Magic as a D&D Edition Setting

[Foxwarrior]

It's possible for different resource schemes to use the same powers, the powers just have to be priced differently for the different resource schemes. Whether you do that by listing the levels a power is for the different classes, or by giving powers tags like [really good when spammed] and having each class define how it uses powers of a given tag, is your choice.

Also, I believe the more Magic-al method of making single color characters worthwhile would be to increase the number of powers of that color they could use at once in some way.

[Mistborn]

I haven't played in a decade, but basically agree with everything that guy says.

/sigh I really dislike it when fanboys shriek like raped apes the way this guy is doing. Don't get me wrong, this sort of our market-research-tell-us-people-all-want-flavorless-gruel thing is definitely a problem, but throwing a S-rank bitch fit about it just make you look like a loon. Sliver do have a unique identity and they are conceptually pretty cool and WotC is doing that concept a disservice, but honestly they are pretty second string when you get down too it.

As for this hypothetical MTG TTRPG system the resource system is simple, everyone has a pool of man that they fill in various ways. Just like in the game there is mana of each color plus colorless mana. Then characters spend that mana to activate their class features.

[Prak]

Just from the first few paragraphs, my image of that guy bawing about the new slivers is basically Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.

The slivers are evolving, that's their whole shtick. The thing that doesn't make sense is why a race defined by super adaptability all look like snakes with stalagmites as heads and a single giant claw. It's like the paradox in D&D where the forces of Evil and Good range in form from mobile piles of shit and balls of light to four armed dog headed beasts and snake bodied women, but the forces of Chaos are all various sizes of giant frog. It makes no sense for a race typified by evolution and rapid morphic adaptability to all environments to all be snakes with an arm and a big pointy head. Granted, they're almost all humanoid now, but there is a greater variety of humanoid sliver appearances than there is of ophidian sliver appearances.

On the mana thing: I really think that the basic game should stay away from mana, and leave that for epicPlaneswalker games. Colours of magic in place of spell schools and alignments is great, but before you hit 20th level, you are the random mook that planeswalkers summon. At best, you're a named character, but much more likely, you are "third soldier from the right in Standing Army" as far as the planeswalkers are concerned. There is a very real possibility that you will pop up in a strange plane, and be told "follow the glowbug and beat on anything that stops you." These guys only use mana at the behest of a planeswalker, beyond that, they have normal spells.

[fectin]

Eh, I'm not invested in that guy's opinion, since that is literally the only thing of his I have read.

However, I do think he has three key points:
- Blanding down your setting is terribad. When you have a unique look and feel for your setting elements, embrace that instead of repudiating it. That doesn't mean you have to slavishly copy earlier design decisions, but your new directions should be an evolution of the earlier work.
- Humanizing your setting is a cop-out. If you have a creature which is both sane and alien, why the fuck would you back away from that. One of the reasons Star Trek TNG and DS9 were so satisfying and SG1 was so campy (first examples I could think of)was the sanity and consistency of the aliens' actions. Getting that set up well is lightening in a bottle: do not let it escape.
- Betraying your audiences expectations is betraying your audience. Like Prak said, a race defined by super adaptability shouldn't all look like snakes with stalagmites as heads. That's a great opportunity to sdtart riffing on what they evolve into. Making them all people is just ridiculous though. That's exactly the same sort of unexplained shift in fundamental assumptions which makes Mary Sue stories so unsatisfying.

Actually, on that last point, think of Star Trek again. Specifically think of the evil mirror universe: Sometimes, characters wake up (step out of the transporter, etc. ) and the entire setting has changed around them. They play that up though, and the episode is about exploring why the change happened. This is more like switching to the mirror universe, without explanation, at the start of a new season and carrying on as though nothing had happened.

[Foxwarrior]

You can divide the mana into smaller quantities: 1 unit of mana for one of these characters could be equivalent to 0.1 mana in the card game. Just because you don't want characters regularly building Summoning Stations at level 7 doesn't mean you have to remove Mana from your resource management and character building systems entirely, Prak_Anima.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I think one of the big disconnects for this idea has always been whether an MTG setting RPG is about super-powerful wizards who tap a whole land's mana and summon epic monsters, or about warriors in a magic land where everyone draws on mana to do their hadoukens.

I suppose you can have both- but any design decisions about how mana works needs to take those approaches into account first.

[Neurosis]

Magic the Gathering has more players than 4e D&D has. Hell, it has more players than 3.5 D&D had 3 years ago. It probably has more players than 3.5 did at its height. So the fact remains that there are more people out there who play fantasy games who know what Mirrodin is about than know what Krynn or Mystara is about. That's a little disturbing if you happen to be an old guard type, but it's also a huge opportunity for gaming in general.

The current M:tG system is that every year they have a world that the sets are taking place in, and then they produce three sets of cards staggered throughout the year. This is marketing genius, because it means that the game continues "feeling fresh" and caters to a lot of different formats and has a built in excuse for tinkering with the rules. For example, this year is bringing in a bunch of cards with "proliferation" (a mechanic where cards can increase the utility of other cards that produce tokens), and "metalcraft" (a mechanic where a card will gain additional abilities iff you have 3 artifacts in play), and "infect" (a mechanic where creatures inflict their normal damage as permanent poison tokens). If those mechanics catch on, they can be rotated into the future card lists, and if they don't, they can be rotated out. Which is pretty smart, considering that like all things, some of their ideas are good and some are not.

Another thing has to be noted for purposes of M:tG as a D&D basis: creatures these days already have a race and class. Seriously. When you pick up a human cleric is actually says "Human Cleric" right on the card. This has advantages, in that it means that you already have people who are a built-in fan club for every class you put out, but it also means that you're going to have to come up with a good answer to what happens when people play "powerful races", because there are demonstrably cards that have ogres, trolls, vampires, and elephant people with character classes.

Anyway, for the next year or so, the world on hand is "Mirrodin". It's a stem-punk fantasy world with a lot of metal on the planet, some relics of an ancient golem-tech civilization and five suns/moons (the people of Mirrodin cannot tell the difference). Sure, why not? Meanwhile, it already has 13 character classes that it throws around, most of the basic fantasy races, and a color-based alignment system that specifically allows characters of any alignment to team up with other characters of any alignment to fight monsters of any alignment (including their own). Which is pretty much exactly what you want out of a default setting anyway.

Mirodin Class	Suggested Difficulty
Archer	Easy
Artificer	Hard
Berserker	Easy
Cleric	Hard
Knight	Hard
Druid	Medium
Monk	Easy
Rogue	Medium
Scout	Easy
Shaman	Easy
Soldier	Medium
Warrior	Medium
Wizard	Hard

Meanwhile, Mirrodin boasts the general assortment of fantasy races (human, elf, goblin, gnome, etc. ) and also finds room for a few special ones:

• Catfolk. It's a standard option here. No biggie actually, no reason that catfolk can't be ECL 0 or whatever.
• Myr. These are like warforged, in that they are quasi-humanoid robot people.
• Clockwork Men. These are pretty much exactly warforged. You could call them "Clockworks" or "Warforged" - I genuinely don't even care.
• Zombies. The "Nim" are sapient, toothy zombie people.
• Trolls. Yes, big, regenerating Trolls. As playable characters.
• Ogres. Big strong ogre types, apparently get character classes.
• Vampires. The Mirrodin Vampire is weird shit. They are actually not much better than a normal man and have two of their fingers on each hand grow really long and clawed. So, like a playable Ghoul in older D&D terms.
• Loxodons. Now we get into the weird shit. Giant elephant headed people.
• Vedalkin. Weirder still, these are ponderous hindu things with four arms, blue skin, and an appetite for mystical power.
• The usual assortment of what 3rd edition would call "outsiders". You got Angels, Demons, Horrors, and Imps, all of which can potentially have a character class, though not necessarily in the first book.

-Username17

Honestly, I'm shocked they didn't do this years ago.

[Username17]

The problem with having race and class be totally independent of colour is that whilst there may be the odd card that breaks the rules, when you hear Vedalken in Magic you think blue, and when you hear Soldier you think white. Whereas if you let people mix and match you run the very real risk that due to some odd synergy it makes more sense to have your Soldier be a Green Vampire or some shit, so then that becomes a staple build and suddenly your game seems nothing like Magic. The fact is some of the cards were made before they tightened up the flavour side of things, and others had creature types added in the Great Creature Update to match the art, and as a result there are some off the wall combinations. That doesn't mean you should take that as the standard.

Forcing Goblins to be Red and Assassins to be Black seems like the only way to ensure that the characters you create will resonate with people who know anything about the card game. If you asked a Magic player to describe a Goblin Druid I bet you over 90% would name a Green-Red card. If you allow that combination to be Blue in your RPG you are not representing the source material at all.

Dude. You're making the argument that players shouldn't be allowed to play Jedi in a Star Wars game because part of the flavor of Star Wars is that Jedi are rare. While it is true that Jedi are supposed to be rare, they are also one of the major things that anyone gives an actual fuck about in the setting, and if you make them off limits to players the players will be justifiably angry.

Sure in M:tG land there are only a couple of Elf cards who are Black and Wizards, but if you say that any Elf/Wizard has to be Green, Blue, or Green Blue you're still going to have players justifiably pissed off when they show you an actual Black Elf wizard card and want to play that guy and get told that they fucking can't. The players are exceptional. It doesn't fucking matter if there are 80 Green Elf cards and only 3 White Elf cards, if someone wants to play a White Elf they can fucking do that.

Players never have to play the most common alignment of their race. Never.

-Username17

[Prak]

It occurs to me that player characters being tri- or even quad-coloured could actually be a very good thing, for narrative at least. Dominia is a multiverse were nigh-godly spellcasters will occasionally just yank living beings out of their world and into some other world for what amounts to a game of pick up street ball. If player characters are frequently multi-coloured, especially with three or more colours, it explains why they are seldom pulled out of the shower to go beat on some mooks, because most Planeswalkers won't consider the majority of PCs worth the colour spread.

Granted, a planeswalker is supposed to go and create a mystic "tie" to the things they can summon, which means you explain it by never having a planeswalker do that, but this explains why they don't do it until the players are high enough level to actually affect the overarching world metaplot.

[Red_Rob]

You can divide the mana into smaller quantities: 1 unit of mana for one of these characters could be equivalent to 0.1 mana in the card game. Just because you don't want characters regularly building Summoning Stations at level 7 doesn't mean you have to remove Mana from your resource management and character building systems entirely, Prak_Anima.

More to the point, if you want this game to feel like Magic it needs to have Mana be the resource for using your abilities. That doesn't mean you need to map 1-to-1 with the card game, but if you don't have Mana at all I think you lose something important.

Now, the idea is that you will start off playing a 1 mana character, so obviously you are not going to be throwing around abilities equivalent to anything on the cards. But I think there is a certain cool factor from levelling your Necromancer up enough that they can cast Drain Life or Terror at level 9. But the general idea is that when you turn your guys sideways in Magic, that's like an adventure in D&D. You travel to exotic places, fight strange monsters and hopefully live to tell the tale.

As the idea for this is a D&D hack, I think you want to map Mana to level at about a 2:1 ratio, so every other level you gain a Mana. This rather neatly means that each "tier" of Mana abilities corresponds pretty closely with a level of spells, giving us a nice baseline for how the abilities should look. It also stops things from getting too far away from the expectations of the base game - a Prodigal Sorceror is a 3 Mana creature and can kill a bunch of Soldiers without breaking a sweat - which corresponds pretty well with a level 5 character.

I think one of the big disconnects for this idea has always been whether an MTG setting RPG is about super-powerful wizards who tap a whole land's mana and summon epic monsters, or about warriors in a magic land where everyone draws on mana to do their hadoukens.

On the mana thing: I really think that the basic game should stay away from mana, and leave that for epicPlaneswalker games. Colours of magic in place of spell schools and alignments is great, but before you hit 20th level, you are the random mook that planeswalkers summon.

This is a mischaracterisation of the basics of Magic. Don't let the grandiose title fool you, Planeswalkers really aren't that powerful in a direct sense. Firstly, it is a core concept of Magic that even a lowly Goblin can defeat a Planeswalker, at least temporarily. Even a starting level party of four 1 mana guys is a weenie rush that can pose a serious threat to a Planeswalker's activities. Secondly, a Planeswalker can't just blast you if you get on his nerves. Whether because his attention is elsewhere or because it uses up resources he might need for other things, oftentimes a Planeswalker will choose not to unleash his full magical power and just weather your attacks.

So what does an "attack" in Magic represent anyway? There's a lot of assumptions tied up in there that are deeply weird from a D&D perspective. The basics are that you and your buddies head off to attack an enemy Planeswalker, you fight whatever minions they have summoned to defend themselves, eventually you break through (or not) and do them some kind of nebulous "damage", then you go home without sealing the deal. I imagine Planeswalkers could have some kind of escape ability, such as a teleport, that takes a lot of time or energy to activate? As they are so passive when not unleashing their (relatively few) spells I would assume they are either in some kind of psychic battle or trance with other planeswalkers that inhibits their ability to directly defend against, or even notice attacks immediately. I guess Life would be some kind of energy shield that you can weaken by attacking it?

Anyway, the point is that just because you are a lowly soldier token doesn't mean you can't get involved in the Planeswalker battles side of things. That is totally an option if we wanted to go that route.

[Username17]

Planeswalkers clearly operate on the same basis as players in Feng Shui - they have special sites that they are protecting and enemy demons rampaging in those sites brings them closer to losing in a nebulous but important fashion. They aren§t necessarily literally killed at the end of the game, but an important tower has fallen or something and they are banished from the area being fought over.

Now, obviously you are going to want to call at least one of your character resources "mana" and have it come in colors. But you have a lot of options for how to do that. Here are a few:

• Mana is a character generation resource. You go up a level and you gain a mana that is some color or another and now you are a three mana creature instead of a two mana creature.
• Mana is a mission preparation resource. You have some mana, you assign it to abilities at the start of the adventure (or day, or whatever), and then you have access to those abilities (possibly at different strengths if you had the option to put more or less mana into a particular ability).
• Mana is a battle resource. You start the battle with a pile of mana, and every super move or major spell has a mana cost to activate it.
• Mana is a turn resource. Every turn you get a pile of mana, and you can invest it into actions, passive defenses, reactions, moves, and whatever else.

Mana could be fixed per refresh period, or it could be randomized in composition, quanity, or both. Yeah, you definitely have one or more things called "mana", but that's basically just a facade you're putting on a set of mechanics that you are using for other reasons that happen to have something quantized in it.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

I'd be totally pumped to see mana operate as a chargen resource and a preparation resource. So characters are all worth a certain number of mana, but you allocate that mana to activate your class abilities.

So as a BBW cleric with two swamp and one plains I could be a minionmancer with both blacks in different drudge skeletons and 1 white in a healing spell, or I could go support and pick up Zealous Persecution and imbue my holy symbol as an Amulet of Vigor.

[Prak]

Ok, we don't have to guess, or claim people are being fooled by grandiose titles. The guy who first conceptualized the game wrote a short story which spells out what planeswalkers are doing pretty well, it's up on the Wizards site here.

Planeswalkers, at base, view the planes like sites in a city. They can look "across the block" and see into another plane. They can walk over there. They can find mana lines at certain sites, and then pick up the threads and stuff them in their pocket.

Sometimes planeswalkers will harass each other, and it really amounts to a pick up game of street hoops. A lowly goblin can wander over and smack you, but it smacks you for the last of your "life," really more energy, then you bug the fuck out because you're tired and need to rest for a week. It doesn't really hurt you, you're just wiped out. Sure, if the other planeswalker came over and was a dick, they could slip a dagger between your ribs. But what happens when a planeswalker uses a summoned creature to attack another, let's say Raging Goblin, is this:
Pull red mana line, yank on it- Raging Goblin drops out of thin air.
Summon a guide for the creature, send it off.
Raging Goblin follows the little glowbug or whatever to the enemy planeswalker, and swipes at them with an axe, assuming they're unblocked. The axe doesn't connect with the enemy planeswalker, it hits their energy field, which "hurts" the planeswalker in a wholy mystical and completely not physical way.

The only real stakes in a planeswalker duel, usually, are respect, pride, and maybe you leave a few of your ties lying around when you bug out, so your opponent now can summon your succubi girlfriend.

[Dean]

So as a BBW cleric I could be a minionmancer

I don't think minions would be your thing

[...You Lost Me]

I don't think minions would be your thing

?

EDIT: OH GOD DAMMIT WHAT THE HELL.

In case anyone was wondering, the first two pages of Bing's results for "BBW" are porn. Why does that exist.

Why.

[hyzmarca]

I don't think minions would be your thing

?

EDIT: OH GOD DAMMIT WHAT THE HELL.

In case anyone was wondering, the first two pages of Bing's results for "BBW" are porn. Why does that exist.

Why.

Because Big is Beautiful.

[fectin]

Even if a character uses mana, they don't have to use it on the scale that planeswalkers do. Planeswalkers suck all the juice out of a site, and only have a few sites where that's worthwhile. You might easily be able to cast dozens of puny mortal spells with that same resource, or even be completely unable to deplete mana with your magic. It's totally okay to say that your game operates on a different scale than MtG, and that it takes 50 game mana to make 1 MtG mana (or whatever).

That possibly implies that anywhere you go has ambient mana, and you're all about channeling it.

[RobbyPants]

I don't think minions would be your thing

?

EDIT: OH GOD DAMMIT WHAT THE HELL.

In case anyone was wondering, the first two pages of Bing's results for "BBW" are porn.

Tip for the future: use Urban Dictionary to look up terms as opposed to a search engine. At least you didn't look it up using Google Image, I suppose.

Why does that exist.

Why.

Hyzmarca already answered it. A lot of people are into that.


On a side note: I love unintentional tangents on the interwebs.

[JigokuBosatsu]

At least you didn't look it up using Google Image, I suppose.

But doesn't Bing's advertising campaign play up how images are right there on your first search? And video preview?!?!?!

[Seerow]

I don't think minions would be your thing

?

EDIT: OH GOD DAMMIT WHAT THE HELL.

In case anyone was wondering, the first two pages of Bing's results for "BBW" are porn. Why does that exist.

Why.

Seriously how long have you been on the internet?

I wasn't aware people could use the internet and not be aware of basics like this.

[Username17]

This idea certainly has legs. One of the first things I did when joining this forum years ago was to necro a long thread that Frank and Ceilingcat had used to come up with some great ideas. Can't seem to find that one now, but several other discussions like this are easily searchable.

I think you're talking about this one. But you might be talking about this one. Ceiling Cat went down several design paths before she abandoned this forum because she felt she could no longer hang with us over the fact that I refused to enthusiastically endorse gender reassignment surgery from a medical standpoint.

Mana as Incarnum is certainly a possibility. Obviously, as noted in the second thread there, Incarnum did not actually work very well. But it's possible that it could. Further, Mana has an advantage that Incarnum does not - in that colored glowing energy that flows into your powers is something that Magic the Gathering has a decent explanation for while Incarnum always had a hard time selling that.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

At least you didn't look it up using Google Image, I suppose.

But doesn't Bing's advertising campaign play up how images are right there on your first search? And video preview?!?!?!

Bing autodetects porn and pixilates the images for your convince. You can still make out the naughty bits if you squint real hard, but it's like trying to watch old analog Pay Per View porn without a decoder box.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Yeah, it was that second thread I was talking about. Prak had some good ideas too, IIRC. I couldn't find it and assumed that it had tripped on its quote tags, fallen through its own asshole, and broken its own motherfucking neck.

[...You Lost Me]

I wasn't aware people could use the internet and not be aware of basics like this.

Well it's not like I exactly go out looking for it...

[beejazz]

Yeah, the power cards for Gamma World offend people. The random minis boxes offended people too. There are many mechanics, storylines, and art pieces that can be profitably swindled from M:tG, but its sales structure will never fit D&D or any cooperative storytelling game.

-Username17

Coming back to this, I think certain aspects of the M:tG business structure could work for an RPG.

1) You can start with one deck, any deck.
2) The cards change but the rules don't (or do incrementally).
3) Organized play vs casual play formats mean you could play more fast and loose with "balance" over the life of the game. You don't need something that will work exactly the same for twenty years. You just need balance within the set for the sake of organized play.

Proposal:
Four boxed sets a year.
Each has the core rules, some character options (not the same, but not randomized), and the sort of GM-centric material that lets you play without prepping (adventures, locations, NPCs, again not the same between boxes but not randomized). So each boxed set could serve either as an introduction or a supplement.
Maybe each boxed set has its own focus. Dungeon/Wilderness/City/Planes for example.
Every year, you get different settings and character options.
Each box may be around 40$.

Randomization bugs people because it doesn't add value. Supplements, settings, and core rules all add value. So you take what works from MtG and you ditch the randomization and booster packs.

What this model would lack is the impulse-purchase-price-point unfortunately. You could do that with a hybrid card based dungeon crawler, but that wouldn't be quite the same thing.