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

[Charlaquin]

I have generally found that any gamble mechanic strong enough to make magic seeming mysterious and uncontrolled tends to put players off from playing magic using characters unless the game is like Call of Cthulhu where the scenario only lasts a couple of sessions.
Where losing your remaining SAN, becoming a minion of Hastur and sacrificing the party is part of the fun.

I really like how Mage the Awakening 2e does it. That’s one of my favorite magic systems in an RPG, and certainly my favorite version of a gamble mechanic. Basically, you have your various Arcana (essentially schools of magic) which determine the base effects you can produce, which default to single target, touch range, instantaneous duration, etc. and then you have a resource called “Reach” that you can expend to scale those factors up - kind of like Metamagic in D&D. As your mastery of an Arcanum increases, you get more base effects, and extra Reach to spend on spells using the lower-level effects within that Arcanum. The kicker is, you can actually spend more Reach than you technically “have”, but if you do, the GM gets to roll some “Paradox dice”, and successes allow them to cancel out some of your Reach effects or add additional ones of their choosing. I’m simplifying a bit, but that’s the basic premise. The important part for this conversation is that it creates a feeling that magic is extremely flexible, but risky to attempt to perform feats that are beyond your level of mastery. If you stick to simple stuff you’ve done a million times and know you can do safely, it’s quite reliable. But if you push yourself to do more, the magic can escape your control. (Sort of; in the lore there’s more going on there than the magic itself being chaotic).

Steering the topic back to esoterica, the other cool thing about Awakening 2e’s magic system is that you can give yourself bonus dice (which can help you contain the effects of paradox - you only need one success to achieve your intended effect, and you can spend additional successes to cancel out the effects of the GM’s successes on their Paradox dice) by using symbolic and ritual elements in the casting. Theoretically a mage can do magic naked, blindfolded, and gagged with their hands behind their back. But using magic words, gestures, tools, and other accoutrements makes it easier to reliably achieve your desired effects, and reduces the risk associated with over-reaching.

 

[MGibster]

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 can see the attraction. For me, it gives me Flintstones vibes. We just replace modern technology with magic and move on with the story. I can just picture the camera panning to an Otyugh in the sewer eating crap, staring into the camera, shrugging its tentacles, and saying, "Eh, it's a living."

 

[MGibster]

I will say that I think most of us are coming at this from a fairly modern perspective where we separate science and magic. If you read early modern manuscripts like Demonology in the Form of a Dialogue (1597) by James I, the speakers don't separate necromancy, sorcery, or witchcraft from the real world. It's part of the real world.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I will say that I think most of us are coming at this from a fairly modern perspective where we separate science and magic. If you read early modern manuscripts like Demonology in the Form of a Dialogue (1597) by James I, the speakers don't separate necromancy, sorcery, or witchcraft from the real world. It's part of the real world.

Part of the foundation of the empirical project (what is often casually called "science") was building an observational baseline of the world. The difficulty of preserving and communicating information hampered this for a very long time. As such barriers were lifted, particularly with the invention of the printing press, magic found itself driven to the edges. On the one hand, because the observations of luminaries became a lot easier to draw on; on the other, because the more outlandish observations became easier to see as...well, outlandish.

You saw a similar process start to happen in the Roman Empire before its collapse. They had inherited the notion of Ultima Thule from the Greeks, who had had extremely limited accounts of a location that is most likely Great Britain or one of its islands. Ultima Thule was supposed to be quite fantastical, and the Romans expected to see such things when they conquered what we now call England. But since they found none of that, they assumed that this was just a mistaken attribution, and that the real Ultima Thule must be further north--ever further, since no matter how far north they sailed they didn't find it. But now we've sailed the whole world; we've removed any "edges" from the map. There is nowhere left for Ultima Thule to be.

Magic and "science" were ultimately the same thing, an attempt to leash the powers of existence to the human will. "Science"--empirical study--flourished because, y'know, it actually works, more or less.* Magic only fell by the wayside because it ended up being actually ineffective when put to proof...and as all the snake-oil salesmen and "breatharians" and the like demonstrate, it never truly died, it just went underground. The siren song of "if you find out The Secret, you can have control" is too tempting for most folks to ignore, though the vast majority of it lies in very mundane things (like "jinxing" something by speaking about a bad possible event before it might occur).

*Not calling into question the overall success of modern science, but rather that individual studies are a lot less reliable than I'd like. The replication crisis in psychology, for example, or known issues with p-hacking and other dubious activities. I did a report on the issues with peer review and the status of scientific claims in the public eye, and predicted that things were about to get really really bad if scientists didn't start owning the narrative and addressing the mistaken image they and others had built. Naturally, what I recommended didn't happen...and most of what I feared did, in ways worse than I could have imagined.

 

[J.Quondam]

Maybe + maybe. It depends on the setting.

 

[Charlaquin]

I will say that I think most of us are coming at this from a fairly modern perspective where we separate science and magic. If you read early modern manuscripts like Demonology in the Form of a Dialogue (1597) by James I, the speakers don't separate necromancy, sorcery, or witchcraft from the real world. It's part of the real world.

That’s what I’m saying! Magic, historically, was very much a sort of proto-science. Someone gets sick, you give them some herbs and say some prayers, and they get better. So, the next time someone gets sick, you give them those same herbs and say those same prayers. Over time, the effective techniques get passed on and the ineffective ones die out. It’s not that magic and science are opposed, it’s that we’ve gotten so good at magic, we’ve managed to almost completely demystify it. Though, some science involves such specialized knowledge, it kind of has been re-mystified for much of the population. I look at high-level physics equations and they might as well be arcane sigils to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think if magic is intended to be used by PCs and not primarily arbitrary (i.e. existing almost entirely by fictional logic) it needs at least some rules. Neither of those qualifications is, of course, strictly necessary.

 

[Tonguez]

skill based magic systems are good because while they let a wizard know generally what the ingredients and procedures to achieve a result are, theres still the element of luck at play to see if it actually works or not, even better in systems that allow “success with a consequence”/wild magic backfires, so that the player never knows quite what theyre going to get.

ie magic should be mysterious but the process should be comprehensible to those who attempt to ‘unravel its secrets’

 

[Tonguez]

I will say that I think most of us are coming at this from a fairly modern perspective where we separate science and magic. If you read early modern manuscripts like Demonology in the Form of a Dialogue (1597) by James I, the speakers don't separate necromancy, sorcery, or witchcraft from the real world. It's part of the real world.

John Maynard Keynes in a 1946 lecture on Sir Isaac Newton organised by The Royal Society of London notes: “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.”

 

[beancounter]

Arthur C Clarke would like a word with you.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

But that presumes there is sufficiently advanced technology in the D&D universe. I know that the D&D universe encompasses many worlds, but I'd say most of them exist somewhere between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. ** - D&D is a fantasy game after all. Not a SciFi game.

I suppose the aliens from the "Expedition to the barrier peaks" could be involved, but they were never fleshed out beyond that one module.

** Personally, I don't view D&D as a version of "Land of the Lost" where different ages get tossed together.