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Cluedrew
2019-04-07, 09:17 AM
So let me get one thing down first, what is magic theory? Basically everything that is more than one step removed from the rules that govern magic. Or any as-not-seen-in-real-life system. Impossibly advanced technology or intricate martial arts follows the same idea. Back to the main example of magic, it is the explanation for how magic works, the rules that give it is abilities and limits overall. Not the action by action rules but the similarities between them. The exceptions and the reasons for them.

So why is this important? One reason is it helps give the magic system a flavour. It gives it edges and colour. Hogpoggs have some appeal but the ones that hold up seem to have a kind of logic to them, even if they seem random at first.

The other big one, also the one that often gets overlooked, is that it lets people figure out what to do with the situations not described in the rules. If you know how something is supposed to work then you can extend the abstraction from what the rules provide to cover new situations. People know this from real life experience, consistent if inaccurate media portrayals or a really good explanation.

This came to light for me when I was trying to figure out why D&D magic still doesn't make sense to me. Despite all the pieces I have been given, including some pretty good attempts at putting logic back on the system, has never come together into a whole.

So that's why I feel like strong explanations are important and have been trying to work them into my settings and have good explanations in the rules. Thoughts? Any good examples? (Mine all seem to come from stories.)

Quertus
2019-04-07, 09:54 AM
I mean, I not only agree, I feel that the general case of "everything must descend from underlying physics" is true and optimal. Otherwise, you may as well check your brain at the door.

noob
2019-04-07, 10:01 AM
Or maybe the person writing the story (or the gm) just want X to happens therefore magic and then x happens.
It seems a quite common rule for magic systems.

jjordan
2019-04-07, 10:03 AM
I mean, I not only agree, I feel that the general case of "everything must descend from underlying physics" is true and optimal. Otherwise, you may as well check your brain at the door.
Yes and no. If you look at magic theory you'll see that a lot of the old/traditional magic is pretty closely tied to mythology/religion and could be described as 'discovering the tools used to craft the cosmos'. Finding a seal that contains the true name of a power creature (the personification of a force of nature) and which then allows you to command that creature/force, for example. The idea that magic should make logical sense is much more modern (see Chaos Magic).

That said, I very much prefer a logical system of magic. Not so much because I think it must make sense, but because when it does follow rules of logic it allows players to actually explore it and create. It invites this sort of activity. And I like that because players aren't just finding made up stuff and the things they create can make sense.

Pippa the Pixie
2019-04-07, 10:27 AM
I agree mostly.

Most games, like D&D, describe a basic magic system. You can add on to it, but then you won't be following the offical rules...but so what, right? Once you can leave the rules behind, you can have plenty of magic theory.

I think the big problem is that you want to keep things in theory, with no hard, real, offical rules. You want soft rules...and even more so, rules the players don't know for exact facts.

A good example is the D&D rule of ''don't put a bag of holding in a portable hole". It's a soft rule, and very vague. It does not have the whole ''the rift formed is 30x30 and exists for seven rounds and the DC to not get sucked in is 13...bah bah bah". Players can still use it, but won't ever know exactly what happens.

I add a lot to magic in my games. For example, I like the idea that emotions power/fuel/focus magic from the TV show Charmed. So a spell cast to save a loved one is more powerful then a spell ''to blast the bad guy and be cool and macho". And this works out great for players that like to role play emotions in a character. So a player of an elven character, trying to save her town, gets a bonus. But I wonld never want this as a bland rule...like a player with Klunk the Barbarian just wants to kill everything and get to level 20 and stop playing, and wants to ''role a charisma check " to have thier character feel emotions and get that bonus.

Can I ask what you don't ''get" about D&D magick? Or would that be another thread?

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-07, 10:47 AM
To me, magic that can be completely described by mortals and written down in a theory doesn't feel like magic.

Magic, to me, is more like cats. Man doesn't own cats. Cats do whatever they please. They may play along and act all domestic, but in reality they're wild animals that will claw the living daylights out of you if they feel like it. Just like this, magic may be placid and amenable to theory, but that's just the surface. Underneath, magic is a barely-constrained wild animal, prone to outbursts and unexplained (and unexplainable!) behavior on a whim.

noob
2019-04-07, 11:13 AM
To me, magic that can be completely described by mortals and written down in a theory doesn't feel like magic.

Magic, to me, is more like cats. Man doesn't own cats. Cats do whatever they please. They may play along and act all domestic, but in reality they're wild animals that will claw the living daylights out of you if they feel like it. Just like this, magic may be placid and amenable to theory, but that's just the surface. Underneath, magic is a barely-constrained wild animal, prone to outbursts and unexplained (and unexplainable!) behavior on a whim.

Understanding and owning are not the same thing at all.
We understand that at any moment a gamma ray burst could kill all life but it does not allows to stop it and even worse since we know the reason why gamma ray busts happens we can not hope there is some creature choosing whenever we will get hit or not.
A mage could know the exact reason why one spell every 1000 spells destroys the entire universe but the mage would not be able to stop it: less educated people which does not understand that theory no matter how much the mage explains his theory to them would still cast spells and then after 1000 spells cast the world would end or even worse there is another planet where people did not find this rule and they cast spells and the universe ends then you might think "maybe we should search for the planets" but knowing how to do that without using spells is hard and by using spells for that we could have the universe end solely because of one thousand planets where a mage had that idea at once.

InvisibleBison
2019-04-07, 12:24 PM
To me, magic that can be completely described by mortals and written down in a theory doesn't feel like magic.

Magic, to me, is more like cats. Man doesn't own cats. Cats do whatever they please. They may play along and act all domestic, but in reality they're wild animals that will claw the living daylights out of you if they feel like it. Just like this, magic may be placid and amenable to theory, but that's just the surface. Underneath, magic is a barely-constrained wild animal, prone to outbursts and unexplained (and unexplainable!) behavior on a whim.

This sort of magic might be interesting in a novel, but I don't think it would be much fun in a game. If I can't rely on my magic to work when I need it, it's at best useless and at worst a huge liability that's going to get me killed.

Also, speaking as someone who's lived with cats for the majority of his life, I don't agree with your description of cat behavior.

Thrudd
2019-04-07, 01:26 PM
I agree, there must be an underlying understanding of where various magics come from and why they work for the GM to adjudicate edge cases in a consistent and unbiased manner.

However, this doesn't mean the players or their characters need to know all of that. It is probably uneccessary to go very deep into a pseudo-science "theory", but it is enough to have a broad idea about magic's source and why it works the way it does according to the game rules. Of course, games with multiple sources and types of magical effects, like modern D&D, can make a "unified theory of magic" difficult, but the designers do make an effort (like "the weave" in Forgotten Realms.)

It's easier when you homebrew your own system based on a pre-determined magic theory, or have a system with a setting that has only one consistent way for any character to interact with magic. For a complex magic system like 5e D&D, designing a magic theory that passes most logical tests while still explaining all the various phenomena described by the mechanics can be challenging.

Millstone85
2019-04-07, 01:44 PM
I do enjoy magobabble.

My headcanon on D&D magic is that the Weave is a complex ecosystem of spirits. Some have been partially domesticated, and now have predictable reactions to certain combinations of gestures, materials, words, and thoughts.

noob
2019-04-07, 01:52 PM
I do enjoy magobabble.

My headcanon on D&D magic is that the Weave is a complex ecosystem of spirits. Some have been partially domesticated, and now have predictable reactions to certain combinations of gestures, materials, words, and thoughts.

Until the fabricate spirit decide "hey now I am going to make art instead of weapons whenever someone asks for weapons because I am bored of making all those identical weapons and also I always wanted to start a career in art"
And then progressively more and more fabricated items gets ornaments.
Thus explaining why most wizard towers have the same kind of art.

geppetto
2019-04-07, 02:05 PM
I like a semi logical theory of magic. Usually I tie it to the "prime forces" the 4 elements, order, choas, positive, negative and spirit.

Most effects, creatures and dimensions are a blend of these elements.

noob
2019-04-07, 02:08 PM
I like a semi logical theory of magic. Usually I tie it to the "prime forces" the 4 elements, order, choas, positive, negative and spirit.

Most effects, creatures and dimensions are a blend of these elements.

The four elements that are five is a great idea.

Cluedrew
2019-04-07, 03:31 PM
I mean, I not only agree, I feel that the general case of "everything must descend from underlying physics" is true and optimal. Otherwise, you may as well check your brain at the door.
The idea that magic should make logical sense is much more modern (see Chaos Magic).Classical magic was studied and sense was made out of it leading naturally into modern science. They just didn't know what the rules where for a long time. I mean they were really off in the beginning. But all of this is just to leads up to say, although everything should make sense, it doesn't need to follow rules from other walks of life. But some set of rules is important.

To the point I think that even if it is not going to be explained, the writer should have some system in mind when creating it to help guide their hand. Maybe it is just me but a lot of good systems that I know almost nothing about still really feel like there is something beneath this, even if I can't actually see it.

Also I think different rules is part of what makes things feel like magic. Sometimes I get a very "alt-science" feel from magic because they call mana another fundamental force or some stored energy and wizards can just access it like some sort of machine. And magic that feels like magic has been a topic of debate before.


Can I ask what you don't ''get" about D&D magick? Or would that be another thread?It has been other threads in the past (at the very least has dominated a thread that included it on a list) so I'd rather not go into depth here. But basically I have trouble going beyond the mechanical effects of magic because nothing beyond that (between those?) has ever filled in. I still don't know what a wizard is doing during spell preparation and last time I mention this two good but contradictory answers were provided.


This sort of magic might be interesting in a novel, but I don't think it would be much fun in a game. If I can't rely on my magic to work when I need it, it's at best useless and at worst a huge liability that's going to get me killed.I'm not sure if this is what you meant but I think reliability is not so much a matter as consistency. If spells consistently fail 9/10 times I can account for that, try to give myself time to use it 10 times to get the result I want or accept that it might just be the hail Mary pass for when things go wrong.

Magic failing because author or GM doesn't want it to this time or any non-conventional interaction with magic coming out to "nothing happens" because its complexity unknown between the defined spells is a problem to me.

jayem
2019-04-07, 04:25 PM
Magic having a will of it's own (or being the actions of the gods) is at least a theory.
It's even one the players could interact with ("give me a fireball or your high priest gets it", being a coherent if suicidal strategy)

Lord Raziere
2019-04-07, 04:38 PM
I am trying to build my own world and yes magic theory is an important part of it.

I've tried my hand at world-building many times, and made many worlds, and I often find a world that has only one form of magic boring, so I try to come up with reasons why there'd be multiple then I come into problems trying to make it all consistent so that they don't clash tone/flavor wise. the more I try to resort to older mythical explanations however, the more magic feels formless and useless to me, as I can't come up with good reasons why it would do this or that for what I want, the rules are too fuzzy and thus doesn't logically lead to something else happening as opposed to another thing.

so the more I design it, the more I realize that magic by itself is seemingly formless and its people that give it structure and meaning. in many examples of magic, there is some medium or other action that people to do to make magic do something specific, certain movements, certain pictures, certain this and that, that all adds up to being like a code or sequence of things you do to make it happen. I can't find any reason why a universe would respond to one movement over another to make a different thing happen, so my thinking is that people don't discover magic-they design it. that a form of magic is something you invent, program or create for a specific reason so that you can do this or that. that if something happens because you do all these weird hand gestures its because someone, somewhere programmed the universe to respond in this certain way to those certain hand movements. which could be a god designing it, but I prefer to be another person, and that there are people constantly making little modifications to the universes programming to gradually make their own branch of magic or whatever. and that such programming this isn't a path of omnipotence at all- just how people design the tool that is magic.

Pippa the Pixie
2019-04-07, 05:37 PM
It has been other threads in the past (at the very least has dominated a thread that included it on a list) so I'd rather not go into depth here. But basically I have trouble going beyond the mechanical effects of magic because nothing beyond that (between those?) has ever filled in. I still don't know what a wizard is doing during spell preparation and last time I mention this two good but contradictory answers were provided.


You don't have any links, I'd guess?

It seems like you want no mystery or unknowns...and that is nothing like real life science.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-07, 06:26 PM
To me, magic that can be completely described by mortals and written down in a theory doesn't feel like magic.

Magic, to me, is more like cats. Man doesn't own cats. Cats do whatever they please. They may play along and act all domestic, but in reality they're wild animals that will claw the living daylights out of you if they feel like it. Just like this, magic may be placid and amenable to theory, but that's just the surface. Underneath, magic is a barely-constrained wild animal, prone to outbursts and unexplained (and unexplainable!) behavior on a whim.

Cats are understandable, once you figure out the ways that they don't think like most people think, what their motivations are, what they're triggers are, etc -- and that each cat is an individual.

In fact I'd say that most cats are more understandable than humans sometimes are.

Mechalich
2019-04-07, 06:45 PM
To the OP I would add that not only is magic theory import, magic theory becomes exponentially more important the more magic there is in the game and the more the characters actively interact with it. If magic is rare and mostly a weird backdrop element or maybe aligned with an occasional McGuffin, then theory matters less and interactions can be handled mostly ad hoc. By contrast, if magic is an everyday affair and the PCs are using it or fighting against it regularly then theory needs to be ironed out pretty well.

As a consequence, in terms of game design you can't have weird and wondrous magic and have PC wizards at the same time, because any power the PCs lay their hands on that isn't a one-off (in like D&D artifacts) has to perform consistently and have standardized interactions with the rest of the ruleset.

Cluedrew
2019-04-07, 07:40 PM
I can't find any reason why a universe would respond to one movement over another to make a different thing happen, so my thinking is that people don't discover magic-they design it.I have done this, or something like this, on occasion. Speak and writing hit similar walls, sometimes I also do you are communicating with something that can listen. But generally I either go to will-power or something more complex as set up, such as including material components.


You don't have any links, I'd guess?

It seems like you want no mystery or unknowns...and that is nothing like real life science.I found the thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?496040-Why-I-don-t-like-Dungeons-amp-Dragons) I was thinking of, but it seems that it didn't contain the conversation I remembered. And goto124 posted in that thread...

Personally I like mysteries, but generally not in the what, when or who. The how or why of it tends to work better. I have a setting where no one knows why new gods keep showing up, despite the fact it the appearance/birth of a new god can be predicted to within a few hours ahead of time. There are people with a talent to boost magic that is unexplained despite the demographics that produce these people are pretty well measured.

JoeJ
2019-04-08, 03:15 AM
I mean, I not only agree, I feel that the general case of "everything must descend from underlying physics" is true and optimal. Otherwise, you may as well check your brain at the door.

I find that connecting magic to physics makes it uninteresting. I'd much rather have magic flow out of semantics.

Millstone85
2019-04-08, 03:38 AM
I mean, I not only agree, I feel that the general case of "everything must descend from underlying physics" is true and optimal. Otherwise, you may as well check your brain at the door.
I find that connecting magic to physics makes it uninteresting. I'd much rather have magic flow out of semantics.I would have a three-layer cake:

Mundane physics, such as gravity, are permanent magical effects, left by the casting of true genesis.
Then there is magic, which can bypass mundane physics as it is more fundamental than them.
Finally, there are the underlying rules of magic, the true physics of the setting. They might be semantic in nature.

Beleriphon
2019-04-10, 03:52 PM
Cats are understandable, once you figure out the ways that they don't think like most people think, what their motivations are, what they're triggers are, etc -- and that each cat is an individual.

In fact I'd say that most cats are more understandable than humans sometimes are.

Eat. Sleep. Hunt. If you can fulfill these needs in a cat you are the cat's best friend. The particular ratios are individual but all cats need those things.

Thinking about magic you can apply the same principles.

All magic has certain things it can do/can't do. D&D magic tends to be a do everything kind of deal, but if you look at it the way it works it really only does a three things. Transport stuff from one place to another, shape existing materials into a new forms, and move/draw living creatures/souls from one place to another. All D&D magic can be explained using one or more of those three things. Fireball: shaping fire; reincarnation: moving souls and shaping materials; a lich's phylactery: all three.

The same logic applies to supernatural abilities, creatures, and magic items.

gkathellar
2019-04-10, 06:10 PM
It can be useful, but it really depends on desired tone. Ars Magica does great with the topic being an in-setting mystery, and that’s a game about magic researchers.

Man_Over_Game
2019-04-10, 06:24 PM
I hear you, OP. One of the biggest concerns I've always had is trying to interpret how the effects of a spell are supposed to play out in specific scenarios.

Taking DnD 5e for example, Water Wall can have segments of it turn to ice when it is dealt Cold damage. Sleet Storm is a mid-level spell that deals no damage, but causes a localized ice storm in an area and freezes the ground. Technically, Sleet Storm does not interact with Water Wall, because Sleet Storm doesn't do Cold Damage, but is that an accident or intentional? SHOULD they interact? Is there something about Cold Damage that makes it especially good at freezing things (even though most Cold damage spells don't say anything about freezing things)? Is there something about Water Wall that makes it react differently to Cold Damage? Does Sleet Storm change the temperature of the entire area very quickly, or does it only impact the ground?

There are a lot of questions and no answers.

I think making numbers/effects based off of physics would be a perfect solution to most of these problems. For example, deciding that the default damage of a 5lb or less falling object deals 2d6 damage is reasonable, and then adding 1d6 damage for every 5lb increment beyond that. That way, when someone uses Enlarge/Reduce to throw something and make it grow, there's much less guesswork as to how much it does. Spells like Catapult (grab an object telekinetically up to 5 lb and throw it at something) would have a clearly defined damage pattern. If a spell makes an exception against a general rule, then it can explicitly say so.

It's good to have patterns, as it implies that the system is designed to grow. DnD magic lacks that.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-10, 06:39 PM
I hear you, OP. One of the biggest concerns I've always had is trying to interpret how the effects of a spell are supposed to play out in specific scenarios.

Taking DnD 5e for example, Water Wall can have segments of it turn to ice when it is dealt Cold damage. Sleet Storm is a mid-level spell that deals no damage, but causes a localized ice storm in an area and freezes the ground. Technically, Sleet Storm does not interact with Water Wall, because Sleet Storm doesn't do Cold Damage, but is that an accident or intentional? SHOULD they interact? Is there something about Cold Damage that makes it especially good at freezing things (even though most Cold damage spells don't say anything about freezing things)? Is there something about Water Wall that makes it react differently to Cold Damage? Does Sleet Storm change the temperature of the entire area very quickly, or does it only impact the ground?

There are a lot of questions and no answers.

I think making numbers/effects based off of physics would be a perfect solution to most of these problems. For example, deciding that the default damage of a 5lb or less falling object deals 2d6 damage is reasonable, and then adding 1d6 damage for every 5lb increment beyond that. That way, when someone uses Enlarge/Reduce to throw something and make it grow, there's much less guesswork as to how much it does. Spells like Catapult (grab an object telekinetically up to 5 lb and throw it at something) would have a clearly defined damage pattern. If a spell makes an exception against a general rule, then it can explicitly say so.

It's good to have patterns, as it implies that the system is designed to grow. DnD magic lacks that.

But introducing physics makes catgirls die. Seriously, magic and physics do not go together. None of the effects there make any sense whatsoever from a physical standpoint, so you'd just be adding arbitrary results and making things more complicated.

5e (in particular) seems to assume that spells are black boxes. We know how to make them go, but the underlying theory is a mystery. They do exactly what they say they do, nothing more. Ray of frost does not, in particular, freeze things unless it interacts with something that says it gets frozen by it. Cold damage isn't achieved by lowering the temperature (the physics there says "not a chance"), but by imposing a state of anti-heat momentarily on something. Elemental cold is a thing. Fireball doesn't superheat the air (see the attempt to determine what temperature it is on the other thread in the 3e forum, which basically came to the conclusion that doing so was meaningless and self-contradictory), it imposes a state of elemental Fire on things, dealing damage and melting/burning things that way.

Physics does not work as it does in the real world, and any attempt to do so both devalues the magic and real physics (by making it lie).

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-10, 07:25 PM
Eat. Sleep. Hunt. If you can fulfill these needs in a cat you are the cat's best friend. The particular ratios are individual but all cats need those things.


My experience with cats is that many of them really do have a 4th need, that you could call "companionship" or "affection" or "my person" -- a lot of cats want some form of actual contact and interaction for its own sake, though it's really individual, from the cat who needs other cats, to the cat who hates other cats but adores people (or one particular person).




Thinking about magic you can apply the same principles.

All magic has certain things it can do/can't do. D&D magic tends to be a do everything kind of deal, but if you look at it the way it works it really only does a three things. Transport stuff from one place to another, shape existing materials into a new forms, and move/draw living creatures/souls from one place to another. All D&D magic can be explained using one or more of those three things. Fireball: shaping fire; reincarnation: moving souls and shaping materials; a lich's phylactery: all three.

The same logic applies to supernatural abilities, creatures, and magic items.


That's an interesting way of breaking it down, and I think for any magic included in a setting, it's important for the person who is presenting that setting, for a campaign or for a work of fiction, to understand what the magic can and cannot do, even if that's never spelled out to the players or the "audience".

Thrudd
2019-04-10, 08:31 PM
But introducing physics makes catgirls die. Seriously, magic and physics do not go together. None of the effects there make any sense whatsoever from a physical standpoint, so you'd just be adding arbitrary results and making things more complicated.

5e (in particular) seems to assume that spells are black boxes. We know how to make them go, but the underlying theory is a mystery. They do exactly what they say they do, nothing more. Ray of frost does not, in particular, freeze things unless it interacts with something that says it gets frozen by it. Cold damage isn't achieved by lowering the temperature (the physics there says "not a chance"), but by imposing a state of anti-heat momentarily on something. Elemental cold is a thing. Fireball doesn't superheat the air (see the attempt to determine what temperature it is on the other thread in the 3e forum, which basically came to the conclusion that doing so was meaningless and self-contradictory), it imposes a state of elemental Fire on things, dealing damage and melting/burning things that way.

Physics does not work as it does in the real world, and any attempt to do so both devalues the magic and real physics (by making it lie).
I think the idiosyncrasies in D&D's magic effects are less because it is a world where physics doesn't work, and more that it is a game that doesn't really care to model or simulate the details of those sorts of interactions. It's no different than maybe an action movie or adventure novel in which implausible things happen. They are clearly taking place in a world much like our own, where the laws of physics apply- they just ignore them sometimes when something cool is happening. It isn't that the air isn't heated or that things don't freeze, but that it is simulating a world on a more abstract level with a focus on action and adventure, rather than complete realism. Of course, some things are just silly, like elemental damage types that have no status effects, just serving as a rock/paper/scissors mini-game.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-10, 08:38 PM
I think the idiosyncrasies in D&D's magic effects are less because it is a world where physics doesn't work, and more that it is a game that doesn't really care to model or simulate the details of those sorts of interactions. It's no different than maybe an action movie or adventure novel in which implausible things happen. They are clearly taking place in a world much like our own, where the laws of physics apply- they just ignore them sometimes when something cool is happening. It isn't that the air isn't heated or that things don't freeze, but that it is simulating a world on a more abstract level with a focus on action and adventure, rather than complete realism. Of course, some things are just silly, like elemental damage types that have no status effects, just serving as a rock/paper/scissors mini-game.

I feel like a scientist who studies an action/adventure world too long, especially with magic will realize that magic/action heroes don't make sense with the rest of physics, study them then eventually realize that narrative laws are more consistently applied than physical ones and go mad from the revelation that their world is a lie. because there wouldn't be enough effort put it to make the world real and well-thought out, so if someone studies the world that is more intelligent than the hypothetical creator of it, they end up seeing the world as broken or fake as a result.

Cluedrew
2019-04-10, 09:10 PM
But introducing physics makes catgirls die.But why? We must study this phenomenon.

To Lord Raziere: Ever read A Practical Guide to Evil? It takes place in a universe where people realized that narrative rules were more important to the universe than many physical ones. So they started giving names to things like The Rule of Three and understand that heroes are usually orphans (particularly if the orphanage is bad) and villains and heroes end up in groups of five. I'm not quite sure I would want to use that sort of logic for a game but it is consistent, understandable and does not induce madness.

I might come back with more later, I'm in a bit of a hurry right now.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-10, 09:18 PM
But why? We must study this phenomenon.

To Lord Raziere: Ever read A Practical Guide to Evil? It takes place in a universe where people realized that narrative rules were more important to the universe than many physical ones. So they started giving names to things like The Rule of Three and understand that heroes are usually orphans (particularly if the orphanage is bad) and villains and heroes end up in groups of five. I'm not quite sure I would want to use that sort of logic for a game but it is consistent, understandable and does not induce madness.

I might come back with more later, I'm in a bit of a hurry right now.

well one would think if those narrative laws exist, one would naturally conclude that those in the designated roles would be the only who can do anything that matters and thus everyone is bound by fate to be side-characters and bit parts and thus be doomed in a manner thus having an element your choices not truly mattering, but then again my mind tends towards the cynical and pessimistic when analyzing things. I think I read a bit of it at one time, but didn't get far for some reason I might have to read it more. good fantasy is hard to come by after all.

Mechalich
2019-04-10, 09:50 PM
Physics does not work as it does in the real world, and any attempt to do so both devalues the magic and real physics (by making it lie).

D&D has a whole set of special fantasy physics all its own, must built around the planar cosmology, which fall into the time-honored fantasy approach of 'works like our world until it doesn't anymore' for observational level human interactions. This alternate physics greater informs D&D's theory of magic. Most of the magic in D&D involves manipulating elemental, energetic, or other extraplanar forces, including the raw fabric of the material plane itself. This can get very weird, to the point that technically, D&D gravity works completely differently from real-world gravity. Spelljammer went into this at some length.


well one would think if those narrative laws exist, one would naturally conclude that those in the designated roles would be the only who can do anything that matters and thus everyone is bound by fate to be side-characters and bit parts and thus be doomed in a manner thus having an element your choices not truly mattering, but then again my mind tends towards the cynical and pessimistic when analyzing things. I think I read a bit of it at one time, but didn't get far for some reason I might have to read it more. good fantasy is hard to come by after all.

Planescape introduced a small number of narrative laws to D&D: the rule of threes, the unity of rings, and the center of all, and the cynical and pessimistic viewpoint that everything was meaningless and/or everything is screwed (or in the case of the Dustmen that everyone was screwed previously and is now paying for it) was quite common.

JoeJ
2019-04-10, 10:14 PM
I would have a three-layer cake:

Mundane physics, such as gravity, are permanent magical effects, left by the casting of true genesis.
Then there is magic, which can bypass mundane physics as it is more fundamental than them.
Finally, there are the underlying rules of magic, the true physics of the setting. They might be semantic in nature.


In my conception, physics and magic basically ignore each other. No amount of magical experimentation will tell you the molecular structure of a substance, or how it reacts chemically with other substances, and no amount of scientific research will tell you how much of each of the four elements that same substance contains, or what it will turn into if you alter the balance. Trying to reconcile magic and physics only leads to frustration; there are two (at least) mutually contradictory ways of conceptualizing the ultimate reality of the universe, and they are both correct.

NichG
2019-04-10, 10:20 PM
Since 'magic' as a term is so all-encompassing, having an underlying theory helps establish what magic can't do. That in turn helps prevent things from becoming overly generic, and encourages extended plans rather than one-move solutions to problems.

If in a particular setting all magic is about a kind of geomancy where you're changing the way the surrounding environment influences and fills a given space, then rather than 'inventing a spell to blow up the enemy city' the process becomes involved: scout the surrounding area for sources of environmental influences that make life difficult (the rapid decay and weathering of a swamp, etc), build geomantic structures to relay and focus those influences towards the city, and watch it slowly sicken and die over the next year.

Having a theory for how it works lets you discern sense from nonsense and by doing so, gives the magic of a setting a particular flavor and shape.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-10, 10:45 PM
In my conception, physics and magic basically ignore each other. No amount of magical experimentation will tell you the molecular structure of a substance, or how it reacts chemically with other substances, and no amount of scientific research will tell you how much of each of the four elements that same substance contains, or what it will turn into if you alter the balance. Trying to reconcile magic and physics only leads to frustration; there are two (at least) mutually contradictory ways of conceptualizing the ultimate reality of the universe, and they are both correct.

nah, seems more limiting and nonsensical than the nonsense your trying to prevent really. to the scientific mind it only raises further questions. you can't have two things be just as valid but never interact and are mutually contradictory thats having your cake and eating it to, it just doesn't work. the only explanation is that there is a force actively preventing these two things from interacting and that furthermore it invites different kinds of abuses. science is a method of thought not physics itself, after all, so magic somehow not interacting with physics in certain ways would either tip people off to this third prevention force and thus form a scientific theory for WHY they don't interact, or cause magic to be abused in certain ways due to the lack of physics regarding it.

if for example, magic doesn't interact with the law of conservation of energy and matter or entropy, then there is nothing holding back a magic user from infinitely conjuring whatever they want because no magic energy is lost and the magic energy is not equal to or greater than matter, thus infinite magic energy to conjure things that are worth less than infinite magical energy, it gets pretty ridiculous. or easily accelerating something beyond the speed of light because it doesn't interact with any form of friction. things like that. you'd have to invent numerous alternate explanations for why it doesn't happen that nevertheless aren't the scientific reasons that its easier to say that some things do apply rather than reinventing the limitation wheel.

JoeJ
2019-04-10, 11:54 PM
nah, seems more limiting and nonsensical than the nonsense your trying to prevent really. to the scientific mind it only raises further questions. you can't have two things be just as valid but never interact and are mutually contradictory thats having your cake and eating it to, it just doesn't work. the only explanation is that there is a force actively preventing these two things from interacting and that furthermore it invites different kinds of abuses. science is a method of thought not physics itself, after all, so magic somehow not interacting with physics in certain ways would either tip people off to this third prevention force and thus form a scientific theory for WHY they don't interact, or cause magic to be abused in certain ways due to the lack of physics regarding it.

if for example, magic doesn't interact with the law of conservation of energy and matter or entropy, then there is nothing holding back a magic user from infinitely conjuring whatever they want because no magic energy is lost and the magic energy is not equal to or greater than matter, thus infinite magic energy to conjure things that are worth less than infinite magical energy, it gets pretty ridiculous. or easily accelerating something beyond the speed of light because it doesn't interact with any form of friction. things like that. you'd have to invent numerous alternate explanations for why it doesn't happen that nevertheless aren't the scientific reasons that its easier to say that some things do apply rather than reinventing the limitation wheel.

Except that there is no third force. Magical reality and scientific reality simply don't interact. Any scientific hypothesis about why they don't will fail to be confirmed. And so will any magical hypothesis.

And you're right about energy and matter not being conserved in magic. Magic doesn't take matter or energy (as those terms are defined in physics) into account at all. If, for example you polymorph a human into a squrrel, the extra mass doesn't go anywhere, and if you polymorph a human into an elephant the extra mass doesn't come from anywhere.

noob
2019-04-11, 12:44 AM
Except that there is no third force. Magical reality and scientific reality simply don't interact. Any scientific hypothesis about why they don't will fail to be confirmed. And so will any magical hypothesis.

And you're right about energy and matter not being conserved in magic. Magic doesn't take matter or energy (as those terms are defined in physics) into account at all. If, for example you polymorph a human into a squrrel, the extra mass doesn't go anywhere, and if you polymorph a human into an elephant the extra mass doesn't come from anywhere.

Then three hundred years later there is one centillion wizards going at near light speed in space in all the directions.
Once there is no conservation of mass or energy weirder and weirder stuff can happen very quickly.

Mechalich
2019-04-11, 01:13 AM
And you're right about energy and matter not being conserved in magic. Magic doesn't take matter or energy (as those terms are defined in physics) into account at all. If, for example you polymorph a human into a squrrel, the extra mass doesn't go anywhere, and if you polymorph a human into an elephant the extra mass doesn't come from anywhere.

Failing to account for the conservation of matter and energy in some way is a problem in magical systems because it allows you to build a perpetual motion machine of the first kind, meaning that magic-using societies in your universe now have infinite energy. That's a problem because if you have infinite energy you have two options: weird post-scarcity universe (really hard to do well, has limited storytelling options) or extremely low verisimilitude romp. In practice the latter option is chosen most often, but the seriousness of storytelling is restricted by the robustness of its setting.

That's why magical theory matters: because if you intend to produce something other than a joyful romp or comedic farce you need to anchor your setting appropriately. In the context of a game this also matters because there may be no practical in-universe way to prevent a player from breaking you world, and thus all your stories, in half by utilizing exploits baked into the magic system.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-11, 01:17 AM
Then three hundred years later there is one centillion wizards going at near light speed in space in all the directions.
Once there is no conservation of mass or energy weirder and weirder stuff can happen very quickly.

and thats being generous and assuming that people can use magic at all!

given that all settings inevitably are human based, and humans are defined by the fact that we exist within physics, the normal rules of the world, once we assume magic ignores physics it must also therefore ignore us, because we are made of physics. our wiggling fingers and magic incantation happen because of energy and matter forming elements which form chemistry which form biology which form our skeletons, organs and muscles which allow us to say sound waves and make the movements necessary to do it all in the first place so that magic reacts. if we're being completely consistent with this no physics interaction rule, then magic can't interact with a single photon of our universe and thus forms an entirely separate one we cannot ever reach or touch, with beings who aren't relevant.

which while neatly solving the interaction issue, introduces the issue of "but why have it all then?" because its not in the setting at all and impacts nothing, like the andromeda galaxy. sure its big and powerful but its so far away and can't touch us, so who cares?

thus its a rule that only works when don't enforce it, which is a bad rule for magic theory.

JoeJ
2019-04-11, 02:03 AM
and thats being generous and assuming that people can use magic at all!

given that all settings inevitably are human based, and humans are defined by the fact that we exist within physics, the normal rules of the world, once we assume magic ignores physics it must also therefore ignore us, because we are made of physics. our wiggling fingers and magic incantation happen because of energy and matter forming elements which form chemistry which form biology which form our skeletons, organs and muscles which allow us to say sound waves and make the movements necessary to do it all in the first place so that magic reacts. if we're being completely consistent with this no physics interaction rule, then magic can't interact with a single photon of our universe and thus forms an entirely separate one we cannot ever reach or touch, with beings who aren't relevant.

That's as ridiculous as saying that physics must ignore us because we are made of magic. You're correct that magic can not interact with a single photon. But it doesn't have to, because it can create, destroy, and control light without interacting with photons. As far as magic is concerned, photons don't exist.

To the scientist, our bodies are made of molecules, interacting according to the rules of chemistry; to the magician, our bodies are a mixture of the four elements, formed into an imperfect copy of the ideal man or woman. Neither view is more correct than the other, or more fundamental. They are two irreconcilable ways of looking at the universe. And both of them are right.

NichG
2019-04-11, 02:17 AM
That's as ridiculous as saying that physics must ignore us because we are made of magic. You're correct that magic can not interact with a single photon. But it doesn't have to, because it can create, destroy, and control light without interacting with photons. As far as magic is concerned, photons don't exist.

To the scientist, our bodies are made of molecules, interacting according to the rules of chemistry; to the magician, our bodies are a mixture of the four elements, formed into an imperfect copy of the ideal man or woman. Neither view is more correct than the other, or more fundamental. They are two irreconcilable ways of looking at the universe. And both of them are right.

That's not what science is, and that misunderstanding means you're going to be talking past other people when you use phrases like 'any scientific hypothesis about magic will fail to be confirmed'.

'There are two redundant representations of the universe, and different things interact according to the one representation or the other but neither is more or less true than the other' is a scientific hypothesis about magic.

JoeJ
2019-04-11, 02:58 AM
'There are two redundant representations of the universe, and different things interact according to the one representation or the other but neither is more or less true than the other' is a scientific hypothesis about magic.

No, it's actually not a scientific hypothesis. It's a statement of faith.

Malphegor
2019-04-11, 03:47 AM
Any sufficiently consistent system will be added to our body of knowledge and allow us to produce models of how the universe works.

Magic is ridiculously easy to incorporate into our scientific understanding of the world unless it is truly random nonsense like 'you try to cast fireball and instead the entire universe is made of tapioca for a bit'.

Sure, magic is weird, but if a set of wiggly motions and saying some words makes a fireball happen without fail given the same conditions (assuming that we can figure out those conditions from experimentation), then fine we know that the current model is inaccurate and we tweak it with thaumaturgical updates.

Magic ignores known physics sometimes, or tweaks it. But that's not exactly a barrier to it being a part of scientific understanding and research.

Magic is a Maxwell's Demon. It lets you slot it into a system and do things that would normally be impossible. It can still be part of our understanding of how things work. It's an exception to the normal rules, which forms a new rule of its own. :)

Lord Raziere
2019-04-11, 03:54 AM
No, it's actually not a scientific hypothesis. It's a statement of faith.

look science is just a model of how our world works. the only reason why science often rubs against religion the wrong way is not because its inherently against religion, its because science found no proof for any religion's model to be accurate. religion is just a very early model that has found a different use.

if you go into a world where gods exist and things happen because you pray to them and this is provable by empirical observation, then science and religion are the same thing, because then you can make science out of studying said gods. and this science is probably useful in that world! you'd be studying the gods psychology to see what really appeals to them, studying what acts of devotion mathematically gives said god the most energy to make sure worship is as efficient and beneficial as possible, and such and so on. the studying and figuring out the mysteries of said being would be science and faith at the same time.

furthermore there are people out there who are both scientists and religious without any conflict, and thats just talking one kind of faith. there are some faiths that have even less conflict with science and blur the line between philosophy and religion. indeed, religion in older eras were places were knowledge was preserved and taught, after all the farmers weren't going to do it, the nobles and rulers had ruling the land duties to attend to,and these religious types writing their texts and contemplating the mysteries of the world have to do something useful. you'd be surprised how much "scholar" and "monk/priest" cross over with each other. and how many religious figures are regarded as people of knowledge and teaching.

this is because, again, models of the world, and models of the world are often interconnected all-defining things trying to explain all of existence. mythology? alchemy? occult stuff? philosophy? folklore? all of these in a way outgrowths of religion and people trying to come with models to explain this or that.

magic users in real ancient times would not be these religion-shunning guys in wizard hats, they'd be priests who think that that what they're doing is a miracle of the gods even if they had Int 18 and learned the entire spell from a book, because everything was of gods. they'd find the divide we make between arcane and divine magic completely nonsensical, because to them, being a cleric and working inside all days with books in a church library was being a knowledgeable scholar, as opposed to working in the fields. knowledge and spirituality to them were connected, not opposed. because who else would be interested enough to investigate something than people who see spirituality within everything?

Glorthindel
2019-04-11, 04:20 AM
I think the idiosyncrasies in D&D's magic effects are less because it is a world where physics doesn't work, and more that it is a game that doesn't really care to model or simulate the details of those sorts of interactions. It's no different than maybe an action movie or adventure novel in which implausible things happen. They are clearly taking place in a world much like our own, where the laws of physics apply- they just ignore them sometimes when something cool is happening. It isn't that the air isn't heated or that things don't freeze, but that it is simulating a world on a more abstract level with a focus on action and adventure, rather than complete realism. Of course, some things are just silly, like elemental damage types that have no status effects, just serving as a rock/paper/scissors mini-game.

I think its an unfortunate consequence of attempting to maintain balance whilst accounting for almost limitless interactions. At its core, Magic in DnD (and other games) is a balanced (supposedly - for the sake of discussion, lets avoid arguements over exactly how balanced it is or isn't) class feature, with scaling damage and utility. Each spells strength is determined by its self-contained rules, and therefore, in order to avoid that balance being wrecked utterly, spell interactions have to be either completely prohibited, or strictly regulated, in order to prevent the damage scaling getting utterly broken by the interaction of two spells that the designers didn't consider. Especially when you consider that new spells are being introduced all the time, it would be a tedious and hopeless job to check for some weird broken interaction between new spells in two different splat books.

While DM's certainly can (and I think should) allow and enable players to be creative with magic, avoiding codified rules allows a DM to rule one-off rule-of-cool spell uses, without running into a player who has figured out (or more likely, read it on the internet) a broken instant-death cantrip combo.

Florian
2019-04-11, 04:38 AM
The whole point of "Magic" is not being part of everyday physics. If "Miracles" were common, they wouldn't be "Miracles" and could be counted as something very reliable that we can calculate the odds and rely on.

gkathellar
2019-04-11, 06:51 AM
The whole point of "Magic" is not being part of everyday physics. If "Miracles" were common, they wouldn't be "Miracles" and could be counted as something very reliable that we can calculate the odds and rely on.

Not everyone wants magic to be miraculous. I understand your view, and sometimes it’s my view, but there are also times I want a world that can be explained entirely via the wacky physics of Essence, or where any narrative development can be attributed to Sanderson-style rules. There’s also a middle ground where we understand the “what,” but not the “how” or “why,” and this has its own benefits. All are valid takes.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-11, 06:51 AM
I think its an unfortunate consequence of attempting to maintain balance whilst accounting for almost limitless interactions. At its core, Magic in DnD (and other games) is a balanced (supposedly - for the sake of discussion, lets avoid arguements over exactly how balanced it is or isn't) class feature, with scaling damage and utility. Each spells strength is determined by its self-contained rules, and therefore, in order to avoid that balance being wrecked utterly, spell interactions have to be either completely prohibited, or strictly regulated, in order to prevent the damage scaling getting utterly broken by the interaction of two spells that the designers didn't consider. Especially when you consider that new spells are being introduced all the time, it would be a tedious and hopeless job to check for some weird broken interaction between new spells in two different splat books.

While DM's certainly can (and I think should) allow and enable players to be creative with magic, avoiding codified rules allows a DM to rule one-off rule-of-cool spell uses, without running into a player who has figured out (or more likely, read it on the internet) a broken instant-death cantrip combo.

I agree. I'm very fond of the basic 5e idea that spells[1] do what they say they do, nothing else. Cold spells don't freeze things unless they say they do. Wind spells don't push unless they say they do. No game element interacts with anything but the general rules unless it claims to do so or the DM makes an allowance.

This is predictable, so players can reason from it and make meaningful choices. It's limited, so the game doesn't turn into "the person with the best twisted reasoning/half-remembered science knowledge wins". It leaves the door open for new effects to be written without a combinatorial explosion of checking needed. More than anything, it lets you get on with the game instead of bogging things down in trying to calculate the airspeed velocity[2] of an unladen swallow[3].

[1] as well as other game abilities
[2] department of redundancy department says "Hey, that's our job!"
[3] African, by preference.

Cosi
2019-04-11, 07:05 AM
One of the basic requirements for a roleplaying game is that the world is well-defined enough that the players can reasonably understand what outcomes are possible or probable as a result of their actions. As such, there will be some laws of physics that describe the behavior of the world, and if there is magic in the game, some of them will describe the functioning of magic. It's ultimately irrelevant if you declare some of those things to be "laws of physics" and others to be "laws of magical theory", just as the fact that we call some parts of physics "gravity" and some parts "electromagnetism" does not make either "not physics" in a meaningful sense. Physics, or science more broadly, is simply the study of the behavior of the world. If there is magic in the world, studying it is as legitimate a part of physics as any other. Hell, if you look at the actual world, early pioneers in physics like Newton also studied things we think of as magic, in hopes that they too would pan out. We've already run the "would people apply the same processes to magic as physics" experiment, and the answer is yes.


Except that there is no third force. Magical reality and scientific reality simply don't interact. Any scientific hypothesis about why they don't will fail to be confirmed. And so will any magical hypothesis.

This is nonsensical. If magic exists, its study is the domain of science. Science has no trouble with the notion that you might have two models of reality you can't (yet) distinguish between, and there is necessarily some process by which interactions between magic and the rest of the world work. When you transfigure lead into gold, the gold has properties.

gkathellar
2019-04-11, 07:12 AM
This is nonsensical. If magic exists, its study is the domain of science. Science has no trouble with the notion that you might have two models of reality you can't (yet) distinguish between, and there is necessarily some process by which interactions between magic and the rest of the world work. When you transfigure lead into gold, the gold has properties.

It's an aesthetic choice. Some people like the idea of magic as something discreet, which ignores all other rules and which may not even follow rules that can be discerned. That doesn't really make sense, but again, dividing the world into "stuff what can be categorized," and "stuff what is esoteric and confusing," is an aesthetic decision rather than a functional one.

Cluedrew
2019-04-11, 07:33 AM
On Magic: Maybe I should have spent a bit more time talking about this in the opening, but for the proposes of this thread I was using "the literary definition of magic". Which is to say I am talking about anything that doesn't work in real life (with anything we are guessing will work included). So until we had radios I would have counted that. But magic, FTL travel, effective cloning, over-the-top pressure point work and so on all count.

Generally I go with science, magic and religion (or the explanatory parts of it) are just different studies of the same underlying universe. And although those might look different or contradictory on the surface, as they develop further they should all combine into one understanding. Or you can make a universe like Discworld or the multiverse of Kill 6 Billion Demons, but that is not what I would call a general solution.


I agree. I'm very fond of the basic 5e idea that spells[1] do what they say they do, nothing else.That way lies the SUE Files. AKA Madness.

It makes things simpler, and is might be a good idea when you want to have the shear amount of content that D&D has. But really I don't like how artificial that make everything feel. It really makes things feel like we are walking around in a computer game. Where every interaction is programmed ahead of time. Actually letting things leak out from these black boxes in a consistent ways is part of my argument for magic theory in the first place.

jjordan
2019-04-11, 09:06 AM
So old magic posits that there is some sort of logical explanation for magic that can be discovered but hasn't been. In the meantime practitioners can discover bits and pieces of pre-existing tools and invoke those tools (or the creatures that use those tools) to effect change in the world. Meanwhile new magic posits that magic is the force of will shaping reality and you can create your own logical structure. New magic is rather like the classic physics example of the little girl pushing against the cruise ship, she's exerting very little force but, over time, will move the ship. Old magic is rather more like pushing the button you discovered to crash an asteroid into the side of the ship, it's been destroyed, but moved far more quickly.

You don't have to have a logical framework for magic. It can be as simple as smart monkeys pushing the buttons of the universe. Why does a fireball spell produce fireballs? Because when you do this and use this that's what happens. But why? Well wizard X insists it's because of Y while wizard A insists it's because of B and neither solution produces predictable results in practical experimentation. It just works and the reasons why are open to exploration and debate.

I prefer a more logical system for a lot of reasons. I like the players being able to extrapolate and explore and create. I feel that adds to the story. I also like to have guidelines for myself so my setting is internally consistent and doesn't add to the burden of disbelief. I'm a fan of the magic systems found in Spell Law and Ars Magica and I liked the research and learning aspects of AD&D which implied that wizards had to learn how a spell worked before they could use it rather than just following a recipe.

But dropping that research aspect and moving to a simple 'monkeys pushing the buttons of reality' model vastly simplified the game for players and made the writing easier for the designers.

Pleh
2019-04-11, 09:20 AM
I completely agree with the OP.

I would add that the importance of magic theory is inextricably tied to the parallel subjects of cosmology and theology (pertaining to the related fictional setting). In some settings there are gods that define the nature of magic to a greater or lesser degree. Other settings have no deities at all.

Over the years, D&D divine magic makes less and less sense to me. I'm partial to the Dark Souls method of redefining them as Miracles to help distinguish they are fundamentally different.

Also worthy of noting is that the Null Set is a valid solution to Magic Theory. That is to say that magic can be demonstrably unknowable. This is great for adding the Wild Magic flair, but it's probably most successful in the Lovecraftian genre; where knowing magic may be possible, but direct knowledge of magic poses a direct threat to your life, health, sanity, and humanity.

However, the Null Set solution does have a problem others have pointed out. If magic isn't reliable or at least somewhat understood, you can't really have true spellcasters. No one can become masters of magic if magic can't ever be domesticated in at least some degree.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-11, 09:58 AM
That way lies the SUE Files. AKA Madness.

It makes things simpler, and is might be a good idea when you want to have the shear amount of content that D&D has. But really I don't like how artificial that make everything feel. It really makes things feel like we are walking around in a computer game. Where every interaction is programmed ahead of time. Actually letting things leak out from these black boxes in a consistent ways is part of my argument for magic theory in the first place.

The problem is that it quickly devolves into "I'm smarter than you are" or, more realistically, "I'm better at BS than you are at detecting it." Anything that can have rules can and will be gamed for personal power and the system (and the universe) fall apart.

Self-consistent "laws of magic" are super hard. Once you let them interact in arbitrary ways, you quickly have an explosion of possibilities. So either you need strongly-constrained magic (which doesn't work for a lot of fiction and doesn't let people do things outside the box either) or you need to accept that the world falls apart immediately on first inspection.

D&D takes the idea that we don't know how spells work. They just do. The underlying theory might not even be accessible to mortals without severe brain trauma resulting. Beyond that, there are lots of "magic" (ie fantastic) things out there, because it's a fantastic universe. Dragons fly, even though they shouldn't. Why? They're magical beasts. Not the sort you can cancel out with anti-magic, but the "background forces" sort. Magic simply is.

This doesn't stop people from making theories, but they'll be incomplete, inconsistent, or both.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-11, 10:07 AM
The problem is that it quickly devolves into "I'm smarter than you are" or, more realistically, "I'm better at BS than you are at detecting it." Anything that can have rules can and will be gamed for personal power and the system (and the universe) fall apart.

Self-consistent "laws of magic" are super hard. Once you let them interact in arbitrary ways, you quickly have an explosion of possibilities. So either you need strongly-constrained magic (which doesn't work for a lot of fiction and doesn't let people do things outside the box either) or you need to accept that the world falls apart immediately on first inspection.

D&D takes the idea that we don't know how spells work. They just do. The underlying theory might not even be accessible to mortals without severe brain trauma resulting. Beyond that, there are lots of "magic" (ie fantastic) things out there, because it's a fantastic universe. Dragons fly, even though they shouldn't. Why? They're magical beasts. Not the sort you can cancel out with anti-magic, but the "background forces" sort. Magic simply is.

This doesn't stop people from making theories, but they'll be incomplete, inconsistent, or both.

So would you reject even the most basic explanation of what's going on with magic as a "pandora's box", or is there a middle ground that's acceptable in your opinion?

Man_Over_Game
2019-04-11, 10:26 AM
But introducing physics makes catgirls die. Seriously, magic and physics do not go together. None of the effects there make any sense whatsoever from a physical standpoint, so you'd just be adding arbitrary results and making things more complicated.

5e (in particular) seems to assume that spells are black boxes. We know how to make them go, but the underlying theory is a mystery. They do exactly what they say they do, nothing more. Ray of frost does not, in particular, freeze things unless it interacts with something that says it gets frozen by it. Cold damage isn't achieved by lowering the temperature (the physics there says "not a chance"), but by imposing a state of anti-heat momentarily on something. Elemental cold is a thing. Fireball doesn't superheat the air (see the attempt to determine what temperature it is on the other thread in the 3e forum, which basically came to the conclusion that doing so was meaningless and self-contradictory), it imposes a state of elemental Fire on things, dealing damage and melting/burning things that way.

Physics does not work as it does in the real world, and any attempt to do so both devalues the magic and real physics (by making it lie).

It's not necessarily about using real world physics, it's about having consistency.

Damage, for example, is an abstraction in 5e. It doesn't represent real wounds all the time, and I don't think it should. There SHOULD be a supernatural aspect with the fact that a warrior with a sword can fight a friggin' dragon.

All I'm asking is for it to make a mild bit of sense. Like answering how metal or water interacts with lightning magic (and it DOES interact with some, but not all, lightning). Or explaining how magical water interacts with magical cold. Or just simply explaining how weight plays a factor in damage.

None of these things are explained, and it all feels very arbitrary, sloppy, and lazy. Like the solution was to say "well, magic's weird, amirite?" and decide to ignore that part of the universe.

There's not even an explanation as to how magical fire or magical cold interacts with real world objects. Like each spell is designed to implement their own laws of physics, while still being randomly consistent (like how Lightning Bolt and Burning Hands can set things on fire, but Flame Blade and Flame Strike do not).

If things are consistent, I can set a scenario or expectations in how things are going to react. Without that consistency, I might as well do what the developers did (which is throw my hands up in the air).

Quertus
2019-04-11, 10:30 AM
I feel like this logic of "if it's explained, it breaks" was pulled from discussions on the nature of HP.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-11, 10:42 AM
So would you reject even the most basic explanation of what's going on with magic as a "pandora's box", or is there a middle ground that's acceptable in your opinion?

As long as the explanation is not contractual and leaves large gaps of "you have no way of knowing that" both in-universe and out, I'm fine with explanations.


It's not necessarily about using real world physics, it's about having consistency.

Damage, for example, is an abstraction in 5e. It doesn't represent real wounds all the time, and I don't think it should. There SHOULD be a supernatural aspect with the fact that a warrior with a sword can fight a friggin' dragon.

All I'm asking is for it to make a mild bit of sense. Like answering how metal or water interacts with lightning magic (and it DOES interact with some, but not all, lightning). Or explaining how magical water interacts with magical cold. Or just simply explaining how weight plays a factor in damage.

None of these things are explained, and it all feels very arbitrary, sloppy, and lazy. Like the solution was to say "well, magic's weird, amirite?" and decide to ignore that part of the universe.

There's not even an explanation as to how magical fire or magical cold interacts with real world objects. Like each spell is designed to implement their own laws of physics, while still being randomly consistent (like how Lightning Bolt and Burning Hands can set things on fire, but Flame Blade and Flame Strike do not).

If things are consistent, I can set a scenario or expectations in how things are going to react. Without that consistency, I might as well do what the developers did (which is throw my hands up in the air).

As soon as you try to get fully consistent, the whole thing breaks down by necessity. The only consistent set of physical laws is the ones we have right now. Any introduction of fantastic things breaks those laws into tiny, inconsistent fragments. You can't get consistency and still have magic. Otherwise those would be our current laws of physics. That's what I mean by devaluing both physics and magic by trying to make consistent theories--it's impossible and you end up having to hack both of them to get anything to fit and it still won't work.

So the only realistic, workable solution is to treat them as unexplained black boxes. Spells work. How they work? That depends, and we're not sure. The answer might even be time- or situation-dependent. A druid and a cleric casting the same "spell" might do so in completely different, inconsistent ways. Why doesn't sleet storm freeze water? For a druid, it might be because the air spirits you called on to produce the effect don't have power over standing water. For a wizard, it might be because the solidification and slippery aspects you're applying to the local conditions are not the same as the freezing aspect required for water. Each person or magical school of thought might have a different, inconsistent, equally valid explanation.

This does allow you (as a player and as a DM) to reason, just not as much as you'd like. You know that whatever the spell (or ability) says it can do, it can do. But it won't do anything else. That's really all you need. Does the spell say it works? Then it works. Is it silent? Then it doesn't work.

This is the same about everything--you don't have to understand how logic gates work and how chips are built to use a computer. You don't have to understand quantum chemistry to digest food. Almost everything around us is, for practical purposes, a black box. We know what to do to get the desired result, but the details are fuzzy.

NichG
2019-04-11, 11:01 AM
No, it's actually not a scientific hypothesis. It's a statement of faith.

The only difference is that a statement of faith is an assertion that something is true, whereas a hypothesis is a statement of something where the speaker retains the possibility that it may, in the end, not be true - and ideally establishes a criterion for abandoning the hypothesis. "If I go outside, elves will cast an illusion on me which makes me perceive the sky as green (but if I go outside and the sky appears to be any other color than green, then this is falsified)" is a hypothesis along with a partial set of criteria for falsifying it.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-11, 11:04 AM
As long as the explanation is not contractual and leaves large gaps of "you have no way of knowing that" both in-universe and out, I'm fine with explanations.



As soon as you try to get fully consistent, the whole thing breaks down by necessity. The only consistent set of physical laws is the ones we have right now. Any introduction of fantastic things breaks those laws into tiny, inconsistent fragments. You can't get consistency and still have magic. Otherwise those would be our current laws of physics. That's what I mean by devaluing both physics and magic by trying to make consistent theories--it's impossible and you end up having to hack both of them to get anything to fit and it still won't work.

So the only realistic, workable solution is to treat them as unexplained black boxes. Spells work. How they work? That depends, and we're not sure. The answer might even be time- or situation-dependent. A druid and a cleric casting the same "spell" might do so in completely different, inconsistent ways. Why doesn't sleet storm freeze water? For a druid, it might be because the air spirits you called on to produce the effect don't have power over standing water. For a wizard, it might be because the solidification and slippery aspects you're applying to the local conditions are not the same as the freezing aspect required for water. Each person or magical school of thought might have a different, inconsistent, equally valid explanation.

This does allow you (as a player and as a DM) to reason, just not as much as you'd like. You know that whatever the spell (or ability) says it can do, it can do. But it won't do anything else. That's really all you need. Does the spell say it works? Then it works. Is it silent? Then it doesn't work.

This is the same about everything--you don't have to understand how logic gates work and how chips are built to use a computer. You don't have to understand quantum chemistry to digest food. Almost everything around us is, for practical purposes, a black box. We know what to do to get the desired result, but the details are fuzzy.

Knowledge and understanding are not binary states -- there's an entire range of nuance between "total comprehension" and "mysterious black box". I know more about how computers work than the average person, but less than someone who designs modern CPUs. I know a lot more about what items the computer store is making good margin on vs what's a loss leader than most people, but less than their accountants do. I know A LOT more about where the fruit you see in the supermarket comes from and what the food industry is like than most people, but I can't tell you off the top of my head which fertilizers and pesticides are legal in which countries like an expert in that part of the business can, I'd have to look it up.


Let me ask about a hypothetical spell, "freezing bolt". It's an instant damage spell that does a certain amount of damage. OK, now, do does this spell just do damage because the stat block says it does damage, and that's it, all questions forbidden? Or can we ask how it does damage?

Does it cause the tissues where it hits to literally freeze? If so, why would it not do the same thing to a glass of water (freeze it)?

Oh, it "imposes a condition of cold"? What does that mean? And how does an "imposed condition of cold" damage the target, other than "because the stat block said so"?

Is a statue or a supernaturally cold creature immune, or resistant, or just as vulnerable?


Other spells -- why would some fire-based attack spells risk igniting things, and others don't?


IMO, the way HERO/Champions handles this is better. If you write up a ranged attack spell, it uses the mechanics from Energy Blast (leans STUN damage) or Killing Attack Ranged (leans BODY damage), with maybe some Advantages and Limitations to better model the spell. However, that spell has a "special effect" (SFX) based on what it does. A fire spell is fire, and it risks lighting flamable things on fire because it's fire. An powerful ice spell freezes things, and it doesn't matter if it hits flesh or a bucket of water, it will freeze it, because it freezes things. A "rot" spell causes things that can rot, to rot. Etc. And things that are naturally resistant to the SFX don't ignite, or freeze, or rot, and might even get some added Defense on a discretionary basis.

"Unfortunately", it requires the GM and players to exercise cooperative discretion and imagination, which is "hard", I know.

Quertus
2019-04-11, 11:05 AM
The only consistent set of physical laws is the ones we have right now. Any introduction of fantastic things breaks those laws into tiny, inconsistent fragments. You can't get consistency and still have magic. Otherwise those would be our current laws of physics. That's what I mean by devaluing both physics and magic.

Well, that assumes that there *isn't* Magic in this world - something which afaict has never been proven, and which some people actively believe to be false. So that's not stable ground to begin with.

But what I much more interesting is this notion that there can be only one coherent physics. Citation please?

I mean, suppose all particles, all matter weighed twice as much, but all gravity (and related forces) was twice as strong to compensate. Would there be any reason why this alternate physics not only wouldn't work, but couldn't be used to produce a functionally identical universe as one with our physics?

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-11, 11:22 AM
The only difference is that a statement of faith is an assertion that something is true, whereas a hypothesis is a statement of something where the speaker retains the possibility that it may, in the end, not be true - and ideally establishes a criterion for abandoning the hypothesis. "If I go outside, elves will cast an illusion on me which makes me perceive the sky as green (but if I go outside and the sky appears to be any other color than green, then this is falsified)" is a hypothesis along with a partial set of criteria for falsifying it.

I'd never look at a hypothetical statement as anywhere near that similar to a statement of faith -- there's a huge gap between "this is true even in the face of contrary evidence" or "this could be true" / "let's momentarily treat this as if it were true".

One is a statement of absolute "truth" -- "This Is." The other is effectively a question -- "Is this?"

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-11, 11:41 AM
Well, that assumes that there *isn't* Magic in this world - something which afaict has never been proven, and which some people actively believe to be false. So that's not stable ground to begin with.


"Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless." -- Larry Niven. That is, things based on magic or magic-like explanation or claims, appear to not do anything useful or significant.

So far, we've seen no sign that magic is real -- there are no known phenomena for which magic is the most useful or predictive explanation, and every attempt I know of to test for magic has "come back negative".




I mean, suppose all particles, all matter weighed twice as much, but all gravity (and related forces) was twice as strong to compensate. Would there be any reason why this alternate physics not only wouldn't work, but couldn't be used to produce a functionally identical universe as one with our physics?


While the wording makes it seem contradictory to your point, I think I know what you're trying to say. It's actually not "everything balances out" when you start changing those things, there's A LOT of interplay involved and your adjustments end up contradicting each other. I'd have to do some/much re-reading to explain in detail, this is not my field of daily expertise.

Thrudd
2019-04-11, 12:35 PM
I think its an unfortunate consequence of attempting to maintain balance whilst accounting for almost limitless interactions. At its core, Magic in DnD (and other games) is a balanced (supposedly - for the sake of discussion, lets avoid arguements over exactly how balanced it is or isn't) class feature, with scaling damage and utility. Each spells strength is determined by its self-contained rules, and therefore, in order to avoid that balance being wrecked utterly, spell interactions have to be either completely prohibited, or strictly regulated, in order to prevent the damage scaling getting utterly broken by the interaction of two spells that the designers didn't consider. Especially when you consider that new spells are being introduced all the time, it would be a tedious and hopeless job to check for some weird broken interaction between new spells in two different splat books.

While DM's certainly can (and I think should) allow and enable players to be creative with magic, avoiding codified rules allows a DM to rule one-off rule-of-cool spell uses, without running into a player who has figured out (or more likely, read it on the internet) a broken instant-death cantrip combo.

I agree, exactly. In D&D, the game is more important than the simulation. Magic theory remains "fluff", while the rules are intended to keep it functional as a game, even when they contradict fluff or common sense physics.

Pleh
2019-04-11, 12:51 PM
I feel there's a critical element in the name, "magic theory" that is somewhat overlooked by some of the arguments presented.

In order for magic rules to be exploited (like freezing a puddle with Freezing Ray spell), the characters must have some mastery of Magic Laws. These laws can't be violated, or they aren't the real laws. That's what gives power to exploit them.

But I think the OP was suggesting RPGs utilize Magic Theories. These theories are probably close approximations to the laws, allowing limited exploitation. It leaves room for the DM to say, "for some reason, that doesn't work."

It's like if all wizards are operating on Classical Mechanics Magic. It's mostly right in the fields it was designed for, but starts to fizzle too far outside that.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-11, 01:15 PM
"Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless." -- Larry Niven. That is, things based on magic or magic-like explanation or claims, appear to not do anything useful or significant.

So far, we've seen no sign that magic is real -- there are no known phenomena for which magic is the most useful or predictive explanation, and every attempt I know of to test for magic has "come back negative".

While the wording makes it seem contradictory to your point, I think I know what you're trying to say. It's actually not "everything balances out" when you start changing those things, there's A LOT of interplay involved and your adjustments end up contradicting each other. I'd have to do some/much re-reading to explain in detail, this is not my field of daily expertise.

Right. A few considerations:

Natural laws describe (not control) behavior. So if the behavior is identical, the laws must be identical (or else differ in meaningless ways or only in descriptors).


But the whole system has to be self-consistent--if you take the output of the law/theory and shove it back in as a "guess", you have to get the same answer out. And that puts severe constraints on what you can do. You can adjust the value of (some) constants, but only a tiny fraction of all values can even lead to condensed matter, let alone habitable worlds. Basically, for whatever reason (this is not understood at all currently), the values of the fundamental parameters of reality have to be exactly what they are, within a tiny tiny range, if you want to have anything like what we see.

The laws of nature must, by their definition, be always true wherever they apply. You can't have exceptions or violations of a universal law--if so, it's not a universal law in the first place. All physical theories depend on a few basic laws, the conservation laws.
* Conservation of mass-energy
* Conservation of linear and angular momentum
* CPT symmetry [1]
* Conservation of charge
* Conservation of color charge [1]
* Conservation of weak isospin [1]
* Conservation of probability

[1] used in quantum mechanics mostly

Magic, if it is to be useful or to approach anything like what fantasy worlds expect, will inevitably violate at least one of these laws. Even if you expand the "universe" to include the other planes, you're running into violations of these laws as a matter of necessity.

Any theory that involves a violation (or a change) in these fundamental conservation laws would only produce an Earth-like world by accident or extreme contrivance. Every time we've tried to do a "what if" that violates them, the theory collapses into nonsense, predicting that 1 = 42 and that any motion produces an infinite amount of infinitely hard radiation.


People have tried to find alternate self-consistent laws of physics (not just variations of parameters, but actual different laws) and have failed. Let's not expect a bunch of writers to do any better, especially in a game context. It won't go well. For that matter, I trust game writers to get science correct about as much as I trust teenagers to handle sensitive emotional matters maturely...if the teenagers were high on a cocktail of every psychoactive drug known to man. But then I'm a cynic.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-11, 02:11 PM
The whole point of "Magic" is not being part of everyday physics. If "Miracles" were common, they wouldn't be "Miracles" and could be counted as something very reliable that we can calculate the odds and rely on.

A limiting and boring definition to me personally, when the alternatives are far more interesting! I truly don't think that a priest of antiquity was any more interested in making exceptions to the rules than a modern scientist- they just had far more limited knowledge to work with and had to work with the limited logic they had available. To them something odd happening could be because a person was behind it, yet no person could do something like give someone a disease or whatnot, so they explained it as some invisible person that they could not see intentionally doing for this or that reason because this creature didn't like or really liked humans for some reason.

its not as if they looked out at the world saw it as we do, lifeless, mechanical, uncaring. they saw the world as a living god or gods, as an interconnected miracle upon miracles within miracles, they saw anything good as apart of the gods, anything bad as a demon, anything weird as a fae doing it, their light of knowledge was dim and they searched for the best explanation they could for everything around them, and because the things they knew that moved and did things were people and animals, thus they thought that weird people and animals in the heavens were also up there doing and moving things around with tools and such, as above so below. they had no means of investigating further or knowing better after all, and it was perfectly consistent with how they knew the rest of life did things.

when a man throws a spear, it hits a man, when zeus throws lightning he throws it like a spear and hits a tree. perfectly consistent reasoning from their viewpoint! is it a miracle? no, Zeus does throws lightning like a spear, duh. they didn't know WHY zeus hits trees with lightning but, he did. poseidon? he was the god of both sea and earthquakes- even if Greeks didn't know the exact reason, they knew that tidal waves and earthquakes were connected, and assigned the same being to both. while Apollo was the god of the sun- and knowledge, music, seeing the future, healing and so on. why? because you can't heal if you don't know anything, and how can you know if you don't have light to see? they already recognized that there is a connection between light, time and knowledge even if they got the reason why wrong. that the world was interconnected and functioned together, they didn't think that the world was somehow arbitrarily divided between gods/magic doing something and not doing something, they were everywhere and everything, because that was the best explanation they could come up with!

They didn't come up with these mythical explanations the creatures behind them because they liked randomness or miracles or whatever. They desired something that made sense to them for a thing that was happening and some person up there doing this activity that was basically a bigger version of a thing they did was understandable to them. they couldn't figure out the actual reason for a disaster or whatever so "oh some magical being did it, much like we do X, and other beings do all the other things in existence much like we do Y or Z.", it was a comfort to them knowing that we know today as natural phenomena, was something with a seemingly human motivation and direction behind it so that they had something to blame and a way to appeal to it then get on with their day rather than waste time wondering.

the idea that magic is somehow not apart of everything else is very modern and I'd say even very technological in its thinking- almost to the point of not really being magic at all. again, models. it doesn't fit into physics as we know it, so we define it as a particular force that does particular things to make things happen to circumvent laws. which is already making it a science just by defining it as a force with rules, energy that can be calculated and so on. just because it doesn't have big machines doesn't mean it isn't a science already. I'd say vancian magic is already a science, since it is studied by people thinking its a model of the world and already gets consistent results. divine magic is just as consistent in its results, mechanically speaking, so yes, the miracles of a cleric are in fact a science in DnD.

I think what people keep trying to say with things like "magic is not apart of physics" and blah blah blah, not apart of the world blah, is that they mean magic is a form of technology to them and doesn't have any natural connection to the world and they do not want actual technology getting in the way of their fantasy technology, which is not science. technology and science are two different things, as science is all about studying the world, all about connecting and explaining how all things work together. technology is about tools that never have existed in the natural world having a new effect because someone made them, and indeed, technology can seem magical when you have an iphone and use it to navigate around a city or whatever. But its not science, nor is science opposed to magic, science is opposed to nothing except things being false, y'know not being factual. technology is merely the result of us figuring out facts from science and applying them in ways to get results that wouldn't get otherwise.

and thus in that regard you have to do science to get magic! because magic as defined is just hand-sign password technology made from studying how it works made rare so as to seem amazing, much like how science fiction makes their inventions seem amazing by making them prototypes. its a trick of scarcity and perception, nothing more. the only difference between the two is that the machine behind the amazing things magic does is invisible.

which is kind of why I decided to make magic something people create in my personal stories, because people think of it as technology without mundanity anyways.

Jama7301
2019-04-11, 02:24 PM
Does making magic more defined and explicit make it easier to do? The more magic can be explained, it feels like it'd lead to everyone being some flavor of wizard/sorcerer and makes it more mundane, at least to me. If "You can do a fireball by thinking about these things, making these gestures while holding these items" seems kinda... boring? Unless you now lock usage of these things behind having some sort of arcane spark or whatever that can interact with these rules, but that mixed with the highly defined nature of magic feels off.

Man_Over_Game
2019-04-11, 02:28 PM
Does making magic more defined and explicit make it easier to do? The more magic can be explained, it feels like it'd lead to everyone being some flavor of wizard/sorcerer and makes it more mundane, at least to me. If "You can do a fireball by thinking about these things, making these gestures while holding these items" seems kinda... boring? Unless you now lock usage of these things behind having some sort of arcane spark or whatever that can interact with these rules, but that mixed with the highly defined nature of magic feels off.

Do you understand how a computer is built? Or how it is programmed? Do you know all of the physics behind a computer?

For most people, probably not, but the individual specifics could easily be explained, piece by piece. I don't think that makes computers any more mundane, given that they provide means of manipulating robots, creating virtual reality, or communicating with everyone across the world in seconds.

Jama7301
2019-04-11, 02:41 PM
Do you understand how a computer is built? Or how it is programmed? Do you know all of the physics behind a computer?

For most people, probably not, but the individual specifics could easily be explained, piece by piece. I don't think that makes computers any more mundane, given that they provide means of manipulating robots, creating virtual reality, or communicating with everyone across the world in seconds.

Computers are so ubiquitous I would call them mundane. They're so incorporated into our daily life, that using them is a necessity for many people. We have computers in our pockets that are orders of a magnitude stronger than commercial computers from just 20 years ago. That's what I feel that magic would be like in a setting where everything is known and explained. Maybe at first, there'd be some wonder to easily accessing the Arcane, but at some point, it'd just be integral to daily life, much like electricity is in developed nations.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-11, 02:44 PM
Does making magic more defined and explicit make it easier to do? The more magic can be explained, it feels like it'd lead to everyone being some flavor of wizard/sorcerer and makes it more mundane, at least to me. If "You can do a fireball by thinking about these things, making these gestures while holding these items" seems kinda... boring? Unless you now lock usage of these things behind having some sort of arcane spark or whatever that can interact with these rules, but that mixed with the highly defined nature of magic feels off.

depends on the rules.

imagine magic as having multiple layers. one layer is that multiple kinds of magic existing, the layer under that is the thing that makes sure all those different systems make sense together. magic can be an ecology, a thing with multiple states like solid, liquid and gas. we have a world where our seemingly defined systems of biology, geography, chemistry and so on lead to incredible diversity and complexity! why can't magic do the same? magic being defined in no way leads to a specific flavor of wizard, especially because "wizard" is only one possibility of many. who says that the premier magic users can't be something else? or that there are no premier magic users and they just wield parts that no dominate over others? there is more to magic than wizards and their hats, you already define magic by limiting it to some guy wiggling their fingers with witch hats and robes using spellbooks in their towers and whatnot, when it can be so much more than the cliches.

Mechalich
2019-04-11, 04:09 PM
Does making magic more defined and explicit make it easier to do? The more magic can be explained, it feels like it'd lead to everyone being some flavor of wizard/sorcerer and makes it more mundane, at least to me. If "You can do a fireball by thinking about these things, making these gestures while holding these items" seems kinda... boring? Unless you now lock usage of these things behind having some sort of arcane spark or whatever that can interact with these rules, but that mixed with the highly defined nature of magic feels off.

Not really. The traditional barrier to magical practice was education, whether as a part of the society's clergy or as a noble or merchant with a source of wealth and copious free time. 'Magic' in the vast majority of its literary and cultural forms, requires study, usually a lot of study, like a lifelong amount. Anything else is a superpower or wild talent or something different. If the returns on magical practice are small enough and if this barrier is maintained its perfectly reasonable that only a small number of people choose to go down the road of wizardry.

In D&D, of course, the rewards of magical practice are far too great and society would inevitably reorient around magic in pretty much all possible ways.


While the wording makes it seem contradictory to your point, I think I know what you're trying to say. It's actually not "everything balances out" when you start changing those things, there's A LOT of interplay involved and your adjustments end up contradicting each other. I'd have to do some/much re-reading to explain in detail, this is not my field of daily expertise.

Fantastical settings with explicitly alternate baseline physics do exist, they're just rare because you have to be a mathematician or physicist to write one in a functional way. That said, pretty much the entire oeuvre of Greg Egan has been producing exactly that sort of work. Part of the problem with such settings is that they end up being shockingly bizarre and impenetrable and dialing in the physics far enough to extrapolate into an ecology and society is nearly impossible.

This is why most magical theories that are worth bothering with are based on circumstantial exceptions to existing physics, as in 'everything works they way it normally would except for...' This is a much more robust approach than trying to claim that reality operates in a fundamentally different way down to the atomic level. Of course, that's what some of the most prominent fantasy gaming systems do in the case of D&D, which has a alternate four element two energy fundamental reality, or Exalted, in which the world is explicitly animist and every physical process is actually negotiated between tiny gods.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-11, 04:16 PM
or Exalted, in which the world is explicitly animist and every physical process is actually negotiated between tiny gods.

no longer canon. Exalted 3e did away with tiny gods. terrestrial gods still exist, but no little men in grass making things happen no more.

Cluedrew
2019-04-11, 06:26 PM
On Magic & Science: (A bunch of people spoke about this, this is kind of a response to all of them.) Historically the study of science grew out of the study of magic. The dividing line came out of a few major revelations. Such as the model of matter going from the proportion based system that grew out of the four elements systems to atoms. Newton has been described as the last alchemist and the first chemist because he was part of this transition, still it took a lot of time for all of this to unfold (and apparently took place largely in France). I don't know the entire story, but I have a few pieces.

Which means that comparing magic & science in real life should probably come with a qualifier of when. A long time ago it was the best "science" we had. Then it was a competitor to science for a while, but science was the new magic and so it won out. Now people discount that magic ever had anything good in it at all. Which I feel is a discredit to the alchemists who gave us chemistry.

Or, yes sufficiently examined magic is indistinguishable from science. Because that is where science came from in the first place.


The problem is that it quickly devolves into "I'm smarter than you are" or, more realistically, "I'm better at BS than you are at detecting it." Anything that can have rules can and will be gamed for personal power and the system (and the universe) fall apart.I have found my groups are not so competitive that trying to fool each other becomes an issue. I can see it still creeping in a little bit by accident and all but to me, its worth it. A world that can be pushed a bit is preferable to one that feels like a bunch of menus, which is the opposite problem. And let's not forget the possibility of a happy medium that minimizes both.


I agree, exactly. In D&D, the game is more important than the simulation. Magic theory remains "fluff", while the rules are intended to keep it functional as a game, even when they contradict fluff or common sense physics.I think the simulation part is important. Not in the sense of "simulationism" (I don't think so at least), but in the fact that the game and story is supposed to take place within a world. If the simulation doesn't resemble a possible world then... is that a still a role-playing game? If it is I'm not sure it is one that I would enjoy, I'm more on the story-telling side. If I want to test my skills I will go to an actual war game or something completely different depending on the skills I want to test. But when I sit down for a role-playing game I am here for the "fluff". Even if is a strange world that doesn't really make sense.


Does making magic more defined and explicit make it easier to do?For me it is more a matter that doing so exposes that there is no reason beyond convention that it is so hard to do. D&D magic has done nothing in my eyes to justify why it takes a degree to learn as opposed to an afternoon course.

And I don't think I managed to reply to everything I wanted to, but hopefully I got the big points.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-11, 06:38 PM
For me it is more a matter that doing so exposes that there is no reason beyond convention that it is so hard to do. D&D magic has done nothing in my eyes to justify why it takes a degree to learn as opposed to an afternoon course.

And I don't think I managed to reply to everything I wanted to, but hopefully I got the big points.

Because it mostly takes practice. If everything has to be said just so, and you have to meditate and learn mostly by doing, it's slow. And the very absence of a unified magical theory makes it harder going. You can't learn from others' work as easily, because half of what they did was either extra or wrong. And that's the trick. You have to figure out for yourself how things work, because that's 90% of the battle. It's not mechanistic (because a level 0 person can't perform the components and cast a 9th level spell no matter how well he does it), but it's based on changing your brain and soul to accept that magic. And non-wizard magic is even worse that way. No amount of theorizing can help you cast divine spells.

Knaight
2019-04-11, 06:39 PM
A lot of this comes down to what we mean by theory. People probably have sets of information about magic, sure - if you do this that happens, if you do that this happens, etc. People probably notice patterns to what it seems magic can and can't do. That doesn't mean there's any sort of deep underlying theory there, just a collection of knowledge where the connections are unknown.

To use my favorite analogy take chemistry. Today we can understand reactions in the context of looking at specific molecules, identifying how electrons move around between molecules, how bonds form and break, etc. We can predict what is going to happen to some degree based on this detailed molecular understanding. People have been using chemistry since long before we had any of that though, including knowledge of those elements themselves - and so instead people learned what specific processes involving mixing substances, heat, time, etc. all did. They recognized general patterns observable at the macroscopic scale, like how you can often dissolve metals in acids then dry them and heat them to get metals out of crushed ores.

I'm all for magic "theory" of the latter sort, where weird stuff happens and you can get a decent understanding of what but not why. The former sort? I'd consider pulling that out for magitech, and even then only rarely.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-11, 06:41 PM
A lot of this comes down to what we mean by theory. People probably have sets of information about magic, sure - if you do this that happens, if you do that this happens, etc. People probably notice patterns to what it seems magic can and can't do. That doesn't mean there's any sort of deep underlying theory there, just a collection of knowledge where the connections are unknown.

To use my favorite analogy take chemistry. Today we can understand reactions in the context of looking at specific molecules, identifying how electrons move around between molecules, how bonds form and break, etc. We can predict what is going to happen to some degree based on this detailed molecular understanding. People have been using chemistry since long before we had any of that though, including knowledge of those elements themselves - and so instead people learned what specific processes involving mixing substances, heat, time, etc. all did. They recognized general patterns observable at the macroscopic scale, like how you can often dissolve metals in acids then dry them and heat them to get metals out of crushed ores.

I'm all for magic "theory" of the latter sort, where weird stuff happens and you can get a decent understanding of what but not why. The former sort? I'd consider pulling that out for magitech, and even then only rarely.

I agree. Magical theory is better in the alchemical regime (macroscale patterns), rather than the "modern science" regime.

Thrudd
2019-04-11, 07:40 PM
I think the simulation part is important. Not in the sense of "simulationism" (I don't think so at least), but in the fact that the game and story is supposed to take place within a world. If the simulation doesn't resemble a possible world then... is that a still a role-playing game? If it is I'm not sure it is one that I would enjoy, I'm more on the story-telling side. If I want to test my skills I will go to an actual war game or something completely different depending on the skills I want to test. But when I sit down for a role-playing game I am here for the "fluff". Even if is a strange world that doesn't really make sense.

For me it is more a matter that doing so exposes that there is no reason beyond convention that it is so hard to do. D&D magic has done nothing in my eyes to justify why it takes a degree to learn as opposed to an afternoon course.


Although I want the challenge in D&D, I think that simulation is important, too - I wasn't really stating my personal preference for magic, just the approach of modern D&D. I think earlier editions, BECMI and 1e AD&D, are easier to fluff/explain and adjudicate in terms of the magic system- because they have far fewer spells to worry about, players have far fewer of them at any given time to work with and attempt to combine or exploit, and there is really only one method of spell casting for all the casting classes: the spell-slot system. Only the difference in source between clerics, druids, and magic-users need be explained. All magic comes in pre-created packets of effects that need to be memorized into specially prepared brain-segments and then triggered, the only question is where do you get the packets from and why are some of them only accessible to certain people. This is do-able. There's only one type of damage. All the spells which are something to do with fire (there's only 3 or 4 of them) explicitly say that anything flammable will be burned/take damage.

In these editions, I believe the justification for a significant period of training for magic use (not a "degree", but more like an apprenticeship), is that it takes significant discipline and training to learn the meditation techniques necessary to create these specialized partitions or "slots" in your mind for holding spell energy, and to attain the concentration/focus necessary to access and transfer the spell energy from its source into your "spell slot". Magic Users are memorizing symbols and holding a complex sequence of patterns in their consciousness, requiring the "intelligence" ability which in part describes their ability to identify and memorize patterns. Clerics and Druids are accessing the patterns not through their own power of reason and memorizing but through psychic affinity with an extra-dimensional source, a sort of "spell server", that downloads the spells into their open spell slots - so they use "wisdom", which in part describes psychic intuition and the sensitivity that lets them hold open the connection to whatever "divine" source they have trained to have affinity for. Wizards certainly value scholarly learning and generally have strong interest in finding out where magic spells came from and experimenting to see how they work, as well as uncovering the history and other secrets of the lost world that left this technology behind - and so a magic-user's apprenticeship likely includes this sort of study as well as the discipline required for actual magic use. Clerics and Druids are undergoing a more traditional religious training as well as the mind discipline, including the lore of their tradition. As their affinity for their divine magic source grows, spontaneous supernatural abilities manifest, like turning the undead and shapeshifting, which are methods of directly channeling energy from their "server" that is not stored in spell-packet form.

NichG
2019-04-11, 08:24 PM
I'd never look at a hypothetical statement as anywhere near that similar to a statement of faith -- there's a huge gap between "this is true even in the face of contrary evidence" or "this could be true" / "let's momentarily treat this as if it were true".

One is a statement of absolute "truth" -- "This Is." The other is effectively a question -- "Is this?"

The similarity is that they're both statements, which I think is actually often the reason this kind of discussion becomes confused. People identify science with the trappings of a particular family of statements ('energy is conserved', 'matter is made up of atoms',etc versus statements about goals, purposes, morals, and other sapient-driven descriptions of the universe) rather than by the methodology underlying what one does with such statements once issued - which is, admittedly, much less visible in the way that people learn about science.

The difference is, as you say, a statement of faith is the speaker's assertion that something is, should, or must be true. While in stating a hypothesis, the speaker's purpose is to identify it precisely entirely for the purpose of questioning it. If there's something intrinsic to the types of statements associated with statements of faith or hypotheses that distinguishes them, it's that a hypothesis must be a statement which asserts something precise and grounded enough that it can be proven wrong. But that doesn't intrinsically exclude hypotheses about e.g. 'lightning is the sky displaying its anger about the disrespect shown to it by people living on the ground' - it just means that you should be ready to follow that up with a random controlled trial varying the degree of disrespect to the sky shown by different neighborhoods and if the results don't go your way be ready to say 'well, I guess that wasn't it'.

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-04-11, 09:31 PM
On Magic & Science: (A bunch of people spoke about this, this is kind of a response to all of them.) Historically the study of science grew out of the study of magic. The dividing line came out of a few major revelations. Such as the model of matter going from the proportion based system that grew out of the four elements systems to atoms. Newton has been described as the last alchemist and the first chemist because he was part of this transition, still it took a lot of time for all of this to unfold (and apparently took place largely in France). I don't know the entire story, but I have a few pieces.

Which means that comparing magic & science in real life should probably come with a qualifier of when. A long time ago it was the best "science" we had. Then it was a competitor to science for a while, but science was the new magic and so it won out. Now people discount that magic ever had anything good in it at all. Which I feel is a discredit to the alchemists who gave us chemistry.

Or, yes sufficiently examined magic is indistinguishable from science. Because that is where science came from in the first place.

Not only did science grow out of magic, but the kind of "historical magic" people often think of when they say magic "shouldn't be scientific" (with the diagrams and candles and chanting and such) was in fact quite scientific in its approach. The Lesser Key of Solomon, probably the most famous grimoire on demonology, wasn't viewed as some sort of magical book that was enchanted in some way and required some innate mystical talent to use, it was a purely mundane instruction manual for demonologists, part Monster Manual (listing all of the known demons and their attributes), part psychology textbook (describing the exact procedures needed to bargain with each demon to get what you wanted and providing advice on how to resist their temptations), and part physics textbook (describing how to manipulate the mystical realm with seals and symbols the same way Physics 101 would teach you how to set up a spring or pendulum to demonstrate a law of motion).

Those historical magicians didn't view the world as divided into natural and supernatural realms, they viewed "purifying the soul for communion with angels" to be as real and as physical a process as "purifying water to remove contaminants" or the like. Practitioners of magic approached it in a rational, experimental manner just as a modern scientist would if you handed them a working magic wand and said "Magic is real, have fun!", they just didn't have our modern scientific worldview and breadth of established knowledge and so they approached it with vastly different assumptions.

If anything, designing a magical theory on the premise that "game magic should feel more magical" should end up with something that makes your magic-users look less like Harry Potter wizards more like grad students and lab techs . :smallamused:

Mechalich
2019-04-11, 10:56 PM
If anything, designing a magical theory on the premise that "game magic should feel more magical" should end up with something that makes your magic-users look less like Harry Potter wizards more like grad students and lab techs . :smallamused:

Harry Potter is actually pretty methodical in approach, at least as far as the trappings of its magic are concerned. The series is after all, built around the British Boarding School experience, and therefore the magical system its offers up is one that happens to be suitable for organized, directed, and dedicated study. There are full-fledged textbooks in the Harry Potter universe that explain exactly how to do stuff like make potions step by step in almost exactly the same way you'd do a high school chem lab experiment. The higher-level magical architecture is a bit less clear, in large part because we never see any wizards engaged in frontline research, we just see everyday rote use of the existing magical technology of the Potterverse (which admitted has some flexibility), but it probably does involve a lot of wizards in laboratories conducting complex experiments, and those labs would look almost exactly the same 19th century (the Potterverse having a distinctly retro aesthetic) scientific laboratories.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-12, 12:35 AM
Not only did science grow out of magic, but the kind of "historical magic" people often think of when they say magic "shouldn't be scientific" (with the diagrams and candles and chanting and such) was in fact quite scientific in its approach. The Lesser Key of Solomon, probably the most famous grimoire on demonology, wasn't viewed as some sort of magical book that was enchanted in some way and required some innate mystical talent to use, it was a purely mundane instruction manual for demonologists, part Monster Manual (listing all of the known demons and their attributes), part psychology textbook (describing the exact procedures needed to bargain with each demon to get what you wanted and providing advice on how to resist their temptations), and part physics textbook (describing how to manipulate the mystical realm with seals and symbols the same way Physics 101 would teach you how to set up a spring or pendulum to demonstrate a law of motion).

Those historical magicians didn't view the world as divided into natural and supernatural realms, they viewed "purifying the soul for communion with angels" to be as real and as physical a process as "purifying water to remove contaminants" or the like. Practitioners of magic approached it in a rational, experimental manner just as a modern scientist would if you handed them a working magic wand and said "Magic is real, have fun!", they just didn't have our modern scientific worldview and breadth of established knowledge and so they approached it with vastly different assumptions.

If anything, designing a magical theory on the premise that "game magic should feel more magical" should end up with something that makes your magic-users look less like Harry Potter wizards more like grad students and lab techs . :smallamused:

I've tried to point this out before, and gotten a lot of backlash.

What makes "magic" in our world historically seem mysterious and personal and evasive of analysis... is that it's not real. It contradicts and eludes and confounds because it doesn't exist.

If magic were real, in our world, humans would do the human thing to it, and figure it out, and take it apart and put it back together again (after many tries), and use it the same way we've always used everything we could in the world. It would be no different from fire, or water running downhill, or levers and pulleys, or the wind turning a windmill.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-12, 12:44 AM
I've tried to point this out before, and gotten a lot of backlash.

What makes "magic" in our world historically seem mysterious and personal and evasive of analysis... is that it's not real. It contradicts and eludes and confounds because it doesn't exist.

If magic were real, in our world, humans would do the human thing to it, and figure it out, and take it apart and put it back together again (after many tries), and use it the same way we've always used everything we could in the world. It would be no different from fire, or water running downhill, or levers and pulleys, or the wind turning a windmill.

humans do like to romanticize what we don't know, or is distant. fantasy worlds just spring into existence because there is no faraway lands on earth left to romanticize, I guess. question is, how much is an acceptable romanticism? the scientific mindset is an enlightenment mindset and that is always opposed by the romantic mindset after all.

Mechalich
2019-04-12, 01:48 AM
If magic were real, in our world, humans would do the human thing to it, and figure it out, and take it apart and put it back together again (after many tries), and use it the same way we've always used everything we could in the world. It would be no different from fire, or water running downhill, or levers and pulleys, or the wind turning a windmill.

This holds true only so long as the 'magic' in question is amenable to empirical study, which is not necessarily the case. For instance, if the 'magic' in question is not in fact a natural phenomenon but is instead based upon making appeals to some other power source, it may very well be arbitrary and inconstant in a way that makes a hash of logical attempts to understand it. A very obvious example of this would be magic as presented in El Goonish Shive, in which the essence of magic is a semi-sapient entity that actively monitors attempts to understand it and periodically fundamentally changes the principles by which it operates in order to prevent mass utilization. A less blatant example would be something like the Force in Star Wars, which is on some level emotionally recursive such that trying to compel the mind to understand it works to raise barriers to further understanding. The myth-and-fable type magic used in the fantastical historical fiction of Guy Gavriel Kay or the legend-and-rumor urban fantasty of Charles de Lint also works in something like this fashion, as do some of the stories of HP Lovecraft, particularly the Dream Cycle. In the fascinating Lovecraft-inspired novella The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe by Kij Johnson the point is made the in the Dreamlands themselves there are no stable constants, and when one character enters actual reality she's so fascinated by the idea the Pi is always the same number she gets it tattooed onto her arm, which might be the most explicit reference I've even seen to this sort of magical variability at the fundamental level.

Now, it cannot be stressed enough that while this sort of ever-shifting-mystic-permutation approach to magical theory can be used to tell some very interesting stories it's a terrible approach to constructing a mechanism for a game because it turns every magical effect encountered or produced by the everyone in the setting into a game of Mother-May-I. White-Wolf's Mage the Ascension, which tried to build a game with this kind of magic, has exactly this problem and every roll to produce an effect has close to a dozen different points where the game can degenerate into a player vs GM argument.

Clistenes
2019-04-12, 01:58 AM
well one would think if those narrative laws exist, one would naturally conclude that those in the designated roles would be the only who can do anything that matters and thus everyone is bound by fate to be side-characters and bit parts and thus be doomed in a manner thus having an element your choices not truly mattering, but then again my mind tends towards the cynical and pessimistic when analyzing things. I think I read a bit of it at one time, but didn't get far for some reason I might have to read it more. good fantasy is hard to come by after all.

That sorta reminds me to many characters in Japanese manga, who act as if they were playing a pre-determined role in a story ("people like me are just side characters/mobs").

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-04-12, 03:23 AM
Harry Potter is actually pretty methodical in approach, at least as far as the trappings of its magic are concerned. The series is after all, built around the British Boarding School experience, and therefore the magical system its offers up is one that happens to be suitable for organized, directed, and dedicated study. There are full-fledged textbooks in the Harry Potter universe that explain exactly how to do stuff like make potions step by step in almost exactly the same way you'd do a high school chem lab experiment. The higher-level magical architecture is a bit less clear, in large part because we never see any wizards engaged in frontline research, we just see everyday rote use of the existing magical technology of the Potterverse (which admitted has some flexibility), but it probably does involve a lot of wizards in laboratories conducting complex experiments, and those labs would look almost exactly the same 19th century (the Potterverse having a distinctly retro aesthetic) scientific laboratories.

Harry Potter magic is something you can learn and experiment with, yes, and there's references to arithmancers designing spells and such that imply some level of rigor in the background. But it still falls afoul of plenty of tropes like the fact that you're either born a wizard or completely unable to use magic, learning a magic word and wand movement lets you cast a spell even if you don't know any of the underlying theory (or even what the spell is supposed to do), older magic items and spells are generally more powerful than newer ones rather than the new stuff improving upon the old, and so forth.

That was largely my point with that example, that when people say "feel magical" they're often referring to fantasy tropes rather than historical magic, and even when they try to make things more historical and/or scientific at least a few of those tropes tend to slip through and undermine the whole thing.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-12, 03:27 AM
That sorta reminds me to many characters in Japanese manga, who act as if they were playing a pre-determined role in a story ("people like me are just side characters/mobs").

ah, thats easily understood once you know the culture behind that. Japan had a feudal, clan-based system, and a hierarchy to go with that, leading to a certain concept called Yamato-damashii or Japanese Spirit", where its believed you can move yourself up in rank in society by having certain virtues. its basically the Japanese version of the American Dream, and is probably just as unrealistic in real life. full explanation would take longer but we'll focus on this:

one of the virtues inherent in yamato-damashii, is Koyu, or "Innate" or "Talent" which is any gift, trait or whatever that makes someone a born winner, and if you don't have that, well, there are two virtues that are considered more virtuous that one believes allows you to be useful and great which are "Resolve" and "Persistence" which leads to the usual Determinator tropes, but, yeah, shonen stories are all about the protagonist embodying these virtues, and you can practically just think of random shonen main characters off the top of your head and they will check all three boxes.

the side character saying that is probably an outgrowth of that where they somehow know they don't got "Koyu" and thus think their use in life is to support someone else who has more of the virtues that make being Japanese simply because they're expected to support someone who becomes a leader and thus leads the "clan" or "nakama" to greatness, thus they support each other by one who leads and the other who follows. thus leading to the Krillins, the Genos, and Joey Wheelers of the world.

so, up to interpretation whether this is a good acceptance that some people are followers and not leaders or a stupid virtue that leaves unseen potential in certain people dormant because your making stupid assumptions about what people are capable of. yamato-damashii is an inherently romantic idea, so like all romantic ideas, it has its unspoken downsides that people who write those stories don't really focus on. Japan actually lost World War 2 because of Japanese Spirit, but thats a story for another time and perhaps another place.

this reminds me: what if there was some kind of "hero magic" that makes one better able to survive and pull off heroic action movie stunts? that would certainly explain a lot about many heroes pulling this stuff off. but then again thats probably just Solar Exaltation from Exalted to a certain degree. but yeah I guess people having narrative roles as a physical law and accepting it wouldn't be THAT far-fetched since there are cultures out there that place value on hierarchies and having specific roles in life.

Satinavian
2019-04-12, 04:12 AM
People have tried to find alternate self-consistent laws of physics (not just variations of parameters, but actual different laws) and have failed. Let's not expect a bunch of writers to do any better, especially in a game context. It won't go well. For that matter, I trust game writers to get science correct about as much as I trust teenagers to handle sensitive emotional matters maturely...if the teenagers were high on a cocktail of every psychoactive drug known to man. But then I'm a cynic.

They did not fail. They succeeded.

There are hundreds of now abandoned theories and concepts that did explain the available observations even in our world. It took a very long time and often technological progress in other fields to design experiments to disprove them.

In the same way it is very possible to have good, self-consistent systems that behave pretty much like our physics in all respects that are easy to observe and still have magic attached that does not work in reality. Sure, you will still have open questions. But you will have open questions anyway, even without magic.

Lord Raziere
2019-04-12, 04:53 AM
They did not fail. They succeeded.

There are hundreds of now abandoned theories and concepts that did explain the available observations even in our world. It took a very long time and often technological progress in other fields to design experiments to disprove them.

In the same way it is very possible to have good, self-consistent systems that behave pretty much like our physics in all respects that are easy to observe and still have magic attached that does not work in reality. Sure, you will still have open questions. But you will have open questions anyway, even without magic.

Indeed. look at luminiferous aether. people used to think that that instead of a vacuum, that light was carried through this infinite medium known as luminiferous aether. even though it became more and more complex to try and explain everything and looked more and more magical in its properties as time went on, but it was so entrenched in physical law that even scientists at the time aware of the problems couldn't come up with anything better until certain experiments couldn't detect the movement of the earth through the aether and thus while there was complex aether theories to explain, it eventually succumbed to occam's razor, that it didn't exist. nevertheless, it was a theory that lasted from the 17th-to-20th centuries.

like, to quote wikipedia:
"By this point the mechanical qualities of the aether had become more and more magical: it had to be a fluid in order to fill space, but one that was millions of times more rigid than steel in order to support the high frequencies of light waves. It also had to be massless and without viscosity, otherwise it would visibly affect the orbits of planets. Additionally it appeared it had to be completely transparent, non-dispersive, incompressible, and continuous at a very small scale."

Honestly? if we didn't have experiments to see if the results line up, then it wouldn't sound much crazier than quantum theory. phlogiston and caloric were early attempts at explaining heat as well. they're failed theories for the real world, but who says they can't find a home in a fantasy story?

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-12, 06:01 AM
They did not fail. They succeeded.

There are hundreds of now abandoned theories and concepts that did explain the available observations even in our world. It took a very long time and often technological progress in other fields to design experiments to disprove them.

In the same way it is very possible to have good, self-consistent systems that behave pretty much like our physics in all respects that are easy to observe and still have magic attached that does not work in reality. Sure, you will still have open questions. But you will have open questions anyway, even without magic.

Here's the thing. Explaining observations is not enough for self-consistency. The presence of all of the epicycles that had to be added is enough to show that those theories are not self-consistent, because the predictions made by the theory, when used as input for the theory, don't match themselves.

And this is fine for a fictional universe, because self-consistency isn't really possible in that environment anyway (without boring everyone to tears and taking forever to actually do anything). Not to mention that even those theories took hundreds of man-years of very smart people doing nothing else to develop (which is way more time than anyone wants to spend on one little, mostly irrelevant piece of a setting).

My whole point is that having a consistent theory is unnecessary. It's just fine to have multiple partial theories that are inconsistent, both in-universe and out of universe, as long as the player-available set of effects (the "spells") is fixed and known. That way players can know exactly what their options are and take meaningful action, even if they can't understand why they're that way or if it seems arbitrary and restrictive. "The spell doesn't say it sets things on fire? Then it doesn't set things on fire, even if that's strange to you. I could come up with a bunch of magibabble to explain it, but that's how it is." And to be clear, any attempt to make a complete game-compatible theory of magic will either be magibabble or so restrictive as to be useless. Because it's a task that's well beyond any of us.

Cluedrew
2019-04-12, 08:26 AM
If anything, designing a magical theory on the premise that "game magic should feel more magical" should end up with something that makes your magic-users look less like Harry Potter wizards more like grad students and lab techs . :smallamused:I mean I have many meanings of the word magic, but for many of them your right. In fact in my main role-playing setting there are roughly 4 types of magic users: engineers, chemists, diplomats and philosophers. The latter two come a cross like classic literary magic users. The first two really don't. And I am fine with that.


This holds true only so long as the 'magic' in question is amenable to empirical study, which is not necessarily the case. For instance, if the 'magic' in question is not in fact a natural phenomenon but is instead based upon making appeals to some other power source, it may very well be arbitrary and inconstant in a way that makes a hash of logical attempts to understand it.Doesn't that just means that the science that explains magic becomes more like sociology or phycology. It can still be studied and understood, even it its behaviour does not come out to a bunch of equations.


And to be clear, any attempt to make a complete game-compatible theory of magic will either be magibabble or so restrictive as to be useless. Because it's a task that's well beyond any of us.I know this, my friends cut me off when I started going into generic structure in my fantasy setting (had to do with miniature summoning circles and the language the gods used to create the universe). But I think there is a happy middle ground. Closer two some other the other stuff you said, a working understanding of how magic works that may not be correct but produces the correct answers for day-to-day interactions with magic. Here the important threshold is that if something not in the rules come up, you should be able to figure out what happens.

For other reasons, I think "nothing" is a bad answer but I will get to that later.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-12, 08:43 AM
This holds true only so long as the 'magic' in question is amenable to empirical study, which is not necessarily the case. For instance, if the 'magic' in question is not in fact a natural phenomenon but is instead based upon making appeals to some other power source, it may very well be arbitrary and inconstant in a way that makes a hash of logical attempts to understand it. A very obvious example of this would be magic as presented in El Goonish Shive, in which the essence of magic is a semi-sapient entity that actively monitors attempts to understand it and periodically fundamentally changes the principles by which it operates in order to prevent mass utilization. A less blatant example would be something like the Force in Star Wars, which is on some level emotionally recursive such that trying to compel the mind to understand it works to raise barriers to further understanding. The myth-and-fable type magic used in the fantastical historical fiction of Guy Gavriel Kay or the legend-and-rumor urban fantasty of Charles de Lint also works in something like this fashion, as do some of the stories of HP Lovecraft, particularly the Dream Cycle. In the fascinating Lovecraft-inspired novella The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe by Kij Johnson the point is made the in the Dreamlands themselves there are no stable constants, and when one character enters actual reality she's so fascinated by the idea the Pi is always the same number she gets it tattooed onto her arm, which might be the most explicit reference I've even seen to this sort of magical variability at the fundamental level.

Now, it cannot be stressed enough that while this sort of ever-shifting-mystic-permutation approach to magical theory can be used to tell some very interesting stories it's a terrible approach to constructing a mechanism for a game because it turns every magical effect encountered or produced by the everyone in the setting into a game of Mother-May-I. White-Wolf's Mage the Ascension, which tried to build a game with this kind of magic, has exactly this problem and every roll to produce an effect has close to a dozen different points where the game can degenerate into a player vs GM argument.

Reading through the first paragraph of your post, my response was going to be "that would make for a terrible RPG setting or system." :smallbiggrin: For starters, because of the very reason you note.

The rules shouldn't be written to require constant GM interpretation and permission -- if the PC wants to accomplish a task, or a spell, or an attack, the rules should give the player at least a ballpark idea of how likely success, failure, or whatever outcome is, once the parameters have been set. I have a friend who loves Amber diceless, and Mage the Ascension, those are the games he raves about not getting more chances to play... and I just do not get it, at all. For all the concern about players "weaponizing the rules" if those rules are written to be objective and comprehensive, I have far, FAR more concern about players "weaponizing the rules" when the rules are deliberately vague and open to subjective interpretation at every turn.

The kind of magic that's subjective, and non-empirical, and requires constant before-roll AND after-roll agreement and adjudication, is just BEGGING for that entire part of the game to degenerate into a bunch of dueling subjective opinions.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-12, 08:49 AM
My whole point is that having a consistent theory is unnecessary. It's just fine to have multiple partial theories that are inconsistent, both in-universe and out of universe, as long as the player-available set of effects (the "spells") is fixed and known. That way players can know exactly what their options are and take meaningful action, even if they can't understand why they're that way or if it seems arbitrary and restrictive. "The spell doesn't say it sets things on fire? Then it doesn't set things on fire, even if that's strange to you. I could come up with a bunch of magibabble to explain it, but that's how it is." And to be clear, any attempt to make a complete game-compatible theory of magic will either be magibabble or so restrictive as to be useless. Because it's a task that's well beyond any of us.


And my view is just the opposite. If a spell unleashes fire on the targeted area, then it risks igniting things, because it's fire. The spell doesn't need to say "this spell might set stuff on fire", the fact that it's fire already tells me that.

If there's a spell that summons a cubic meter of water, and you cast it in the middle of someone's house, then there's a cubic meter of water inside their house with all the consequences thereof. Things get wet, papers might get ruined, carpets or rugs are soaked, tile floors are slippery, etc. The spell text does not need to lay out all these things in detail, they're all the absolutely normal and predictable and natural outcome of that much water being let go inside a house.

These secondary effects are where GM and player agreement needs to come into play, rather than in the casting of the spell itself.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-12, 08:51 AM
Reading through the first paragraph of your post, my response was going to be "that would make for a terrible RPG setting or system." :smallbiggrin: For starters, because of the very reason you note.

The rules shouldn't be written to require constant GM interpretation and permission -- if the PC wants to accomplish a task, or a spell, or an attack, the rules should give the player at least a ballpark idea of how likely success, failure, or whatever outcome is, once the parameters have been set. I have a friend who loves Amber diceless, and Mage the Ascension, those are the games he raves about not getting more chances to play... and I just do not get it, at all. For all the concern about players "weaponizing the rules" if those rules are written to be objective and comprehensive, I have far, FAR more concern about players "weaponizing the rules" when the rules are deliberately vague and open to subjective interpretation at every turn.

The kind of magic that's subjective, and non-empirical, and requires constant before-roll AND after-roll agreement and adjudication, is just BEGGING for that entire part of the game to degenerate into a bunch of dueling subjective opinions.

For me, personally, it's enough for game purposes if the following are true:
* The possible effects is limited and discrete. So "make your own spell" systems only work if there are strict controls.
* The interactions between effects are either explicitly stated or do not exist. That is, the effects must state what they do, and do what they state. Nothing more, nothing less.
* The resolution method is clear enough.

Going beyond that, a non-binding theory might be useful, mainly for world-building purposes. I have a basic one for my setting, but it's total magibabble when seen objectively--it's an attempt to "rationalize" the decisions made by the system. It's also got a heavy "fiat" part--the god of magic has the explicit responsibility and absolute power to adjust the laws of magic to make sure certain bad things don't happen (at least in that same way) again.

NichG
2019-04-12, 01:00 PM
At this point I suppose it's worth stating that my preference would be that the GM makes a theory, holds that theory to be binding, and the game system emerges as a way to operationalize specific aspects of the theory where that kind of fine-grained resolution is needed, while getting out of the way when it isn't. But I tend to hold the minority view here that for a really good campaign, it's necessary to actually build a system from the ground up to support the campaign.

I think the sort of impossibility of self-consistency is getting thrown around in a 'perfect is the enemy of the good' fashion here. Modern physics isn't internally self-consistent (GR and QM don't play nice at small scales + high densities; string theory/M-theory/etc is a mess; etc). Even QM on its own has this extra shoe-horned in stuff about measurement that makes it overcomplete. But it doesn't make for a day to day problem for a practising physicist. There might be some places where you have to make arbitrary choices in order to get fine-grained predictions, but then you just make those choices, state them in the paper, and move on - much the same way that anyone doing Bayesian modeling is going to have to drop a few words about their choice of prior.

Same for a 'self-consistent theory of magic' - what you're going to need from it to run a game is a set of guidelines that help you resolve questions, rather than a set of equations you're going to solve to time-step the game world. To that extent, it's okay if they have some amount of apparent paradoxes and the like - after all, there hasn't been a point in time in human history when we weren't faced with paradoxes in our own attempts to explain things. Much of that can be absorbed into the fact that the characters (and players) have imperfect renditions of that underlying theory - something they think is a paradox can be explained a failure of their own understanding or incomplete information on their part.

The important things then are two-fold: first, if there are to be paradoxes, try to keep them off of the main path of how this thing is used by the players and the people in the setting. It's one thing to say 'well, in this rare set of circumstances that honestly are hard to come by, its unclear what would happen' and 'here's a wizard who casts spells every day, but its ambiguous what should happen when they cast their signature spell'. Second, when you do encounter a paradox, make a ruling and then adapt the underlying theory accordingly. That doesn't mean that 'if X happened this time, X must happen again', but rather that whatever made you decide that it was X instead of Y, given the same sort of choice in the future that latent factor should be the same. Do that, and you'll get an effective level of consistency that's fairly robust against normal usage.

It's a bit harder when running a campaign with an underlying theory where researching into that theory is central to the campaign's purposes. For that, you have to have good experience with what kinds of underlying ideas tend to resolve internal conflicts versus what kinds of underlying ideas create stresses in a theory that lead to paradoxes, and make sure to build magic systems that have enough give to them. But it's certainly possible to do in a way that makes sense, and lets players make use of their 'sense-making' abilities to predict outcomes or plan strategies around their understanding of the world.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-12, 01:41 PM
I think the sort of impossibility of self-consistency is getting thrown around in a 'perfect is the enemy of the good' fashion here. Modern physics isn't internally self-consistent (GR and QM don't play nice at small scales + high densities; string theory/M-theory/etc is a mess; etc). Even QM on its own has this extra shoe-horned in stuff about measurement that makes it overcomplete. But it doesn't make for a day to day problem for a practising physicist. There might be some places where you have to make arbitrary choices in order to get fine-grained predictions, but then you just make those choices, state them in the paper, and move on - much the same way that anyone doing Bayesian modeling is going to have to drop a few words about their choice of prior.

Same for a 'self-consistent theory of magic' - what you're going to need from it to run a game is a set of guidelines that help you resolve questions, rather than a set of equations you're going to solve to time-step the game world. To that extent, it's okay if they have some amount of apparent paradoxes and the like - after all, there hasn't been a point in time in human history when we weren't faced with paradoxes in our own attempts to explain things. Much of that can be absorbed into the fact that the characters (and players) have imperfect renditions of that underlying theory - something they think is a paradox can be explained a failure of their own understanding or incomplete information on their part.


"Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" is a perfect description of some of the objections seen in these threads.

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-04-12, 01:41 PM
I mean I have many meanings of the word magic, but for many of them your right. In fact in my main role-playing setting there are roughly 4 types of magic users: engineers, chemists, diplomats and philosophers. The latter two come a cross like classic literary magic users. The first two really don't. And I am fine with that.

I'm definitely not saying that historical-style magic is "better" than literary-style magic or anything like that; a magic system can work no matter where it falls on the literary-to-magitech scale, depending on the system and setting, and in fact mixing multiple magical approaches can be a lot of fun when characters get into theoretical debates and such in-game. I'm just saying that people often conflate "feels magical" with "follows very specific and modern literary tropes that have no resemblance to any real-world magical practices," so using that as a metric or arguing that self-consistent magic systems don't "feel magical" is generally misguided and unhelpful.


But I tend to hold the minority view here that for a really good campaign, it's necessary to actually build a system from the ground up to support the campaign.

I'd disagree that you need to build a brand new and totally custom system, since designing a perfect engine for the campaign you want to play will give you diminishing returns for time and thought invested and can impose unnecessary limitations if the campaign wants to change theme or scope or focus as it goes on. Not to mention the overhead of learning a new system for the players, having to create every last monster and obstacle from scratch, and so forth.

But picking a base system and houseruling the heck out of whatever subsystems it has to make things fit the campaign? Definitely. I've been running a Norse-themed D&D campaign for the past few years and have houseruled half the core books at this point, including races (replaced with social classes since everyone's human), classes (with available classes varying by social standing and clan of origin, and some like the barsarkr [barbarian] and fjolkunnig [shugenja] being totally rewritten), prestige classes (all hand-crafted for individual characters), healing (called shots and wounds are a thing, for that "you're not a real warrior until you've lost a hand or are covered in scars" look), spellcasting (runic and godly spellcasting replace arcane and divine spellcasting, with completely different casting mechanisms, spell lists, and so forth), magic items (all magic items are named and unique, and grow with their owners in defined ways), and much more.

Relevant to this thread in particular, heavily houseruling magic has been key for making the setting feel Norse-themed and not just "D&D with Viking helmets." The altered spell lists tie directly into the cosmology: removing teleportation, making healing higher level, making shapechanging magic much more common, and so forth encourage the style of campaign we decided we wanted and reinforce mythical themes; gođi (clerics) don't have a shared spell list and generic domains, they draw their spells entirely from flavorful god-specific spheres like Thor's Smiting Storm (weather spells and personal weapon buffs), Surtr's Furious Volcano (earth and fire effects), Heimdall's Horn Sounder (wards, bard-like group buffs, and sonic blasting), and the like; runic spellcasters need to seek out and learn the various runes to accomplish their spell effects, and have varying maximum spell levels to reflect their different understanding. While only one person in my group had actually read much about Norse mythology, the Eddas, and so forth before the campaign, at this point everyone has a pretty intuitive understanding about how Norse cosmology and historical magical practices worked because of how I shaped the magical rules for the campaign.

jjordan
2019-04-12, 01:46 PM
I still like the chaos magic definition of magic: belief defines the system. I particularly like this because it allows for multiple explanations that may be contradictory and still work. Each system defines and limits itself. I like the variety this allows me to have. I've got self-taught sorcerers. I've got school taught wizards. I've got indoctrinated clerics. Found a spell book? Cool. But the wizard who wrote it had a different understanding of how magic worked. You'll have to figure out his interpretation of magic and then transfer that knowledge to your system in order to figure out how to add his spells to your inventory of knowledge. Which means I can have entire schools of wizards studying the works of long dead mages, the fossilized remains of ancient magical systems.

I find this very flexible. Players that want to roleplay some of the deeper aspects of magic can do so. Folks that just want to load up their next spell and get on with the combat can do that too. It allows for deeper play but doesn't demand it.

Beleriphon
2019-04-12, 03:10 PM
My experience with cats is that many of them really do have a 4th need, that you could call "companionship" or "affection" or "my person" -- a lot of cats want some form of actual contact and interaction for its own sake, though it's really individual, from the cat who needs other cats, to the cat who hates other cats but adores people (or one particular person).

Not to derail the thread with cat chat, but cats can get the three core instinctual needs without human interaction, or interaction of other cats. That said, cats despite a reputation for aloofness are social animals. There's a reason why feral cat colonies happen.


That's an interesting way of breaking it down, and I think for any magic included in a setting, it's important for the person who is presenting that setting, for a campaign or for a work of fiction, to understand what the magic can and cannot do, even if that's never spelled out to the players or the "audience".

Its the simplest way to explain D&D magic, at least as are as I want it explained. It also lets me come up with weird old sages that study just one thing and have them be competent and powerful, but not in the way the PCs are competent and powerful. For example it lets me have NPC researchers looking into magical fungal growth without the players from having access to the same abilities, at least without dedicating the next 50+ years of the in game reality to becoming glowing fungal experts after reading all of the relevant treatises on glowing fungi and attending all of the glowing fungi lectures at Caedwala (in setting magical university akin to Oxford circa 1400)

NichG
2019-04-12, 03:21 PM
I'd disagree that you need to build a brand new and totally custom system, since designing a perfect engine for the campaign you want to play will give you diminishing returns for time and thought invested and can impose unnecessary limitations if the campaign wants to change theme or scope or focus as it goes on. Not to mention the overhead of learning a new system for the players, having to create every last monster and obstacle from scratch, and so forth.

I find that it's about 3 months of time in preparation for a 1.5 year campaign, and I'm not sure that time is really 'extra' per se since the setting and rules end up being very integrated such that setting design ends up partially happening in parallel. The aspects of players learning a new system I also find to be a plus since it naturally matches the process of character growth, and it keeps things fresh in terms of exploring the mechanics. Preconceptions can still be a problem (for example, carrying over D&D-style behaviors into a gritty system) but that's a universal I think regardless of whether you're making your own system or just changing between existing ones with a different feel.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-04-12, 03:35 PM
I find that it's about 3 months of time in preparation for a 1.5 year campaign, and I'm not sure that time is really 'extra' per se since the setting and rules end up being very integrated such that setting design ends up partially happening in parallel. The aspects of players learning a new system I also find to be a plus since it naturally matches the process of character growth, and it keeps things fresh in terms of exploring the mechanics. Preconceptions can still be a problem (for example, carrying over D&D-style behaviors into a gritty system) but that's a universal I think regardless of whether you're making your own system or just changing between existing ones with a different feel.

For me, I run 2-3 campaigns simultaneously in the same persistent world, with each campaign lasting ~20 sessions (due to school year restrictions). This for teenagers who aren't immersed in TTRPGs all the time (and barely learn more than their core mechanics by the end of a campaign). Making a new setting is exactly what I don't want to do, and making a new system is even less interesting. I'd rather spend my time actually world-building and playing, not playing amateur game designer.

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-04-12, 04:05 PM
I find that it's about 3 months of time in preparation for a 1.5 year campaign, and I'm not sure that time is really 'extra' per se since the setting and rules end up being very integrated such that setting design ends up partially happening in parallel.

How rules-heavy are the systems you generally make? I've written up a full Fate hack of Mass Effect over a three-day weekend, but my Norse campaign houseruling took at least 4 months because it involved traveling to new continents (and, eventually, the other eight of the Nine Worlds), establish settlements, training NPCs, raiding multiple different civilizations, fighting against kingdoms of Alfar and Jotuns and Trolls, waging religious wars with invading Christians, and more. That sort of thing is easy enough to do in 3e because it already has rules for seafaring, stronghold-building, gaining followers, leveling, many different combat styles, and so forth, and while I didn't use any existing monsters the framework for creating monsters and bunches of common monster abilities I could use were already in place, but trying to write all of that from scratch would be a tremendous effort.

If you're mostly leaning rules-light then writing up new systems definitely makes sense, but in that case it still seems like a Fate hack or other tweaking-and-adding-to-a-flexible-base-system setup would be easier and more balance-able than starting from scratch.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-12, 04:59 PM
Both settings I'm working on have very specific takes on magic that don't line up with D&D's default assumptions. Both are predicated in part of the setting-fact that the vast majority of humans, even those who can work magic, don't have direct access to the sources of energy that make magic possible.


The RPG-centric setting:
* Animism and ancestor worship -- a spirit is entreated to aid in a task, empower a potion or concoction, strengthen a piece of metalwork, heal a wound, shield in battle, etc; this is by far the most common form of magic in the present day. The effects are usually more about augmentation than overt action.
* Entreating the gods, both minor and major deities -- the line is blurred between minor gods, vs powerful location spirits, famous heroes, revered city and family founders, etc; but the more powerful the entity the higher the risk and reward of daring to entreat them directly for actual magical effects. Priests get something of a pass if it's in the line of fulfilling their duties.
* the Wilder (kinda sorta wood elves / wild elves kinda) have a very close relationship with tree spirits, and get some added benefits on certain magic
* "White Magic" -- an ancient and now-forbidden art that can be summarized as the opposite of lucid dreaming, changing reality as if it were a waking dream; required a strong mind and intense study and training, to avoid losing one's self in that dream.
* "Black Magic" -- also ancient and forbidden, based on pacts and bindings and bargains with primordial reality-warping, reality-corroding "unclean" spirits of ash and shadow, using the old seals and sigils and signs. Mistakes can be fatal, or worse.

The fiction-centric setting:
* The energy of life is the energy of magic is the energy of "conceptual, metaphoric light", originating with the old "solar" creator deities who were unmade long ago at the end of the last Age, at the fall of the Bright Empire.
* Most people cannot directly access the vast wellspring of this energy, they only have access to what's in their own self, meaning that anything beyond the most subtle of workings quickly turns into "casting from hit points" (or in HERO parlance, running out of END, casting from STUN, then casting from BODY).
* Group workings can pool the energy, taking a little from each participant -- mass ceremonies and rituals can add up to impressive amounts.
* Sacrifice can tap the entirety of the victim's energy, at the cost of their mortal life and weakening of their spark/soul right at the moment it's trying to move on, resulting in trapped, lost, or enslaved souls, hauntings, etc. Bad stuff.
* Spirits can tap directly into the vast wellspring of this energy to some degree, and there are ways to bind, bargain, or make pacts with spirits to channel the energy for the caster... how a caster does this will reveal both the sort of magic they'll work and their own true personality. A cruel and domineering magus will have spirits bound in servitude, for example, thoughtlessly pulling more energy than the spirit can channel and leaving it weak and hurt.
* Some Peoples (a "People" can roughly be understood as a human subspecies that carries both bloodline and spiritual ties) have ancient affinities that make specific magics easier. The Moon People have those who are born able to walk the "byways between", guiding their troupes and caravans and warbands along the ghosts of ancient roads to cut days off travel time, visit hidden meeting places and shrines, etc. The Storm People are close to the spirits of the wind and sea, and the most gifted navigate the vast oceans almost by instinct and feel. And so on for other Peoples. Because these bloodlines can be intermingled with those of the Earth People (ie, "plain old humans"), those sorts of talents will rarely and randomly "pop up" for someone who didn't even know who their great-great-etc ancestor was.
* The now-gone Sun People were dearest to the two original solar deities, had direct access to the wellspring of "light", could work great wonders, and were the rulers of the old Bright Empire. It is said that they died to the last when the solar deities desperate attempt to avoid destruction drained the wellspring and in turn the Sun People who were directly connected to it, leaving them all lifeless husks.
* A few, few present-day people can, through some combination of "recessive genes" (or rather the spiritual equivalent thereof), uncovering lost secrets, and intensive study and training and meditation, gain some measure of direct access to the wellspring of "light", enabling anything from superior physical abilities to "mentalism" to "astral" projection to whatever.

* the Twilight People... have no bright spark, but rather a dark mote of the primeval infinite timeless void that came before the light, before anything. Their "magic" is all alchemy and artifice and shadow. Their rely on seemingly wondrous materials and devices... strange potions... automatons and even self-aware constructs inhabited by shadow spirits. Depending on the strength of that dark mote, their minds and souls can be dangerous to touch, and a few are powerful enough create ersatz copies of the magic of the other Peoples.

* Some monsters... things of the night... haunting shadows... mockeries of life... or lurking creatures so of-the-darkness that sunlight drives the shadow out and leaves only a husk of stone or pile of dust... even the dragons of old myth... are said to be descended from the void itself.


So in both cases, magic is more rare, more subtle, and generally less powerful than either what is explicitly stated in the setting descriptions for D&D's published settings, or implied by the magic system of any version of the rules yet printed.

Lemmy
2019-04-12, 06:26 PM
Does making magic more defined and explicit make it easier to do? The more magic can be explained, it feels like it'd lead to everyone being some flavor of wizard/sorcerer and makes it more mundane, at least to me. If "You can do a fireball by thinking about these things, making these gestures while holding these items" seems kinda... boring? Unless you now lock usage of these things behind having some sort of arcane spark or whatever that can interact with these rules, but that mixed with the highly defined nature of magic feels off.That's only true if you assume that's all that is needed to use magic.

I'm a mechanical engineer. I can pretty easily calculate the forces necessary to move an spherical object to an intended point in space and where/ how to apply them. And yet... I'm terrible at soccer... Because unless you want me to build a ball-kicking robot, all that knowledge is useless. Without the strength, dexterity and kinetic memory of an actual athlete, I won't fare any better than I would have if I dropped from highschool.

Similarly, it's conceivable that magic actually requires some sort of metaphysical "muscles" or skill (the character's "caster level" in D&D). Wigling your fingers and mumbling nonsense is only part of the process.

DuctTapeKatar
2019-04-12, 06:31 PM
I actually am starting to design a campaign based around what people would do if magic was starting to drain from the world. I am trying to go for a Dark-Souls or Bloodborne feel for it.

The general gist of it is that magic in the land is starting to fade and flicker -- wizards' spells are weakening, magical creatures like dragons and fairies are starting to go into catatonic states, and to top it all off, the world is experiencing earthquakes that can swallow kingdoms (plot twist: the flat disk that is the world is turning into a globe).

The reason for the disappearance of magic is because the old gods have started to take it away -- there is a stopper in the Land Which Magic Began that magic is flowing into (I am actually thinking of making it a sphere of annihilation now). They had basically used magic to make the world, but left it behind after its construction. It was never meant to be left in mortal hands. However, because of a deal that the gods made with ancient heroes, they decided to wait until the time that magic could actually inadvertently destroy the world, I.E., right as a major kingdom is starting to enter a civil war that will affect everybody.


I haven't read everything in this thread, but I will be eagerly going through and taking notes. I need more of this stuff to fill out this world.

Cluedrew
2019-04-12, 06:49 PM
But I tend to hold the minority view here that for a really good campaign, it's necessary to actually build a system from the ground up to support the campaign.I wouldn't go as far to do it per campaign, but per setting is perfectly reasonable to me. And in futuristic settings the same applies to made up technology. I have played comedic settings, horror settings and neutral but serious settings in D&D and they all felt the same. Outside of the set-pieces it didn't really matter. Maybe it could of, but you really have two tools to get things across: description and mechanics. Leaving one of these untouched mutes a lot of your efforts. The rest I could say I think has already been said. Other than for games with really big shifts in tone or focus you might want to swap out your base mechanics as well.


I'm definitely not saying that historical-style magic is "better" than literary-style magic or anything like that; [...] so using that as a metric or arguing that self-consistent magic systems don't "feel magical" is generally misguided and unhelpful.I like both and included both in the same setting because of that. Other times I have picked just one to get a certain feel. Different solutions to different problems, some might even break the rules I am arguing for (mostly in stories where they are just viewed instead of interacted with). In fact in some "feel magical" is not even a useful judge, because the magic serves some other purpose. Like how in serves to expand the tactical space in a different way then a lot of realistic options do in strategy games.

On Game Magic: I went down this long chain here. Agreeing that self-consistency is not as important as it might seem and going for a working understanding, then trying to pin down what that meant and going with extrapolating and trying to figure out why even when I could figure out the no-op special cases that didn't feel the same. Mostly I realized it came down to it feels like a video game. Like the old JRPGs where you had combat spells that could only be used once the screen flashed. So you couldn't use quake to open a door, call in a tsunami to fill in a dry pond (I mean that destroy the pond but still) or set flame to something with a fire spell. You can summon meteor strikes underground, that tsunami in the desert and I have no clue where that dinosaur came from.

Because magic there does what it was intended to do and doesn't otherwise interact with the world around it. In real life things interact naturally, to the point isolating things is often the issue. And that is one essential intuition I have about the world that I have a real problem trying to get rid of and ... that might be it, just a feeling at the base of all this. Actually there is one other bit, non-interaction as the default makes martial/caster interactions slanted towards the caster, "our abilities interact when mine say they do" is not a great place to start balance. You can do it, if both sides get interactions or the caster's abilities include built in exceptions (or just the martial interacts with the base system so much better) but that doesn't seem to happen so often.

Mechalich
2019-04-12, 06:51 PM
Similarly, it's conceivable that magic actually requires some sort of metaphysical "muscles" or skill (the character's "caster level" in D&D). Wigling your fingers and mumbling nonsense is only part of the process.

It's quite common, in folklore, for the use of magic to require some level of altered consciousness, such as the trance states used by shamanic practitioners, the meditations of various South Asian schools of mysticism, the chanted sutras of esoteric Buddhism, and others. These are all things that require continual, rigorous practice and training to both learn and maintain and may have side effects such as drug addiction, isolation from society, or madness.

Many magical systems also demand some form of 'purity' that requires constant maintenance and imposes huge restrictions on magical capability due to limitations on the moral quality of the practitioners and the ethical maintenance necessary to access their craft. The most famous system of this kind in popular culture is the Force in Star Wars, but there are many other examples to be found, such as Christian, Daoist, Shinto, or Zoroastrian mysticism.

Systems of either type are difficult to implement in game because they require the GM to adjudicate either the mental state of a PC or the moral state of a PC in a direct way. The various iterations of Star Wars RPGs provide a good example of how fraught this can be in their continual struggle to try and measure and monitor the dark side without having it generate shouting matches or allow PCs to get away with literal murder.

NichG
2019-04-12, 10:47 PM
How rules-heavy are the systems you generally make? I've written up a full Fate hack of Mass Effect over a three-day weekend, but my Norse campaign houseruling took at least 4 months because it involved traveling to new continents (and, eventually, the other eight of the Nine Worlds), establish settlements, training NPCs, raiding multiple different civilizations, fighting against kingdoms of Alfar and Jotuns and Trolls, waging religious wars with invading Christians, and more. That sort of thing is easy enough to do in 3e because it already has rules for seafaring, stronghold-building, gaining followers, leveling, many different combat styles, and so forth, and while I didn't use any existing monsters the framework for creating monsters and bunches of common monster abilities I could use were already in place, but trying to write all of that from scratch would be a tremendous effort.

If you're mostly leaning rules-light then writing up new systems definitely makes sense, but in that case it still seems like a Fate hack or other tweaking-and-adding-to-a-flexible-base-system setup would be easier and more balance-able than starting from scratch.

Closer to D&D than to Fate, I'd say they're pretty rules heavy but of course they don't have decades of splatbook support by the time I run them. Here's the list of ones that are in any shape to share.


Completely from scratch:

- Limit Break (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pDnZ5NnSUeRwQEOuEjxMFGmT4isb9iGI) - Currently running superhero campaign, probably the most rules-light thing I've made. Gimmick: the only limits are in your mind. Characters have an advancement track, but can basically ignore it and do crazy stuff if the player can justify it to their mental image of the character. Very experimental, but shockingly has not blown up yet despite a starter character being fully capable of snapping their fingers and destroying the moon in a single action.

- Dynasty (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rQVwwi6-rCKGIOA5aV3GlEWTWVQTBrye) - Civilization-builder game where you play multi-generational guardian spirits and their chosen ones.

- Memoir (https://drive.google.com/open?id=19wGJjcq2QjqFUmJVGf-kmyX74Z0lJF_k) - Everyone has amnesia, but by eating the fragmented souls of shattered gods you get to consciously decide your backstory on the fly and force the present to conform to what you decided. This writeup only has the starter information, but there's a hidden powers system as well that gets unlocked through play as the PCs gain access to god souls. The three branches correspond roughly to the ideas of 'the world is a lie' (Weft), 'my form is a lie' (Shape), 'my soul is a lie' (Numina). Each uses the fact that the setting is causally backwards to let the user exert that their will makes more sense than reality as presented. Weft lets you reshape terrain, summon objects out of nothing, create auras, etc. Shape lets you do things from ignoring physical effects ('even though your blade passed through me, I decide that my body is not one which was cut') to freeform shapeshifting. Numina is the crazy cosmological soul alchemy stuff where you can extract attributes from souls and imbue them into items, inter-convert forms of XP, enact rituals which break stat and skill limits, etc.

- Elseportrait (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dA4eGNGIMIbprcPXUb4NOWUG3THNuaP5) - Based very distantly on roll&keep mechanics from 7th sea and L5R, this is a system for a setting where the creator of the world made it so that the world responds pliably to any creative endeavor (painting, composing music, dance, acting, writing). So all forms of human expression end up forming the basis of magic systems - sculpture creates golems, architecture creates magical buildings, writers can force people into their plots, etc. Shares its cosmology with a campaign by another GM, which was very heavily homebrewed D&D.

COGS - Everyone has to try their hand at a retroclone at least once. This was mine. Main conceit is to try to make different character roles as orthogonal as possible while still retaining a functional game. I'd say this one wasn't very successful honestly. I think this may have been lost to bit rot and time, since I can't find it in my archives.

(Memoir and Dynasty use the same basic dice and resolution systems, but are very different in what they specify mechanics for. Their main gimmick in resolution is that it's almost impossible to force someone to take a hit if they choose to spend resources to avoid it and retain the resources to do so, but 'basic' hits are decisive if they can be landed and having 'weaker' attacks that merely debuff or disadvantage the enemy can be good since they are more likely to let the effect land.)

Adaptations based on other systems:

- Gilded Flasks (https://drive.google.com/open?id=14MNDja0nwjdddmYqMuRMK0f37fNkmkmb) - A D&D rewrite (totally new spell list, every feat and class has new mechanics, totally new equipment/magic item system, new status conditions, new character stats). The target was the feeling of the various 'alchemist' JRPGs like Atelier Iris, Mana Khemia, But it's D&D compatible meaning that you could easily import most character options from splatbooks as long as they're not dependent on specific spell lists. My player group pitched in for this, it's probably the largest system we've worked with in terms of total rules content.

- 7thscape (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_Vv9lBxCkBf6Fo8zSzM-KUQIw3zOsRPL) - A system based on the Planescape setting but 7th sea/L5R style roll&keep mechanics. But pretty much everything is new.

Things more along the lines of 'extensive added homebrew':

- A Few Dead Men - D&D core up to Lv6 but then you die, become a spirit and use a totally separate advancement system that involves turning your soul into a 10 room mansion where each room has a different function, and rooms are specified in a totally free-form word association fashion. That is to say, players aren't given a list of rooms, but if they say 'I build a theatre in my Keter sephiroth' then I have to figure out what a theatre would do on the fly and tell them how it upgrades as they invest Mojo into it (for example, a theatre lets you re-enact scenes from the game so far and ask 'what would have happened if I had done X instead?'). I don't have a consolidated writeup for this one because so much of it was written in response to specific things the players asked to try.

Max_Killjoy
2019-04-12, 11:09 PM
I'm officially impressed, if nothing else by the volume of efforts and the follow-through on intentions to actually do those things.

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-04-12, 11:43 PM
Closer to D&D than to Fate, I'd say they're pretty rules heavy but of course they don't have decades of splatbook support by the time I run them. Here's the list of ones that are in any shape to share.

Most of them look fairly rules-light, actually, maybe shading towards a WoD-esque rules-medium, but of course the dividing lines are kinda fuzzy and opinion-based.

I was pretty skeptical about the idea of creating a totally new RPG ex nihilo every time, but skimming through your systems overall, what you meant by "a new system for every campaign" is making more sense. I'm seeing a lot of common influences (Fate in the way combat works, resources are shared, and skills are set up, GURPS in the advancement systems [or maybe that's all 7th Sea, I haven't played that one], D&D in attributes and character archetypes, and so forth), and a lot of similarities between systems, so it's more building up a library of common idioms and remixing them for each campaign than starting fresh.

Which isn't a criticism at all, in fact it's quite close to what I do for my campaigns (though I prefer wikis to PDFs). My current campaign borrows a lot of its subsystems from previous campaign homebrew: its social standing subsystem, skill rewrite, and inter-faction negotiation mechanics come from an intrigue campaign back in high school; its hexcrawl generation mechanics, exploration procedures, and resource management subsystems come from a Birthright-meets-Game-of-Thrones campaign a few years back; the casting rules, modular weapon and armor system, downtime training, proficiencies, and magic item setup come from my standalone D&D revision I've used for a few games. So I definitely see where you're coming from now, and while I wouldn't say that amount of customization is necessary to make a good campaign I agree that campaigns with lots of addons and TLC from the GM are generally more engaging than those run purely by-the-book.

Bohandas
2019-04-13, 12:12 AM
But why? We must study this phenomenon.

To Lord Raziere: Ever read A Practical Guide to Evil? It takes place in a universe where people realized that narrative rules were more important to the universe than many physical ones. So they started giving names to things like The Rule of Three and understand that heroes are usually orphans (particularly if the orphanage is bad) and villains and heroes end up in groups of five. I'm not quite sure I would want to use that sort of logic for a game but it is consistent, understandable and does not induce madness.

I might come back with more later, I'm in a bit of a hurry right now.

This was also the case in Discworld. It plays a major role in the plot of Witches Abroad.

NichG
2019-04-13, 01:29 AM
Most of them look fairly rules-light, actually, maybe shading towards a WoD-esque rules-medium, but of course the dividing lines are kinda fuzzy and opinion-based.

I was pretty skeptical about the idea of creating a totally new RPG ex nihilo every time, but skimming through your systems overall, what you meant by "a new system for every campaign" is making more sense. I'm seeing a lot of common influences (Fate in the way combat works, resources are shared, and skills are set up, GURPS in the advancement systems [or maybe that's all 7th Sea, I haven't played that one], D&D in attributes and character archetypes, and so forth), and a lot of similarities between systems, so it's more building up a library of common idioms and remixing them for each campaign than starting fresh.

Which isn't a criticism at all, in fact it's quite close to what I do for my campaigns (though I prefer wikis to PDFs). My current campaign borrows a lot of its subsystems from previous campaign homebrew: its social standing subsystem, skill rewrite, and inter-faction negotiation mechanics come from an intrigue campaign back in high school; its hexcrawl generation mechanics, exploration procedures, and resource management subsystems come from a Birthright-meets-Game-of-Thrones campaign a few years back; the casting rules, modular weapon and armor system, downtime training, proficiencies, and magic item setup come from my standalone D&D revision I've used for a few games. So I definitely see where you're coming from now, and while I wouldn't say that amount of customization is necessary to make a good campaign I agree that campaigns with lots of addons and TLC from the GM are generally more engaging than those run purely by-the-book.

WoD-level of crunch seems to be an accurate description on average. I think maybe the thing that makes these systems seem light is that rather than starting from a set of situations and setting up rules as to how each situation would be resolved mechanically, I try to put most of the focus of the written system on establishing what could be thought of as things the PCs can intentionally bring mechanics to bear on. So I tend not to do much in the way of things like random generation tables for the contents of a hex of terrain in these systems, since that's not really an 'action' on the part of the players.

The other thing I tend to spend text on is establishing 'mechanical hooks', which are specific variables which have the ability to matter in determining what is possible/impossible and are exposed in such a way that it's easy for things to come along later and modify their interactions. The idea of movement working a certain way creates design space for spells, effects, skills, items, attacks, etc to modify how movement works and therefore create things that have indirect impacts. Or more concretely, the Leverage mechanic in Memoir (pool of points that anyone can pull from to add to rolls) for example creates design space for things which generate, destroy, gamble, and exchange Leverage as well as things which allow Leverage to be spent or referenced in ways other than adding to a roll - you could make an effect that doubles the value of leverage spent on its particular use, or an effect that forbids leverage from being spent against it when it applies, or an effect that lets you do something special when there's more than a certain amount of leverage in the pool. Those hooks aren't necessarily player affordances, but they're the building blocks for making the system have things like mechanical depth (combos), tactical and strategic depth, etc.

Cluedrew
2019-04-15, 08:15 PM
OK I think I have one missing piece of what I consider to be a good magic theory. We were even talking about it and no one called it out:

The magic should be designed with the setting.

Not only should the spells be designed for the setting, but the setting should reflect the fact that there are people who use that magic in it. This may be a small difference if spells are weak or rare, but it should still be there. If it is common, people should probably be using it in day-to-day life. If it is used in war, people should have counters for it. And if it is cut off from the world and super-rare. Maybe it shouldn't be super convenient and easy to use.

Of all the greatest magic systems I have seen (including advanced science) the best ones have always been paired with the world they were in. The ones that were quick add-ons may have gotten the job done, but no more than that.

To Bohandas: I stalled on Moving Pictures, so I haven't read that one yet.