I'm trying to build a world that makes sense with magic. The basic objective is this: I want more out of combat spells that aren't in the PH, and I want to remove some of the existing ones, but I DONT want to do this by fiat or by writing tons of new spells. I want to create a system which creates opportunities for players to come up with and make spells but also defines boundaries in an organic way. This wouldn't be that huge of a problem except for some conditions....
-Isn't horribly contrived. I might have to sacrifice this...
-Can't be so low magic as to be uninteresting.
-Martial classes shouldn't be marginalized.
-The idea of only certain spells existing and other spells which are similar not existing is ridiculous and unacceptable. Spells need to be creatable and organic. If you have a spell that allows you to do something like create a floating plane of force (Tenser's floating disc from the PH), it follows that you can create floating planes of force of various sizes and shapes (which quickly gets out of hand).
-I'm don't particularly want to screw with combat, and am willing to handwave combat powers if I have to (changing descriptions can help here too).
-Magic affects the world in a 'realistic' way. What I mean is, if something is available for use, it will be used as much as possible by anyone who can, with the associated effects on society.
-Corollary to the above: can't be so high magic that the ramifications are so far reaching and revolutionary that the world is nothing like ours. While interesting, I'm not up to running to a campaign in something like that...
-Powerful enough to be interesting, but not powerful enough for players to constantly shortcut things without liberal contrivances like countermagic.
Maybe it's not possible.
I've been trying to think of something usable from fantasy, but I'm not particularly well read in that department (just the popular stuff really). And while a lot of ideas might work for a novel, they're hard to reconcile with certain conditions. For example, magic in The Wheel of Time. The idea of a few powers and that special people can with training 'weave' such powers to affect the world is solid. But it naturally follows that anyone with such skills is going to completely overshadow anyone without them. The whole fighter class as hero makes no sense. Also, such far reaching powers run counter to my last condition.
Anyways, the route that seems to hold the most promise of meeting most of these is a magical world with a lot of contrived limits to magic, in terms of how much and how powerful. I'm trying to build it so that those limits are somewhat intuitive and don't seem silly the more you think about them.
If anyone has ideas, commentary, experiences with this, or help, thanks a lot
How do people wield and control magic? Is wizardry like a blend of linguistics, engineering and chaos theory? What about divine magic? Could it work like religious practices (meditation, yoga, koans, etc.) that get you out of your rational mind and into a receptive state that makes miracles possible? What about other forms of magic?
What makes magic too hard for the average person to bother with? Maybe magic isn't hard. It just carries some unpredictable risks. Would a spell gone awry do something people, branding them in some strange way (hair falling out or turning colors, eyes changing color or type - like a human getting a reptilian eye, weird "tattoos" appearing on the body, etc.)? Could magic be tied to karma?
Then again, you could just have it be more or less mysterious, with only a few people knowing a little bit of what's really out there. Think along the lines of astrophysics, chaos theory, and quantum mechanics. There's a huge gap between what we know (which ain't much) and what we can do with it (which is far less).
The Ars magica system basically had Verbs (destroy, create, change and so on) and Nouns (Fire, Body, Spirit, Mind, animal, senses). And all spells were based off a combination of one verb and one noun - so a D&D fireball would be create and fire, while Charm Person would be change and Mind. Not sure how easy it would be to implement such a system in D&D - maybe you could use the choice of combat powers to determine the verb/noun levels and they then play those to create other effects (So a wizard with lots of polymorph and charm spells would have quite high "Change" and might then play that a noun he's weak in like senses to create an illusion).
Since this might make magic using classes more powerful you could bring back the old D&D idea of "Name Level" (it was around 9th) where a fighter can build a keep and attract an army, a Rogue can attract a gang of followers and so on.
GURPS, Ars Magica and Marvel Super Heroes all had spontaneous magic systems where you could create effects on the fly.
The Ars magica system basically had Verbs (destroy, create, change and so on) and Nouns (Fire, Body, Spirit, Mind, animal, senses). And all spells were based off a combination of one verb and one noun - so a D&D fireball would be create and fire, while Charm Person would be change and Mind. Not sure how easy it would be to implement such a system in D&D - maybe you could use the choice of combat powers to determine the verb/noun levels and they then play those to create other effects (So a wizard with lots of polymorph and charm spells would have quite high "Change" and might then play that a noun he's weak in like senses to create an illusion).
Since this might make magic using classes more powerful you could bring back the old D&D idea of "Name Level" (it was around 9th) where a fighter can build a keep and attract an army, a Rogue can attract a gang of followers and so on.
Nice, I'll have to look into this Ars Magica thing. Definitely sounds workable from a game system point of view, and the verbs and nouns customizable to what you want.
Magic class balance...I might assert that everyone can use magic, but only the particularly talented people who are magic classes have the ability to do magic in fast paced, heated combat scenarios, in which situations they don't blow away martial classes because what they can do is limited under such stressful conditions.
I think it could work really well along side the Ars magica system mentioned above.
It's been some time since I read the books, but if I recall correct, the main character in "A Wizard of Earthsea", Ged first practices magic as a young shepherd, just after overhearing a wizard speak a command to an animal, he tries it too and the goes onto train with the wizard and later goes to a school of magic, where he tampers with ancient names he shouldn't and unleashes an evil force on the world that he has to then hunt down. Along the way he learns new names, seeks the knowledge of a dragon who still knows the ancient names and so forth. It's a good read and probably only a 200 page read for the first book.
Good luck
How would this translate into D&D? Perhaps, at each level, the Magician learns to speak to a new class of being. Thus, at a certain level, they can speak to the air and ask it to harden in one spot, making "Tenser's floating Disk", or ask the trees to bind their enemies, or call upon stone to turn itself into a flock of blackbirds. Just a thought - it may not work out practically. Also - Werewolf: The Forsaken uses a similar idea, with the PCs making deals with spirits, so you may want to check that out.
One system I always thought was very interesting and flavorful was used in Susanna Clark's novel "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell". The highest form of magic is described by the phrase "Tree speaks to stone, Stone speaks to water". That is, everything has a mind and a personality, from the stones to the sky to the animals to the land itself. A magician can speak to the sky and the trees and request things of them, calling upon ancient alliances and pacts.
(snip)
Just a thought - it may not work out practically.
No, but it's still cool!
Shift, the darn game doesn't seem to have been popular enough for me to get information on the system online (or maybe Im not looking hard enough...).
Mostly ghostly, I like Clarke's novel a lot too, but I guess practical implementation seems like too much of a stretch. Maybe primarily because it's so hard to gel with the combat spells in the game, but that's honestly coming up with just about any system. The magic of DnD isn't made for explanations, it's made for cinematic effect
Another thing about Strange and Norrel is that as a work of fiction it's great, but try to imagine that as a real setting, and questions start popping up. Without some built in limits, you either have silly contrived limits or a situation where the world is changed irrevocably. Take the magic in Strange and Norrel to it's logical conclusion and you have a world that is completely unrecognizable, a society that might not even be human anymore.
“How does magic work? Hah! What a silly question. But since you're asking so earnestly, here's what I know. Just don't complain about me lecturing.
Things didn't always work this way, before whatever cataclysm that left us stranded on this...rock. Used to be stuff happened because of this thing called science. Used to be people studied something called physics. Used to be that stuff was worth a damn.
Well, when the gods saved this chunk of dirt and stuck it in the Astral Sea they mucked all that up. Nothing worked anymore, least not the way it was supposed to. Everything that was alive nearly got wiped right out, and even the stuff that wasn't alive was in danger of falling apart.
So they had to fix it someways, and they didn't choose physics. Gods didn't understand half that junk anyways; when they heard that light was both a particle and a wave they remembered they had pressing business elsewhere.
But the gods were still pretty clever, and they came up with something. They didn't really get physics, but on the human scale they pretty much got what it did. So they replaced it. Jury rigged some sort of...well...I guess you could call it stage machinery. It's just behind the scenes and makes the world work pretty much like it's supposed to. People call it all kinds of things, the ether, the essence, the arcane, but in the end, it's just a divine bandaid.
And it's pretty much everywhere. Has to be, of course. Like a framework behind the reality of our senses. Infuses everything, especially living things. Some think of it as behind the spirit or the soul. Maybe that's why people can touch it. Animals can too, but they're generally not smart enough to think much about it: they accept it as part of the world and move on. But people don't just accept it, and that's why we have magic.
Doing magic is like growing an extra pair of arms, reaching out and bending that framework. Most people can't do this. They can't see the frame very well, and their brains just don't have the capacity to make those arms. Even if they can, they're like the limbs of a baby: short and weak with chubby clumsy fingers. But with training and talent, those little stumps turn into the arms of giants, the fat fingers into the slender digits of a pianist.
Those kind of people are one in a million though. More likely to give sire a frog than a natural wizard. But luckily for the rest of us, there's the powder. Eat some and you'll start seeing the framework. Eat some more and you'll get some feeble arms. Eat a purse and you'll practically be an archmage, in the minute or so before you keel over dead.
Bending isn't easy. The backstage machinery wants to run in a certain way, the way it's run for the past couple thousand years. To bend something for the first time, not a whole lot of people can do. But it gets easier after that. It's like magicians are trying to get through this dense jungle. Initially you constantly have obstacles in your way, branches, vines, tangled roots. But come back to that again and you've cleared a few things out. Walk it enough times and you have a path. That's a spell.
Of course whatever you bend you can also break, like working a piece of silverware back and forth too much. Same with magic. Some spells bend things so hard, not just the framework of the world but your mind as well, that you've got to wait a while before you can try it again. Thankfully you can try it again, as the stage machinery seems to repair itself. Least that's what's always happened up to now. Maybe some day a fool will go and break a place for good.”
-The Historian to Jord Oberon
I'm starting to like this a lot because it meshes well with the campaign setting and satisfies some conditions without too much contrivance (I hope).
First the problem of why magic is common enough that the setting is a magical world, and why such magic taken to its farthest logical degree would not create a world completely unrecognizable to us. The idea of magic as being very difficult to do and very local limits it: there's magic going on everywhere but only where a trailblazer has already cleared a path. And trailblazers are very rare indeed. Doing new magic is a feat, mostly accomplished by people using a lot of the powder.
The powder is a gimmick meant to address the fact that non-wizard players need to be able to do some out of combat magic or feel a trifle left out. The built in limit here is that this substance is so expensive that few people can afford to ingest it for the sake of trying some new magic that might very well fail (just because you can take the face off a clock and see and touch the gears, doesn't mean you know what they do). Too expensive for all the farmers to magic their plows and revolutionize agriculture. Of course the epic scale of wealth the PCs achieve can fuel a few such exploits in reality bending.
The problem is that combat magic, since it takes place in such varied locales, is almost without fail going to qualify as new magic. This...is where I start having to contrive. The idea is that their arsenal of combat spells (usable only after intense training
) is like a clinic on how to bend reality efficiently, using shortcuts and clever moves to minimize the amount of levers you have to pull on that stage machinery behind reality. If doing new magic is hard, coming up with new magic efficient enough to be used in the heat of combat is unheard of (maybe I'll let the PC's do this beyond lvl 25 or so?). So now the issue is making a system. Which is what makes an Earthsea/Ars Magica combo so tempting...but I digress. I've been thinking of making a hierarchy of effect difficulty based on how many laws of physics you have to shatter or warp to get what you want. Moving an object around is easy. Conjuring something up is ludicrously hard. And so on. Difficulty sets cost. Sure the players might theoretically be able to animate a castle to fight for them. Could they ever afford that much powder or eat that much without it killing them? Who knows.
And then of course there's removing whole classes of magic, which I don't mind so much actually. Scrying and divination for one become hard to justify: if the concept is using mental arms to reach out and bend this framework, you can really only affect things that you can see (though in a world slightly bowl shaped, you can see a long way).
Anyways more things to think about...
http://www.nobleknight.com/ViewProducts.asp_Q_ProductLineID_E_2137419380_A_ManufacturerID_E_100_A_CategoryID_E_12_A_GenreID_E_
I can't find my old copy, so I just may buy one!
- Wizard gets X number of spell points (SP) per level. These restore after sleeping.
- Different spell effects cost different amounts of SPs. Add up all the effects you want, and thats how many points it costs. Allows you to cast a lot of weak spontaneous magic, or blow your wad on one hella FWACKOOMING spell.
For example (just made these up - not thought through or tested):
Duration - costs 1 SP per category - the longer it lasts, the more it costs
Area of affect - 1 SP per target or 1 SP per square
Damage - 1 SP = 1d6 damage - pump up as necessary
Special effect - paralysis etc - 5 SP per
No Saving Throw - 10 SP
etc etc (massive DM judgement calls constantly necessary)
So, dude decides he wants to create a flaming trident that paralyses its target with no save while doing 3d6 damage, the DM just adds up the total number of costs and the player subtracts that total from their available points.
Note that this system would require A LOT of testing to avoid serious balance issues.
The Powder might only be a vailable from one source, in small amounts and it might also have major side effects. All of these things would keep it in check.
I posted and it got deleted. Anyway, I was just saying that your Powder idea sounds a lot like Frank Herbert's "Dune" (And the film), where a substance known as The Spice enables presentiment and is thus essential for space travel.
The Powder might only be a vailable from one source, in small amounts and it might also have major side effects. All of these things would keep it in check.
Haha, yes, it is definitely reminiscent of melange. Which I believe was related to ideas of mind altering drugs (kinda written around that time and all)...and when I explained the powder thing to my players and how it allowed you to see the framework behind reality, they were basically like "oh wow, so this stuff is like an acid trip?".
And yeah Savesstupidity I'm thinking of using some sort of spell point system for making rituals/out of combat magic, except instead of points it's costs. Actually sorta reminds me of making spells in Elder Scrolls... I'd probably even have a cost category for special effects: if you want a fireball to actually create fire out of thin air instead of simply being superheated air, that's going to increase your budget astronomically :p
Example:
Low damage: heroic: 1d6, paragon: 2d6, epic: 3d6 (low cost)
Normal damage: heroic: 2d6, paragon: 4d6, epic: 6d6 (medium cost)
High damage: heroic: 3d6, paragon: 6d6, epic: 9d6 (high cost)
Ongoing damage
Terrain effect
Combat effect
Cover
etc., you get the idea
The big disadvantage of such a system is that it needs a huge lot of work to get started, and that you will have to rework it a couple of times after using it. That kind of work is not everybodys thing...I did something like that in 1st Edition and let me tell you that I had to polish it for months
We used it for 7 years, so the investment wasn't too bad, but it might have been a flop, and then the time would have been wasted.