D&D General What does "magic" mean? [Read carefully, you can't change your vote]

[Minigiant]

Meh. Ten years into 5e and nothing terribly stands out as unbalanced.

5e magic is very unbound, unrestricted, and generally allowed to do anything as time marches forward. That's kinda the background for this discussion. That many think almost everything supernatural is magic and, as the poll shows, everything supernatural can be encapsulated as a spell.

So you have the same people saying "D&D Magic can do anthing" and "Why is everything a spellcaster with magic items?" That's the people stating lack of balance. Not of power but scope.

 

[Tallifer]

In real life, I consider magic to be any attempt by man to (vainly) manipulate supernatural forces. In a game, "magic" is a piece of jargon to define according to genre, game balance, mechanics or setting.

 

[Hussar]

5e magic is very unbound, unrestricted, and generally allowed to do anything as time marches forward. That's kinda the background for this discussion. That many think almost everything supernatural is magic and, as the poll shows, everything supernatural can be encapsulated as a spell.

So you have the same people saying "D&D Magic can do anthing" and "Why is everything a spellcaster with magic items?" That's the people stating lack of balance. Not of power but scope.

I'm sorry. I'm not following your argument. How is it unbalanced when there is no mechanical imbalance? Balance only refers to mechanical balance doesn't it?

So, yeah, that's how 5e has resolved most of the balance issues of the past- they simply made everyone a caster. Which, when you think about it, is balanced. Everyone is the same.

I think I'm getting confused by the conflation of spell and magic. The spell system and the magic inherent in D&D are not the same thing. However, the spell system is more than flexible enough to encapsulate any mechanics related to magic. So, no, there's no "spell" for letting a pegasus fly or a giant exist. Because those things don't need mechanics. Spells are only there as a mechanic for effects that are specific to a time and place.

 

[DEFCON 1]

So, no, there's no "spell" for letting a pegasus fly or a giant exist. Because those things don't need mechanics. Spells are only there as a mechanic for effects that are specific to a time and place.

Indeed! In fact, I always found it interesting back in the 3E era when people would come onto the message boards asking what spells were going to be needed in order to create magical traps for themselves (either DMs for their adventures they make, or players for their keeps they build and so forth). Because of the rules that were put into place to create magic items, it gave the impression that every magical thing in the game had or needed some underlying game mechanic rule to allow it to exist. So someone would ask "I'd like to make a trap that does X, Y, and Z" and there would be all this talk not only about what spells would be needed to "make" it... but also arguments all about the levels spellcasters would have to be in order to get the spells needed to make these traps. It gave us the idea that there HAD to be all these high-level spellcasters throughout the course of history just to have the capabilities to create all these magic items and magical traps and so forth and it blew up people's sense of reality.

But any attempts to just tell people to handwave it and say "If you want the trap in the game, just put it in the game" were oftentimes met with disagreement if not outright disdain, because the game was set up to give us rules for everything. So by some people's accounts there needed to be these rules in the game because that's just what it required to function and anything else was a dreaded "house rule" (and of course we also then got the occasional whackadoo who would also chime in with your standard "The designers are all lazy bastards because they won't give me this thing that I think the game HAS to have!"... which honestly really hasn't changed much at all since then, LOL.)

This is the one thing I really love about 5E... they specifically tell us that whatever we want to do is fine and we don't need any rules in the books to do it. It has cut down on a lot of the caterwauling that we otherwise would be hearing if it didn't.

 

[jmartkdr2]

But can you actually define the difference?

I think they're going with something like "innate vs. intentional"

So it might be better to think of the difference between spellcasting and supernatural natures: one is a deliberate act that actively uses magical forces in an intentional way, the other is just the essential nature of a thing that doesn't work in real-world physics. For some people, only one of those gets tagged as magic.

(I personally would say both are magic, but I also hate anti-magic fields in settings where that's true.)

 

[jmartkdr2]

But SF usually only uses one source of supernatural.

Generally, but superheroes use a multitude of options and that's pretty much the only difference in many cases.

It's really only fantasy that does multiple forms of supernatural.

Honestly, it's really only fantasy gaming that does this. Most fantasy books and shows have only one kind of magic.

So saying the aliens who invade Midgard from planet Crogag are using magic because of SF comes off as backwards thought.

That's a fair point. You'd need a really broad (and kinda gamey) definition of magic for that to work.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Magic is just a device to handwave away having to explain how something happens. In RPGs, it's used as a special divider to excuse some mechanics from explanation.

 

[NotAYakk]

Magic means I can change my vote on a poll.

 

[Oofta]

One other way I've explained magic in my world. Magic taps into the Aether that permeates everything without interacting directly and using it's energy to manifest something. The Aether is potential magic, much like a wound spring has potential energy waiting to be released.

In some cases, creatures are born with or made at least in part from that energy stored in the Aether in their formation. Things like dragons can fly and breath fire because they are, in part, made from Aether and are innately tied to it.

Spells on the other hand channel the Aether to create their effect. So antimagic zones work by neutralizing that transformation of Aether.

 

[Lanefan]

Indeed! In fact, I always found it interesting back in the 3E era when people would come onto the message boards asking what spells were going to be needed in order to create magical traps for themselves (either DMs for their adventures they make, or players for their keeps they build and so forth). Because of the rules that were put into place to create magic items, it gave the impression that every magical thing in the game had or needed some underlying game mechanic rule to allow it to exist. So someone would ask "I'd like to make a trap that does X, Y, and Z" and there would be all this talk not only about what spells would be needed to "make" it... but also arguments all about the levels spellcasters would have to be in order to get the spells needed to make these traps. It gave us the idea that there HAD to be all these high-level spellcasters throughout the course of history just to have the capabilities to create all these magic items and magical traps and so forth and it blew up people's sense of reality.

Not mine - this sort of thing is what adds to my sense of reality, that there's a consistent explanation for repeatable things and that A + B + C always comes to D no matter the situation.

But any attempts to just tell people to handwave it and say "If you want the trap in the game, just put it in the game" were oftentimes met with disagreement if not outright disdain, because the game was set up to give us rules for everything.

So by some people's accounts there needed to be these rules in the game because that's just what it required to function and anything else was a dreaded "house rule" (and of course we also then got the occasional whackadoo who would also chime in with your standard "The designers are all lazy bastards because they won't give me this thing that I think the game HAS to have!"... which honestly really hasn't changed much at all since then, LOL.)

This is the one thing I really love about 5E... they specifically tell us that whatever we want to do is fine and we don't need any rules in the books to do it. It has cut down on a lot of the caterwauling that we otherwise would be hearing if it didn't.

And when the inevitable happens and a PC wants to reverse engineer said trap in order to, say, build one to put in the party's stronghold or just to find out how it was made, then what? Suddenly you-as-DM need to know how it was made, and you can't just handwave it.

If constructing the trap used only spells that are already in the game then the reverse engineering process should be easy for both the PCs and the DM. But if it was made using magic that's not in the game* then that magic is in the game now, and the PCs are going to want access to it.

* - I'm ignoring Wish here, as using a Wish to build a trap seems like overkill.