Magic as a D&D Edition Setting

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Magic as a D&D Edition Setting

Post by Username17 »

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

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

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

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

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

The problem here is that M:TG is produced with a quality far above 4e.

With this in mind, I kind of doubt they would want to taint M:TG by relating it to 4e.
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Post by erik »

Thymos wrote:The problem here is that M:TG is produced with a quality far above 4e.

With this in mind, I kind of doubt they would want to taint M:TG by relating it to 4e.
4e was only tangentially related to this if I'm reading right. Twas an outcropping of this post. The point is that M:tG is a game and setting with huge appeal.

Let me preface this that I am barely knowledgeable about anything to do with M:tG, I still think M:tG would be an excellent setting and basis for 5e purely for the name and brand recognition.

"Dungeons and Dragons : The Gathering" sounds like a sound way to try and save the declining D&D lines. They'd have to make damned sure to nail the D&D side of it though otherwise a new setting isn't gonna save anything, and that means scrapping their old game design crew.

I wish "cleric" was called priest or paladin or anything less blah than cleric, but it's already ensconced in the M:tG cards, so I guess it says.
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Post by K »

The problem with converting Magic is going to be that the RPG is going to be so different from the CCG that no is going to want to play it. It's the same when just about every setting gets ported to RPG (I mean, have you played the Elric port, or the Diablo port, or the Wheel of Time D20 port?).

Plus, I don't buy that the setting is that popular when separated from the CCG. The Magic novelizations don't flood the bookshelves, but Forgotten Realms still do (and we all know how crap those tend to be).
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Post by TheWorid »

RPGs being supported by a different, popular game is nothing new (Legend of the Five Rings and Warhammer come to mind) so I could see this working.

The trick is not to make it a port, but rather inextricably fuse them. The designers of both games have increasingly migrated them together anyhow: power cards in 4E, level up mechanisms in MtG.

I'm thinking, to do the least amount of work, you could keep Vancian casting (to appease old fans, if you care), but swap out the schools of magic for the color wheel (I doubt anyone would care about losing the old schools). You could also create a new, mana-based system, but that runs the risk of cries of "It's not D&D". So instead, publish an Epic level book that defines Epic levels to be planeswalker stuff, in which you can cast all spells, but you need mana to power them, and they're partially randomized, and so on. For each block, put out a setting book, no exceptions. Each block has setting, so if the lines are to be joined, then those settings need D&D representation.

On the other side, start making Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, and so on into MtG blocks. If you're planning on doing 5E, set up your release schedule so that they coincide: so on the year 5E comes out, release the FR book as well as make FR the theme of the block. Also, when your cards refer to classes, have them use the same classes that your D&D edition uses.
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Post by Zinegata »

Thymos wrote:The problem here is that M:TG is produced with a quality far above 4e.

With this in mind, I kind of doubt they would want to taint M:TG by relating it to 4e.
Yeah. With MtG posting record sales and D&D posting record embarassments, I don't see the Magic brand team being receptive to the idea of handing their baby over to the guys handling D&D.
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Post by Calibron »

Zinegata wrote:Yeah. With MtG posting record sales and D&D posting record embarassments, I don't see the Magic brand team being receptive to the idea of handing their baby over to the guys handling D&D.
It wouldn't be 4E, it would be fifth, or an offshoot like D&D miniatures, and of course the D&D team would have to follow the Magic team's lead since that's pretty much the only sane thing to do with the relative sales and popularity of the two projects; not to mention the shear "we obviously did not think ahead at all" clusterfuck that 4E has been.

Honestly this is possibly the last gambit that could allow Wizards to keep the Hasbro Ban-Hammer away from their horribly mismanaged IP; anybody that pitched this to Wizards or Hasbro in a coherent manner would deserve a big phat bonus and maybe a promotion.
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Re: Magic as a D&D Edition Setting

Post by Koumei »

FrankTrollman wrote: [*] Myr. These are like warforged, in that they are quasi-humanoid robot people.
[*] Clockwork Men. These are pretty much exactly warforged. You could call them "Clockworks" or "Warforged" - I genuinely don't even care.
Am I the only person left on the planet who hates Warforged and is violently opposed to bringing fucking robots into my goddamn fantasy?

And yes, this is why I feel FR will always be better than Eberron. One gave us Dominatrices as Clerics, the other gave us fucking Warforged (and everything else is "X fucked a human, IT BREEDS TRUE!").
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

Warforged are dumb as implemented, but that doesn't destroy the appeal (for some) of having 'robots' in the game. My impulse would be to remove the planar nature of modrons and re-cast them (pun intended) as self-constructed people. Then we won't have to worry about male and female whorerforged.
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Post by erik »

I really like the idea of clockwork humanoids in a fantasy RPG. I can dig having a steampunk city-state faction that tries to get by in a highly magical world where the other kingdom factions are magic-using humans/demi-humans, monsters, undead, nature, aquatics, and the occasional extra-planar outsider.

I think warforged are an underwhelming execution of clockwork men however. I dunno what it is about them, but they just never really got me excited. The way that these guys do.
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Post by Jilocasin »

Oh man, seriously. If you're gonna have clockwork people (and you should) you need to have some version of The One Electronic in there. People really seem to love robots in their fantasy. Reasons vary but inevitably someone I play with or run games for will want their character to be a robot.
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Post by Koumei »

If we have to have them, then I suggest this, this, this or this.

With any luck the appearance will keep the player from resorting to either of the three standard personalities for robots, and that way they're not even playing a robot, they're playing a cute girl who happens to be immune to the same things that robots are immune to, and who has eye beams. And fuck it, Celestials have eye beams.
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

Koumei, I'm not sure that Maharomatic & all are going to do it for people who want to play clockwork soldiers. For one, those guys can't reproduce. Having everyone's back story as 'I was crafted in the magitech golem factory of Blargh and escaped' isn't a good thing.

Plus, when you need illithids to help craft your robots something is very wrong.
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Post by Username17 »

From what I can tell, the current Magic direction is to have a lot of cyborgs and to have "high level" characters run around with a lot of glowing shit on their weaponry. That's pretty much the direction that D&D has been going since 3e, but of course, Magic can afford much better art:
  • Magic Art:
    Image

    D&D Art:
    Image
As for the actual robot people, apparently Mirrodin has at least three types of robot people. It has big clunky robot people called Golems:
Image

It has these... war ducks? That are apparently self replicating robots that were created to be the army of some mad cyborg BBEG that tried to conquer the world from his secret base in the hollow core of the planet. Some are self aware and some are not. Some are loyal to the old BBEG and some are not. It sounds like some sort of scam to allow the DM to handwave unlimited numbers of enemies of scaling difficulty without worrying about making sense. Anyway, those are called "Myr".

Image

And it has clockwork copies of normal people and beasts called "Constructs". And those are seriously just your bog-standard whoreforged types:
ImageImage

It seems workable all told. Looking through the card art, the previous set - Zendikar, is a more natural fit for D&D since it seems to consist largely of adventurers in action poses. But if you brought the game out now, you'd want to tie it to the magic cycle you happened to be doing now. Which happens to be in a steam-punk world apparently inspired by Heavy Metal comics.

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Post by Surgo »

I'm a little confused, because I thought Mirrodin was done like 5 years ago. Did they randomly decide to bring it back?
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Post by Username17 »

Surgo wrote:I'm a little confused, because I thought Mirrodin was done like 5 years ago. Did they randomly decide to bring it back?
Mirrodin was the name of a set that happened in like 2004 or 2005 or something. I showed up for a sealed deck tournament in those days on a lark and won. But it's also the name of a world. And the current "block" for this year is three sets that are set in Mirrodin. Apparently, they now have seven planes that they intend to set card sets in (although it may be more than that, because I don't see Phyrexia on that list, and Lorwyn and Shadowmoor are listed together or something).

There's like a circle of them on their webpage, so maybe they are bringing Alara back next year? It's been a long time since I payed attention to that sort of thing.

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Post by mean_liar »

I don't think we ought to be spending much effort on deciding a setting for 5e DnD when we should be instead designing a 5e absent tethers.
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Post by Neurosis »

Is this something that we are actually doing as an exercise? I'm not sure if this topic has a goal or was just "I have an interesting idea, discuss".
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Post by Username17 »

mean_liar wrote:I don't think we ought to be spending much effort on deciding a setting for 5e DnD when we should be instead designing a 5e absent tethers.
Tethers define your game. GURPS and shit was fine for the pot smoking youth of the late 80s, when we all though that we could make a game where everyone could do anything and it would all be "Way Cool, Man!" but the fact is that pipe dream was just that - a pipe dream. Every ability you have only matters to the extent that it interacts with things in the setting. Even your attacks only matter if they are relevant to the opposition that the setting provides. Computer hacking only matters if the setting has computers to hack, melee attacks only matter if your opponents are within melee range (and not, for example, if they are on other boats or star ships), and banishment only matters if your opponents include some percentage of summoned creatures. And so on.

The tethers of the setting define what your challenges are, which in turn determines what abilities your characters need and how much relatively speaking any of those abilities should cost. Yes, everything goes crazy when the rubber meets the road, and the players will go out of their way to adventure in locations and manners that maximize the benefits of their abilities and minimize the handicap of not taking the abilities they skipped over. But still, without some sort of baseline adventure setting and path in mind, it is impossible to accurately or even coherently cost any of the powers anybody has access to.

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Post by Orion »

Zendikar was actually, officially, the "D&D" magic block. It featured "Allies" which were parties of adventurers with defined roles.

It also had "traps" as a major game mechanic. And a "level up" keyword ability.
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Post by Koumei »

FrankTrollman wrote:GURPS and shit was fine for the pot smoking youth of the late 80s, when we all though that we could make a game where everyone could do anything and it would all be "Way Cool, Man!"
Best explanation for GURPS ever.

Also, that first picture you showed, with the magitek orbs in the sword? That's totally Materia. What a sucker, though: she's using a pair of Blue Materia, Blue only works when linked to Yellow, Red or Green.

Though I suppose in D&D/Magic, it would make sense that it be Blue. What with Magic of Blue.
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Post by Zinegata »

Mirrodin is the artifact-centric world. It's a bit out there compared to standard high fantasy lore in the LoTR tradition.

However, the Magic Core Set (one released every year) is pretty much generic fantasy more in line with D&D.

http://www.gatheringmagic.com/magic-201 ... page-0248/

They even mentioned adding spells like Sleep because they felt it weird that Magic never had a Sleep spell, but it can be seen everywhere in fantasy.

And their poster girl? She rocks too.

http://image3.examiner.com/images/blog/ ... ar_art.jpg

So really, no need to even tie it up with Mirrodin. There's always Core Set.
Last edited by Zinegata on Mon Oct 25, 2010 12:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lokathor »

Holy fuck the artwork has gone up a notch since I last saw it.
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Post by Zinegata »

This is what happens when you have a proper art direction team ;).
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Re: Magic as a D&D Edition Setting

Post by JigokuBosatsu »

Koumei wrote: Am I the only person left on the planet who hates Warforged and is violently opposed to bringing fucking robots into my goddamn fantasy?

And yes, this is why I feel FR will always be better than Eberron. One gave us Dominatrices as Clerics, the other gave us fucking Warforged (and everything else is "X fucked a human, IT BREEDS TRUE!").
Sounds like someone has never read China Mieville.

Though I have never played Eberron, something about the setting always seemed a little off, so I can see where it might ruin your idea of fantasy robots. But when either gay bald ex-roleplaying sociologists get in on the action, or Denizens do, cool things result.
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