Do you know an Open magic system?

[Blu]

So do you guys know of a system that has a more open kind of magic?

For example i would give the game Magicka, where you can combine elements to create a spell and there are really a ton of possibilitys.

I was really wanting to know if there was a rpg system focused on magic or with magic that worked more openly like that, combining effects/elements/other things into spells. If you guys know of some good homebrew, it can also work.

[ATHATH]

Nevermind.

[Arbane]

Check out Ars Magica. It's a game all about playing magicians in medieval Europe, and has a well-regarded magic system based on combining dog-Latin nouns and verbs. (For example, "Creo Ignam" = "Create Fire".

[Beneath]

Donjon uses a spell system where you have a short list of words and can cast spells by sticking those words together to create a spell name, decide what the spell does, and it works as long as the effect is justified by the name.

[Bogwoppit]

Monte Cooke's d20 version of World of Darkness has a comprehensive "build your own spells" system. It's very good, but needs some controls to keep the available power in check.

Also, Pathfinder's Words of Power goes some way to making a universal magic system, but I found it to be really imbalanced - the power levels of words were vastly different to each other.
I've made a tweaked version of PF's Words system that worked better for our group. If you're interested, I could put it up on Homebrew...

[BWR]

Seconding Ars Magica.
Also White Wolf's "Mage: The Ascenscion" (and presumable "Mage: the Awakening", though I haven't read that one, and this one is still in print, IIRC)

[Deffers]

If it doesn't necessarily have to be "magic," Genius: The Transgression gets you there with Mad Science Wonders that pretty explicitly aren't real science. Make all *sorts* of devices that bend the fabric of reason.

[Knaight]

More open than a list of discrete spells is pretty easy. From most to least codified:
D&D
Ars Magica
Dresden Files
Fudge: Noun-Verb Magic
Barbarians of Lemuria


Obviously these are just five examples, there's plenty more. The big question is how much the group is willing to have GM rulings impact the system, as more abstract systems tend to take more.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Mage the Awakening is indeed open magic.

It specifically works like this. There are 10 different "schools" of magic, called the Arcana, each with their own purview of what they can affect. They come in matched pairs, as your character defaults to being better at two of them. These are Time/Fate, Space/Mind, Matter/Death, Forces/Prime, and Life/Spirit. A few of those are a little tricky, Space for example covers teleportation and scrying, Matter is transmutation, Death is necromancy, Time is wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey, Fate is curses and blessings, Forces is fire and lightning, Prime is truth and symbology, Life is vital forces, and Spirit is communing with the spirits.

Each Arcana has five levels, which offer greater mastery over it.
As an Inititiate, you can do Compelling, Knowing, and Unveiling spells. Compelling is a little nudge. A Fate Compelling spell can change a coin toss, or a Mind Compelling spell can make a bored worker take their coffee break now rather than later. A Knowing spell is divination. A Death Knowing spell can tell you a cause of death, or a Space Knowing spell can tell you which way is North. Unveiling spells allow you to see things you couldn't normally. A Forces Unveiling spell could allow you to see radio waves, or a Spirit Unveiling spell could allow you to see through invisibility.

Apprentice is the next level, with Ruling, Shielding, and Veiling spells. Ruling gives unnatural level of control over the affects. Matter Ruling can make water flow uphill. Mind Ruling can make someone your puppet. Time Ruling can slow or speed up time. Shielding spells protect against something in the Arcana's purview. Death Shielding could protect you against ghosts, Forces against fire, Life against disease, or Matter against poison. Unveiling spells conceal. Matter Concealing can hide a building from view, Mind concealing can make people not notice you.

Disciple is the third level. It has Fraying, Perfecting, and Weaving. Fraying is weakening something. Forces Fraying could damp a fire, Life Fraying could sap someone's strength. It can also do direct damage, through psychic overload (Mind) or a blast of lightning (Forces) or similar, though with cleverness you can do damage much earlier. Perfecting is the opposite, it strengthens, healing (Life) or repairing (matter), or even making a modest destiny into an earth-shaking destiny (Fate). Weaving allows you to alter somethings properties. Solid steel to liquid (Matter), rewriting short sections of time (Time), enchanting swords to hurt ghosts (Death).

Adept is the fourth level, giving Patterning and Unraveling spells. Patterning turns something outright into something new. A memory can be completely replaced (Mind), you can turn into an animal (Life), or teleport (Space), or turn into a living pillar of fire (combined Life and Forces). Unravelling is like Fraying on a larger scale. A storm become a calm day (Forces), iron reduced to dust (Matter), spells undone (Prime). It also similarly is used for damage spells, like a heart attack (Life).

Master is the last level, with Making or Unmaking spells. These are literally full control over creation and destruction, conjuring entire new days to live in (Time), or birthing an animal out of nothingness (Matter) and then creating it an intelligent mind (Mind) are Making spells. Simply stopping someone from living is a Life Unmaking spell. Forcing two locations to exist overlapping each other is a Space Unmaking spell.

So you imagine the effect you want, and figure out what Arcana (or multiple Arcana) and what tier of spell the effect is. You can of course get clever and get the same result of a higher level spell with a lower level spell. Then, you modify the specifics of the spell, spending "reach" to make it have a longer range, longer duration, area of effect, effect more than one person, take less than a half hour to cast, stuff like that. If you exceed the "reach" you are allowed, you risk letting in the "wrongness" of magic, the fact that it does not belong, that it isn't "real". This can simply cause damage to you, or it could accidentally summon gibbering horrors that should not exist, depending.

it's definitely a high-powered system, and is not intended for use alongside non-mages in a party. A non-mage could never really compete without magic of their own.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

The trouble I have with Mage: The Awakening is that the book is stupidly hard to read - the section headings are written in fine, caligraphic script, in pale gold on white pages. So finding any partuicular entry is really hard.

Is there a version out there that gets rid of this feature? It really is a barrier to using the book for me.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

I believe that's a 1st edition book. 2nd edition does not have that problem, in addition to being a lot less restrictive in spell casting. The reach rules I wrote above are from 2nd edition for example.

[khadgar567]

Spheres of poooower can both reing the opness of wizard in 3.5 edition and allow you to pull gilgamesh out of kobold baby

[Mutazoia]

You might want to give Green Ronin's True Sorcery a look-see. This was lifted from their Black Company setting for D20, and expanded quite a bit.

[Blu]

Mage the Awakening is indeed open magic.

Mage seems interesting, i don't really worry about it being high-powered, that is actually more of what i'm looking for. But from what i can get, the system does not have much crunch to it, or i'm mistaken?

One more, do you know the diference between Mage the Awakening and Mage the Ascenscion?

Spheres of poooower can both reing the opness of wizard in 3.5 edition and allow you to pull gilgamesh out of kobold baby

Oh, i already know Spheres of power, i really like it, but for some situations is actually more easy to convince my friends to play a whole new system than convince them to play pathfiender. It's sad, i really like the crunch of D&D.

Check out Ars Magica. It's a game all about playing magicians in medieval Europe, and has a well-regarded magic system based on combining dog-Latin nouns and verbs. (For example, "Creo Ignam" = "Create Fire".

Seconding Ars Magica.
Also White Wolf's "Mage: The Ascenscion" (and presumable "Mage: the Awakening", though I haven't read that one, and this one is still in print, IIRC)

I'm reading good stuff from Ars Magica, but can you tell how chrunchy it is?

Donjon uses a spell system where you have a short list of words and can cast spells by sticking those words together to create a spell name, decide what the spell does, and it works as long as the effect is justified by the name.

I will take a look at it later, thank you.

Monte Cooke's d20 version of World of Darkness has a comprehensive "build your own spells" system. It's very good, but needs some controls to keep the available power in check.

Also, Pathfinder's Words of Power goes some way to making a universal magic system, but I found it to be really imbalanced - the power levels of words were vastly different to each other.
I've made a tweaked version of PF's Words system that worked better for our group. If you're interested, I could put it up on Homebrew...

I will take a look at it. Thank you for your entry.

Thank everyone for their sugestion

[Calthropstu]

Monte Cooke's d20 version of World of Darkness has a comprehensive "build your own spells" system. It's very good, but needs some controls to keep the available power in check.

Also, Pathfinder's Words of Power goes some way to making a universal magic system, but I found it to be really imbalanced - the power levels of words were vastly different to each other.
I've made a tweaked version of PF's Words system that worked better for our group. If you're interested, I could put it up on Homebrew...

I can confirm the experience with the words of power for pathfinder. It was an amazing concept, terrible in practiced. And so nerfed it was nigh unusable.

[Satinavian]

I'm reading good stuff from Ars Magica, but can you tell how chrunchy it is?

Pretty crunchy. Not D&D-levels of crunchy, but it is still a very traditional system from before the big narrative games explosion and depending on the edition there can exists quite a number of books.

I like it too.

[Blu]

Pretty crunchy. Not D&D-levels of crunchy, but it is still a very traditional system from before the big narrative games explosion and depending on the edition there can exists quite a number of books.

I like it too.

Oh, that sounds promising, thanks!

[BWR]

Ars Magica is indeed pretty crunchy but that's pretty much unavoidable with that sort of system. 5e has been out for more than a decade and is still going strong, with the community in general not wanting a new edition, which should tell you something about how solid it is. If you want to use it for something other than the Mythic Europe setting you'll probably have to hack it a bit, but this shouldn't bee too great a problem.
The other mechanics, like combat and social encounters and whatnot are notably simpler than the magic, even when you start bringing in optional mechanics from various splat-books.

[Jay R]

How much arithmetic are you willing to do?

I favor Fantasy Hero for this. It's the fantasy version of Champions, and the powers are infinitely adjustable.

I once ran a bard who used his songs as buffs, and his spells all had the advantages area effect. They had the limitations that they required a performance check, had a verbal component, took five minutes to cast, did not work on the deaf or anyone out of earshot, and lasted for 24 hours.

This meant he could sing inspiring songs that would buff the party's fighting skills for a day, but couldn't cast in combat.

My GM once designed a clerical spell of healing that only worked when the recipient was down to zero points, because in all the stories he'd read, nobody healed a minor injury. So he designed it the way it appeared in the literature.

Lots of people don't like the math. But I love the infinite flexibility of the system.

[Knaight]

How much arithmetic are you willing to do?

I favor Fantasy Hero for this. It's the fantasy version of Champions, and the powers are infinitely adjustable.

Hero doesn't actually work well for this - it's very much a discrete powers system, and while the options at character creations for what discrete powers to make are extremely varied if not actually unrivaled, the nature of the game as a discrete powers system gets in the way here.

[mikeejimbo]

GURPS Thaumatology has a good deal of content dedicated to building open-ended yet well-defined magic, with a lot of different options. The system from Mage, for example, can be fairly easily replicated. This is largely because there was a licensed GURPS Mage in third edition, and one of Thaumatology's systems (Realm Magic) took that translation and generalized it, showing how to build it into whatever specifics you want.

Thaumatology also has a Noun-Verb system option, as well as others, though some are slightly less open-ended.

All are as crunchy as you'd like them to be, provided you are willing to do the up front work in developing the system.

If you don't want to do that up front work, GURPS Ritual Path Magic and GURPS Sorcery provide worked examples of systems that are robust, open-ended, and crunchy on their own. RPM draws inspiration from Mage, but also works out to be somewhat different. Magic in it tends to be slow and subtle, except at very high point values.

[Stryyke]

The Wheel of Time. The books were written by Robert Jordan, and there are a few WOT themed systems out there. If you want, I'm working on one right now, and I could use help banging out some of the problems.

It works kind of like this: Magic users are affiliated with a specific element (determined by the setting). But just for the sake of simplicity, let's go with a standard Earth, Air, Fire, Water setup. So your magic user is affiliated with earth, for example. Rather than spells, or weaves, or anything of the sort, the player simply explains what they are trying to accomplish. The DM issues a DC based on how easy or complicated the task is. The player then rolls against the DC. A successful check means they accomplished what they were shooting for. A failure means they screwed it up. The only issue is that the DM has to be able to assign DC on the fly.

It's easier to limit each caster to a single element. If you start having them mixing all the different elements, setting DCs gets absurd. There was a system like this a long time ago, but I never found it again. So I'm recreating it as best I can.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

Spheres of poooower can both reing the opness of wizard in 3.5 edition and allow you to pull gilgamesh out of kobold baby

I don't know what that last bit means but SoP is amazing enough at this that I believe you.

Aside from Spheres for Pathfinder, if you want a more rules-light option check out Spell RPG. It revolves around open-ended casting, in that all your spells are (initially) cast by drawing letter tiles and spelling something with them that you can hopefully work with. It really rewards creativity and audacity and has a neat stat system as well!

[Jay R]

Hero doesn't actually work well for this - it's very much a discrete powers system, and while the options at character creations for what discrete powers to make are extremely varied if not actually unrivaled, the nature of the game as a discrete powers system gets in the way here.

Well, I agree that a GM can let it do so. The last time I played, the GM required a specifically defined magic system that would define what kinds of spells could be used. That led to my bardic style that required five minutes of singing to cast a spell. I could also have defined a system that required spells from a specific element, or a summoning style, or something else.

The first version of Fantasy Hero I ever read, in the late 80s or early 90s, had a specific form for defining a magic style, which was what I had in mind. I couldn't find it when I looked at my current version, although there are dozens of pages of rules for how to do it. So it's probably true that they've let the universality of the system run away with them.

But it doesn't have to.

[Milo v3]

Mage seems interesting, i don't really worry about it being high-powered, that is actually more of what i'm looking for. But from what i can get, the system does not have much crunch to it, or i'm mistaken?

The system is pretty crunchy. Not D&D level I guess, but few things are. It's a system with narrative-tied mechanics, but that doesn't make it less crunchy, they just use narrative-tied mechanics to increase the chances of plots going in a way suitable for the genre.

One more, do you know the diference between Mage the Awakening and Mage the Ascenscion?

Ascension is (old) World of Darkness, and thus has metaplot and giant amounts of history and is based on the idea "belief changes reality" sorta, while Awakening is a Chronicles of Darkness game with different mechanics, is made so you can decide how your patch of setting operates without trouble as a GM, and is based on gnosticism.

[Knaight]

Well, I agree that a GM can let it do so. The last time I played, the GM required a specifically defined magic system that would define what kinds of spells could be used. That led to my bardic style that required five minutes of singing to cast a spell. I could also have defined a system that required spells from a specific element, or a summoning style, or something else.

Specifically defining a magic system is fine - it's not the breadth of powers that causes an issue here, it's how the system is built for making distinct powers ahead of time instead of doing it on the fly.