D&D General What Should Magic Be Able To Do, From a Gameplay Design Standpoint?

[Micah Sweet]

id like magic to be bad at permanence.

A wall of fire that lasts for a fight? Ok

A wall of iron that lasts for ever? Nope

A wall of iron that lasts forever and destroys the iron -mining industry? Nope nope nope

Id lkie magic to be a lot more expensive than the nonmagical method for mundane things.

Wall of Iron is a pretty high level spell. Probably not a lot of casters capable of it, so I doubt it's primed to destroy any industries.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

None of those issues are a priority for me, but rather a necessary evil that occasionally has to be catered to for playability. I want gamism playing as minimal a role at my table as I can practically manage. That will never be zero role, but it can and will be less than what I am taking to be the average desire of the RPG community. I am comfortable with that.

And all I'm saying is: That role is never quite as minimal as you'd really be comfortable with, especially for a game like D&D, which needs to cater to so many different interests and tastes and preferences.

If D&D is going to position itself as the fantasy toolkit game that anyone can use to play a nigh-infinite variety of worlds and ideas and things-people-want-to-do, it cannot commit everything to simulationism. It just can't. No more than it can commit everything to gamism or narrativism.

 

[Lanefan]

What magic can do in a fantasy setting in general, or in a D&D like setting in particular, is a complicated conversation.

What I would like to do is narrow that conversation a little bit and focus a discussion here on what D&D magic should be able to do or accomplish specifically in the hands of PC casters, and specifically from a game design standpoint with an eye toward balance and playability.

Note that I am tagging this D&D general but I understand we are likely to discuss this primarily from a 5E perspective because it is the current game and one that is very hackable. But we can also certainly talk about it with regards to earlier editions, retroclones, and adjacent systems.

I feel like there are a couple schools of thought folks might fall into, summed up broadly as "Anything, but not very often" and "Damage and status effects." I feel like utility spells are generally the most controversial and lead to discussions about spotlight stealing, among other things.

I don't want this discussion to be too focused on the traditional debate about casters versus martials, although that is going to come up. I am more interested in what role folks see D&D magic as filling in the game design and play experience, and by extension what that looks like in a theoretical PHB.

I want magic to be able to:

--- replicate combat-related things the game doesn't otherwise allow for, most notably blast-style artillery and area damage
--- provide a means of accessing traditional story tropes e.g. diminution, flight, invisibility, scrying
--- replicate non-combat things the game doesn't otherwise allow for, most notably long-range travel and communication

I also want magic to be high-risk high-reward in that it works fine most of the time but when it doesn't - e.g. a caster gets interrupted mid-casting or a magic item gets destroyed - wild magic happens and chaos ensues.

 

[James Gasik]

Wall of Iron is a pretty high level spell. Probably not a lot of casters capable of it, so I doubt it's primed to destroy any industries.

Or say, Fabricate.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And all I'm saying is: That role is never quite as minimal as you'd really be comfortable with, especially for a game like D&D, which needs to cater to so many different interests and tastes and preferences.

If D&D is going to position itself as the fantasy toolkit game that anyone can use to play a nigh-infinite variety of worlds and ideas and things-people-want-to-do, it cannot commit everything to simulationism. It just can't. No more than it can commit everything to gamism or narrativism.

This is one reason why I don't play official D&D. It doesn't serve my needs, and has been doing so less and less in recent years.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Or say, Fabricate.

Fair enough. I wouldn't mind seeing the setting implications of that though.

 

[Reynard]

One of the questions we have to ask of the setting is are wizards weird old codgers and crones that live alone and fiddle with powers and knowledge better left alone? Or are they scientists that apply their expertise to a consistent (if not easily understood) form of energy with quantifiable laws?

Either works, but I feel like a given setting should choose between them (or someplace on the spectrum between them). I don't think magic is convincing in a setting if both can be simultaneously true. Either casting fireball demands you barter with the dark powers, or it requires just the right set of words and movements than anyone can learn. Either there is a local wizard for hire in every settlement, plus arcane universities and the like, or they are hidden away in isolated towers to best avoid getting lynched by nervous peasants or arrested by overzealous templars.

These are not, of course, the only options, but my point is that magic users in a setting should have a flavor that helps inform the way magic works and what it should be able to do -- including in the rules. And of course a half dozen arcane classes with wildly different "class fantasies" that all pull from the same spell list muddies the waters even more and makes "magic" much less so, IMO.

 

[TheSword]

I think this topic should focus around "Wizards in Downtime". aka time and spell slot availability is not a concern for a wizard. Assume that anything that can be spammed in the long term will be spammed.

A few areas of focus:

1) Divinations: Casting a divination about a subject is fine, but right now a lot of divinations can allow you to spam a number of questions if you have like a week of downtime which can get burdensome and consumes a lot of screentime from the group to the magic user.

2) Magic that requires magic to beat it. A classic example is wall of force, which a normal fighter has no real way to get around unless the DM provides some plot way to get. Those should be extremely tough but possible for a badass fighter to break.

1) the whole party can contribute to the questions for spells like divination, augury, speak with dead etc. They can all contribute to solving riddle like answers. I don’t believe divinations need to steal spotlight - that’s a positioning issue.

2) Most characters can’t get through a wall of force. Heck most wizards won’t be able to get through unless they happen to be level 11+ and happen to know the disintegrate spell (one of 35 possible 6th level spells) why would you expect a fighter to do something that only a small proportion of one class can do?

 

[James Gasik]

Fair enough. I wouldn't mind seeing the setting implications of that though.

Same! There's so much about the magic system that should have an impact on D&D settings and just...doesn't.

Like, many settings have had adventurers for hundreds, even thousands of years. You'd expect, therefore, to be a brisk trade in not just Continual Light objects being made, but all the old ones that should still be around, hundreds of years later, having been passed on or sold by retired adventurers!

*Or, a little outside the thread topic, the children of high level adventurers having magic gear passed down to them to start their own careers!

 

[Micah Sweet]

One of the questions we have to ask of the setting is are wizards weird old codgers and crones that live alone and fiddle with powers and knowledge better left alone? Or are they scientists that apply their expertise to a consistent (if not easily understood) form of energy with quantifiable laws?

Either works, but I feel like a given setting should choose between them (or someplace on the spectrum between them). I don't think magic is convincing in a setting if both can be simultaneously true. Either casting fireball demands you barter with the dark powers, or it requires just the right set of words and movements than anyone can learn. Either there is a local wizard for hire in every settlement, plus arcane universities and the like, or they are hidden away in isolated towers to best avoid getting lynched by nervous peasants or arrested by overzealous templars.

These are not, of course, the only options, but my point is that magic users in a setting should have a flavor that helps inform the way magic works and what it should be able to do -- including in the rules. And of course a half dozen arcane classes with wildly different "class fantasies" that all pull from the same spell list muddies the waters even more and makes "magic" much less so, IMO.

Dragonlance kind of does both. Wizards are thought of as strange and mysterious by nearly everyone who isn't a wizard, to the point of persecution, but the actual practice of magic is largely presented pseudo-scientifically.