Better Magic Schools

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Chamomile
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Better Magic Schools

Post by Chamomile »

Quick background: As part of my Kickstarter I made a few one-page, one-shot RPGs, one of which was about crazy wizards inventing spells. In it, you played as a wizard with access to a certain amount of six types of mana stolen from that one time Frank talked about making a better Magic: the Gathering game, and you could use that mana to cast spells from any of the eight D&D schools. Each spell had to have a totally unique combination of mana and school. If there was a combination of mana and school that didn't yet have a spell, you could make one up, and other players at the table could vote on whether that was acceptable, with the GM having veto power over anything that would break the game or which clearly violates the (admittedly vague) boundaries between mana types or schools.

There were some more details, but they don't matter. What matters is this: A wizard with only one point of red mana could cast any of eight different spells, because Evocation (1R) is different from Illusion (1R). A wizard with a point of red mana and a point of purple mana could cast 24 different spells, because Evocation (1R), Evocation (1P), and Evocation (1R/1P) are all different spells. Mana spent doesn't return until sunrise. This means there is lots of blank space for wizards to invent new spells, but also that wizards don't have a giant arsenal spells constantly at their disposal which gives them no incentive to bother inventing new spells instead of just using Evocation (3R) on everything. You cast that once, and now you've got an orange and a yellow left over and you start looking at the group's grimoire to see what spells you can cast with that, and what blank spots are left to invent new spells that can hopefully get you out of whatever jam you're in.

This brings me to my question: Are D&D's eight magic schools really the best for this kind of thing? On the one hand, the main function here is to serve as an input for mad libs spell generation. In that sense, what you want is something that is easily remembered. The six color mana is ROYGBP, which most people know from elementary school. The eight schools are common knowledge amongst the kinds of people who play obscure one-page RPGs. Not many people have to double check their character sheet to remember what most, if not all of the schools are. For a game whose primary draw is the negotiation between players over what spells to use for which mana/school combinations, being able to easily keep track of what other schools still have blank spells with the same mana combination is a big bonus. It means that Alice can vote aye on Bob's proposed Illusion (2G) spell in exchange for a promise from Bob to vote aye on her proposed Evocation (2G) spell because she knows in advance that her enemy-blinding spell can be reasonably argued to be either of those two, whereas if Illusion is the only school left with a 2G spell and Alice really wants to cast her color spray for two green mana, she needs to vote nay on Bob's spell in order to keep the spot open. For the same reason, the vague boundaries between the schools is also a feature rather than a bug.

That said, some of those boundaries are way too vague. What can't illusions do? If you're able to sell your GM that "your mind makes it real" Matrix-style for a minor effect, you can use that precedent to use the Illusion school for literally anything. You don't even need to be thinking two steps ahead like that for the Necromancy school, which is really just "anything spooky," which means it can be used for death rays, summoning minions, telling the future, causing fear, bolstering allies with the unholy strength of the dead, anything. Conjuration can be used to summon creatures who might have any magical ability, and what's the difference between casting fireball and summoning a salamander that can cast fireball? Other than the fact that the latter probably doesn't have to spend any more mana to do it several times a day. For this game's purposes, a single magic school that serves as a wild card capable of basically anything wouldn't be terrible, because it still needs to get nailed down to one specific spell per mana combination, but of the D&D eight, Conjuration, Illusions, Necromancy, and Transmutation all have that problem and the baggage of D&D's long history means that a GM who makes the mistake of accepting "there's a Dragon magazine enchantment spell from 1997 that just deals straight damage" as valid precedent for his group's grimoire has just accidentally dragged every single school down to the level of the stupidest spell ever written for it in any edition of D&D.

Of course, part of the problem is that we're bumping up against the limitations of a game that is mainly just a few simple voting protocols bolted onto what is otherwise almost pure MTP, and it's entirely possible that the limit of what this game can be expanded to is from a one-page game to a two-page game, in which GMs are offered some advice on establishing boundaries between schools to help keep things interesting and that is the end of it. Even in that case, however, replacing MtG's five color wheel with the ROYGBP six color wheel retains the benefit of everyone immediately knowing what the basic deal is but clears the board of the specific connotations of what it means for something to be Blue mana, because Blue is now associated with swamps and not islands so is it like MtG Blue or MtG Black or some other third thing? The group gets to figure it out, and that's the game. A new set of schools would have that advantage as well as hopefully clearing the board of overly broad schools like Necromancy.

tl;dr the eight D&D schools are bad, but if we wanted to divide magic up between distinct schools that split spells up based on how they affect the world, how would we do it better?
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Post by deaddmwalking »

The schools of magic in D&D are bad for D&D, but not NECESSARILY bad for what you're trying to do.

First off, in D&D, there's a general problem with 'theme'. If I tell you that I'm a necromancer, you can reasonably assume that I have a number of spells that emulate/create/duplicate abilities of undead creatures. It does not tell you anything about what I can't do. As a Necromancer, can I fly? Can I cast color spray? Can I cast fireball? Under 3.x rules, there is a school that I can't cast from, but you don't know what that is. Under 2nd edition rules, each school was 'opposed' so you'd know what I couldn't cast based on my specialization. But there's no reason I had to specialize. If I say I'm a wizard, there really is nothing I can't do.

If you want wizards to fit a 'theme', they need access to a number of types of spells. A necromancer might have spells that affect the mind (like fear), that heal undead (like cause light wounds), that give them thematic defenses (like bone armor), that summon/create/control undead (who are immune to mind affecting abilities). You might want 'ghostly lights' of bursts of negative energy or the ability to make someone appear dead. There's no D&D school that you could definitively say you shouldn't have access to. Having a 'necromancer spell list' that has spells from all the schools isn't crazy any more than having a Beguiler spell list have spells from every school is crazy - the point is that there is a concentration in thematic spells.

In your system, if you're trying to give everyone access to all the spells, and you're trying to make everyone a 'generalist' that feels/plays the same, then using established schools might be best in part because there is no shared conceptual space about what 'orange' magic is. If you create schools that have no pre-existing conception in the player's mind, then they're not going to be able to tell the difference between Purple and Orange.

I do think that it might be more interesting to assign each color a 'theme' and go from there.

For example:

R(ed) - Fire
O(range) - Death
Y(ellow) - Earth
G(reen) - Druidism
B(lue) - Storm
V(iolet) - Deception

With a setup like this, you could plausibly suggest a spell that lets you fly as R (rocket), G (bird wings) or B (borne on the wind). You could suggest a spell that makes your skin tougher as O (bone armor), Y (stone skin) or G (bark skin). Ideally some schools will be better at their 'schtick'. Stoneskin might be better than barkskin, even if they're the same level. But druids can fly and earth wielders probably can't (or if they can float on levitating clods of earth, it's probably a higher level ability).

Ultimately, how you divide up the schools is just a matter of preference, but the clearer the mental picture for your players, the easier it is to make communal decisions.
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Post by Username17 »

Chamomile wrote:tl;dr the eight D&D schools are bad, but if we wanted to divide magic up between distinct schools that split spells up based on how they affect the world, how would we do it better?
The answer to how you do things better depends on what goals you have. While the schools in D&D are bad for any set of goals I could imagine having (up to and including "using English terms correctly" because obviously Gygax didn't know the difference between "Invocation" and "Evocation"), there are numerous possible goals you could have that could be satisfied in many different ways.

Your schools of magic have a front end - the way the player interacts and describes them. And they have a back end - the way they interact with narrative and mechanical balance. The front end may as well be completely thematic, because that's easier to get across to new players who don't actually care about the intricacies of your system's color pie. It could be something like this:
  • Theurgy can do pretty much anything as long as it's divine intervention and miracles themed.
  • Witchcraft can do pretty much anything as long as it's spooky themed.
  • Shamanism can do pretty much anything as long as it's new-agey animal spirit themed.
  • Psionics can do pretty much anything as long as it's science fantasy themed.
You could also do something that was themed around what the mages had to carry or do while using their powers: so Blood Mages had to cut themselves, Bards had to sing, Hucksters had to throw cards around, and Mystics had to faff about with crystals. Or you can have everyone choose their favorite classical element. Or you could associate each of your magics with a region in your fantasy game such that the users wear different ethnic outfits and shit.

Now on the back end, your schools of magic divide up what they can do mechanically. And these divisions are pretty much arbitrary. I can certainly imagine a set of flavor text that justifies putting healing into Psionics (Mind Over Body), Witchcraft (Soul Invigoration), or fucking whatever. But I could also equally imagine someone gravely intoning that either or both of those schools of magic can't heal wounds. In an elemental paradigm, I would most likely expect healing to appear in Water, but depending on what special effects your setting's healing had it could appear also or instead in Fire (Cleansing Fire), Air (Breath of Life), or Earth (Healing Earth).

How the mechanics are distributed between schools of magic has to do with what the expected play space is supposed to be. Magic that turns water into wine is basically a flavor text thing in a game about stabbing dragons and making off with piles of gold coins, but in a game that has extended sections on carrousing or running a restaraunt it would be extremely narratively powerful. How useful is it to be able to see in the dark? To translate languages? To corrode metal?

Once you have a grasp on what kind of tasks magic can do that is "good" you can start deciding on how you want to divide it up. And really truly the way you divide it up is functionally arbitrary.

The more kinds of magic there are to divide exclusive powers between and the firmer the divisions between different kinds of magic the less narratively obtrusive the different casters are. Remember that in 3e the Wizard is significantly more powerful than the Cleric, but it was the Cleric that forced people to admit that Casters >> You because the Cleric Archer managed to do everything a Fighter could do and still have powerful spells on top of that. Many game balance problems can be solved by adding or subtracting a +2 bonus or some shit, but ceded conceptual space and violated role protection never comes back.

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Post by Emerald »

deaddmwalking wrote:First off, in D&D, there's a general problem with 'theme'. If I tell you that I'm a necromancer, you can reasonably assume that I have a number of spells that emulate/create/duplicate abilities of undead creatures. It does not tell you anything about what I can't do. As a Necromancer, can I fly? Can I cast color spray? Can I cast fireball? Under 3.x rules, there is a school that I can't cast from, but you don't know what that is. Under 2nd edition rules, each school was 'opposed' so you'd know what I couldn't cast based on my specialization. But there's no reason I had to specialize. If I say I'm a wizard, there really is nothing I can't do.
That's not actually a problem with the schools, that's a problem with the wizard class. Without changing the schools at all, "Necromancer" could mean "someone who can only cast spells from the Necromancy school" instead of "someone who has minor extra perks with Necromancy and can otherwise cast from who-the-fuck-knows which other schools," and really, that's how most new players expect school specialization to work anyway, in my experience.

Specialization isn't really about theme; a "pyromancer" wizard would seem to fit solidly into Evocation, as that's the "make things out of elements and energies" school but he's also going to want Abjuration (fire auras and fire immunity), Conjuration (fire elementals and smoke clouds), Divination (actual pyro-mancy!), and Transmutation (turning into fire elementals and turning the ground into lava).

If you do want wizards to be more narrow via specialization, the 2e thing where the schools were arranged in an octagon with thematically similar schools adjacent to each other and thematically opposed ones across from each other was a pretty good setup. Sure, you might quibble with the exact placement and shuffle some schools around, but doing something like "a specialist wizard can cast spells from his specialty school at full effect and spells both adjacent school at [penalty]" would go a long way toward making wizards more consistent. But making themed casters a la the Fire Mage and Dread Necromancer are going to do theme much better than school specialization
FrankTrollman wrote:The answer to how you do things better depends on what goals you have. While the schools in D&D are bad for any set of goals I could imagine having (up to and including "using English terms correctly" because obviously Gygax didn't know the difference between "Invocation" and "Evocation"), there are numerous possible goals you could have that could be satisfied in many different ways.
I personally don't think the school system is inherently bad. Wizards in D&D are supposed to be pseudo-scientists throwing around lots of bad Latin and making in-jokes with spell components, and in that context dividing spells into eight grandiloquent categorizations that mostly works most of the time is fine. The schools aren't supposed to be themes any more than cleric domains are supposed to be themes; the Fire domain, for instance, can be picked by clerics of Hephaestus, Surtur, Apophis, and Pelor, but they have it for entirely different reasons.

For most of the schools, the divisions are relatively clear. Conjuration/Divination/Evocation/Transmutation are the schools of stuff/know stuff/make stuff/change stuff, and Enchantment/Illusion are the schools of mental stuff/perception stuff. There are two real problems:

1) Abjuration and Necromancy don't fit; "protective stuff" and "spooky stuff" aren't at the same level of granularity as the other schools. Why is mind blank Abjuration and cause fear Necromancy, when both deal with the mind and should thus be Enchantment? If those schools are refocused--Necromancy is obviously "life force stuff" and Abjuration could be "pure magic stuff," dispels and AMFs and such, maybe nab [Force] stuff from Evocation if you want Evocation to be more classical-elements-y--then they'd fit in a lot better.

2) Conjuration and Transmutation are "dumping ground" schools, as Chamomile alluded to. It's fine to have multiple ways to achieve the same effect--anyone who's played Ars Magica has had the "Okay, so I can't Creo Ignem, but can I Muto the air into Ignem or Rego the air molecules to move them so fast that they combust into Ignem?" conversation--but a lot of 3e spells were shoved into those two schools when they didn't belong. And that's not counting Conjuration (Creation) and Conjuration (Healing), which are just new subschools invented to give Evocation and Necromancy schools to Conjuration.

So most of the problems with the existing schools can be addressed by refocusing the theme without changing the schools themselves. D&D: MadLibs Edition can easily declare that Abjuration means antimagic, Conjuration means summoning creatures or things, Necromancy means death magic and healing, and Transmutation means polymorph and Transmute X To Y spells, or whatever, and you're golden. And if there's still some overlap in what schools can do, that's fine, the same way that it's fine that both Creo Ignem and Muto Auram can make a fireball and both White and Red in Magic deal with lots of small creatures.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Emerald wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:First off, in D&D, there's a general problem with 'theme'. If I tell you that I'm a necromancer, you can reasonably assume that I have a number of spells that emulate/create/duplicate abilities of undead creatures. It does not tell you anything about what I can't do. As a Necromancer, can I fly? Can I cast color spray? Can I cast fireball? Under 3.x rules, there is a school that I can't cast from, but you don't know what that is. Under 2nd edition rules, each school was 'opposed' so you'd know what I couldn't cast based on my specialization. But there's no reason I had to specialize. If I say I'm a wizard, there really is nothing I can't do.
That's not actually a problem with the schools, that's a problem with the wizard class. Without changing the schools at all, "Necromancer" could mean "someone who can only cast spells from the Necromancy school" instead of "someone who has minor extra perks with Necromancy and can otherwise cast from who-the-fuck-knows which other schools," and really, that's how most new players expect school specialization to work anyway, in my experience.

Specialization isn't really about theme; a "pyromancer" wizard would seem to fit solidly into Evocation, as that's the "make things out of elements and energies" school but he's also going to want Abjuration (fire auras and fire immunity), Conjuration (fire elementals and smoke clouds), Divination (actual pyro-mancy!), and Transmutation (turning into fire elementals and turning the ground into lava).
Like I said:
deadDMwalking wrote: f you want wizards to fit a 'theme', they need access to a number of types of spells.
Personally, I think a fire-themed caster with fire-related divinations, fire-related protective spells, fire-related offensive spells, etc, is a generally good direction to go. I think expecting players to care about 'evocation' or staying in a single school like that is not good.

In the bidding game, if players have virtually identical access to all 'schools', then it doesn't really help to have a strong theme - it'll be diluted anyway.

If players have access to only one or a very small number of 'schools', then having them broadly cover an archetype with a variety of 3.x 'schools' included makes sense.

In D&D, 'summoning' is one school, and summoning demons or summoning wolves is basically the same thing. In Magic, summoning demons is probably black and summoning wolves is probably green. Giving each color access to thematically appropriate spells in multiple D&D spell schools works better.
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Post by Username17 »

A general issue with attempts to divide schools of magic by functionalist concepts is what in Shadowrun we called "Manipulation Bloat." That is to say that it's very frequent for one category to be "other stuff" or "changing things" or in some other way have a remit that is simply so titanic that it becomes much larger than the other schools. You see that with Manipulation in Shadowrun, with Transmutation in D&D, with Muto in Ars Magica, and so on and so on. Functional divisions of magic pretty much inevitably involve some slice being much larger than all the other slices.

Now in Shadowrun it's pretty egregiously bad, because "combat spells" are just things that do damage (and not even all damage dealing spells, because you can set things on fire with Manipulation magic and knock people out with Illusion magic), while Manipulation is everything from mind control to telekinesis to transformation to creating darkness or fire. But I haven't seen any functionalist split that doesn't have this problem.

Fundamentally "creating" things isn't very different from "transforming" things. It turns out you are surrounded by air and dirt and rocks and walls and trees and bugs and shit all the time, so requirements that your magic start with something rather than creating things from whole cloth aren't actually limitations. See: Full Metal Alchemist. Their magic always requires that you start with something and transform it, but that limitation is completely meaningless since pulling shields and guns out of the ground isn't meaningfully different from conjuring them from nothing. In D&D-land, polymorph any object is significantly more powerful than summon monster spells because having a large quantity of dirt or foliage vanish while your monster appears is a meaningless cost and the spell can also be used for other things.

What you actually want your limitations to be is caveats on what parts of game play each magic branch interacts with. And that requires you to have an idea of what your playspace is supposed to look like. In Magic: the Gathering Tap-down effects are Blue or White, and Lifegain effects are White, Black, or Green. It's important that a Red card isn't going to tap down an opponent's creature unless it's also White or Blue (and even then, usually use White or Blue mana to do it - see Legion Guildmage). But those are in-game concepts. There are definitely defensive Red cards and Red cards that dissuade or prevent enemy creatures from attacking - they just do so using mechanics that are available to Red cards.

Limitations are obviously going to be based on the setting and the intended play space. In Shadowrun, astral observers can't read computer screens and that's an important limitation given that there are high tech heists going on. That restriction would mean absolutely nothing in a typical D&D setting. In Magic the Gathering, Blue cards don't gain Life, but they do reduce incoming damage and that's not a meaningful difference without the specific turn order that Magic has. It's important to note that the importance of the narrative limitations and the importance of the mechanical limitations are both "as important as you make them, based on the rest of the setting and the way the rules work."

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Post by OgreBattle »

Do monsters and ghosts and so on also follow the rules of your magic system or use their own?
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Post by Iduno »

I'm assuming you want a lot of flexibility, but you also want a limit on crossover. We have rules to reduce the amount of time spent deciding how things should work out.

You would want to define your schools on what they can do, but also (probably more importantly) what they cannot do. And you don't want one category to cover another category.

Illusion can't create real things.
Necromancy can't affect the living directly.
Divination is terrible because it's either too good or not good enough, either way because the limits aren't definable for every situation.

If you have a category of attack spells, only that category can directly do damage. That's a huge limit on the other categories, assuming combat is a common occurrence in your system.

You also want to avoid having overlap with your colors or elements or whatever you call them.
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Post by Chamomile »

OgreBattle wrote:Do monsters and ghosts and so on also follow the rules of your magic system or use their own?
The original one-page didn't have nearly enough space to specify this kind of thing, so it's up in the air. By default I'd say they use the same system because consistency is good, but if you want to make an argument for only wizards being bound by these rules and dragons and vampires and stuff doing some other thing, I'm willing to hear it.
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Post by Emerald »

FrankTrollman wrote:Now in Shadowrun it's pretty egregiously bad, because "combat spells" are just things that do damage (and not even all damage dealing spells, because you can set things on fire with Manipulation magic and knock people out with Illusion magic), while Manipulation is everything from mind control to telekinesis to transformation to creating darkness or fire. But I haven't seen any functionalist split that doesn't have this problem.

Fundamentally "creating" things isn't very different from "transforming" things. It turns out you are surrounded by air and dirt and rocks and walls and trees and bugs and shit all the time, so requirements that your magic start with something rather than creating things from whole cloth aren't actually limitations. See: Full Metal Alchemist. Their magic always requires that you start with something and transform it, but that limitation is completely meaningless since pulling shields and guns out of the ground isn't meaningfully different from conjuring them from nothing. In D&D-land, polymorph any object is significantly more powerful than summon monster spells because having a large quantity of dirt or foliage vanish while your monster appears is a meaningless cost and the spell can also be used for other things.
Like I said, though, the "default school" effect can be addressed by defining the schools more narrowly. Manipulation in Shadowrun covers pretty much everything because they're defined as spells that "transform, transmute, and control matter or energy," but there's no reason it can't be defined in different ways. Simply removing the "or energy" portion of the definition removes Armor, Ignite, Light, etc. from Manipulation, and you could tweak the definitions of the other groups so that Armor and Ignite go to Combat and Light to Illusion. Changing it up further, like making it "spells that apply an external physical or mental force to creatures and object without changing their fundamental makeup" would make it the telekinesis-and-mind-control school, with everything else split out into new schools or other existing ones.

Similarly, if Transmutation in D&D is not "transforming stuff" but e.g. "transmuting one uniform nonliving substance (such as earth, stone, ice, wood, air, or the like) into another, or altering the physical shape of an object or a mass composed of such a substance" then it's restricted to spells like transmute X to Y, X shape, and the like--you couldn't have any Transmutation spells that created complex creatures or objects from raw materials because people, clothing, crossbows, etc. are outside of that definition. You could split off another school--call it "Alteration" for old time's sake--to cover spells involving "transforming all or part of a creature into another creature or substance," and that gets you your polymorph (but not polymorph any object), bite of the X, Xskin, enlarge X, and similar spells. But again, it doesn't cover absolutely anything involving changing things.

And if you go through and narrow all the existing schools (and split them if necessary) and it turns out that certain spells won't fit in any of the schools that are left, well, it looks like that's a thing D&D magic can't do under that paradigm, which is something D&D is sorely lacking. You don't have to leave a school as the "other stuff" school, it just tends to happen because designers keep writing up new spells and get lazy about categorizing them, something that doesn't happen in either a more free-form environment like the one outlined in the OP (where the group can just say "looks like that spell doesn't fit in any of the free slots, come up with a different idea") or a hypothetical re-schooling of all existing spells (where you can say "Welp, polymorph any object would have to end up as a quadruple-school Transmutation/Alteration/Animation/Creation spell to do everything it does, it's probably too versatile, let's take it out").
What you actually want your limitations to be is caveats on what parts of game play each magic branch interacts with. And that requires you to have an idea of what your playspace is supposed to look like. In Magic: the Gathering Tap-down effects are Blue or White, and Lifegain effects are White, Black, or Green. It's important that a Red card isn't going to tap down an opponent's creature unless it's also White or Blue (and even then, usually use White or Blue mana to do it - see Legion Guildmage). But those are in-game concepts. There are definitely defensive Red cards and Red cards that dissuade or prevent enemy creatures from attacking - they just do so using mechanics that are available to Red cards.
I still think theme and school are largely orthogonal concerns, and that both can coexist and both can have mechanical weight. In D&D terms, creature spells in Magic are Conjuration, like deaddmwalking said, and starting with "I want to build a creature deck" (Conjuration) or "I want to build an aggro deck" (Evocation) is completely color-independent and just as valid a life choice as "I want to build a Green deck" or "I want to build a Red deck"--and Green creature, Red creature, Green aggro, and Red aggro decks are all going to look different.

If you made a "MtG wizard" class in D&D that cast spells like those from Magic, you could certainly replace the eight schools with the five colors, but you don't have to. Having Red Evocations (fire/lightning spells that deal tons of damage), Red Enchantments (rage-/madness-inducing spells), Red Abjurations (spells that damage attackers), Blue Evocations (water jets that push and debuff targets), Blue Enchantments (mind control), and Blue Abjurations (counterspells) works fine too. And if I say "White Abjuration" or "Green/Black Transmutation" you probably have some idea of what those spells might do in the same way that "Red/Green token card" and "Green artifact" give an idea of the card's attributes.
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Post by Ice9 »

They're pretty broad, but I've wondered whether Affects Self / Affects Others / Affects Environment / Summons Things would be a good split. In terms of the conceptual space, it seems like a division with reasons to want any of them over another.

It would rely on some mechanical backing, though - self-buffs have to be better than other-buffs, and zapping people directly has to be more effective than turning the floor to lava or summoning something hazardous. But I think it could be an interesting choice. Not sure where information spells go though. Depending on the type of game, they could be worth a whole school themselves, or else stick them in Affects Self maybe.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Ice9 wrote:They're pretty broad, but I've wondered whether Affects Self / Affects Others / Affects Environment / Summons Things would be a good split. In terms of the conceptual space, it seems like a division with reasons to want any of them over another.
That, and generally, you're going to want people to have access to all of those things. Tim the Enchanter is going to want to encase himself in a pillar of fire (affects self) and launch bolts of flame (affects other), create a wall of fire (affects environment) and summon fire elementals (summon things).

In a D&D style game, 'affects others' is going to get the most mileage. You're going to have friends and enemies so that's going to give you the most conceptual space by a landslide. Unless you can summon things that can do everything of course.
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Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Post by erik »

Along with all the other unrelated threads of 2011.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Pretty sure criticism of "No Self Buffs" is relevant when the suggestion of restricting magic according to who you can target is raised.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

In an effects-based school system, I think you can get a lot of mileage out of multicolor/crosspath mechanics. For example, if all direct damage effects are in the Strange school and all debuff effects are in the Bottom school, then a spell like Arrow-to-the-Knee (which deals direct damage and inflicts a movement debuff) couldn't be in either school. But such a spell could exist as a Strange+Bottom effect, available to anyone who had access to both schools and denied to everyone who lacked access to either.
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JonSetanta
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Post by JonSetanta »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:In an effects-based school system, I think you can get a lot of mileage out of multicolor/crosspath mechanics. For example, if all direct damage effects are in the Strange school and all debuff effects are in the Bottom school, then a spell like Arrow-to-the-Knee (which deals direct damage and inflicts a movement debuff) couldn't be in either school. But such a spell could exist as a Strange+Bottom effect, available to anyone who had access to both schools and denied to everyone who lacked access to either.
Conversely there would also be "hybrid mana" spells that are available to characters knowing either school. Easier to gain access.

With all the MTG comparisons, why not just go with Frank's colors and call it a day?
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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile »

Because the central mechanic is that each wizard has more than one spell for each combination of mana currently available to them, that the total number of spells available to any given mana combination is finite and you can eventually fill them up, and that there are clear boundaries around what the different spells for each mana combination can be so that the extra spots aren't freebies, nor does the grimoire get filled up with lots of near-redundant spells. That is, if you have only one point of red mana, then that means you have both an evocation and an abjuration spell available to you, you can only cast one or the other, and if the evocation spell has effects you don't like while the abjuration spell is undefined, you cannot create an abjuration spell that functions exactly like an evocation spell because the boundaries between those two are reasonably easy to define.
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Neurosis
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Post by Neurosis »

just popped in to see if we were talking about "Magic Schools" i.e. Abjuration or "Magic Schools" i.e. Hogwarts lol
Last edited by Neurosis on Fri Oct 26, 2018 8:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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