Every little thing you do is magic.
May. 21st, 2012 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinA Wilder World doesn't have a character class system, though it is being constructed with the classic four core classes of D&D in mind... not exclusively, of course. I'm keeping other archetypal character types in mind, but I know one of the things that will be looked at is how well it handles fighters, thieves, clerics, and magic-users. The answer... particularly for the latter two... is going to be "a bit differently from how D&D does, but hopefully well."
Sometime later (possibly this week, possibly next) I'm going to be making a post about cleric-fu, which is probably the least developed of the four concepts, but today I want to talk a little bit about magic systems in roleplaying games, and my approach to them.
Imagine a roleplaying game that has eighty pages of actions like "Push Open Door" and "Pull Open Door", with the more advanced "Open Door" action. Each one has its own little heading and description of how long it takes to complete, and then two or three paragraphs of specific rules and caveats and so on.
Doesn't sound like a very satisfying game, does it?
This is among the reasons that I've never found the way D&D (and most fantasy roleplaying games descended from it) handle wizards to be very satisfying. Most of the things that anyone can do in a roleplaying game are handled under some variation of the principle of "Well, if it's something your character could reasonably do in real life, you can at least attempt it."
Obviously for a fantasy element like wizardry there needs to be some kind of rules or guidelines for what is reasonable and what is possible, since we can't make a real-world comparison, but having a finite list of discrete spells seems like going too far in that direction, to me.
D&D is over 30 years old at this point and we've all been playing games and consuming spin-off media descended from it, so the idea of a spell list seems pretty natural and normal by this point, and there are some positive points to it. I mean, I remember when I first got into the hobby, every D&D or similar book I got my hands on that had a spell list in it... it would fire up my imagination, thinking about the different ways to combine them, imagining different uses for them. It can definitely be valuable as a jumping-off point, and having a number of "plug and play" spells to choose from does simplify playing as a wizard compared to a "build your own" spell system.
But say you're a wizard who knows how to conjure fire from your fingertips. If you have enough magic energy for a big blast of flame once a day, why don't you have enough energy to light candles all day long? Why can't you twist the spell to make two smaller blasts of flame at the same time? Why can't you reverse it to make a blast of cold? Why can't you take the basic principle of "manipulate/control fire" and protect yourself from blasts of fire?
Granted, as a D&D player you can tailor your spell list around a theme, more or less, to somewhat accomplish this... the concept of "reversing" spells existed in early editions, and 3rd edition introduced meta-magic feats that can be used to somewhat depict this sort of flexibility. There are some nods here and there to the idea that magic isn't only capable of existing as these particular discrete packets.
But in less D&D-centric fiction, a "spell" is as likely to refer to a specific working of magic as it is a generic, off-the-shelf, mass produced Way Of Doing Some Magic. People who know enough magic to work a spell generally know enough magic to work it a little bit differently when the situation warrants it.
For A Wilder World, I wanted a magic system that felt less like choosing from an inventory or catalog of predefined effects and more like an extension of the core game system that allows for the fact that some people can do magic, have magic, know magic, and are magic.
In game terms, anybody who has put at least one point into Magic can use magic to accomplish anything they could have automatically done otherwise by hand. When you start straying from what you could immediately accomplish without a die roll using your own natural mundane capabilities, then you have to get dice involved. For balance purposes, using magic to get around another die roll always takes a harder die roll... the benefit is flexibility, rather than reliability. Magic is also assumed to be flashy, loud, and not exactly quick... altering any of these assumptions also adds a penalty.
Abilities that grant a bonus to magic checks/attacks tend to be themed, revolving around an element or concept like plants or fire or undead. You get the bonus if you can solidly connect what you're trying to do to the theme element. These bonuses don't stack, so you can have a broader repertoire (plants and fire and undead) but you can't make a super spell by combining them (flaming undead plants).
Tricks (once-a-scene/limited use abilities) include things labeled "Magic Spells", but rather than being a specific discrete package... well, to explain a bit about Tricks (formerly called Techniques, but that term didn't seem universally applicable), they grew out of D&D 4E's "encounter power" system. But as much as I like the idea of the power system, they really took the problem of the narrowly defined wizard spells and spread them to every class.
If you're a Ranger and you have the level one daily power "Hunter's Bear Trap", you can make an extra powerful arrow attack that inflicts a bleeding/hobbling leg wound with precisely defined effects. You can't, according to the rules as written, use the same pinpoint accuracy to nail something to a wall to stop it from tumbling into an abyss. You can't shoot something out of someone's hand with the same level of accuracy. Having Hunter's Bear Trap as a power selection means day of your adventuring life, there will be at least one time orchestrated by the player where the character has the opportunity to make this one incredible shot... this one exact same incredible shot.
And while you can devise and describe other tricks, other stunts, other special showy shots, you have to sell them to the DM and get approval and then probably make some additional rolls to make them work, but here's this ability you have, this card in your hand, that says you can just kneecap someone. So you'll do it. You can do it as often as once a day, so every day of your adventuring life you'll shoot someone in the leg with an arrow for extra damage plus slow, because you can. You do this until you get leveled up to the point where you replace that power with a higher level one, at which point one of the three tricks you do every day changes.
Tricks don't work like that. Instead of picking something so specific as "arrow to the knee", you'd have a trick shot ability that allows you to add a bonus to a ranged attack if it is inflicting an effect (disarm, knock down, stun, etc.) instead of damage, or make a ranged attack with an effect on top of the damage for free, or give a bonus to any not-actually-an-attack attack roll you make with a ranged weapon (competitive target shooting, cutting a rope or snuffing a candle with an arrow, pinning a falling object/person to the wall, etc.) Note the "ors" there... I'm not saying that there might be three different Tricks that have these different function. I'm saying one Trick would have those things listed. Once per scene, you can do one of those things... or add a +2 bonus to something the GM agrees is closely enough related.
That's how Tricks work.
So a Trick that is a "Magic Spell", instead of being "Melf's Acid Arrow", would be something like "Create Acid". And its description would list some of the possible uses (projecting a stream or glob of acid as an attack, covering an area in acid to make it dangerous to pass, weakening/destroying inanimate objects, etc.) You can make an arrow of acid into your character's personal signature if you want, but then it's your acid arrow, not Melf's. And if you find yourself in a situation where a puddle of acid would be better than an arrow of acid, you don't have to rue the fact that when you woke up in the morning you were thinking about arrows and not puddles.
Now, somebody without a Trick called Create Acid could use magic to try to destroy a metal lock and say that they're creating acid, or attack someone with magic and have the medium of damage be acid. This is a key part of the system: when I say "things you could try to do normally", I'm talking end results, not methods. You can't create acid out of thin air without magic, but you can attack someone or break something without it. The Trick would simply give bonuses, let you avoid penalties, or otherwise bend/tweak the ordinary rules, once per scene.
If you're a magician-alchemist and acid is your schtick, you'd probably use acid more often than once in a fight scene anyway. The Create Acid trick is what you'd pull out when it really matters, when you need to add a little extra oomph.
In addition to Tricks, the section on magic is going to list a bunch of the more common uses of magic in fantasy fiction and how it works with the rules. Wherever possible this isn't going to involve entirely new separate rules for types of magic, just an explanation of how to use the basic rules to achieve them... in case it's not obvious how to achieve what you want, or in case you don't know what kinds of things your wizard should be able to do or you just want ideas.
While magic does make the game a little more complicated, ultimately my goal is to have wizards playing the same game as everyone else, where what they can do is defined by their imagination, a few relatively simple rules, and some reasonable negotiation with the GM vis-a-vis plausibility... and what they can do well is defined by their Special Ability and Trick selections.
Sometime later (possibly this week, possibly next) I'm going to be making a post about cleric-fu, which is probably the least developed of the four concepts, but today I want to talk a little bit about magic systems in roleplaying games, and my approach to them.
Imagine a roleplaying game that has eighty pages of actions like "Push Open Door" and "Pull Open Door", with the more advanced "Open Door" action. Each one has its own little heading and description of how long it takes to complete, and then two or three paragraphs of specific rules and caveats and so on.
Doesn't sound like a very satisfying game, does it?
This is among the reasons that I've never found the way D&D (and most fantasy roleplaying games descended from it) handle wizards to be very satisfying. Most of the things that anyone can do in a roleplaying game are handled under some variation of the principle of "Well, if it's something your character could reasonably do in real life, you can at least attempt it."
Obviously for a fantasy element like wizardry there needs to be some kind of rules or guidelines for what is reasonable and what is possible, since we can't make a real-world comparison, but having a finite list of discrete spells seems like going too far in that direction, to me.
D&D is over 30 years old at this point and we've all been playing games and consuming spin-off media descended from it, so the idea of a spell list seems pretty natural and normal by this point, and there are some positive points to it. I mean, I remember when I first got into the hobby, every D&D or similar book I got my hands on that had a spell list in it... it would fire up my imagination, thinking about the different ways to combine them, imagining different uses for them. It can definitely be valuable as a jumping-off point, and having a number of "plug and play" spells to choose from does simplify playing as a wizard compared to a "build your own" spell system.
But say you're a wizard who knows how to conjure fire from your fingertips. If you have enough magic energy for a big blast of flame once a day, why don't you have enough energy to light candles all day long? Why can't you twist the spell to make two smaller blasts of flame at the same time? Why can't you reverse it to make a blast of cold? Why can't you take the basic principle of "manipulate/control fire" and protect yourself from blasts of fire?
Granted, as a D&D player you can tailor your spell list around a theme, more or less, to somewhat accomplish this... the concept of "reversing" spells existed in early editions, and 3rd edition introduced meta-magic feats that can be used to somewhat depict this sort of flexibility. There are some nods here and there to the idea that magic isn't only capable of existing as these particular discrete packets.
But in less D&D-centric fiction, a "spell" is as likely to refer to a specific working of magic as it is a generic, off-the-shelf, mass produced Way Of Doing Some Magic. People who know enough magic to work a spell generally know enough magic to work it a little bit differently when the situation warrants it.
For A Wilder World, I wanted a magic system that felt less like choosing from an inventory or catalog of predefined effects and more like an extension of the core game system that allows for the fact that some people can do magic, have magic, know magic, and are magic.
In game terms, anybody who has put at least one point into Magic can use magic to accomplish anything they could have automatically done otherwise by hand. When you start straying from what you could immediately accomplish without a die roll using your own natural mundane capabilities, then you have to get dice involved. For balance purposes, using magic to get around another die roll always takes a harder die roll... the benefit is flexibility, rather than reliability. Magic is also assumed to be flashy, loud, and not exactly quick... altering any of these assumptions also adds a penalty.
Abilities that grant a bonus to magic checks/attacks tend to be themed, revolving around an element or concept like plants or fire or undead. You get the bonus if you can solidly connect what you're trying to do to the theme element. These bonuses don't stack, so you can have a broader repertoire (plants and fire and undead) but you can't make a super spell by combining them (flaming undead plants).
Tricks (once-a-scene/limited use abilities) include things labeled "Magic Spells", but rather than being a specific discrete package... well, to explain a bit about Tricks (formerly called Techniques, but that term didn't seem universally applicable), they grew out of D&D 4E's "encounter power" system. But as much as I like the idea of the power system, they really took the problem of the narrowly defined wizard spells and spread them to every class.
If you're a Ranger and you have the level one daily power "Hunter's Bear Trap", you can make an extra powerful arrow attack that inflicts a bleeding/hobbling leg wound with precisely defined effects. You can't, according to the rules as written, use the same pinpoint accuracy to nail something to a wall to stop it from tumbling into an abyss. You can't shoot something out of someone's hand with the same level of accuracy. Having Hunter's Bear Trap as a power selection means day of your adventuring life, there will be at least one time orchestrated by the player where the character has the opportunity to make this one incredible shot... this one exact same incredible shot.
And while you can devise and describe other tricks, other stunts, other special showy shots, you have to sell them to the DM and get approval and then probably make some additional rolls to make them work, but here's this ability you have, this card in your hand, that says you can just kneecap someone. So you'll do it. You can do it as often as once a day, so every day of your adventuring life you'll shoot someone in the leg with an arrow for extra damage plus slow, because you can. You do this until you get leveled up to the point where you replace that power with a higher level one, at which point one of the three tricks you do every day changes.
Tricks don't work like that. Instead of picking something so specific as "arrow to the knee", you'd have a trick shot ability that allows you to add a bonus to a ranged attack if it is inflicting an effect (disarm, knock down, stun, etc.) instead of damage, or make a ranged attack with an effect on top of the damage for free, or give a bonus to any not-actually-an-attack attack roll you make with a ranged weapon (competitive target shooting, cutting a rope or snuffing a candle with an arrow, pinning a falling object/person to the wall, etc.) Note the "ors" there... I'm not saying that there might be three different Tricks that have these different function. I'm saying one Trick would have those things listed. Once per scene, you can do one of those things... or add a +2 bonus to something the GM agrees is closely enough related.
That's how Tricks work.
So a Trick that is a "Magic Spell", instead of being "Melf's Acid Arrow", would be something like "Create Acid". And its description would list some of the possible uses (projecting a stream or glob of acid as an attack, covering an area in acid to make it dangerous to pass, weakening/destroying inanimate objects, etc.) You can make an arrow of acid into your character's personal signature if you want, but then it's your acid arrow, not Melf's. And if you find yourself in a situation where a puddle of acid would be better than an arrow of acid, you don't have to rue the fact that when you woke up in the morning you were thinking about arrows and not puddles.
Now, somebody without a Trick called Create Acid could use magic to try to destroy a metal lock and say that they're creating acid, or attack someone with magic and have the medium of damage be acid. This is a key part of the system: when I say "things you could try to do normally", I'm talking end results, not methods. You can't create acid out of thin air without magic, but you can attack someone or break something without it. The Trick would simply give bonuses, let you avoid penalties, or otherwise bend/tweak the ordinary rules, once per scene.
If you're a magician-alchemist and acid is your schtick, you'd probably use acid more often than once in a fight scene anyway. The Create Acid trick is what you'd pull out when it really matters, when you need to add a little extra oomph.
In addition to Tricks, the section on magic is going to list a bunch of the more common uses of magic in fantasy fiction and how it works with the rules. Wherever possible this isn't going to involve entirely new separate rules for types of magic, just an explanation of how to use the basic rules to achieve them... in case it's not obvious how to achieve what you want, or in case you don't know what kinds of things your wizard should be able to do or you just want ideas.
While magic does make the game a little more complicated, ultimately my goal is to have wizards playing the same game as everyone else, where what they can do is defined by their imagination, a few relatively simple rules, and some reasonable negotiation with the GM vis-a-vis plausibility... and what they can do well is defined by their Special Ability and Trick selections.