Goetic Physics

[virgil]

I was considering a Goetic magic system, where all magic is convincing spirits to work for/through you. Monsters have magical abilities either through racial pacts or are hosts for spirits (similar to Gaijin's oni). I want the aesthetic of D&D magic, but it doesn't need to be hard-nosed about it, since D&D is rather schizophrenic.

However, like any good magic system, it needs to be defined by what it cannot. However, I'm uncertain of where to put limits, especially if I want shapeshifting and teleportation.

Ideas/suggestions are welcome.

[Omegonthesane]

Offhand, I'd have thought that you couldn't have "beam me up Scotty" style teleportation, where you don't at any point intersect with the points in between start and finish - even if you then have the effects of that, via your summoned Transporter carrying you into its plane before running at Warp 9 to the location and dropping you off in the Prime Material.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

Not sure if this is what you're looking for or not...

I'd suggest making your system be incapable of creating something out of nothing. That should get rid of a lot of economy rape that you find in D&D systems. For classic spells you just manipulate things to get the effect. Ex. fireballs aren't creating fire, it's manipulating the air to make it so hot it combusts while ice spells are just sucking the heat out of the air.

For shapeshifting, maybe make it so spirits can only give you forms that they knew/know, so you can't necessarily dumpster dive for forms unless you know a lot of obscure spirits. That should keep the game from going full retard.

I may have completely missed the mark.

[Omegonthesane]

Not sure if this is what you're looking for or not...

I'd suggest making your system be incapable of creating something out of nothing. That should get rid of a lot of economy rape that you find in D&D systems. For classic spells you just manipulate things to get the effect. Ex. fireballs aren't creating fire, it's manipulating the air to make it so hot it combusts while ice spells are just sucking the heat out of the air.

That's achievable by not giving anything ontological inertia. You can create what's needed to make the spell work, but no making a Wall of Iron castle out of it.

For shapeshifting, maybe make it so spirits can only give you forms that they knew/know, so you can't necessarily dumpster dive for forms unless you know a lot of obscure spirits. That should keep the game from going full retard.

Or make you have to spend some sort of skill point type resource per form you know about, though that's dependent on what system it's implemented in.

[Almaz]

I was considering a Goetic magic system, where all magic is convincing spirits to work for/through you. Monsters have magical abilities either through racial pacts or are hosts for spirits (similar to Gaijin's oni). I want the aesthetic of D&D magic, but it doesn't need to be hard-nosed about it, since D&D is rather schizophrenic.

However, like any good magic system, it needs to be defined by what it cannot. However, I'm uncertain of where to put limits, especially if I want shapeshifting and teleportation.

Ideas/suggestions are welcome.

Make maintaining several different pacts at the same time difficult. No, not through applying a hard cap on the number of pacts you can learn or use or whatever - actually make it difficult. Mages who use spells of a given kind are less likely to be able to use spells of a different kind simply because the two obligations are likely to get in the way, and people who cast too many spells, regardless of kind, usually wind up overburdened with duties, as each restriction alone is unnotable but together they pile up in intensity. You'd want some kind of way of figuring out how this stacks up, but in any case it should definitely feel like taking out a loan... only done if you feel you can repay it.

Obviously, if the mage sees a period of free time ahead wherein they can just work off their duties, as it were, they will try to throw out as many spells as they can. But those who want to keep their mobility (literally - if a pact obligation makes you dance a funny shuffle-step... !) will not do so.

I'd also suggest having it so given types of spirit like a particular kind of personality in general... Goetic sorcery is kind of about drawing on not just spirits, but the demons of the self. Nothing so crude as a "seven deadly sins" setup, I think, but they should definitely show preferences on top of merely demanding obligations, such that even trivial spells with minor obligations which can be endured in great numbers will not be accessible to absolutely everyone (although the set of mages who can manage it might be quite large). The point is, after all, negotiation.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Read James Blish's "Black Easter".

[Grek]

Since this is the "Goetic Physics" thread, and not the "Goetic Magic" thread, I'm going to assume you're going to be sticking to your guns and keeping magic from raping physics too hard. As such, Energy, Heat, Mass, Momentum and Work are all conserved. This has several implications: A spell effect that requires X amount of energy requires that the goetic spirit you summoned expend X amount of energy. Goetic spirits can only produce heat/light/sound to the degree that they're able to obtain the same from the world around them or that you provide them. They can only produce objects for you by physically going out and looking for the requested object. Smaller spirits go faster, while larger (and persumably more powerful) spirits move slower. Increases in force require a decrease in the distance over which the force can be applied, while very short decreases give great increases in force.

So, examples:
-Casting Fireball involves summoning a spirit of fire that is able to produce blasts of fire in a mundane fashion. It's probably a dragon sort of thing, or possibly some sort of weird imp that reproduces with spores spread via explosion. In the former case, you'll need to feed it a lot of meat in order to keep up with the caloric requirements involved in fiery explosions, but the number of fireballs that you can produce in a day is only meaningfully limited by the amount of meat you can provide and the time it takes for the spirit to eat/digest it. In the latter case, you'll need to constantly obtain more imps for more fireballs via whatever process it is you use to conjure fireball imps.
-Casting Create Water involves summoning a spirit (possibly a djinn!) to go off and find you some water and bring it to you in a bucket. Likewise with Create Food and whatever other creation spells you want to use. The amount of time it takes for the spirit to come back with your water/food/whatever depends on 3 factors: The power of the spirit you summoned (and, by extension, your own magical powres), the mass of the object you're trying to obtain, and the difficulty for the spirit to find the object you want.
-Casting Fabricate looks like the favour text for the Dominions III spell Three Red Seconds where you ritually sacrifice 666 virgins in order to summon a legion of 10000 imps to build you a castle in three seconds of motion-blurred red imps running around building frantically. Obviously, fabricating smaller, less intricate or more easily worked items with goetic magic takes less time per spirit assigned to the task.
-You're probably going to end up wanting to have people obtain a single familiar that they trust implictly, follows them around and performs the actions required to 9/10ths cast spells with an instantaneous duration. This is because, thematically, a sorcerer is going to want a single spirit that likes them a whole lot over a bunch of spirits that are essentially mercenaries who need to be told what to do every single time, and because, mechanically, it's easier to deal with each character having a single spirit with constant, easy to remember statistics involved in most of their day to day spells.

[virgil]

Actually, I'm fine with magic having nonconsensual congress RL physics. The reason I call it "Goetic Physics" is because I'm making a vague nod to the quote "sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!" It's not important for magic to cleave closely to normal physics, but instead for magic to have internally consistent and circumscribed rules.

Brandon Sanderson is an example of an author taking this view in fiction for his magic systems.

Right now, I only have a basic theme and underpinning of its source, but I haven't decided what/how spirits do what they do.

[Almaz]

Actually, I'm fine with magic having nonconsensual congress RL physics. The reason I call it "Goetic Physics" is because I'm making a vague nod to the quote "sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!" It's not important for magic to cleave closely to normal physics, but instead for magic to have internally consistent and circumscribed rules.

Brandon Sanderson is an example of an author taking this view in fiction for his magic systems.

Right now, I only have a basic theme and underpinning of its source, but I haven't decided what/how spirits do what they do.

Presumably, spirits get some kind of energy out of whatever the mage offers them, or else they would be less likely to do it. Considering that, it could be that the spirits in question also use that energy to fuel their powers, with pacts generally providing spells instead of "unspecified services with non-definite durations or ranges" because that is how they have worked out the exchange to be a net positive for them.

The fact that this all works out kind of like the proposed Elan economic system for Asymmetric Threat is mostly accidental - Elan just happens to be a decent example of a way to do this kind of thing. Your system, however, might be more complex, if it defines a lot of the game.

[Prak]

(literally - if a pact obligation makes you dance a funny shuffle-step... !)

I just had a mental image of a spirit compelling a mage to do a ministry grade funny walk. I'm ok with this.

[Grek]

Human brains do a fairly good approximation of Newtonian physics. Not perfect, but good enough to plan around and good enough to be suprised and confused when things behave differently from what Newton would predict. The more your magic system goes at odds with Newtonian physics, the slower people will grok the general principles of how magic works and the more likely that they'll make a mistake as they do so Imagine a spell that reduced the value of pi within its area of effect. Try to work out what happens on the interface of that. Hard, isn't it? By avoiding things like that, things that fundementally change the rules of physics, geometry, chemistry and biology, you allow yourself to tap into people's natural understanding of how the world works and then deal with magic by understanding it as a special case, or an exception or an augmentation of physics.

Example: Let's say that goetic spirits are essentially like people, except that they know supernatural spirit things and have the ability to change forms, turn invisible and do a limited number of other spirit things based on what sort of spirit they are. Once you've got a grasp on what the spirit is, you've got a grasp on what sort of spells it can do, and what will happen in cases the rules don't explictly cover.

[DrPraetor]

Are we worried about game balance, as well as realism? What do you mean by the *aesthetic* of D&D Magic? It's certainly easy and relatively natural for such a system to be Vancian (since the spirits owe you a finite number of favors, or whatever.) Or do you mean - hardly any ritual magic, magic users tend to do stuff on the spot?

If you're just coming up with a *setting* this is not a problem, but it's potentially a big issue for a *game*.

Suppose that magic only does mind control, illusions, and biomanipulation (maybe via mind control.) Magic barely interacts with the laws of physics at all, but could be awesomely powerful. In a world with nothing that has mind-effect immunity, the enchanter/illusionist is basically unstoppable.

Likewise, magic could operate via luck or seeming-coincidence only, although this might be hard to adjudicate.

Put another way - if I'm a sorcerer and you're not, is there some reasonable level of competence at which we could fight and it would be fair?

Shape changing and teleportation are a somewhat odd pair. If you want the D&D Aesthetic, this means you want Blur and Dimension Door to be relatively easy to do, but teleportation *into* the other dimensions should be hard?

Shape changing that alters your total mass might be forbidden to non-evil practitioners, since it requires you to find a bunch of wolves to melt into your body, since the spirit that's posessing you can't provide extra mass?

[Prak]

Speaking of Newtonian Physics, it'd be awesome to see a class that specifically worked with Aristolic physics...

[virgil]

Part of the D&D aesthetic is the idea that casters largely function in combat-time with their spells, with rituals and time-intensive aspects being a general preparatory element that's handwaved along with weapon/armor maintenance, biological needs, etc.

In addition, the overwhelming majority of magic in fiction and games do not follow the Laws of Thermodynamics. The closest thing I've ever seen is to treat thermodynamics as a symbolic element; like eating acorns for visions because the oak tree is a symbolic door to the other planes. People can accept quite a few things that break from real physics. What's important is internal consistency.

I want a system that at minimum allows for fireballs, walls, summoned creatures, shrinking, shapeshifting, illusions, and teleportation (of some kind). It needs to have strict limits on what it cannot do, and follow a line of logic that allows one to extrapolate such limits.

[fectin]

Maybe keep your spirits like pokemon then. You prepare by finding a bunch of fire spirits, and convincing them to hang out in your spirit fetishes for a day or so. After they make a fireball for you they go home, and you have to summon new ones.