A long, rambling magic system thread

[DrPraetor]

If possible, I want to write a scalable open-ended magic system into the game engine for After Sundown. This may not be possible so I'm going to jabber a bunch about it first. I think I started and abandoned at least one other thread where I started to do this (but it might have been on another board).

There are very good reasons why the magic system in After Sundown doesn't work this way, and Assymetric Threat probably won't either. In both cases, having an infinite-variety wizard explosion is something you explicitly want to avoid.

But, let us suppose that did want to run a futuristic Ars Magica using the After Sundown engine. The purpose then is to support settings similar to Rifts and/or Shadowrun, with mages who can do an effectively infinite number of things, but not everything.

I'll express the other design goals in terms of the games which have them (in preference to pointing to fantasy novels, which have cool vignettes in them but are problematically vague):

Ars Magica: Especially in the surprisingly well-evolved and supported 5th edition, this game really delivers a lot in terms of making the wizards diverse, open-ended and playable.
One of the keys to this is that there are bonuses which are way bigger than the swing on the RNG. So once you can summon storms you can fly pretty-much automatically, and if all you can do is fly, you can't summon storms at all.
It also leverages the open-ended magic system into a number of sub-systems, especially for making magic items and having familiar spirits, which end up working reasonably well.

The rules will generate thresholds for a wide range of magical effects drawn from lists with many example difficulties and clear guidelines for adjusting those difficulties; large fixed bonuses (reductions in thresholds) will be used to differentiate levels of magic capability.

The magical effects will feed into (an arbitrary, expandable) number of subsystems to generate magical effects which are more complex than a spell which you cast.

There are problems with the system, of course. Some spells are very useful to cast on the fly (Wall of Fire) while others are really useful to have permanently on a building (Protection from Weather). The same issue inevitably crops up when you have different resource management systems drawing from the same effect tables as well. But we'll hope that things are balanced enough that it will work out with a minimum of special cases.

Rifts, Paladium and Shadowrun: I'll fill in some elaboration later.

Using an alternative focus for your magical effects, such as brewing potions, performing rituals, drawing magical symbols on things, and so forth, needs to be a viable alternative vs. just casting spells.

Mages should have specialized training, which should give them special abilities that embed them in the fantastic elements of the setting (Astral Projection, Wards vs. Spirits, Ley Line Phasing, Sense Extradimensional Monsters, etc.)

Summoning of various kinds should be important and interesting, on an equal footing with other types of magical foci.

WFRP: I'll fill in some elaboration later.

Wizards should have medium-sized splats. The spell system in WFRP is too limiting, but the conceptual space covered by each wizard splat (there are Fire Wizards who can manipulate literal fire and figurative fire in the form of anger or desire, but have no powers outside that sphere) is of the right size.

Risk of side-effects should be an acceptable resource management scheme; but the side-effect risk needs to be carefully modulated (so the perils of warp never straight-up kill you).

Runequest, Powers and Perils, and Stormbringer: I'll fill in some elaboration later.

The magic system should be well-integrated into the cosmology; this is related to Goals 4 (integration with fantastic elements), 5 (balanced summoning) and 6 (medium-sized splats).

Different traditions of magic should be available, and they should have a wide range of effects on how your wizard plays, partially-independent of your choice of magical foci.

Unconventional combinations of foci, as for example in Stormbringer where you summon spirits, and make magic items by binding summoned spirits into them (yes I know that isn't actually how Moorcock's novels worked but it's a cool conceit nonetheless), should be possible and should flow in a sensible and balanced way from the previous points.

Crawl (the Roguelike) and Retromud (the MUD): I'll fill in some elaboration later.

Major supernatural patrons splats should be a big deal and make substantial changes to what magic powers your wizard has and to how she interacts with the fantastic elements of the setting.

The fantastic elements of the setting should interact with mundane (or futuristic) skills in a synergistic way. The fantastic elements should be geared in such a way that representatives of different magical factions are both able to, and highly benefited by, joining the same party (street gang, cartel, band of mercenaries, whatever).

[Schleiermacher]

The main problem I see on first reading is that this:

One of the keys to this is that there are bonuses which are way bigger than the swing on the RNG. So once you can summon storms you can fly pretty-much automatically, and if all you can do is fly, you can't summon storms at all.

is an absolutely terrible fit for a dice pool system like AS, which attempts to model a "basically human, albeit really badass" scale. You'd want a short, mostly linear RNG -like the 1d10 that Ars Magica not coincidentally uses.

[DrPraetor]

Um, no. The linear vs. bell-shaped RNG determines the kertosis of the distribution (the relative frequency of outliers), it doesn't prevent you from shifting the entire distribution up and down the scale.

So in Ars Magica a basic wizard gets 1D10+20, while a mighty mage gets 1D10+50 - they are about three entire RNG swings apart.

To extend the After Sundown engine to that exact scale, a basic wizard gets 9D (0-6 successes) with his threshold reduced by 12; and a mighty mage gets, say, 12D (1-7 successes) with his threshold reduced by 30. The difference between the two is that you get fewer outliers with the bell-shaped curve, which Ars Magica tries to simulate (rather poorly, in my opinion) with their botch system. Although the botch system is at least easy to get a handle on quantitatively - you have a roughly (# of botch dice)% chance of actually botching.

Scaling a bell-shaped mechanic in this way does require you to accept what are basically free successes. These are nails on the chalkboard anathema to anyone who played SR1 in which free successes were used in the context of a very poor grasp on the underlying statistics.

Going back to the game entire - there are still some problems of narrativistic scale. In fact, the same mega-damage problems that bog down Rifts. Tanks want to be able to harm other tanks, tanks want to be invulnerable to knives, but you don't want tank shells to autokill the heroes. That's a distinct problem that is (last I talked about it with Frank) bogging down Asymmetric Threat, by the by.

But for the magic system these scale shifts don't have to cause such problems, although you want to avoid various forms of authodeath from the large threshold shifts.

[Grek]

I think you need to decide right away whether you want Ars Magica style freeform casting (where you describe what you want to happen and the MC determines a threshold) or a system based on Magic Physics (where you have specifically defined fundamental powers that interact with each other to produce more complicated effects).

[DrPraetor]

I think you need to decide right away whether you want Ars Magica style freeform casting (where you describe what you want to happen and the MC determines a threshold) or a system based on Magic Physics (where you have specifically defined fundamental powers that interact with each other to produce more complicated effects).

I was very much thinking Ars Magica - up to and including a table of guidelines for each Effect + School combination.

I'm not even sure how the Magic Physics alternative would work? Something like Sorcery in Runequest, where you have individually-small spells which you can chain together with logic? I forget how exactly it worked but even for characters with outrageous skill ratings, I call that complicated multicast stuff was essentially-never successful.

Now, there is going to be some building of more complicated powers out of little powers - so if you want a tower that detects Youkai and shoots frap beams at them, you need enough effect levels for both "Detect Youkai" and "Frap Youkai". But for those effect levels you look up the tables for Detect + Fae and Destroy + Fae.

[Grek]

Lets take your fire mage example. He's supposed to be able to control literal fires and metaphorical fires.

Ars Magica works on a Verb Noun system, where you cast a spell by picking a Verb off a list and a Noun off a list and then the DM letting the spell do anything that they agree is best described by you verbing the noun modulo some universal limits. The fire mage gets the Verbs ignite and extinguish and the Nouns object, creature, anger and desire.

With a Magic Physics system, you'd have rules for fire. How easy it is to set an object on fire, what happens to it when they catch fire, how long they burn for and what they leave behind. You'd also have rules for emotions. How they're quantified, how they connect to each other, how mages can access them and their properties once accessed. The fire mage gets two spells: Manipulate Flame and Manifest Emotion. The limits on those spells arise from the flammability index of love and the heat of the mage's flames.

[Previn]

Ars Magica works on a Verb Noun system, where you cast a spell by picking a Verb off a list and a Noun off a list and then the DM letting the spell do anything that they agree is best described by you verbing the noun modulo some universal limits. The fire mage gets the Verbs ignite and extinguish and the Nouns object, creature, anger and desire.

This... actually sounds really cool. Can anyone point out the problems while I read through some of the Den's issues with it, because if it was as awesome as it sounds, I would have expected to hear of it more.

[Stahlseele]

Well, the main problem i see with it is that that's not so much a rules system and more of MTP with way too much GM Approval and Influence needed from a players point of view . .
From the GMs point of view such things are nice because you can have cool stuff happen and still not have the lowly mage simply cast ignite on the big bad evil plot devices eyes by simply saying:"no, it does not work. does not matter that idt worked before."

[virgil]

There's an Ars Magica OSSR on this board relatively recently. I myself am running a campaign, but the magic hasn't been delved into deeply thus far because of new system jitters. As a result, I've not tested the fiat-property of it all & the players are keeping themselves firmly within the explicit guidelines if not just using the spell list with different parameters.

[Username17]

The noun-verb system is just a "many magic schools" system. If you have seven nouns and seven verbs (which isn't a lot), you have 49 schools of magic (which is a lot). You're just hiding that fact behind a layer of obfuscation by making the players generate the schools. And since they are procedurally generated, I'd bet even more money than I normally would that those schools would be nothing like balanced.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

With a Magic Physics system, you'd have rules for fire. How easy it is to set an object on fire, what happens to it when they catch fire, how long they burn for and what they leave behind. You'd also have rules for emotions. How they're quantified, how they connect to each other, how mages can access them and their properties once accessed. The fire mage gets two spells: Manipulate Flame and Manifest Emotion. The limits on those spells arise from the flammability index of love and the heat of the mage's flames.

So Ars Magica has rules like that (the rules for passions are somewhat hand-waivy), so again I'm not sure what distinction you are drawing.

Ars Magica has a very narrow definition of what constitutes a Spell, but in the sense that you mean it, each noun + verb combination is a spell. So it has a "Create Fire" table, a "Destroy Fire" table, and so on, which tells you the limit on the Create Fire spells you can do for a given Create Fire effect level. Likewise with the "Create Thoughts" table.

How is that different from your Magic Physics engine?

the main problem i see with it is that that's not so much a rules system and more of MTP with way too much GM Approval and Influence needed from a players point of view

the players are keeping themselves firmly within the explicit guidelines if not just using the spell list with different parameters.

In the first three editions, Stahlseele would be correct and virgil's playgroup would have found this impossible. The two last editions have a lot more, and better developed, guidelines than previous editions had. Furthermore, the internal reasoning of the magic system is reasonably well-developed (not as well-developed as Shadowrun, but close), so you can more or less answer how stuff should work. Now I happen to think that the internal reasoning is a pain, but I can see why someone would think it was cool.

There are still a lot of grey areas in adjudicating Ars Magica - which are exacerbated by various features of that internal reasoning, which modern readers have trouble with.

The reasons *I* don't want to run Ars Magica are:
1) It works poorly for stuff like "sneaking into the castle".

2) It is set in a game world where dark ages ideas on physics (objects come to a rest on their own without friction - heavy objects fall faster), medicine (leechcraft helps) and sociology (the king is divinely appointed to rule you) are real.

For example - in Ars Magica, you really really want to be able to drop boulders on people (because it does a lot of damage and bypasses their magic resistance).
Can you *teleport* inanimate matter around? Presumably yes, using the same guidelines as teleporting another person applied to rocks.

Another example - does deleting air create a vacuum? Can you suffocate people with it? Rules kind of imply you can't create vacuums, and that suffocation is impossible outside. But, it isn't strictly stated.

But if you declare the gray areas off-limits there are more than enough effects in each verb+noun to fill up a character sheet with spells.

and 3)

nothing like balanced

The procedural generation which makes the game anything other than a game of MTP does make the magic system unbalanced.

Plant and Animal are lame, for example. Because the game isn't MTP, it is just as difficult to heal a wolf as it is to heal a person (and a lot not as good.) The upgrade:
"make one person super-tough for a while" -> "make everyone in this mob super-tough for a while"
=
"make one wolf super-strong" -> "make that entire pack of wolves super-strong"

Mentem is outrageous - telepathically dominating everyone you meet is not a high level power. It is the same level as telepathically dominating wolves.

It also has quite-possibly the *lamest* hand-waiving excuse for all this ever put to print - we're just trying to tell good stories, see.

So if you are a master of mind control, Mister Cavern is supposed to fuck with you ("generate stories") to reflect your ability to do this, including as a last resort having literal deus ex machina punish you for overthrowing the natural order or something. I suppose that if you insist on being master of plants, the DM is likewise tasked with providing dryads for you to ward off or whatever to make yourself feel useful.

If you have seven nouns and seven verbs (which isn't a lot), you have 49 schools of magic (which is a lot). You're just hiding that fact behind a layer of obfuscation by making the players generate the schools.

Ars Magica doesn't have that problem, it has 5 verbs and 12 nouns and it has 60 sections on what each verb/noun combination can do, which are in fact reasonably thorough (although not balanced.)

Actually I was thinking of these verbs:
Create
Detect
Harm
Liberate
Obscure
Restrain
Shape
Transmute

And these nouns:
Biosystems
Events
Forces
Places
Materials


Then in addition to all of that, you have 13 magic schools which determine your schtick and place further restrictions on what you can do.

So most schools do get a blast spell, which works more or less like a Shadowrun Mana Bolt and is governed by Harm + Biosystems, but your special effect, special rules, and relevant level calculations are different if your power comes from Ahuras, then if it comes from Gnosis or ... Irony? As Champions showed us, "Fire and Passion" can do anything - if you need to fly, you turn your lower body into a fire tornado and fly around. The individual magic schticks/splats are defined by what you can do easily and/or well.

Will that huge heap of differences be balanced? Certainly not on the first try. If this were easy I would've done it already.

[Grek]

How is that different from your Magic Physics engine?

In Ars Magica, the basic resolution mechanic for spells is "The DM will set a DC for your spell based on what it does and what noun/verb combination they feel best describes it. If you pass the DC, your spell works." That is: you can ask the DM to let you have any effect from a spell ou like, but the effects of the spell determine how hard the spell is to cast and whether you have it available in the first place.

In a magic physics system, all of the available spells are listed in the book. No procedural generation or freeform description of magical effects occurs. The effects of each spell is fixed and the DC for each spell is listed. The DM interpretation and freeform aspects happen when spells interact with other spells, or with the world around them in unusual ways. The objective behind writing spells is to create verisimilitude and to give spells a wide range of applications while still retaining a limited scope and internally consistent rules.

For a concrete example: Our hypothetical fire mage needs two discrete spell effects in a magic physics system: One that lets him control the spread of fire and another that lets him make sympathetic connections between objects and a subject's emotions. Those two effects let him do everything he is supposed to know how to do and very little outside that sphere. In your noun/verb list at the bottom of your post, they need something like Shape Biosystems to do the emotion altering work and Shape Materials or possibly Shape Forces to do the firebug work, or possibly Harm instead of Shape for some of those. But even "Shape Biosystems" is an incredibly broad power that could be a character all by itself, with the emotion altering effect being a side note.

[Korgan0]

Here's the thing: Ars Magica isn't "go down on the DM for a good DC." It's a great deal more robust than that, since all the verbs and all the nouns actually have very legitimate, robust domains that don't trangress on each other. Here's the problem: understanding how those work, which is never really explained in the rules explicitly, requires an understanding of certain schools of medieval metaphysics (i.e. not Scotus and not Ockham), which is really very different from how modern metaphysics, and indeed modern physics, works. In other words, you have to slog through some of the most complex, difficult, poorly translated, arcane philosophy in existence to get it, since in addition to the medievals you really have to have a decent grip on Aristotle, in addition. Like, if you don't know the difference between the fourfold and tenfold divisions (assuming you adopt the anti-linguistic position), or at least an equivalent understanding of the distinction between properties and essences in these kinds of metaphysics, you can't really adjudicate Ars Magica properly, and that's a really fucking tall order, unless you have a PhD in this particular sub-sub-sub field of philosophy.

To be precise, to show that I'm not full of shit, I'll explain how all the Techniques work within this system. Creo is both creating matter (not souls, that's God's domain), and improving things solely in accordance with their final cause, despite acting on the material cause (Art and Academe, 24). Rego operates on certain specific qualities, namely those that can change naturally, and other predicates such as posture, action, and place. Muto effects those changes that cannot occur naturally in both quality and quantity. Perdo does the reverse of Creo; eliminates matter and moves things away from their final causes. Lastly, Intellego allows for perception; I'm not going to go further as medieval philosophy of mind isn't something I've really delved into. Now, the obvious response to this whole thing is as follows: "sure, Korgan0, you can say that Rego only acts on natural changes, but why the fuck can't I say that me turning into a horse is a natural change, or that making a meat pie get me drunk is a natural change?" And ordinarily, I couldn't, and the DM would have to pull something out of their ass, which is how we get into exactly the kinds of things that Grek highlights as a problem, where a legitimate character optimization strategy is to be the DM's significant other, by virtue of it implicitly reducing all your DC's. However, "natural" actually means something in the world of Ars Magica. It points to a set of really existing characteristics that things in the game world have, and that can be elucidated via not only game material, but by going back and seeing what, exactly, it is that real-life medieval people (and Aristotle) actually believed. Naturally, there's a lot of debate about these things in the actual corpus, and some adjudication is called for. But, in the end, there's something you can use to adjudicate, and have actual arguments over. So, humans and horses have objectively different substances (since humans have souls and horses don't), so changing into a horse is not a natural change for a human. And so on, and so on, and so on. Ultimately, if you have a magical system that acts on the theoretical building blocks of the universe, you need to have those building blocks clearly defined, which is, essentially, the task of any metaphysics worth its salt. In other words, you don't need a magic physics system. You need a magical metaphysics system, capable of adjudicating categories and what kinds of changes require what kinds of ontological baggage.

As an example to bolster my point, Shadowrun's magic system has been so consistent and effective throughout lord knows how many revisions because it's based on a consistent set of metaphysics, which allows for clearly working magic.

The obvious problem that crops up, of course, is translating your elegant, perfect, and impeccable metaphysics (reviewed by the ghosts of Aristotle, Kant, and Quine) into the clumsy vehicle of TTRPG RNG's. And this is where Ars Magica falls down somewhat. While all the Forms and Techniques have very clearly delineated margins, actually assigning difficulty levels to things can hamper things, somewhat. ArM5 takes the shortcut of making spontaneous magic suck total mega ass, meaning that every piece of magic worth a damn is gonna happen via formulae, which in turn means that all the kinks can be worked out ahead of time. Ultimately, though, RNG's are an abstraction. Unless how difficult it is to cast a spell for a given character is a metaphysical property in of itself (confusing, to say the least), the fact that non-discrete phenomena will ocassionally fall in one segment or another, quite frankly, isn't a huge deal. If your TTRPG doesn't suck, most of the effects your character that are relevant to common gameplay spaces will have clear delineating mechanics, which means you can pretty easily assign difficulties to those things, since they're necessarily discrete.

I'm pretty tired, and i know it sounds like I fucked a thesaurus, but hopefully I can clear up any questions.

[DrPraetor]

The underlying physics don't have to be perfect. Ars Magica is seriously borked because it violates real-world physics in such a severe way (also it has a category for Illusions or Appearances which makes no fricking sense) but even Shadowrun has problems - Shadowrun magic is vitalist, and vitalism isn't real. Is a test tube completely full of viral capsids "solid" on the Astral Plane? That's an impossible question to answer - but it also doesn't really matter. "Is alive" is well-enough understood from our own experience that we can use it in the Shadowrun game without tripping over ourselves for the edge cases.

So the magical schticks associated with the different traditions and guidelines need to be at-least-almost that rigorously centered.

First, the basic structure of these things in terms of the After Sundown mechanics. These thresholds changes are huge, they take you way off the RNG. That's okay, because you then get huge reductions in threshold based on your Verb and Noun ratings. You always use the single most appropriate Verb and Noun (so there is none of that pre-requisite crap from Ars Magica, which is an abortion.)

But those reductions in thresholds cannot do more than cancel the threshold penalty from the effect you are generating. Thus, if you are high enough level to cast "Mentally Dominate City", you still have to meet the (Empathy + Willpower) / 2 threshold on your own (Persuasion + Willpower) / 2 test in order to hit individual people (and each individual gets to soak the magical effect by rolling their own Willpower + Edge, potentially giving you only partial control or letting them break free if you order them to do something nasty etc.). That is, having huge amounts of magic ranks lets you dominate more people, longer, without side effects, from farther away etc. but does not change how you roll the dice to dominate each individual person.

Second, every Magical tradition has a Schtick. These are a parralel universe of guidelines for which enough examples need to be given for them to be individually logical.
-- An effect which is comfortably within the Schtick (shooting a fireball, for a fire mage) has the normal threshold adjustment from your Guideline. There are a list of effects (does fire damage, causes people to become angry or lustful) associated with each tradition, and you get these at normal cost.

-- An effect which is an extension of your Schtick - and this can be most things - has double the threshold penalty from the guidelines (or +4, whichever is greater.) Examples would include - turning your legs into a fire tornado in order to fly around, mesmerizing people who look into the dancing flames in order to (whatever, really). These spells also take a complex action instead of a simple action to cast, and their effects are delayed a turn as well.

-- If you can't make the elemental control work at all ("I build these logs into a house by setting fire to them?" it's hard to think of where this would come up), or if you try to do something that your magic school is explicitly weak at doing (fire mages are explicitly weak at any magic that makes things colder, so your borked even if you come up with a sensible fire spell to do that), you get a +TRIPLE>8?TRIPLE:8 penalty to your threshold.

Now, I'm going to use the existing powers in After Sundown (mainly the sorcery effects) to work this up.

I'm fiddling with the borders between the verbs as I go. In general, Shape applies only when no other verb applies. Anything which is most-defined by being hidden or subtle is Obscure (even if does something else entirely.) That's going to be a tough guideline because then Obscurantists will want to do everything as definitively-hidden in order to use Obscure guidelines all the time. Have to think about that one.

Command *
Mesmerism *
Conditioning **
Possession ***
Mob Mind *** : Restrain + Biosystems. If you want to control robots or computers you need Restrain + Events.

Suggestion *
Cloud Memory ** : Obscure + Biosystems.

Quickness *
(the rest of celerity) ** or *** : Liberate + Biosystems. If you want to speed up a car like a Shadowrun spirit, you need Liberate + Materials. If you want to speed up a complex procedure that isn't physically moving through space (like a computer program), you need Liberate + Events.
Liberate + Place has a parallel trajectory that enables you to speed up everything moving through an area, whatever it may be.

Quicken Sight **
Rapid Thoughts *** : Detect + Events. Detect spells do not have to provide the information to you, so this is still a Detect spell even if someone else gets the benefit.

Clinging * : This is a limited form of flight, which is Shape + Forces.

Devastation ** : This is a limited form of telekinesis, which is Shape + Forces.

Force Field *** : This is straight up telekinesis, which is Shape + Forces.

Vigor *
Giant Size ** : Transmute + Biosystems.

Earth Quake *** : Creating earthquakes is Create + Forces - whether you do this by punching the ground or something is a function of your schtick.

Supernatural Senses * : Sense + Forces.

Aura Perception * : Sense + Events.

Sensory Damper * : Obscure + Forces. This is an odd corner for some "protection" effects to show up in.

Psychometry : Sense + Events.

Telepathy: Sense + Biosystems.

Divination: Sense + Events.

Dimensional Translocation: Transmute + Places.

Patience of the Mountains: Transmute + Biosystems.

Revive the Flesh: Shape + Biosystems.

Restoration: Shape + Events, and quite a bit more limited in scope than what vampires get (probably turns you into a Liche.)

Indomitability: Liberate + Biosystems.

Endless Persistence: Liberate + Biosystems.

Skin of Night: Transmute + Events, but ridiculously high level. Transmute + (depends on damage source) would work on particular sources of aggravated damage.

I need to set up a table and see what holes I'm making myself. Anyone care to point out major hazards that I have failed to foresee?

[Grek]

Korgan: I didn't bring up the DM's Girlfriend issue as a problem. I don't actually think it is a problem. Or, at least, not a rules problem. My issue is that abstract Noun/Verb systems do not lend themselves well to character concepts like "Pyromancer".

Obviously any Pyromancer worth his salt should be able to create fire, detect fire, harm people with fire, restrain fires and shape fires. But what noun do you use? Fire definitely is not a Biosystem or a Place and probably isn't a Event either, but both Forces and Materials are way too fucking broad. Obviously our Pyromancer isn't supposed to be using Create Force to produce gravity, or Shape Material to do walls of stone. They're just supposed to do stuff with fire.

Frankly, any single Verb/Noun combination on DrPraetor's list could be a single character concept and a very thematically powerful character concept at that. But none of them are concepts for characters I'd be interested in playing in a game that's nominally about medieval wizards. They're way too fucking broad.

[DrPraetor]

The game is meant to be about modern, futuristic, or post-apocalyptic wizards. I'm copying the verb + noun aspect of Ars Magica - which many people do not like for exactly the reasons you name - but not any aspect of the setting.

Pre-existing fires are Forces (as would be other sustained chemical reactions, if that matters.)

So if you had Create + Forces = 8, you could create an environmental fire hazard at level 8 easily; killing people by shooting them with fire is actually Destroy + Biosystems, but you do fire damage because you're a fire wizard. If you wanted to use Create + Materials to cause some lava (which is close enough to fire, also this is happening because the lava is angry) to spew out of the ground and make a wall of stone, you'd only be able to generate a level (Create + Materials) / 2 wall of stone type effect easily.

I'm trying to design a system in which some fire wizards can put out a building which is on fire, and some can't because they don't have Constrain. But at high level in the correct combination of things, the fire wizard can do extended-schtick stuff like hypnotize people with fire, or fly around with a flaming tornado instead of legs.

If this results in an open-ended system in which nonetheless the powers of each individual wizard are rather limited, I view that as a strength because wizards are way better than you in every system under the sun so wouldn't that be a refreshing change?

This system sets up some admittedly-strange combinations of powers that end up packaged together; as long as that works out for the science fiction setting I think that is okay.

[Username17]

If you wanted to do Noun/Verb bullshit, then you'd probably want your value in casting a spell to be based on the higher of the relevant Noun/Verb numbers plus half of the lower of the two numbers. So you could be a Fire mage by having a fuck tonne of Fire and only a tiny smattering of various verbs. Or you could be a Floobification wizard by taking a fuck tonne of Floobify and only a tiny smattering of various nouns. Or you could invest in medium values in various nouns and verbs and be pretty good when your nouns and verbs match up and slightly shit where you only have a noun or a verb going for you.

Setting the rate at which a noun or verb becomes more expensive to buy up as your skill increased would set the incentives for which kind of wizard was optimal and therefore most frequently used.

Ars Magica isn't "go down on the DM for a good DC." It's a great deal more robust than that, since all the verbs and all the nouns actually have very legitimate, robust domains that don't trangress on each other. Here's the problem: understanding how those work, which is never really explained in the rules explicitly, requires an understanding of certain schools of medieval metaphysics (i.e. not Scotus and not Ockham), which is really very different from how modern metaphysics, and indeed modern physics, works. In other words, you have to slog through some of the most complex, difficult, poorly translated, arcane philosophy in existence to get it, since in addition to the medievals you really have to have a decent grip on Aristotle, in addition.

When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

For now, I'm working under the assumption that Nouns and Verbs will be capped to start, but linear in progression (the same advancement scheme as After Sundown).

A linear progression makes hyper-specialization perhaps over-attractive anyway, but it's certainly worth keeping in mind that this is a degree of freedom over which we could manipulate the math.

[Username17]

Well, if you just do things linearly, there is absolutely no fucking reason for people to buy up their nouns and their verbs. People are just going to be Verb Mages, and then you might as well just have five schools of magic named things like "Creo" or whatever the fuck.

If your goal is to get to 20 points in the noun/verb combinations you love, and you get only 20 points to spend, it of course doesn't make any difference how you split that up. You get exactly one Noun/Verb combo, and it doesn't matter if the split is 10/10 or 18/2 or whatever. But if you get 50 points, then splitting things 10/10 gives you two verbs and three nouns - which is six combos at 20. On the other hand, if you put 19 into Verbs and 1 into all the nouns, you get twenty combos at 20, and you still have 2 points left over.

Even if you go triangularly like Ars Magica actually does, it's still grossly in favor of specialization on one end of the noun/verb split. Going 10/10 in 2 verbs and 2 nouns costs 220 relative points, while going 19/1 in one verb and all ten nouns costs only 200 relative points. It's not quite the "everything you can do, I can do better" thing that happens with pure linear costs (and if you have enough points, there are actually some breakpoints in the distant science fiction future where putting 10 in every noun and every verb makes you come out ahead for a little while), but we're still at the point where the verb specialist is paying less points to get two and a half times the number of spell categories.

If you want people to invest in both nouns and verbs, you have to either give people separate points to buy the two types of thing with (at which point, there are no relative costs at all), or have the cost progression of getting higher values in a single noun or verb be really fast (like, cubic or something), or give solid actual abilities for specific levels in both nouns and verbs. And of course, while the last one is the only one that allows you to really keep a linear or triangular cost structure, you'll also notice that it's literally the system from Changeling.

Because in all ways at all times, Ars Magica would be better if it adopted ideas from World of Darkness. Because World of Darkness literally is the branch of Ars Magica that tried to actually advance things.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

You could make the progression linear, but double the lower of the two scores. That would cause you to spread out - or, at least, cause you to take both a Verb and a Noun.

Ars Magica had two incentives to get you to spread things out at least a bit:
1) Everyone gets a magical focus, which doubled the lower of the two (verb/noun) for certain spells. This is a 1 pt virtue so in practice everyone takes it.
2) Verbs are still better than Nouns, so Nouns give you a fixed bonus as well. A few of these are super-important (Vim gave you a bonus to your save vs. explodes when defeated roll, for example.) They are decidedly unbalanced.

It is super-important that the arithmetic works out, although that may mean it needs to go through several iterations. How about, with a triangular progression:
a) Within the focus of your tradition, the lower of your verb + noun is doubled. EDIT: So you get (lower of pair x 2) + (higher of pair).
b) Outside the focus of your tradition, you get the raw sum of the verb + noun.
c) If, for some reason, you are trying a spell that is specifically weak for your tradition, you only get the lower of verb or noun.

How's that? I'm not sure how to work a triangular progression into the After Sundown rules, though.

[DrPraetor]

So I re-read Frank and AH's oMage vs nMage comparison - I now know exactly how NOT to run a country.

I'm taking the Lathe of Heaven, subtracting the angle where reality is explicitly a dream (which is the part that is most like oMage), and swapping in the magic system more-or-less from the Wheel of Time, albeit without an explicit Creator. We'll see how this goes.

=====
It's important that you have a plot which gives the characters a reason to play together, and also gives them the freedom to sandbox-game it, drive around LA looking for bitches and big-ass cars, while playing social challenges with other wizards.
So the characters have a common goal in opposing their rogue's gallery, but there are enough colorful characters that you can get invited to their parties anyway.
Thus, when Anubis (leader of the Pack, a dog-headed cybernetic street-gang who is trying to achieve immortality by getting Muggles to worship them; they get plenty of spells from demons) invites you to his estate for a party - you go.
But you reluctantly leave half-way through if someone threatens to release Colour out of Space spores in the subway.

=====
So in a fantasy game, people need to be invested in the fantastic elements. I like the following conceit:
[*] There is a cosmic infindibulum (hence the True Source), to which ordinary people do not have access, but Mages can go on vision quests and get stuff. Doing so is difficult, but important and worthwhile, because the True Source can and will do amazing stuff - whether your vision quests involve asking for things from a recognizable agent is not guaranteed. Amazing stuff includes raising the dead, traveling back and forth in time, and giving you cryptic wisdom that if you heed it will result in fixes to arbitrarily thorny problems. Is this a deus ex machina to which we are fapping? Yes, it is, because every player character is a fucking wizard and if vision quests don't do amazing shit, you have zero investment in the fantastic elements of the setting.
The goal is to have a basically humanist non-deity, but also to avoid preaching at the players since that is boring and also a turn-off for religious people.
[*] The True Source has no relationship whatever to healing crystals, pyramid power, or the theory of Atlantis.
[*] There are demons who may or may not want you to go on vision quests, but they definitely want to give you evil spells. Unlike whatever entities may or may not interact with you during vision quests, they are definitively individual agents. Demons also want to give you cryptic instructions that, if you follow them, will give you what you want but also cause terrible things to happen (so like the Devil in that Stephen King novel).

I'm taking a conscious tack away from more cynical settings. This isn't a horror game, it's an Ursula K. Le Guin novel; there are demons who would love to slather on the grimderp (and may occasionally succeed), but the villains are for the most part bad guys because they are selfish or ambitious or tragic or wrong-headed or in-the-way, and they're no more evil than is credible in the real world (which can be plenty evil, but is generally only slightly evil and even sympathetic from their own point of view).

So, Mages have insight, which is the definitive thing that makes you a Mage and lets you go on vision quests. You've gone on at least one, and you got the True Source to be enable you to cast spells, so now you can.

You don't really understand how your insight works, and you can't explain it to other people. Spells have been previously generated for your tradition of magic by asking the True Source, and the particular rituals, chants, mental exercises that you do actually matter, but people without insight cannot make the magic work by repeating the words - although they can be celebrants (basically, living props) in ritual casting.

Miracles are a big enough deal that you want to get more of them and that people have opinions about what you should use them for; the players had better care about these opinions or the entire conceit collapses because they won't want to play magic politics.

Things I have to avoid:
[*] The force of infinite benevolence that gives you the power to cast spells is not in favor of child rape, bestiality, purging the heathens, or shooting fireballs at people. You can learn fireball but you have to get that spell from Demons (or cast it spontaneously from your Forces rating, which the True Source will give you.)
[*] It can't (not won't, can't) give you definitive answers to theological questions that make any sense. If you understand why it can't (you may or may not), that understanding is part of your insight that you can't in turn explain to other people (including the player). This is a cheap dodge, live with it. This includes such stuff as "are you God?", "what happens after we die?", "why are there malevolent demons trying to lead people astray?" and other basic realities of the setting which are intended to be mysterious.
[*] It has tremendous respect for free will and thus will not, for example, establish world peace by fiat. If you try to discover "why is there evil in the world?", this is what you will find - I'm willing to use Thomas Aquinas' arguments here, because I think they solve the problem in a relatively satisfactory way.
[*] The True Source won't do anything wicked, EXCEPT that it will give you magic powers even if you yourself are wicked. Probably this is also because of free will.

Assuming that is enough to get the players to agree that the fantastic elements of the setting are worth arguing over, this enables you to introduce factions of people with insight, whose primary purpose is to dispute how to handle this situation:
[*] Some Mages get magic and now they have it, which they think is really cool. It is generally assumed PCs will be in this group.
[*] Some Mages think that the True Source is inaccessible for a reason and that going on vision quests and getting things is actually a mistake. They're a minority but the True Source won't tell them they're wrong.
[*] Some Mages think that getting the personal ability to cast spells is a waste of good wishes, or vain and selfish, and you should get super-science or negotiate the end to individual wars instead. This is the technocracy, except they need a new name. They are not opposed to magic because they hate magic, and they accept that magic exists - they just think it is a waste of good wishes, since if you wish for superscience you can just tell people about it and it works (although they may not always do so), while only other people who have spent a wish to join your tradition can learn your spells.
[*] You can also learn spells from other wizards; generally only wizards of your own tradition, and anyway they would probably be out-of-schtick for you if you learned another tradition's spells anyway.

These groups are rivals who are competing to see who can achieve the most good (as is one group of demons, from their perspective), thus conflict will tend to be of a non-violent nature.

There are also several flavors of demons (which are called astrological Archons in the rules text and by one of the western magic splats, but have different names according to other wizards - I'm toying with having different traditions of wizards divide them up differently, which would be realistic but possibly overburdened), who have human flunkies and which may require fireballs and bullets:

[*] Terrestrial Archons are spirits who want physical rulership of the world. They can teach mages spells, but their coincidence-based magic increases their own power rather than causing general harm. They tend towards dangerous extremes - so some of them are anarchists for whom rulership consists of general societal collapse. Terrestrial Archons throw fun parties, either Eyes Wide Shut type shit for the powerful or stylish riots or whatever. Terrestrial Archons do not really seem capable of engaging in philosophical discussion of why they behave this way; although they may study such things as a means of persuasion, it is a front. Terrestrial archons are fundamentally worldly and they don't really have opinions on such matters.
Bad Terrestrial Archons provide a general excuse to be shadowrunners against the corrupt governments and megacorps, if that is what you want to do (it is assumed that this is what you want to do.)

[*] Planetary Archons, or Demons, are spirits who seem devoted to evil for its own sake. They have a drive to grant monkeys-paw style wishes to people and to otherwise lead them into wickedness. They don't know why they're doing this, and many would like to stop (others don't really seem sentient). Mages can bind them as servants and they are into this but many demons wish to become human. Others seem to enjoy living as sarcastic demon swords. They will teach you fireball with minimal convincing, since burning people alive is wrong. "Why don't you try that out on some babies? Pretty please?"
Straight-up cackling satanists impel a response of ultraviolence in most circumstances. If you want to try and solve this problem without violence, you should be able to run such a campaign, however.

[*] Things-once-men are normal humans (lacking insight) who have made deals with Planetary Archons in which they give up some or all of their conscience in exchange for power. There are whole clades of these things, they are bad news. The Risen are basically the same thing except the deal included coming back from the dead as a host body for a demon.
Sometimes these entities want to recover their humanity; maybe they are sometimes a playable splat because they acquire insight even though they are monsters?

[*] Sidereal Archons claim to be angels and this may in fact be true; they may also be non-human beings with insight, whatever that means. They are all Lorax and they speak for the trees - they also get stuff from the True Source (unlike other Archons they have their own verb/noun values instead of fixed powers); Archons do not do anything harmful themselves but they have Terrestrial Archons and magical beasts as flunkies who will fuck your shit up.

There are ley lines which are places of demonic power. Thus, player characters who climb the "place of power" ability tree get bonuses in the places their enemies are, and not at home. Ley lines are dangerous because they attract the Color out of Space (which is a mindless, and particularly nasty, Planetary Archon.)

=====
Sorta unrelated (except to the demons above), you have a fixed number of permanent magic slots.

You can spend these to have bound demons, to have human flunkies with limited magic powers, and to have permanent enchantments cast on yourself of various kinds. You need to go to the lab to swap these things around but that is the only lab work mechanic - you don't keep track of how many weeks you spent brewing an alternative potion unless you abuse your permanent-enchantment shuffling (if you try to shuffle your slots more than once per game session this is considered abusive, unless there is a multiple-week layover.)

Your demon flunkies are going to be called Goblins and if they're killed you have to provide new bodies for them (another lab activity we are abstracting away). The paradigm example of this is that you use alchemy to make pumpkins grow arms and legs; you can also animate corpses or whatever is appropriate to your tradition/schtick. Demons cannot generally do this on their own, although some can strike a deal with a mortal where the Demon gets to assume their identity when they die. In general, Goblins want to become humans - the True Source can do this but you have to do a series of vision quests; if you succeed you win game mechanically - the Goblin becomes human but the permanent magic slot the goblin was in gets upgraded.

Should some goblins get insight and thus be a playable splat? I'd need to come up with a couple of comparable splats that would interact with the rules in a similarly intensive way (which could include other sorts of playable archons?), and that would be tough.

[Mask_De_H]

The fact you're playing a game with fantastic elements is generally enough of a reason to interact with the fantastic elements, unless it's something like nMage where there's no reason to interact with anything. The true source vision quest stuff is neat, but unless everybody belongs to the same tradition and initiates at the same time, the main part of what you do to get people interested in the fantastic bits is solo play. Making the conflict about the archons and the humans that love them gives you more of a driving impetus to band together and do shit.

Also, I wouldn't make it so the Archons don't know why they're lolevil; they should have goals and motivations so you can have intellectual debates and deeper characters. Sure, the lesser demons can just be automatons of alignment, but it's boring if they all are, unless you're doing a Shin Megami Tensei thing where you can sway archons to your way of thinking and each faction of archons has a distinct ideology.

If you can't explain your paradigm, how do paradigms get started? Do a bunch of people experience the same kind of vision quest and that determines their starting paradigm? If so, does that mean the Source understands the concept of superscience innately? Is the Source sentient or sapient? Because if it just exists like gravity and magic is an act of will or wishing or whatever, you can dodge having to answer the big questions without it being blatantly obvious you're dodging the big questions.

[DrPraetor]

Mask De H makes some good points which I will think about and then either change my mind or not, depending. The super science angle needs revision, because the feature of the technocracy where they not only have individual superscience breakthroughs but also get to look fantastic in suits and be somewhere near as good as Batman in spite of not pretending not to have powers? I want to keep that.

As regards vision quests going it alone - splitting up the party is to be avoided. I would prefer that, when you on vision quests, the other party members get to tag along because sailor moon.

[DrPraetor]

I'm drawing a bunch of this from Gnosticism of a particular stripe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge#Valentinus

Terrestrial Archons have no spiritual nature - whatever else that means, they don't care for philosophy. There are Demiurges (plural), who are the most powerful Terrestrial Archons and are regularly called upon when you cast spells. Terrestrial Archons are frighteningly amoral and untrustworthy - they have reason, but lack the moral sensibilities that people have. This implies a very alien sort of thinking - so for example they have no intrinsic objection to being treated "unfairly", which is so basic to human cognition that most people don't think about it. You can have intellectual discussions with them but they want they want and introspection doesn't interest them. To the extent that I'm borrowing anything from the spirits in nWOD, these are they.

Planetary Archons - spirits of wickedness, proper demons - do have a spiritual nature and have philosophical ideas about their role in the cosmos which they may embrace, resent, rail against, or wish to change. They have a terrifically intense compulsion to do evil for its own sake, but they have free will and may not be happy with their lot. However, they do not know for sure about their own origins - they tend to blame the True Source or human wizards for their existence and may not be happy about it. Demons have a sense of right and wrong which is more or less human - they prefer wrong for others but are very sensitive to being wronged themselves. These beings are also consciously patterned on the demons in Journey to the West and related stories, which are profoundly evil and would like to rape and eat people, but are nonetheless capable of being reformed.

There are also Planetary Archons who do not seem sentient, or are at most dimly aware of the world around them, or have intellectual faculties which are totally alien to humans - they may not be the same order of being exactly, but they are clearly related. Seemingly-non-sentient demons are the inverse of terrestrial archons; they have souls (and thus something like a human moral sense) but little or no reason. They are petty and vengeful in spite of their lack of understanding, and it can be very dangerous to disrespect them. So malevolent genus loci (such as the Colour out of Space, a personal favorite of mine) are of this category.

In one of Terry Pratchett's later novels, there's something (a dragon?), about which he says that people don't need to believe in it - it believes in itself. I want that as the tag line for the Sidereal Archons but can't find the quote. Sidereal Archons regard themselves as lesser divinities of nature, or as angels. Some of them are basically elves; others are talking trees and things. I'm still trying to decide how to flesh them out - wearing white hats and rescuing people is supposed to the PCs job, so I prefer to set up other would-be good-guys as rivals if not outright antagonists. If the natural world is magically delicious, it is easy to set up Lorax types as sympathetic antagonists with a legitimate gripe against all this culture and stuff that humans are doing; but, who nonetheless absolutely must be opposed.

Does that provide a basic legendarium with sufficient storytelling capacity, do you think or no?

[DrPraetor]

Sooner or later I need to get back to cranking on individual spell guidelines, but in addition to sailor moon there is also Lythande (the guy, who later turns out to be a woman in disguise, with the blue pentagram):


and Ged from wizard of the earthsea:


Both of whom have secrets which fuck you over if other wizards learn them but which you might wish to share with your closest allies.

I think this conceit will drive the Coterie mechanic, and unless it comes across as too forced, I will use this to encourage mages of multiple traditions to form coteries together.

The basic idea is, if you know another wizard's secret you can summon them (even if you yourself are on a vision quest), and if you are of the same tradition you can undo their works and diablerize them highlander style, although this is not easy or automatic.

So Mages of different traditions ally with one another by trading secrets.