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ShadowFighter15
2015-10-02, 08:16 AM
Okay, this is more for a setting I've been working on for a while than anything related to a particular RPG, but I figured there was a pretty good body of knowledge here to delve into.

So; in this setting, magic is pretty easy to learn - the rudimentary parts, at least - and is all about manipulating existing energy. Not any esoteric energy; just the same kinds of energy you learn about in a physics class, so freezing something isn't casting a cold spell on it, but sucking out most of the heat and transforming it into some other form of energy (like light, electricity, sound, kinetic energy, etc - even just re-locating the heat elsewhere). Anyway, part of this is that the same senses that let you know where available energy is around you, also can be trained to let you perceive the world in full 360-degrees. You can sense people by the heat in their bodies, the kinetic energy of their movements and so-on, you can sense where objects are by the light and sound reflecting off them. Not to mention that, with a quick thought, you could grab a bunch of the nearby energy and instantly form it into a momentary shield of kinetic energy, just enough to parry a strike that you couldn't fend off with your sword.

Now; honing those magical senses like that is far from easy but I figured it would have happened often enough that people would have designed armour meant to help when fighting like that. Trick is; I have no idea how it would go. Furthest I got was something light and flexible so as not to inhibit their movement, which would also let them carry various energy-containing devices (for those times when you need more energy than you can feasibly gather from the immediate surroundings). Or would people who'd learnt to do this simply not bother with armour and just protect themselves with kinetic barriers?*

And would someone who'd mastered this fight differently? Obviously, they'd leave a few more openings in their defence as they could just close them up with a kinetic barrier, but would there be certain techniques or strikes that suddenly become a lot more viable than they are in real-life because of that extra protection? Could dual-wielding become more viable with this all-around perception and being able to use kinetic energy to reinforce your grip on the blades or add more striking force to them? Could they more readily engage multiple opponents at once?

I'm just trying to get a few ideas here, see if a world with this sort of magic would differ on these points at all or if they'd be close enough to our own world as to not matter.


*Theoretically; they could also just pull all the kinetic energy out of their opponent's weapon but I figure that weapon design would've ensured that wouldn't be possible.

Garimeth
2015-10-02, 09:04 AM
Okay, this is more for a setting I've been working on for a while than anything related to a particular RPG, but I figured there was a pretty good body of knowledge here to delve into.

So; in this setting, magic is pretty easy to learn - the rudimentary parts, at least - and is all about manipulating existing energy. Not any esoteric energy; just the same kinds of energy you learn about in a physics class, so freezing something isn't casting a cold spell on it, but sucking out most of the heat and transforming it into some other form of energy (like light, electricity, sound, kinetic energy, etc - even just re-locating the heat elsewhere). Anyway, part of this is that the same senses that let you know where available energy is around you, also can be trained to let you perceive the world in full 360-degrees. You can sense people by the heat in their bodies, the kinetic energy of their movements and so-on, you can sense where objects are by the light and sound reflecting off them. Not to mention that, with a quick thought, you could grab a bunch of the nearby energy and instantly form it into a momentary shield of kinetic energy, just enough to parry a strike that you couldn't fend off with your sword.

Now; honing those magical senses like that is far from easy but I figured it would have happened often enough that people would have designed armour meant to help when fighting like that. Trick is; I have no idea how it would go. Furthest I got was something light and flexible so as not to inhibit their movement, which would also let them carry various energy-containing devices (for those times when you need more energy than you can feasibly gather from the immediate surroundings). Or would people who'd learnt to do this simply not bother with armour and just protect themselves with kinetic barriers?*

And would someone who'd mastered this fight differently? Obviously, they'd leave a few more openings in their defence as they could just close them up with a kinetic barrier, but would there be certain techniques or strikes that suddenly become a lot more viable than they are in real-life because of that extra protection? Could dual-wielding become more viable with this all-around perception and being able to use kinetic energy to reinforce your grip on the blades or add more striking force to them? Could they more readily engage multiple opponents at once?

I'm just trying to get a few ideas here, see if a world with this sort of magic would differ on these points at all or if they'd be close enough to our own world as to not matter.


*Theoretically; they could also just pull all the kinetic energy out of their opponent's weapon but I figure that weapon design would've ensured that wouldn't be possible.

Interesting! Sounds like a bad system tbh. Needs some limitations!

Couple of thoughts:

First what is the energy threshold? How fast is it? Can it be stored? Does Potential Energy count? Couple of thoughts me and a co-worker had:
- you hit me with a hammer, I absorb and redirect the energy into your brain, you are dead or have TBI.
- I convert your energy into gravity and your weapon is too heavy for you to hold.
- I convert all the chemical and heat energy from the other people in a crowded square and kill them by taking it, then form a giant fireball and blow up another neighborhood, or turn it into a kinetic "blade" and cut another crowd in half.
- flight would be super common, convert the gravitational pull on myself into kinetic energy pushing me where I want to go while I am weightless

Basically, unless there are limitations of some type I am immortal unless you can react faster then me. If there is a threshold level of energy to be converted then the only way to fight someone is to overwhelm how fast they can convert that energy. How far out can I sense and convert? Crossbow bolt in the back might be a thing, but not if I can sense it and convert it. You are basically fighting my reaction time, either way the fighting of someone like this boils down to overwhelming their senses or capacity.

smcmike
2015-10-02, 02:24 PM
Yeah, I think you need to fully flesh out the magic system, and specifically its limits. In this process you can brainstorm interactions with weapons and armor and fighting styles, but the key is going to be just when and how one can manipulate energy.

Just brainstorming rules -

In general, it should either be hard to kill with magic or easy to prevent others from killing you. High-powered villains might have nasty tricks to freeze or burn or something implode others, but if it's easy to do and hard to prevent, weapons and armor are t going to do much good.

Perhaps every adept first learns to control her own energy, and interfering with this control is very hard.

Another step in this direction - the closer one is to something, the easier it is to affect, and direct touch is far more powerful. Even a weak magician has more control over the things in her hand than an archmage across the room.

This means you need to be close to or touching both the source and the object of your casting.

In terms of kinetic energy, I think this means you want to have some sort of armor with which to use your kinetic block - blocking with a gust of wind seems inefficient, controlling your opponent's weapon directly requires that you are vastly more powerful than he is, and reinforcing your skin is possible, but could have some nasty side effects.

ShadowFighter15
2015-10-02, 08:51 PM
Thankfully, I had thought about a lot of this; should've been a bit clearer on that. I was just trying to keep the details short.


First what is the energy threshold? How fast is it? Can it be stored? Does Potential Energy count?
Threshold varies based on the person's own magical affinity (which is trained up like a muscle) and the grade of magical focus they use - a device that's required for magic to work and has to be carefully calibrated to the user's neural patterns (a bit like the neurohelmets in Battletech). A Class 4 Focus is the highest you can get without it being a job requirement (ie; law enforcement can get a Class 5, comparable to a real-world officer's sidearm, 7-10 are military-grade and everything above that is either restricted to highly-complex magical research or the magical equivalent of a tactical nuke - but require multiple people working together to use and are kept under an obscene and excessive number of security measures).

Energy can't be stored yourself, but in special devices meant to contain it (I'm still deciding whether part of the spell process is converting the absorbed energy into a transitory form that doesn't naturally occur or not - if I do go with that, this transitory energy is what's stored in the devices). The transition is more-or-less instant (instant for practical concerns, anything more specific would be reserved for researchers) but you can't maintain a particular spell for very long. Maybe 30 seconds if you're happy to take the headache and not use any more magic for the next 20 minutes or so, depending on the Focus you're using. Think of it a bit like how Battlefield 4's mounted machine guns work; you fire them long enough and they heat up and jam, can't fire them again until they cool down. Same deal here; run the Focus too hot and it cuts itself off for a while. Idea being that each use of magic disrupts the focus' attunement and it has to take time to re-attune itself.

Potential energy's a no-no. Technically there is a way to do it by siphoning the kinetic energy from a falling object. As soon as all the kinetic energy's gone, there's nothing keeping the object aloft so it starts falling again. That new kinetic energy is instantly sucked out so that the object would only fall by a microscopic amount each moment, but you'd only be getting a small amount of energy each time so it's only good for keeping something aloft.


Couple of thoughts me and a co-worker had:
- you hit me with a hammer, I absorb and redirect the energy into your brain, you are dead or have TBI.
- I convert your energy into gravity and your weapon is too heavy for you to hold.
- I convert all the chemical and heat energy from the other people in a crowded square and kill them by taking it, then form a giant fireball and blow up another neighborhood, or turn it into a kinetic "blade" and cut another crowd in half.
- flight would be super common, convert the gravitational pull on myself into kinetic energy pushing me where I want to go while I am weightless
Using the energy in someone's body is incredibly-difficult, requiring both a high magical affinity and at least a Class 9 Focus, and even then anyone with a decent bit of magical self-defence training can make it a hell of a lot harder. Not to mention I'm planning for there to be a lot of cultural taboos and such around it. Whoever figured out how to use the energy in someone else's body would have the same general reputation as a certain German scientist from WW2 (I'm not even gonna try and spell his name, though). By the same token, feeding the energy directly into someone's body is also very difficult. Even though magic can't be used naturally without a focus, every living thing has a natural barrier preventing magically-controlled energy from entering or exiting their body. It can be over-ridden, but as I said; that's very difficult and often more trouble than it's worth.

Manipulating gravity itself is very inefficient - on top of what I said before about not being able to maintain constant effects for long. You could soften a landing of yourself or someone else (or you and someone else but you'd have to get the timing just right or have both of you working in concert - although you could get the same effect by converting the kinetic energy of your fall), maybe glide over a chasm Peter Quill-style, or do a Force Jump-style trick. But actual flight would need complex magitech machinery that can maintain it for longer. Far too large to be man-portable, either, so I'm relegating those to airships - smallest being about the size of, say, the Serenity and the largest being comparable to a modern aircraft carrier (although those are also making use of anti-grav tech from the setting's technological golden age - which went well into the Sufficiently Advanced Technology end of the spectrum).


Basically, unless there are limitations of some type I am immortal unless you can react faster then me. If there is a threshold level of energy to be converted then the only way to fight someone is to overwhelm how fast they can convert that energy. How far out can I sense and convert? Crossbow bolt in the back might be a thing, but not if I can sense it and convert it. You are basically fighting my reaction time, either way the fighting of someone like this boils down to overwhelming their senses or capacity.

I figure you can absorb energy from up to two or three metres away, further away if you have special training or aren't too bothered by how much of that energy you can actually use (further you are from the energy you're grabbing the less efficiently you can use it) but you can project it out to about ten or twenty metres (still not solid on that part, mainly because I'm terrible at judging distances). Senses would go further, maybe about ten metres or so. Reflexes are the same, though; no way to augment those... well, not without using some sort of bio or cybertech that's probably been lying in an abandoned lab for the last half-dozen centuries or so.



In general, it should either be hard to kill with magic or easy to prevent others from killing you. High-powered villains might have nasty tricks to freeze or burn or something implode others, but if it's easy to do and hard to prevent, weapons and armor are t going to do much good. What I was thinking was that your mental control over the energy acts as a form of encryption - stopping a spell is as much about dealing with the energy as unravelling that encryption. Most people expecting to be on the wrong end of a spell would have something on their person that can passively deal with basic spells. Most warriors wouldn't put any extra effort into their magical encryption so any attack spells they use would be to try and overload the target's Focus or otherwise distract them rather than do any actual damage. Oh; they can still kill, but the defensive device automatically strips away the encryption enough for the target to get their metaphorical hands on the energy and convert it to something harmless.

A dedicated battlemage, though, has learnt to beef up that encryption on-the-fly or is carrying around techno-magical computers that augment the encryption automatically (or both). Someone who puts that much effort into their spells means they're almost guaranteed to hit without some quick-thinking from the target. Since a warrior's attack spells are less likely to work on the target, standard practice is to use them defensively. Offensive spells are reserved for enemies that can't defend themselves (various monsters or other non-magic-using hostiles). Full battlemages are the ones that use spells offensively against people who can use magic since they can reliably encrypt their spells enough to get through most people's defences. Shadowrun-esque armour inlays would be a thing, conductive elements to channel electricity into capacitors or batteries, that sort of thing, but that would be probably the most common form of anti-magical defences (that or techno-magical anti-encryption computers, but I figure those would be expensive).


Another step in this direction - the closer one is to something, the easier it is to affect, and direct touch is far more powerful. Even a weak magician has more control over the things in her hand than an archmage across the room.

This means you need to be close to or touching both the source and the object of your casting.I was thinking more that most weapons have certain elements worked into them that prevent fully controlling the energy inside it, they could slow a sword down, but not stop it. And certainly not slow it enough to make it non-lethal. It's not encryption, like the spells themselves, but more like an outright jamming field. Trying to grab the kinetic energy in a sword would be like trying to grab a half-melted stick of butter, essentially.


In terms of kinetic energy, I think this means you want to have some sort of armor with which to use your kinetic block - blocking with a gust of wind seems inefficient, controlling your opponent's weapon directly requires that you are vastly more powerful than he is, and reinforcing your skin is possible, but could have some nasty side effects.The idea with the kinetic barriers is that they're more like invisible force fields. They don't have to be tied to any physical objects. But a barrier can only be maintained for a moment - or more specifically, it's a bad idea to maintain it for longer than that unless you want to overload your Focus too quickly. Just create one the size of a buckler in the path of the other guy's sword and release it right after their weapon's deflected.

Berenger
2015-10-03, 08:01 AM
Why do these guys even fight?

Why did they bother to invent enough technology to have swords and armor to begin with?

I mean, if they can transform every type of energy to every other other form of energy, they could literally live off sunlight and keep themselves warm by absorbing the kinetic energy of wind and rain. They wouldn't have to fight for a territory or resources at all...

ShadowFighter15
2015-10-03, 06:30 PM
Why do these guys even fight?

Why did they bother to invent enough technology to have swords and armor to begin with?

I mean, if they can transform every type of energy to every other other form of energy, they could literally live off sunlight and keep themselves warm by absorbing the kinetic energy of wind and rain. They wouldn't have to fight for a territory or resources at all...

Technological development came about because magic can't naturally be used by anyone other than elves (who were on their own continent separate from most of the setting's other species for a very long time and took another several centuries after contact was made to develop the magical foci that allow non-elves to use magic).

Certain restrictions are in place depending on what they absorb energy from - rain has to fall in order to feed farmlands, for instance. Weather-altering tech could get around this, but that's one piece of tech that's been lost since the golden age with no great desire to see it return.

Besides all of that, I do have reasons for fighting and for the nations to have standing armies. Getting into the ones I've settled on is getting somewhat off-topic for this thread and there are a few others I'm still trying to decide on. Suffice to say that just because you can harvest that energy doesn't mean you can live off it. I've been working on this setting for at least a decade, I'm just trying to keep what I put of it here to the bare minimum for the original question in the OP because I'd either be waffling on for ages and most of this is still just in my head rather than written down. Not to mention that some of the stuff I have worked out is a bit all over the place.

braveheart
2015-10-06, 01:46 AM
A couple of ideas about your question, the first is that sword combat tactics would involve quick movements that allow for as little time as possible for the opponent to react with shielding magic, so plenty of feigns, and quick thrusts, and a lot less swinging of swords to put their weight behind them. With that in mind, since with a moments notice anyone can shield themselves from a strong attack, their armor would likely be designed to stop the fast attacks. Their armor would probably handle piercing attacks best, paying less attention to defending themselves from slashing and blunt weapons, because they allow more time to use use their magic shields in.

I don't actually know what types of weapons and armor are best for this, but I suspect that depending on the range of senses, archers might be among the most deadly of warriors, and if guns exist there is no way that anyone has the reflexes to stop a bullet

AceOfFools
2015-10-06, 12:31 PM
I'd think that projectile weapons would be fairly week under those conditions, especially if you're aware of them. They have to pass through the entire range where you can draw off their kinetic energy (posibly into pushing them aside with their own energy), and there's no way for the attacker to magically reinforce them after they get to range.

Obviously projectiles that travel fast enough (e.g. bullets) won't be so easily to deflect with human reaction times. On the other hand, kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared, so these projectiles will be "brighter" to energy senses.

One thing I might expect to see is armor that insulates. They may not be able to boil your blood directly, but it wouldn't seem hard to weaponize making the air around someone hot enough to burn or freeze. Granted, that sounds like torture in a naturally hot environment if magic can't be used to normalize temperature within the armor.

Sacrieur
2015-10-06, 12:45 PM
Consider that in modern warfare, armor evolved to suit tactics. While you could theoretically design armor that can deflect rifle rounds, it would be too heavy and expensive for use. Instead lighter kevlar vests are used. Even the military full on Interceptor armor is about mitigating damage than preventing it entirely. That's just because the weapons are more powerful than what you have to stop it.

What you have instead is an adaption of tactics. Now it's all about finding cover, so I'd imagine the same rules would apply to magic. Since many spells require line of sight to work, by denying them LoS you deny them most spells. Obfuscation abilities like smokebombs would be ideal.

AceOfFools
2015-10-08, 11:28 AM
Since many spells require line of sight to work, by denying them LoS you deny them most spells. Obfuscation abilities like smokebombs would be ideal.

The OP specifically mentioned that magic comes with energy senses that are inherently non-visial, smoke bombs are useless at obscuring people within the enemies magical sense range.

That has very interesting implications for srealth, actually. Without some sort of magical multisense invisability, in order to be undetected, you need to lay down energy obscuring camafloge first. Heat the area to your body heat, spread trash or insects to cover kinetic and chemical energy signatures. Or maybe employ flashbaang tactics and simply dump huge amounts of light and heat to disoriented anyone looking for you with magical senses long enough to take them out or jet away.

Actually, acelleration armor is almost certainly going to be a thing. Not a flight suit, but something that allows you to go a large distance in a very short period to control the flow of battle. For maximum benefit have it drain your own momentum into a battery to act as energy-conserving breaks. Spring atrack at 90 meters.

ShadowFighter15
2015-10-10, 08:29 AM
Projectile Weapons: I have been thinking about this and I figure, for most people and even the ones who fight like I described in the OP, they'd be as deadly as to anyone else. The only ones who can deflect them, like AceOfFools suggests, would be more specialised battlemages* who have designed their own machines to do it automatically - ie; they constantly scan the area around the battlemage and anything travelling over X metres-per-second and on a collision course with the mage has half its kinetic energy absorbed and then re-directed back at the projectile along the exact opposite vector. None of the energy is stored or wasted, it's a momentary channelling and done by a machine to allow inhuman precision.

Most people, though, would be just as successful trying to catch a projectile with their bare hands. I guess some non-battlemages could do it, sort-of the magical equivalent of being able to tell when someone's going to punch you just by looking for slight tells in their muscles or eyes. But it would be just battlemages who could deflect projectiles like that and only with their machines, which they would have programmed themselves.

Bullets would be 'brighter' to magical senses, true, but considering they only get that energy after they've been fired, reaction times come in again. Just because you see the muzzle flash doesn't mean you can dodge it, after all.

Stealth: This is something I've been stumped on as well, main thing I can think of would be devices that act like the magical version of active camoflage; cancelling out most of the energy your body emits so it can't be sensed. Can't just use the magical jamming devices I've been thinking of since they'd appear like a 'void' to someone's magical senses. Other possibility is that you have to actively use the senses to detect anything beyond a couple of metres away - you train to do it instinctively in a fight but unless you're actively paying attention, you won't notice anything happening in the next room.

Smoke bombs would be useless, though, as said. Only sort that worked would be the ones that combined it with magical 'chaff', sending up a whole lot of different energy in random patterns to obscure where the bombs' users are going from magical senses while the smoke stops visual tracking.

Acceleration Armour: I might've considered something like this a while ago, can't remember now, but I figure this sort of thing wouldn't work either - comes down to reflexes. You'd probably get some use out of it for super jumps, but otherwise you'd be moving too fast to see where you're putting your feet and by the time you realise that you want to stop, you've probably overshot and face-planted into a wall. I've always seen magical items that accelerate the user somehow also enhancing their mental speed to compensate and let them maintain full control. Like in Age of Ultron; Pietro clearly had his thought processes accelerate along with his body - from his perspective, he was moving at a normal speed and everything else was slower, hence why he had the time to make this stupid decision. (http://38.media.tumblr.com/2329d1ab8ec6f19f011b1230851fa728/tumblr_nnsmkaxNAG1uovo1xo2_500.gif) One thing I want to avoid with this setting is that there's no way to alter mental activity. Oh; it's theoretically possible for someone to take hold of the bioelectricity running through someone's brain and control them like that, but odds are you'll just make it either shut down or overcharge their grey matter and then have to find a way to dispose of the corpse. Speed-enhancing armour would certainly be possible, the problem is that there's no reliable way to control it.

Other Stuff: One thing I have thought of, armour-wise, is a cultural opinion of it - basically that the less armour you wear, the more confident you are in your magical skill. So a battlemage taking to the field wearing some classic robes would be giving the image of someone very confident in their abilities and personal devices, while someone in a suit of full plate is essentially telling the world that they don't care about using magic. There's no positive or negative stigma attached to either, nor is it universal - the guy in plate could really be a potent battlemage and the armour's as much for personal protection as deception, while the guy in the robes could just be full of himself. Generally, though; if you see someone ready to fight in just normal clothes, odds are he knows how to beat your head in with sunlight.

One other thing was something Ace touched on; insulating armour. I considered that superheating the air around your target could be handled with the armour inlays I mentioned earlier, which could absorb that heat and store it in various capacitors or just convert it into something harmless. But I'd thought of that core principle way back when as a form of environmental control. If you're going into an arctic climate, you don't have to wear a whole lot of bulky and heavy clothing, you can get away with just a cloak that regulates your body heat, warming you with either absorbed light or from energy capacitors. Same cloak could be all you need for a desert, too; simply radiates the excess heat as light, sound, or kinetic energy that makes it billow dramatically in a non-existent wind. Wouldn't be too hard to scale that up as a form of combat protection (well, not hard to imagine someone having scaled it up over the last few millennia).


*Battlemages, in this setting, being those who have focused a lot of their magical training on using it in combat. Their understanding of magic and energy gives them the necessary insight to program a lot of the energy-manipulating defensive devices they use. As for why such devices aren't common, it's a few things - general cultural attitude is not to use tech you don't need, the computers powerful and compact enough for such uses are either very expensive or very hard to get the components for (meaning most battlemages only have one or two) and since there's no real operating system for these computers, it's incredibly hard to share programs between computers, it's less "running MS Office on Linux" and more "running MS Office on a completely-unique OS created by one guy and that does not exist anywhere else in the world".

EnglishKitsune
2015-10-11, 06:39 PM
I would suggest reading Patrick Rothfuss' designs about magic (Specifically his Sympathy school of magic) for his Kingkiller Chronicles. It is very similar and would help address some of the issues raised. Also looking up the Bloodless from the same series would be a cool idea as how magic could work with Tech.

http://kingkiller.wikia.com/wiki/Sympathy

To agree with the others, the magic system as it exists sounds like it could do with a Nerf or just some limitations.

Or simply, the Mage acts as a conduit, channeling the flow of energy through themselves, this means they are limited by their own health, for example, if a mage tried to block an object of great force, say a cannonball, if they are not careful they could do serious damage to themselves, being physically affected and thrown back by the force they are trying to block. Also just because the mage is aware of everything doesn't mean they could react as quickly, although they could detect the arrow fired at them, they would have a microsecond to process this before it hits, too quick to channel the energy or react as necessary.

Speaking of which, maybe people have developed items/alloys that are resistant, or Magically null. Things like cold-iron, dead/petrified wood, Leather. Things that lack life, and have had no energy residual in them. This means the Mage would have to channel energy into them before affecting them.

Those are just my thoughts. :smallsmile:

ImNotTrevor
2015-10-11, 07:45 PM
I agree with the sentiment that it needs to be nerfed.

Now, you seem to be under the impression that lots of rules and a high degree of complexity makes for the same as a nerf, but that much isn't actually true. It's just irritating and slows things down. Within an rpg system, this is bad. People will utterly hate magic users because they slow the game to a crawl because now we have to deal with preparing for all of the magical senses and doing all of their weird energy bull, which will invariably be slow.

With one exception:
Magic is just a skill, and what they want to do gets an arbitrary DC.
That makes them even more ludicrously flexible and powerful, and makes playing anything other than a caster incredibly pointless.

The magic needs a nerf. Maybe you can only specialize in one sort of basic energy or one basic force (except the nuclear forces). And that's it.

Of course, manipulation of even one basic energy is going to be incredibly powerful and I can list about 100 ways to kill someone with any of them, and there will be thousands more that no one will count on until the player thinks it up. And ways to solve problems will be even more common.

It's basically a combo of how in The Elder Scrolls pretty much everyone can learn magic and in XMen some people manipulate basic energies. It's a nifty thought for a book, but not particularly good for an rpg. I'd go back to the drawing board on this one. If it is taking you several-paragraph-long posts to answer FLUFF questions about this, how much longer will it take to write out the mechanics and mechanical limitations?

Not worth it.

ShadowFighter15
2015-10-11, 07:59 PM
I think I remember reading about that series a while ago, but Sympathy magic like that isn't what I'm going for - I'm basically forcing magic to follow Conservation of Energy.

As for channelling energy; as I said upthread, the foci people need to use magic can't run forever. Only a couple seconds of effects at a time usually. Actually; if you've watched gameplay of Vermintide, it's a bit like how the Bright Wizard's staff works - every use of it builds up energy in her and it has to be vented. It's similar to that but replace the venting with a passive cooldown and you've got the main limit of magic in this setting.

Another possibility would be will-weavers in the Iron Kingdoms RPG - in that, they gain Fatigue Points with each spell they cast and they lose their Arcane stat in them at the start of each turn. But every time they cast a spell that takes their Fatigue above their Arcane, they have to take a Fatigue Test which, if they fail, stops that spell from going off and stops them from casting the following turn as well.

Elves don't need foci to use magic, but they have it a bit rougher; I've decided I will go with the idea of a transitory state for energy and elves have that energy pass through their own body (still working on the specifics, can't decide whether it's a particular organ or something like that) which can damage them. They can channel more efficiently than the other species but it does cause them physical harm if they go too far.

But the people who use magic also tend to learn ways to get more bang for their buck. Re-directing the energy is more efficient than changing it. Say a runaway cart's rolling downhill towards you, you could turn most of the kinetic energy in it into light and slow it down safely, but its easier to simply change the direction that energy's going in - like, say, shifting its course slightly so it lands in the river next to the road instead of hitting someone (or into something solid that'll stop it entirely if there's nobody in the cart). Doesn't strain the focus as much.

As I said before; a normal magic-user can't reliably catch arrows or bullets, the only way a battlemage can is because they've built and programmed their own energy-altering machines (it's the machine stopping the projectile, not the battlemage's focus and its ability to react to what it senses is even faster than any computer in the real-world). And people with that sort of skill are a rarity - there's no internet and general cultural opinion is that if you're going to use something like that, program it yourself (there are help books, but they're more giving you a foundation for experimentation and step-by-step guides). And getting a reliable program requires the programmer to have a very good feel for how energy moves and acts. Basically you need to have a damn-good head for physics to program a device like that.

There are things that magic doesn't work on but they're usually elements that are worked into other objects that gives them a sort-of jamming field (like I said in my first reply with the weapons). As well as dedicated devices that create a localised jamming field - so something the size of a grenade could generate one that lasts for a short period while larger-scale ones could be worked into a building (like putting one in a bank as part of its security system).


ImNotTrevor: Something I should've probably added to the opening post is that this isn't actually for an RPG, but for a story I've been planning for a long while. Just trying to iron out potential kinks before I write myself into a corner.

goto124
2015-10-11, 09:07 PM
ImNotTrevor: Something I should've probably added to the opening post is that this isn't actually for an RPG, but for a story I've been planning for a long while. Just trying to iron out potential kinks before I write myself into a corner.

That would make for pretty different implications. Unlike players and GM, your characters' minds are completely up to the world-builder, which means much less unexpected shenanigans. Readers might sometimes realise characters aren't using certain tactics, but they won't pour in nearly the amount of effort players do to come up with the best builds/creative uses of spells/etc.

Oh, and yes, you don't have to bother with fiddly numbers and exact mechanics. More fluffy storyline stuff.

AceOfFools
2015-10-12, 02:03 PM
When I said projectIles would be useless, I meant as weapons of war intended to be used on and by trained soldiers. And also fortufications. This would limit the amount of energy and time invested in engineering better projectiles.

Humans are capable of sprinting at speeds faster than would required to leap 60' and attack someone in a six seconditions window. 30 mph (300 ft/round) is slow for driving an automobile. You can't go supersonic with acceleration plate, but it could be used for battlefield mobility. Just look before you leap, and be ready to break early, because crashing that will hurt.

I'm confused how you could build a "continuous scan and react" or temperature control type of effect if you are limited to 3 or second long effects.

ShadowFighter15
2015-10-13, 06:36 AM
That would make for pretty different implications. Unlike players and GM, your characters' minds are completely up to the world-builder, which means much less unexpected shenanigans. Readers might sometimes realise characters aren't using certain tactics, but they won't pour in nearly the amount of effort players do to come up with the best builds/creative uses of spells/etc.

Oh, and yes, you don't have to bother with fiddly numbers and exact mechanics. More fluffy storyline stuff.
Which is why I originally made this thread just for swordplay and armour design, how they might be affected by such magic being available if the particular application of it I described in the OP was prevalent enough.


When I said projectIles would be useless, I meant as weapons of war intended to be used on and by trained soldiers. And also fortufications. This would limit the amount of energy and time invested in engineering better projectiles. You're right to an extent; massed arrow fire, like what the English used at Agincourt, would be useless against a force that had a decent supply of battlemages able to create protective barriers. Of course; millenia ago before computers and magic-using machines were invented they would have been perfectly viable - those protective barriers are only capable of lasting long enough due to being maintained by machines (that being said; get enough skilled mages in one place and have them only concentrate on a portion of a single volley and you might have something without the need for computers). Battlemages would've been more heavy artillery back then. In the setting's present; personal projectile weapons tend to be either weapons of surprise (ie; sleeve-mounted derringers), assassination (sniper rifles, crossbows) or for dealing with hostile wildlife (let's just say there were more than a few geneticists and bio-engineers around during the golden age and let your imagination fill the gaps). Combined with various cultural opinions, bows and crossbows tend to be the more preferred weapons for fighting at range. Not to say firearms stagnated; man-portable railguns would've been developed sometime long in the past and enough knowledge of how they work mean you can still find them around without too much issue.

In all out war, where you find the bigger projectiles would be on vehicles. And once you get to vehicles that are big enough, like the airship equivalent of a battleship, they've dispensed with actual projectiles and moved onto things like particle beams and the like.


Humans are capable of sprinting at speeds faster than would required to leap 60' and attack someone in a six seconditions window. 30 mph (300 ft/round) is slow for driving an automobile. You can't go supersonic with acceleration plate, but it could be used for battlefield mobility. Just look before you leap, and be ready to break early, because crashing that will hurt.True, but you wouldn't need dedicated armour for that - you could either do it just with the focus on its own, or work a mana-channelling device into your clothing/armour and let it do the work.


I'm confused how you could build a "continuous scan and react" or temperature control type of effect if you are limited to 3 or second long effects.
Simply sensing stuff doesn't draw on the Focus at all - it's the equivalent of feeling the shape of something by running your hands over it. What draws on the Focus is actually manipulating that energy. And when it's a separate machine creating the effect, it's not putting any strain on the focus and the device's own focus-equivalent would be either more robust than one that could be linked to humanoid neural patterns or simply so specialised that the constant drain doesn't destabilise it (the one in a cloak meant to keep you warm, for instance, would just be a straight light-to-heat conversion and that's all it would be capable of doing - the more versatile a focus is, the quicker it can destabilise from use and the sooner it cuts itself off for recovery before permanently destabilising). It's not the person making these continuous scan and react effects, but the machine running on its own programming and using a separate, far more limited, magical focus. The momentary limit you mentioned there is just when you're doing something yourself due to either the concentration involved or the resilience of your focus (or, more often, a combination of both).

Garimeth
2015-10-13, 12:05 PM
Something I should've probably added to the opening post is that this isn't actually for an RPG, but for a story I've been planning for a long while. Just trying to iron out potential kinks before I write myself into a corner.

Ah! A key detail. I think most of us assumed you were trying to homebrew a system or setting. I think your system works pretty well for a novel depending on how you implement it.

braveheart
2015-10-13, 01:05 PM
So with your point about specialized foci, how common would it be for someone to specialize in a single type of energy output and have a better foci that won't destabilize, say a fire Mage who's foci can only output heat, do it is significantly more effective as a result, I'd imagine that plenty of people have kinetic energy output only foci, and while we're at it why wouldn't you have multiple different soecialized foci and only carry around one?

ShadowFighter15
2015-10-14, 04:29 AM
So with your point about specialized foci, how common would it be for someone to specialize in a single type of energy output and have a better foci that won't destabilize, say a fire Mage who's foci can only output heat, do it is significantly more effective as a result, I'd imagine that plenty of people have kinetic energy output only foci, and while we're at it why wouldn't you have multiple different soecialized foci and only carry around one?

Not sure on the specialisation, haven't decided on that bit. As for the multiple foci, though; calibrating multiple foci to the one set of neural patterns causes them to interfere with each other, there's no clear way to have your commands go through any specific focus so the 'order' gets sent to all of them. This makes the spells a lot harder to control and has been known to cause migraines from prolonged use. It's why elves don't use foci of their own at all; interferes with their 'organic focus'.

Plus; foci above a Class 4 are expensive and you have to pay extra to have it properly calibrated. Rule of thumb with foci is only one per controlling 'mind' - whether that mind's living or a computer.

braveheart
2015-10-14, 11:42 AM
Another thought, converting matter to energy is shown with E=MC^2 so anyone who is aware of this could potentially reverse it as well, so a device designed to sit there and concert photonic energy into matter, given your setting I certainly understand that being beyond the current technology, but it likely occurred furring the golden age and such artifacts would be rare, but not untesonable. It's possible that golden age capacitors contained small amounts of matter that could be easily and nonvolitally converted to energy for use, and would be able to store a lot more energy per weight. But this is a fantasy story not a Sci-fi so you may not want to broach these very science fiction ideas

ShadowFighter15
2015-10-16, 05:04 PM
Yeah, I was thinking about devices like that, but then I figured it would change things a fair bit (like everyone using Borderlands-esque storage devices instead of backpacks and what-have-you). So I figured that they'd been maybe 40 or 50 years away from inventing such a device when the technological regression came about. You might find the research or early prototypes for it in an old lab, but fat chance getting one that's usable.

As for the idea being too sci-fi - don't worry on that. Honestly; I'm not sure what genre this is gonna fit into, it's becoming a weird mash-up of fantasy, sci-fi and science-fantasy. For instance; most of the 'monsters' in the setting are the result of genetic scientists and bio-engineers millennia ago conducting experiments and creating enough of them to act as a breeding population.

Griffins (which may get a re-name, still deciding), for example, get around the Square-Cube Law by having an organ that acts as an organic anti-gravity device (not a magical one, though). Not powerful enough to actually let it fly (or even negate its own weight entirely), but it makes the creature effectively far lighter than it should be letting it use its wings to fly, keeping it from buckling under its own weight and move faster than something that big* should. Does mean they lack some of the muscle strength a creature that size would have, it would still develop some of course, but it would probably be just as strong as a normal lion, despite being about twice their size or larger. They can also extend the field so that they can carry larger prey away. A side-effect of using this to explain how they can fly is that it would let them perch and stand on stuff that should, by all rights, collapse under their weight. Although that can be a benefit of its own; I can depict one landing on a simple wooden house in a village and nobody would question why the roof isn't caving in under it.


*Think about the size of Warhammer Fantasy's Griffons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epK0ouN0l7U), like Deathclaw at the end of that video.

Jormengand
2015-10-16, 08:03 PM
I think I remember reading about that series a while ago, but Sympathy magic like that isn't what I'm going for - I'm basically forcing magic to follow Conservation of Energy.

If you haven't read the Inheritance cycle you should.