What SHOULD magic be like in D&D?

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OgreBattle
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What SHOULD magic be like in D&D?

Post by OgreBattle »

So there are a ton of legacy effects in D&D since it was cobbled together in the late 70's where wizards must have the options to shoot seizure rainbows, never-miss missiles, charm people, summon badgers, and induce sleep all at level 1, and a few months later outdo YHWH in biblical scale destruction and creation. Slitting sleeping goblin throats and charming your way past social encounters are among the things complained about with wizards being able to do everything thieves and men at arms can. And everything I said sorta applies to clerics too.

If you could start completely from scratch without needing to appease grognards though, how would you make the magic system work? Would you leave "sleep and slit their throats" as a first level spell and so on.

This can also include the 'fighter question' if you decide "everyone gets magic by level X".
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Post by Ancient History »

Well, there's only three real solutions to the Linear Fighter/Quadratic Wizard issue.

1. Tamp down the wizard, starting at, oh, fireball-flinging level. The wizard should not be useless, but their abilities need to be commensurate with that of the fighter for balance of play.

2. Ramp up the fighter. There's a couple ways to do this, from a fighters-use-magic-too-but-differently route like Shadowrun's adepts to "Fighters get lots of cool non-magical abilities as they level to keep them on par with wizards" to straight up "Fighters get more antimagical as they level."

3. An overhaul of what magic is and what it can do. Part of the problem with spellcasters in D&D is that at a high enough level, you've got spells that can not just mimic the abilities of other classes, but outright surpass them - who needs a Climb skill when you have fly, for example? Upper level spells like wish are straight into "whatever I want" territory. Hell, save-or-die spells alone are gamebreaking for a lot of classes. You really can't even begin to address the fighter/wizard issue until you revamp the crazy, sprawling, insane, never-regulated magic system.

So, I'd probably combine all three, honestly. The core of the game needs to be a ground-up rebuild of the magic system - which means you can incorporate as much crap like psionics, True Names, Binders, Shadowmagic, blood magic, artificing, etc. as you want, because all you really need is to introduce the basic concept in the core book and then you can expand it to your heart's content later. You need rules about what magic can do and cannot do and touch on why - we're not talking really complicated stuff here, we're talking Shadowrun style guidelines like "Matter cannot be created from nothing." or "Spells are not sentient." - those obviously aren't necessarily the starting rules, you get the idea. Save-or-die spells need to go. Wishes need...well, drumming down, with at least some Dragonball-style limitations.
I would, in fact, be fine if every wish spell was just a specific, one-time geas directed at a particular NPC or outsider, where they would be required to use all their vast power to try and accomplish the wish - instead of a direct "let's fuck with reality" spell. It means that not every entity will be able to fulfill every wish, and a wish from a greater god is worth more than that of a demigod or minor devil, etc.
There's some pain that goes with the process, of course. Spellcasters are going to have to learn to work within a new paradigm with actual rules instead of implicit ones. They're going to chafe. But it can be done, and I think if it was done carefully and with forethought, it could be done without losing really thematic stuff.

But it's never going to be done like that.
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Re: What SHOULD magic be like in D&D?

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OgreBattle wrote: If you could start completely from scratch without needing to appease grognards though, how would you make the magic system work? Would you leave "sleep and slit their throats" as a first level spell and so on.
This "start completely from scratch" idea has already been done, over and over again. Please see ever fantasy rpg since the 1970s. Also for extra credit look up every "fantasy heartbreaker" rpg that has ever been made. Oh don't forget "the fourth," it's significant because it was first "fantasy heartbreaker" that successfully stole the D&D brand name for itself, and nearly made the brand name worthless. The damage is still ongoing.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

OgreBattle wrote:If you could start completely from scratch without needing to appease grognards though, how would you make the magic system work?
First of all, I'd tell the non-magic classes that they can go fuck themselves after a certain point. They can either upgrade to a magic class like Witch King or Hokuto Shinken Master or Pillar Man or their shit can go weeaboo/mythological. But the idea of a 15th or even an 8th level PC Fighting Man (out of level 20, with core 3E D&D as the upper limit of power) needs to go.

Secondly, I'd gather up all of the schools of magic and extensively write up what they can and can't do and how they worked. Psionics, Divine, and Arcane magic have enough thematic baggage to them so that you can tweak and segregate their effects without people going 'OMG weeaboo'. For example, I'd declare that only divine magic can be sentient or bestow independent sentience in of itself. Psionics and Arcane magic can simulate the effect by imprinting a portion of your mind onto a thing or bind spirits, but only divine magic is the real deal. Psionics can only create objects out of pure force, electricity, or ectoplasm. Only arcane magic can alter time. Stuff like that.
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Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Dean »

When I read the Conan RPG I was deeply impressed with the direction they took their magic rules. Magic in Conan can accomplish very impressive results but it takes lots of preparation, time, money and warm bodies. As a result Spellcasters in that setting could both beat and be beaten by fighter types depending on how much advance they had. A wizard who knew he would arrive at an enemy city in 3 days time could be a Necromantic fire-eyed terror by the time he arrived but a wizard who was attacked out of an alley is just a weak guy with with a single AOE spell he can use once.

If I were totally revamping D&D I'd upgrade Fighters to something closer to Warblades but I would also split magic users into the Warlock/Sorceror group which uses are basically blaster casters and the Wizard/Priest group which have really spectacular effects they can concoct if given preparation and effort. I think it would be cool to have classes have different attack styles they prefer. It would reinforce an idea that I really like about good RPG play which is that not everyone needs to be great in every fight. Players like a lot more when over the last 6 encounters they each have stories to tell about the time they were really amazing. So let the Wizard destroy the boss fight he could prepare for, let the Assassin alpha strike the group he sneaks up on, let the Barbarian just keep getting stronger as he fights making him the star player in the nail biting knock-down drag out fights.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Dean wrote:So let the Wizard destroy the boss fight he could prepare for, let the Assassin alpha strike the group he sneaks up on, let the Barbarian just keep getting stronger as he fights making him the star player in the nail biting knock-down drag out fights.
Why would this be a good direction for D&D except to baby the delusions of relevancy that grognards have over their precious cultural totems?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by violence in the media »

In addition to many of the other replies, I'd put in some specific rules about what effects can go in what spell levels. For example, you might decide things like:

No spell below 3rd level can affect multiple targets.
No spell below 5th level can have a duration longer than a day.
Magic does not distinguish friend from foe in it's area of effect.

Whatever hard caps you wanted to put in to constrain future spell design would go here. I might also try to include/create a formalized "build a spell" system to replace the "write something and eyeball it" thing we have going on now.

Also, I'd get rid of the specialized lists for all the partial casters and just give them minor access to whatever master lists you come up with. Any really iconic or specialized spells they might have should just get folded into class abilities. So a Paladin would just get access to levels 1-4 of the Divine master list, or whatever.
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Post by Mistborn »

violence in the media wrote:Also, I'd get rid of the specialized lists for all the partial casters and just give them minor access to whatever master lists you come up with. Any really iconic or specialized spells they might have should just get folded into class abilities. So a Paladin would just get access to levels 1-4 of the Divine master list, or whatever.
You do realize that means that partial caster's get level appropriate spells never instead of once in a blue moon right.
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Post by Sakuya Izayoi »

While I like my melee with a generous helping of weeabo ORAORAORAORAORAORAORA, I'm not adverse to the fightin' man being Tony Stark, either. Being able to constantly upgrade their gear to give themselves new procs and SLAs seems like a pretty straightforward and thematic class feature. And it doesn't make them necessarily the sum of their gear, either - Tony Stark is just as much about the riddle of steel as your archetypical fantasy fightin' protagonist.
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Post by erik »

Dean wrote:Players like a lot more when over the last 6 encounters they each have stories to tell about the time they were really amazing. So let the Wizard destroy the boss fight he could prepare for, let the Assassin alpha strike the group he sneaks up on, let the Barbarian just keep getting stronger as he fights making him the star player in the nail biting knock-down drag out fights.
But do they like that 5 of 6 encounters they're the losers who couldn't do anything useful?

It's okay to have situations where someone shines, but you don't want to do it at the expense of the rest of the party having to sit around feeling like jackasses. I mean, unless you rotate through evenly on when people get to shine and when people just sit out the fights, you are going to have some nights where people might as well not have shown up. That's balls.

Granted that's like every night for a fighter in high level D&D, or every level ever for a monk. But you change that by improving those classes rather than going to the land of the anti-magic field once every couple sessions.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Well, D&D has always been about swiping from the currently hot mass-nerd-media fantasy works. So with that in mind if I were starting over right now, and I couldn't manage to get the rights to do the obvious thing and rip off MtG's color wheel due to in-house brand protection, I'd go in one of about 3 directions:
  • Write up a system where each magic class is an IP-scrubbed expy of a Game of Thrones character. You could get Beast Magic, or be a Fire Priest, or master the Vanishing Visage or be a Dragon Wrangler. This doesn't really allow for characters that go past about 10th level (in 3e terms)
  • Hire Brandon Sanderson or some other "right now" named fantasy writer to write out a bunch of flavor text and sales pitches for the magic system and then try to translate it into game terms.
  • Have each magic class swiped from a different mass media fantasy work. You have Summoners based on Pokemon, Magic Archers based on Link, Augmentors swiped from a WoW popular MMORPG buffing class, Wand Wizards swiped from Harry Potter, and so on.
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Post by MGuy »

I'd choose to make 'magic' more like 'chi'. Everyone has it, everyone can unlock the power of bad ass, classes just determine how you manifest it. Fighty types get immediate effects, self buffs, etc. You can have your illusionists, necromancers, beast tamers, verdant lords, what have you and there would be no nonmagic classes. I'd also draw back on some of the higher end stuff. No more "Wish" or "Create Demiplane" type stuff.
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Post by Seerow »

Hire Brandon Sanderson or some other "right now" named fantasy writer to write out a bunch of flavor text and sales pitches for the magic system and then try to translate it into game terms.
Honestly I'd just love to see someone competent get their hands on the Stormlight Archive IP to make a tabletop out of. The whole spren bonding thing has a huge world of potential, and the Oaths even give a built in "Take a level in badass" mechanic to them.
Have each magic class swiped from a different mass media fantasy work. You have Summoners based on Pokemon, Magic Archers based on Link, Augmentors swiped from a WoW buffing class, Wand Wizards swiped from Harry Potter, and so on.
WoW doesn't even have buffing classes. (Think Everquest might though?)





So I just got done writing a big lengthy post following that about a magic system I want to see, but ultimately it's not a D&D magic system. So how to make the magic system work but still be D&D?

I'd probably make daily vs at will something that changes on a per spell basis. So you can spend a spell slot to get magic missile all day long, or Sleep once. I'm not sure that actually balances anything, but it makes investing spell slots into damage dealing spells feel less bad.

Remove basically any spell that is "Fuck you just lose". Save or Lose is fine. Save and lose even if you pass is horseshit.

I actually like the thing someone proposed above where Wish is a one time service from a powerful entity instead of rewrite reality at a whim. Go ahead with that.

Utility remains largely untouched. Some may need to get shifted up to higher levels.

If I was feeling particularly ballsy I'd have mandatory specialization for Wizards, with that specialization being "Gain this school plus lesser access to a few other schools", and other casters with a more restricted list (example: Clerics restricted basically to domains, with domains retuned such that they end up with somewhere between 6 and 10 spells per spell level). But that may be stepping too far away from D&D.


Addressing the mundane side of the equation, I have a hard time thinking of anything that addresses it while still feeling suitably like D&D. I think something like Physical Adept powers would be a great starting point. A shared pool of augmentations that all non-casters can pull from, utilizing a resource that only non-casters have access to (possibly because casters actually have that resource and are using it for actually casting).

Actually there's a thought. Just give the Mundanes fucking spell slots, but no ability to cast with them. They sacrifice the spell slots for these largely passive abilities. From there you could probably even introduce a magic item bonding system where magic items eat spell slots to use.

...who am I kidding, giving mundane characters literal spell slots even if they can't use them to cast spells would go over about as well as vegetarian barbecue being served in texas.
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Post by Korwin »

Seerow wrote:
Hire Brandon Sanderson or some other "right now" named fantasy writer to write out a bunch of flavor text and sales pitches for the magic system and then try to translate it into game terms.
Honestly I'd just love to see someone competent get their hands on the Stormlight Archive IP to make a tabletop out of. The whole spren bonding thing has a huge world of potential, and the Oaths even give a built in "Take a level in badass" mechanic to them.
There is an Mistborn RPG...
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Post by Seerow »

Korwin wrote:
Seerow wrote:
Hire Brandon Sanderson or some other "right now" named fantasy writer to write out a bunch of flavor text and sales pitches for the magic system and then try to translate it into game terms.
Honestly I'd just love to see someone competent get their hands on the Stormlight Archive IP to make a tabletop out of. The whole spren bonding thing has a huge world of potential, and the Oaths even give a built in "Take a level in badass" mechanic to them.
There is an Mistborn RPG...
Mistborn and SLA are two very different series (and iirc the Mistborn RPG wasn't done by anyone competent, and was an overall disappointment).
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Post by Dogbert »

Empower fighters and you get Exalted... which is not d&d.

Dumb casters down and you get 4E... not even going there.

The problem with d&d is on a concept level as d&d is by definition a high fantasy premise about "magic haves" and "have nots." Any attempted solution on a mechanics level is basically trying to fix what's fundamentally broken. In d&d land, magic is supposed to be >you, castles in the sky are supposed to exist, and Sleeping Beauty's evil queen is supposed to be able to become a dragon and spit fire (making a long story short, magic is supposed to exist, and it's supposed to be "magical enough").

At best, the most feasible solution that comes to my head is the WFRP approach: Split the game in tiers, with muggles, mugbloods, and casters being in different tiers with segregated narratives.
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Re: What SHOULD magic be like in D&D?

Post by ishy »

OgreBattle wrote:So there are a ton of legacy effects in D&D since it was cobbled together in the late 70's where wizards must have the options to shoot seizure rainbows, never-miss missiles, charm people, summon badgers, and induce sleep all at level 1, and a few months later outdo YHWH in biblical scale destruction and creation. Slitting sleeping goblin throats and charming your way past social encounters are among the things complained about with wizards being able to do everything thieves and men at arms can. And everything I said sorta applies to clerics too.

If you could start completely from scratch without needing to appease grognards though, how would you make the magic system work? Would you leave "sleep and slit their throats" as a first level spell and so on.
I don't see why anyone would consider sleep a problem spell. If a wizard starts casting a one-round spell at level one, just stab her in the face.

Since I want out of combat utility for my characters, you need to give characters magic. So assuming a progression like 3e, everyone needs magic at lvl ~5. Even if it is just magic like I have an unseen servant that is always active.
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Post by Korwin »

Seerow wrote:
Korwin wrote:
Seerow wrote:
Honestly I'd just love to see someone competent get their hands on the Stormlight Archive IP to make a tabletop out of. The whole spren bonding thing has a huge world of potential, and the Oaths even give a built in "Take a level in badass" mechanic to them.
There is an Mistborn RPG...
Mistborn and SLA are two very different series

Well, they do hang losely together.
(and iirc the Mistborn RPG wasn't done by anyone competent, and was an overall disappointment).
I have it somewhere around, but dont remember specifics... so probably is an disappointment.
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Korwin wrote:There is an Mistborn RPG...
a review found via seconds of googling wrote: Mistborn uses dice pools to determine whether an action is successful or not. Success is accomplished by rolling matching numbers. The matching numbers rolled become the Result, and must be equal to or higher than the required Difficulty (rated 1-5) to succeed at a Challenge. In Contests and Conflicts, success goes to the character with the highest Result. All sixes are ignored when determining Results, meaning the best roll will have matching fives.

Sixes are set aside and become Nudges. On a success, Nudges add a little pizazz and flair or quicken the attempt. On a failure, Nudges can help mitigate Complications.

Sometimes you may want to know not just who wins, but by how much. If you want to emphasize how badly one roll beat another, Outcome can be used. Outcome is figured by subtracting the lower roll from the higher roll. For example, if I roll two ones and my opponent rolls two threes, my opponent wins the contest with an Outcome of two (3 - 1 = 2). The Outcome can also serve as a guide when narrating what happened. An Outcome of one is a much narrower victory than an outcome of three or five.

Creating a dice pool is pretty straightforward. The base number of dice used is the rating for the most appropriate Attribute, Standing, or Power. This base number is modified (up and down) by Traits, Tools (sometimes Props), and Circumstances, and will lead to a player having between two and ten dice in a pool. For example, someone with a Physique of 4, a Natural Climber Trait, and a rope and grapple Tool would have six dice (4 + 1 + 1 = 6) in their dice pool for scaling the walls around Luthadel.

Ah, but isn't it possible to have less than two or more than ten dice in a pool? Yes, but those are handled a bit differently. Any dice beyond ten in a pool become automatic Nudges. If, for some reason, a player wants to use an Attribute, Standing, or Power that has been reduced to one die, they get to roll two, but the Result is automatically reduced by one. This means that a Result of three is reduced to a Result of two.
Yeah, that's the sort of shit that makes me auto-reject dicepools, even when they are probabilistically sound.

That's not narrative nor rules light, that's "I have no fucking clue what my character's chances of success are ever, nor does the MC". And I encourage anyone who ever meets Mr Sanderson at a convention to ask him what the odds of at least triples on 6d6 are when you don't count the 6s as part of those triples, and then follow up with how that changes if you need those triples-or-better to be of a face that's say 3 or higher.
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Post by FatR »

Fucking fuck, the forums ate my long-winded post with a dozen of examples from various fantasy books. So let me tell this stait:

(1)Magic being Just Better, either in principle or because magic-user have a much higher "ceiling" of power, is the core assumption of the vast majority of fantasy verses. Arguing that muscle power should remain relevant all the way is like arguing that you should equal chance against modern firearms with a sword.

(2)Where DnD systematically goes wrong is attempting to nerf offensive spell effects ever since they peaked in AD&D 2E, while providing all sorts of means to very easily and reliably shield oneself against direct physical assaults, which fantasy wizards usually lack.

(3)The solution is to both officially institute mandatory mojo acquisition/removal of mundane classes after some point and reduce the magic-users' capability to shield themselves impenentrably, having multiple stacking buffs is a shitty paragidm anyway.
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Post by Stubbazubba »

I bought and played the Mistborn RPG and Josh is 100% correct; you don't know when anything will ever work, ever. There is no way to predict success or failure, period, you can't even begin to estimate what you are most likely to roll without insane calculations no lay person can do. The magic systems, while true to the books, were broken (because magic rules in the books).

The only good thing about that RPG was the chargen. I don't remember exactly what, but it had some good things about it.

I often wondered if you could just straight change the dicepool system to a hit-counting system and solve 70% of that game's unplayability. Then I remember the combat is declare first, then act in reverse order of declaration, which is...I dunno, some people like it, but it takes forever to do a round of combat, and this is an IP where combat is cinematic and awesome. Doesn't work. You'd have to rewrite the whole game to make it work, and there's still no conceivable way to make playing a muggle OK without totally ignoring the books.

Stormlight Archive would have the same problem; the difference between mundane and Knights Radiant is gigantic, and it would be hard to tell anything other than the story of the Stormlight Archive with the system. Unless you extrapolate it out to some sort of Exalted setting where there's just two classes of people and society is just really that stratified. The one nice thing about SLA is it has separate, distinct magic systems. Ten, apparently. That's certainly enough to build a game around.
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Post by Scrivener »

I would love to see magic users have a much more focused scope.

As it stands the true strength of casters is everyone can do everything, choices like specializations and deities mean little in the grand scheme of things. I would like it if wizard chose a very narrow school, like lightning, augury or enhancement, that narrow school would have two to three spells each level. At higher levels you might have a choice of diversification versus potency (a second narrow school, or free heighten on your chosen school). This means two wizards of different traditions are drastically different, and if you print new spells you would just print a new school, stopping the inherent power creep of choice from supplements.

Clerics could work similarly, just substituting domains for schools and deeply trimming the standard spell list.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

The problem with eliminating all simple ways to 'go straight to win' is that it requires that all forms of realism be eschewed.

In reality, it's very easy for people to hurt themselves or others with the physical sciences. Chemistry in particular. Most people have cleaning products in their homes that, when mixed, produce free chloroamines. Chemistry students need a great deal of supervision to ensure that some disaffected individual doesn't make some deadly toxin.

If 'magic' were real, then it would probably be dead simple to hurt or kill people with it.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Occluded Sun wrote:If 'magic' were real, then it would probably be dead simple to hurt or kill people with it.
Honestly, this depends entirely on the OP question - 'what SHOULD D&D magic be'.

It is possible to run a 'historical' campaign that has 'real magic'. Bernard Cornwell's King Arthur series does a good job of describing magic that COULD be real... If you make your soldiers 'hard to see' before you sneak past the enemy sentries and you don't get seen, was it because of the magic or because the other sentries weren't watchful?

Ultimately, anything that gives you a straight bonus or penalty on a die would be difficult to prove as magic in character. Sure, we know that if you have a 50% chance of hitting something, and you get a +1 from Bless that you now have a 55% chance - but how apparent is that to the observer?

Even if you notice the effect, it's just as easily explained as a type of placebo effect. If the bishop exhorts you to fight like demons because every soul you send to hell will ensure you a century of bliss in heaven and you fight well, is it because of the magic or because of your belief?

As for more 'visible' effects, even a fireball isn't a great example of how easy it is to kill people. We know that a fireball detonated in a gasoline cloud won't ignite the gasoline droplets. Does that strain credibility? If you can accept that it causes burns to people in the area but doesn't burn objects, then you can probably accept other limitations on 'real magic'.
Seerow
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Post by Seerow »

That's not narrative nor rules light, that's "I have no fucking clue what my character's chances of success are ever, nor does the MC". And I encourage anyone who ever meets Mr Sanderson at a convention to ask him what the odds of at least triples on 6d6 are when you don't count the 6s as part of those triples, and then follow up with how that changes if you need those triples-or-better to be of a face that's say 3 or higher.
I wouldn't bother Sanderson about it personally. It's a near certainty he did none of the design work on the game, and if I got a chance to meet him at a convention I'd have a lot of other questions that he would be better able to answer (or at least get a RAFO card >_>)

Stormlight Archive would have the same problem; the difference between mundane and Knights Radiant is gigantic, and it would be hard to tell anything other than the story of the Stormlight Archive with the system. Unless you extrapolate it out to some sort of Exalted setting where there's just two classes of people and society is just really that stratified. The one nice thing about SLA is it has separate, distinct magic systems. Ten, apparently. That's certainly enough to build a game around.
Yeah in SLA you have 10 different powers, and 10 classes, each class gains access to 2. That combination of two also allows for synergies so that each class has access to abilities that the other class with access to the same surge can't use.

I also suspect there would be a place in an SLA based RPG for the Listeners as a race with their own special class. I mean they're a pretty cool take on similar concepts, with the ability to bond spren to modify their physical form and gain special powers. Sure certain spren are very very bad and cause major problems when bonded, but it doesn't mean you can't have Parshendi heroes who stick to "safer" spren, just like the existence of Blood Magic or Bug Shamans doesn't mean it's impossible to play a good Mage in Shadowrun.



But yeah, you definitely couldn't have SLA taking place during the same timeframe as the books without basically just telling the story of the books (though it could be interesting playing a group of people during the same timeframe who were bonded by spren and found each other independently of the main cast. Like some of the Interlude characters who have bonds but are mostly unrelated to the main story), going somewhere a couple generations down the line (or in the ancient past) where the Orders are clearly established, you can totally have a coherent game based around the world and magic system that would be fun to play. Just don't allow standard mundanes (or if taking place during the generation where the books take place, Mundanes are required to have Shards to keep up in combat. But even then they'll be left behind pretty quickly).
Last edited by Seerow on Thu Sep 04, 2014 7:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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