style magic like you see in comics like where Dr. Strange will pull a new spell out of his butt or Piper will find a new thing in the book of shadows every episode and neither will ever come back again. And I say that as someone who has to write that kind of magic as part of the style.

 

[overgeeked]

I prefer magic to be mysterious and chaotic. Like in WFRP and DCC. You might be able to control channeling pure extra-dimensional chaos and bring some desired effect into the world, or you might mutate yourself and/or create a portal to hell. Magic as technology is predictable, repetitive, and boring.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I'm a big fan of Brandon Sanderson style magic systems with clear rules that the people of the world have studied and refined over their time in the world. I especially like it that magic is actually part of the world and people have interacted with it like people rather than just a veneer painted over the world that people apparently never think to observe like we've done with literally all of existence.

I'm not fan of completely esoteric, non-reproducible 'chaos' style magic like you see in comics like where Dr. Strange will pull a new spell out of his butt or Piper will find a new thing in the book of shadows every episode and neither will ever come back again. And I say that as someone who has to write that kind of magic as part of the style.

personally, I like it when you have both living in the same setting for the evitable problems that makes and is funny to me.

 

[Leatherhead]

Always seems to me that the questions in these kinds of threads are backwards.

What does "magic like a science" mean?

For a working model of magic in a game you have three options:

1. Magic is a pseudo-science, where people can test things in order to figure out a reliable way of doing things.
2. Magic is a pseudo-religion, where people are told the rules. These rules can seem arbitrary and non-sequitur (Put a green left shoe on your head and spin three times to summon lightning!), or they can be sympathetic (if you burn this lock of hair from person X in the magical brazier , you will make them burn) But either way, if you obey the rules, you get a reliable way of doing things.
3. Magic is random chaos that no sane person would ever attempt to use, unless they were already going to die. But you can reliably do something by performing this ritual that is likely banned.​

It's always cause and effect: You do the thing, then the magic happens. Even when your head has a 5% chance to explode into a demon when you try it.

 

[Lanefan]

Voted for "Maybe, contextual to each table" and "Other", as the poll seems to be asking about what the overarching setup should be rather than what I do at my table; and this sort of thing is very much in the DM's court to tinker with as desired.

Had I been voting based just on what I do it would have been a lot harder, in that I have magic as being mystical in some forms (divine, mostly), scientific in other forms (arcane, mostly), and a bit of both in other forms (psionics and bardic sound, mostly) but in all cases following the same universal set of underlying rules-of-setting-physics that characters in-game may or may not be able to learn about if they so desire (IME no-one really ever cares).

Magic is also dangerous, and releasing it in ways unintended (interrupted spell, breaking a magic item, etc.) can cause wild surges with results ranging from near-nothing (common) to great benefit to lots of pain and death (both rare).