Klaus said:
So if T&T had epic spells one would power them with kremm de la kremm.
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Tired of "Mana"
- Thread starter The Mad Kaiser
- Start date
So if T&T had epic spells one would power them with kremm de la kremm.
Voadam
Legend
jmucchiello said:
Perhaps, but looking at the two definitions in the dictionary it seems more likely to me that the correctly spelled word with a Polynesian magical force definition was originally used for magical power than a deliberate mispelling of a term for divinely provided food. Occam's razor and all that.
AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
JamesDJarvis
First Post
The Mad Kaiser said:Just getting a big gripe off my shoulders, but I have become weary of the word Mana being used to describe "magical energy" in RPGs and card games. Larry Niven was clever to borrow it from the Polynesians, but the word has slowly become my prime buzzword for "creative sloth."
If you are a game author or DM and need a word for "magical energy," please take a few days to research a new name to describe it. Stop squeezing blood from the vultures which fed on the dead thieves who mugged The Magic Goes Away.
You may now punch my pleading face.
Well the word Mana is part of the english language and it means
1. A supernatural force believed to dwell in a person or sacred object
2. Power, authority
the word is of Maori origin and means somethign along the lines of integrity or charisma to them.
It also sounds like Manna, food from heaven.
This statement hits the nail on the head. The main reason the term "mana" is used is that people, thanks to a small amount of knowledge and a whole pile of ignorance about how the term conveyed meaning in its original cultural conext, is that, for some reason that baffles me, people want D&D magic to be as much like modern ideas of technology as possible. If I wanted that, I'd run a sci-fi game.Psion said:
There are lots of different theories of magic, some of which can and some of which cannot be easily represented in game mechanics in RPGs. But we seem to wedded to the idea that RPG magic should look like it was designed by Tesla that we discard a lot of opportunities for interesting play.
Now, there are some theories of magic that work like our conception of mana; I note that baraka has been raised. This doesn't surprise me because in some Sufic magical traditions, it works just like we imagine mana working. And we've effectively done the same thing with chi in our RPG interpretation of it, ignoring or suppressing all the ways that chi involves sympathetic magic.
Not being a point-based system, D&D is actually not a good fit with the magic = meta-energy idea people try to convey using "chi" or "mana" or "power." But then the spell system is so unsatisfying, D&D is not really a god fit with any specific theory of magic other than its own. But given that it is not that descriptive of how magic actually works in D&D, why do so many GMs and players choose to conceptualize it that way when the rules are essentially silent on the physics underlying it?
One could play D&D with equal fidelity to the rules by imagining sympathetic magic, intermediation or true name magic. So why the mana? Sadly, I think it's because people have settled on the idea of D&D as modernity in medieval drag; so, we dress up some kind of quantum souped-up Tesla-like theory of energy and slap the label "mana" on it. I think it's kind of unforuntate that many have decided that the problem we're having is that our favourite term for this "energy" is getting worn out. I think what's getting worn out is the concept that this is how magic works.
