
Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems in RPGs - networked
http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html
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ChuckMcM
This entry doesn't feel like a complete thought to me, basically some
observations on notional "magic" and the rules for developing and implementing
the same. Conceptually there has been a lot of work done on Magical systems,
both from a technical point of view and story point of view, very little of
which seems referenced :-).

Typical RPG systems use magic either entirely, or mostly entirely, for combat.
Meaning attacking and defending against attacks (physical and magical) which
result in damage to the player or the opponent. And unlike Magic in books like
the Harry Potter series where it has more of a 'tool' nature (travel,
lighting, retrieving things, fixing things, cleaning, Etc.)

That said, having dabbled in game design I have found that "real world" things
like economics and physics express self contained and dynamically stable
systems. That can be useful in the fantasy world given that one ever burning
fire spell could burn everything in the game universe if there wasn't
something which prevented that from happening. So thinks like the inverse
square law and conservation of (magical) energy really help out in keeping the
game from becoming radically unbalanced.

When I read "The Magic Goes Away" by Niven I felt it was an interesting take
on 'magic as alternate scientific thing' and Zelazny's unfinished "Changling"
trilogy about magic in an alternate world an interesting 'magic is where you
find it' sort of system.

~~~
FlailFast
+1 to Zelazny's take on magic. Didn't realize Changeling was meant to be a
trilogy (although that makes a ton more sense in retrospect, too bad it never
had a threequel).

I also find his Chronicles of Amber to be an interesting take on Universe
building, although the magic system is less formulated (but damn is the whole
Pattern/Chaos thing cool).

All of which to say: if you haven't read Zelazny you should, he's a wonderful
writer.

~~~
CurtMonash
+N to any Zelazny praise, for N a rather large integer.

An attempt was actually made to codify Amber into a "diceless" RPG. Had some
great times playing it.

~~~
lizzard
There's at least a couple of AmberCons (like AmberConNW:
[http://www.amberconnw.org/](http://www.amberconnw.org/)), entire weekends
where a bunch of people get together to run games in this system.

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WalterSear
I always liked the magic system in Maelstrom:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom_%28role_playing_game%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom_%28role_playing_game%29#Magic_System)

Essentially, the DM judges the difficulty of a particular spell based on how
unlikely it is.

So a lightning bolt in the middle of a cloudless day would be more difficult
than accidentally finding a weapon on the street in the middle of a fight,
which would be more difficult than your opponent stumbling and dropping their
weapon.

~~~
zyxley
That seems silly to me. If the rules are just "do whatever you feel like, I
guess, with the GM deciding what works", why even have rules?

Compare to, for example, Nobilis, which allows assorted flexible
impossibilities but is crafted to encourage certain effects on both theme and
the actual flow of gameplay.

~~~
WalterSear
>If the rules are just "do whatever you feel like, I guess, with the GM
deciding what works", why even have rules?

If the DM can't make an entertaining story without 'rules', then why even have
a DM?

I've hosted RPGs with nothing but a pencil, paper and some dice.

~~~
zyxley
The point I'm trying to make is that the rules should, in some way, actively
encourage results in line with the game's thematics.

For example, Dogs in the Vineyard encourages/threatens players with the risks
and rewards of escalating conflict, Nobilis tries to get you to reenact a game
version of the Sandman comic, and Vampire: the Masquerade rewards you for
treating normal humans like pawns and playthings.

~~~
WalterSear
Fwiw, the Maelstrom system did exactly that. It's essentially a historical
fiction role playing game, so high fantasy tropes and the like are meant to be
discouraged. Magic-as-luck-manipulation allows just enough freedom to be
entertaining, while maintaining the milieu of the game.

It also makes for very creative magic, since you are essentially handing the
magician player an opportunity to effect the plot directly, in however they so
imagine (and the DM and the dice permit), rather than giving them a gun with
so many bullets in it, ala D&D.

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Semiapies
That moment you read something and realize that someone is talking generically
about a broad field (fantasy RPGs) and only has any experience with one or two
examples (probably D&D).

A few other games to look into, for the curious: HeroQuest, Mage: the
Ascension, Nobilis, and Sorcerer.

~~~
aetherson
John Kim has very broad experience with roleplaying games, fantasy and
otherwise. He certainly does not have a worldview comprised entirely or mostly
of one or two RPGs, and definitely not just D&D.

Source: I'm a personal friend; we play roleplaying games together fairly
often; I go to one of the several cons that he goes to regularly; I have been
discussing roleplaying games with him online on-and-off going back to
rec.games.frp.advocacy in the mid-late 90's.

~~~
dragonwriter
> John Kim has very broad experience with roleplaying games, fantasy and
> otherwise.

The completely lack of concrete ties to specific systems makes it hard to
tell, but the generalizations he makes seem to be, at best, only valid of
games designed to operate in a simulation-oriented manner like D&D, rather
ones designed to operate in a more narrative-oriented manner (FATE, among
others.)

> He certainly does not have a worldview comprised entirely or mostly of one
> or two RPGs

If not, he certainly seems to have a narrowness of understanding on the
particular subject similar to what you might have of issues in programming
languages when you had an experience of more than one or two languages -- but
they were all statically-typed OO languages with Algol-style syntax.

~~~
aetherson
Nope, sorry dude. You're just wrong in your inferences concerning the author's
experiences. To my certain knowledge, John has played many games from the
indie/narrativist/storygame branch of the rpg family tree.

Now that that essay is dated 2006, so Fate and Apocalypse World had not risen
to their current prominence. But the branch of roleplaying games precipitated
by the Forge existed.

Maybe you'd like to make your point without explaining what the author must
have experienced?

~~~
dragonwriter
> You're just wrong in your inferences concerning the author's experiences.

I didn't make any inferences about his experiences, I made a statement about
the scope in which the generalizations he made were defensible.

> Now that that essay is dated 2006, so Fate and Apocalypse World had not
> risen to their current prominence.

Sure, I used FATE as an example that was likely to be familiar to current
readers of what I was referring to, not as a specific system which the author
should have addressed.

Now, its possible that the author's intent was to make an argument specific to
simulationist-style rules.

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omegaham
One of the biggest reasons why we have scientific magic in RPGs is that it
gives agency to the player. When magic is a relatively mundane tool, it
becomes an _option_ that a player can rely on, and that is really important.
If magic is unknowable, then it forces the _GM_ to use the magic rather than
the players. This takes agency away from the players and makes it more of a
movie (zero-player game) than a game.

Personally, I find the "scientific for mundane things, but mythical for
greater things" model to be the most desirable, because it's directly
applicable to how we view magic in the real world - any sufficiently advanced
technology is viewed as magic. If you show an 18th-century machinist a laser-
etched piece, he'll be mystified. And as you gain wisdom, knowledge, and
experience, the current mystery slowly unravels, to reveal still more
mysteries beyond.

So, the mechanism to cast a small fireball should be mundane and
understandable. In contrast, the fact that 500 years ago, a great sage burned
an entire forest to ash should be mystical and unknowable... for now. Maybe it
will always be a mystery. Maybe the method will become known but shown to be
impossible with current abilities. Maybe the magician of the group _will_
attain that power, but at some great cost. It's up to the GM.

This way, we get the best of both worlds - the delight and intrigue of
mysterious things, _and_ the agency of being able to manipulate known rules to
solve problems.

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hosh
Magic-as-a-technology has been popular in the sci-fi/fantasy genres for novels
for the past ten, twenty years. I remember when it started getting popular,
and I thought, "this is awesome."

It's not so awesome anymore, not for me at least.

Magic as a consequence of _shifts_ in consciousness and awareness, as in, how
you perceive and experience reality rather than any set of manipulable and
repeatable forces -- that's something more interesting. I've been seeing one
or two indie authors writing in this space, listing their works for the under
$5 bin at Amazon.

Now how to portray that in a game? That's more difficult. One of the games I
remember that have done something like this is Bastion. It wasn't necessarily
part of the game mechanic, though. It was the way the narration unfolded as a
reaction to your actions that started changing experiences. Another is Batman:
Arkem Asylum. Another one that comes to mind is Ninja Pizza Girl, though it
wasn't intended as a game on magic. It does have the shifts in consciousness
though.

I expect to see a lot more of this when immersive VR/AR gets more popular.
It's very easy to start messing with frames and breaking out of them in ways
that will seem mildly trippy.

Still, I've got some ideas of my own, and they are implementable even with a
2-D, top-down game.

~~~
DennisP
What indie books treat magic as a shift in awareness? That does sound
interesting. It's similar to many actual shamanistic beliefs.

~~~
hosh
It's not just shamanism. I've met psychonaut, meditator, or practitioners in
ceremonial magic will tell you about such shifts.

Here are some of the recent ones I've found:

MageLife, P. Tempest. Warning: badly edited, though the run-on sentences has
it's own rhythm and somehow works with consciousness shifts. This author
nailed it. This is the one that stands out the most among the ones I have
read.

MageBorn: the Blacksmith's Son. Five book series. First book is badly edited
when I read it (the author didn't get a professional editor until the second
book), and you don't really start seeing the consciousness shifts until at
least the second book. It becomes more prominent as the series goes on.
However, the first book starts out by treating enchantments as a lost
technology.

Notable mentions:

"Path of Calm" is OK, but it could be done a lot better. I applaud the
author's attempt because, frankly, people are stumbling their way through it.
The book's "paths" are loosely based on Buddhist practices, with "Path of
Calm" being samatha, and "Path of Fire" being tumo. However, the way the
author talked about working with emotions tells me that, while the author
might have meditative practice ... you can tell where his personal experience
ends when when he starts making shit up.

"Dawn of Wonder" doesn't start with magic. It does deal deep with emotions.
It's probably one of the better fictional books I've seen that depicts a
genuine "born again" experience. That's towards the end though.

DK Holmberg's series, starting with Chased by Fire is OK. Again, by "OK", I
mean it shows these shifts better than your run-of-the-mill magic-as-
technology. The series is a bit slow, since the main character ignores a lot
of himself quite a bit. I have to admit, I have not finished the series. Fell
off of it at the end of the fourth book and have not gotten back into it.

There is one by a Russian author, but I don't remember the name. In this
world, there are no prisoners. Criminals get sent into an MMO with the pain
blockers settings removed. There are a lot of classical MMO elements -- but as
you start getting deeper into the book, you start seeing those shifts come
out. I'm looking forward to the next books in the series when they get
translated to English.

~~~
hosh
I did think of a story I want to write.

People use magic a lot in combat settings, and I finally got tired of that. If
say, magic comes from the shaping of consciousness, what if there are grave
consequences to using magic to kill someone.

The story I'll write (eventually) starts with an intelligent kid whose been
told never to do that. He's smarter than his teachers and parents. One day, he
saw someone in trouble, wanted to be a hero -- and prove all those other
adults wrong -- and steps in to kill someone.

Consequences ensues. He pretty much spends his whole life trying to run away
from said consequences.

Not your usual fare. Most people want to hear a story about defeating
impossible odds :-D

~~~
DennisP
Thanks for all the references! I've downloaded some samples.

Your story idea reminds me of Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, one of my all-time
favorite fantasy works.

~~~
hosh
Earthsea is pretty cool.

Ursula K Le Guin grew up in Asia. Her father had this copy of the Tao Te
Ching, something Le Guin later rendered in English. She worked with it with
the ear of a poet, spent decades working on it, throughout her writing career.
Earthsea superficially resembles a Western, Tolkien-esque high fantasy, but
its thematic core is rooted in the Tao Te Ching and similar streams.

~~~
DennisP
That's really interesting, I didn't know that.

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ebbv
It's really easy to say existing magic systems in games don't have the mystery
that magic can in literature, like LotR. It's a lot harder to actually propose
a way of designing a system that has mystery but yet is understandable to
players and makes the game fun to play.

This post is all really obvious observation and no unique or innovative
suggestions. Let alone a fully thought out new way of doing magic in games.

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Shivetya
having played a great many fantasy games in my early years I was appreciative
of the Hero systems take on fantasy. You created spells by choosing an effect
then modifying it with advantages and disadvantages; a common disadvantage is
a focus, think staff or similar.

When it comes to MMOs, Asheron's Call had the most unique system whereby as
originally launched the uses of a particular spell by all players could reduce
its effectiveness. Akin to a world mana pool. While it never went down
severely it did suffer a reduction in effect. Combined with an early spell
learning system that eventually was broken by players through group effort
higher tier spells were initially rare. The best thing about their magic
system was that projectile spells had the same rules as projectile weapons
which means the target could dodge them!

Currently most MMOs have reduced magic spells to nearly auto attack format. As
in, you never really run out of power, your health is your real resource.

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CurtMonash
I played Morrowind long ago, and am playing Elder Scrolls Online now.
Morrowind had lots of non-combat magical ability, but it was still a
"scientific" system in the terms of the article, with some balancing errors
that I abused brutally. (Who needs cheat codes when you can achieve 100%
prevention of ALL kinds of damage, as well as rapid flight?)

Elder Scrolls Online has a system that's "scientific" for the players and for
generic NPC enemies, but there are much more mystical forms of magic in the
world as well, which are encountered in a considerable number of quests.

One nitpick -- I'd say that in most games I've seen, evenn "non-magical"
healing works very differently from that in our real world. I'd say that most
healing, therefore, is magical in nature.

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digi_owl
Games have rules, and rules are what science is made of. As such, you can't
create non-science magic in a game without throwing out the rules, and
therefore no longer have a game.

BTW, a whole lot of though on RPG design out there is so far up their own
exhaust pipe that arguing creationism seems more sane.

~~~
richardjdare
The thing is, you _can_ interact with a game world without knowing what those
rules are. You can chase definite goals using means that you do not fully
understand. We do that all the time in ordinary life.

I think that the mystification of game mechanics would do a great deal to
improve immersion, and open up new kinds of gaming experiences. It's something
I've been thinking seriously about as an indie game developer.

~~~
digi_owl
And then the kids sit down and document every mechanic by trial and error over
at Gamefaqs and like.

Meh, i hold to Sir clarke's adage about technology and magic.

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CurtMonash
Meanwhile, MMOs are plagued by lag, especially in large-scale PvP combat, as
they can't calculate what's happening in real-time. So introducing a little
pseudo-randomness might be good, just to allow for more drastic approximations
in the calculations. :)

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superskierpat
One magic system I've always found would be interesting in an rpg would be
Michael Moorcocks elric of melnibone. Specificaly having to depend on pacts
with demons, gods and other supernatural creatures in order to obtain magic
items or spells.

~~~
Vulume
In Darker than Black there are Contractors. They have a "contract" which means
they can cast one particular spell, after which they have to complete their
"contract payment" before they can cast again. That's often a simple but
annoying task like smoking a cigarette or writing a poem. The spell and
payment are different for each one. Nobody got to choose.

[http://darkerthanblack.wikia.com/wiki/Obeisance](http://darkerthanblack.wikia.com/wiki/Obeisance)

~~~
comrh
That is such an interesting idea, especially because so many of those
"obeisances" mimic OCD symptoms.

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sehugg
Hadean Lands (recent IF game by Andrew Plotkin) is all about trying to figure
out the rules of the magic (alchemy) system and it's relation to the world.

