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

[Jer]

It depends on the setting and the context.

Some settings benefit from mystical unknowable magic. Some settings benefit from having a scientific approach to magic.

Sometimes I like my DC universe magic, sometimes I like my Marvel universe magic. It's all good depending on the game.

 

[Scribe]

In my opinion magic = sci/tech. No society that has a foundation of economics would allow for magic to remain in the shadows once it was discovered what it could do. Someone would ALWAYS pay good money to see it flourish for economic gain. Especially once it became known that the power of what 9th level spells could do-- as soon as any of this magic became known, people with money would rush to get as many of their employees up to speed on how to tap into it.

The idea that magic was only known by a select few individuals and was a complete mystery to everyone else is a bunch of hooey. It makes absolutely no sense.

This makes a great argument for magic needing to be unknowable, random, and dangerous LOL.

 

[Fanaelialae]

This makes a great argument for magic needing to be unknowable, random, and dangerous LOL.

None of those NEED to be true to avoid magic as technology.

For example, imagine a world where the Great Phoenix is the source of all magic. Periodically (maybe every few centuries/millenia) the Phoenix undergoes a cycle of death and rebirth. When this happens, the laws of magic change. All of the old spells become useless and mages must recreate them from scratch.

In such a world you would arguably never have magic as technology, unless the cycles are sufficiently long (in which case society would probably undergo a collapse at the end of each cycle).

Magic could be knowable, nonrandom, and safe, but you still wouldn't be able to rely on it as we do with modern technology. It would be as if, in the RW, the laws of physics changed every few hundred years and we had to figure it all out again. Even armed with the scientific method, we'd be lucky to have indoor plumbing. Computers would likely be out of the question.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Gonna add that I absolutely love magic as technology because there is a lot of creativity that can be had with both how magic would effect the form of conventional tech as well as what tech ends up advancing with magic in place of our conventional means.

I dislike medieval stasis. Especially when applied without knowing what was actually a thing in the medieval period.

 

[Charlaquin]

I ran a modern fantasy game with the premise that magic only worked if you didn't try to understand it.

“What have you done?”

“The magic chose the shape, not I. I am a bearer, I am a dwelling, I am a messenger.”

“You are an idiot!”

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Not necessarily. Ars Magica has a great system that combines formulaic magic (very close to D&D, usually more powerful but hard to customise) with spontaneous magic (more subject to interpretation, less powerful but able to do almost anything), with power guidelines.

It's also a fairly complex system that works because the magic is set along a number of dimensions, there are four realms, five techniques and 10 forms, and that's for hermetic magic which is at the core of the game for PCs, while there are other systems for non-hermetic magic. It is fairly versatile, but not necessarily covering all the types of magic of D&D, for example.

So you can have much softer magic in a TTRPG, but at the price of more complexity if you want to more or less avoid the "may I", and noting at the same time that "may I" is not necessarily a bad thing.



That, I can certainly agree to, changing magic deeply (no more spells !) was for me one of the major causes of failure for 4e.

I never got the opportunity to play Ars Magica but even so the player using the spontaneous magic rules will have some expectation of success? will they not? This to me is still a hard magic system. Fantasy Literature that employ soft magic, the magic remains unknown and mysterious to the reader and most of the characters. One never knows what may or may not be done with it. Which is why as a literary trope it is very easy to mess up.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I for some reason want both at the same time.

So do I really but I do not believe that, that is reasonable in a game.

 

[Charlaquin]

I voted for “depends on the setting,” because of course it should always depend on the setting, and “always mystical” because that is my preference for how settings handle magic.

On another note, the idea of magic and science being in opposition to each other is a very modern one. In a more historical view, science is magic. Take metallurgy, for example. In many ancient cultures, metallurgy held a special, mystical significance. Smiths could create incredible works by treating the metal they worked in just the right ways - ways which were esoteric to others. A “magic sword” would just be a particularly well-made sword, who’s properties might seem miraculous to someone who knows nothing of the science behind it. These techniques were probably arrived at through trial and error, but when you found something that worked, you kept at it, which meant things like saying particular prayers at particular points were often considered by the smiths themselves to be as important to the process as any of the direct physical actions.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah, but in this respect, pretty much all TTRPGs fall into hard magic systems with respect to the rules facing elements. The only way to use a soft magic system is to go free form.

This calls to one of Sanderson's Laws, which (to paraphrase) is that your ability to solve problems in a satisfying manner is proportional to how well understood (by the reader, not the characters) the magic system is. If you have a completely free form system, there's absolutely nothing to prevent a caster from casting deus ex machina at any time, and therefore it can be very unsatisfying for problems to be solved by magic.

Which is why the vast majority of RPGs have well defined (hard) magic systems. The game would be grossly unsatisfying if, anytime the GM presents an obstacle, the mages simply respond by casting Solve Problem.

Of course, just because magic is well defined from a player perspective, doesn't necessitate that it is understood equally well by the characters (this is even true of Sanderson's novels). They could even be obfuscated from the players (managed by the GM) and still count for hard magic.

There is definitely a middle ground.

For instance, in the game I’m writing, types of magic are skills, or require complex rituals (basically skill challenge), in a system where you cannot ever get guaranteed success (only statistically very probable success).

In this system, each skill describes the sorts of things it can do, and what general principles underpin it. Then, you use skills like the physics engine in Gary’s Mod. The limits are scale and frequency of use, with spendable tied to attributes to overcome either limit or just juice a check into greater levels of success.

 

[Charlaquin]

I never got the opportunity to play Ars Magica but even so the player using the spontaneous magic rules will have some expectation of success? will they not? This to me is still a hard magic system. Fantasy Literature that employ soft magic, the magic remains unknown and mysterious to the reader and most of the characters. One never knows what may or may not be done with it. Which is why as a literary trope it is very easy to mess up.

Magic hardness is a spectrum. At the far ends you have magic with precise, reliable, empirically testable rules, and magic that is completely unknowable and acts seemingly at random. In between those extremes, there is a wide array of possibilities.