Why is Shadowrun's magic so praised?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I've spent the past few months lurking around here and I eventually accumulated enough questions over viewing hundreds of dead threads that I decided to finally sign up to actually talk to people. While I have enough RPG experience to be able to follow discussions on game mechanics, I have much less knowledge about fluff, especially when it comes to non-fantasy settings.

I've noticed a consistent pattern when talking about Shadowrun - people tend to say that it's more thought out than other magic systems. Mostly in that questions about magic actually have in-world answers. I'm working on my own setting and one of my PCs is getting really involved with this whole "magic" shit, and pulling answers out of my ass just feels unsatisfying. I'd like to pin down the "physics" of magic, so to speak, and I figured that looking at other sources would be a good place to start, since stealing shit and changing it is a time-honored tradition of all GMs... and it's harder to make something up in a vacuum than to operate off of already existing frameworks.

To get to the point, what is it exactly that makes Shadowrun's magic so consistent and fun to talk about? Obviously sitting down and thinking about all this shit before you start spewing spells onto the page is the way to go, but I've never actually played Shadowrun or read the books, and to be honest, I have no intention of doing so because I've already got shit to play. I tried wikicrawling, and while that was enough to get the basics, it didn't strike me as super revolutionary or anything, so I assumed there was more information out there I was missing. If anyone could give me a rundown for idiots or point me to a comprehensive overview somewhere else, I would be most appreciative.

[Whipstitch]

Shadowrun is one of the only magical systems that provides a short but genuinely useful description of what the "normal" features and limitations of magic are. Those descriptions aren't just player facing metagame concepts, either, they're explicitly known in-universe. For example, Shadowrun sorcery doesn't feature known methods teleportation, so if a player mage confronts a magician that can apparently teleport that's a big ol' fuckin' plot point and there are super rich and powerful people who would kill for that information. Whereas in D&D it's frankly unclear if peasants consider it weird to have blink dogs as neighbors or not. It's kitchen sink fantasy that barely even has a default setting to play in and reading the books can actually do a surprisingly poor job of telling you what the average man on the street knows about much of anything. So it's not that Shadowrun is perfect or anything, it's that Shadowrun is at least well-defined enough that separate groups can come together on the internet and swap stories without re-enacting the Council of Nicea just to determine the canon.

[Iduno]

It's based on the real-life laws of sympathetic magic, which have been ironed out before Shadowrun existed. It's a pre-set set of rules that can't be broken, and because it's known, people know if it's done correctly or not. The example I remember is an elf who appeared to teleport, which is specifically forbidden.*

It's also a system where whatever your PC's beliefs about magic are, their magic works. Different types of magic use different stats (charisma, intuition, or logic) to resist taking damage from your spells, and they summon different types of spirits (5 out of 10-ish types), but otherwise magic works the same for everyone. Someone's air spirits might appear to be angels, while someone else summons Amelia Earhart, and a third an air elemental, but they're all the same mechanically.

*I think the rules for what it can't do are interesting as well:
1) Can't teleport
2) Can't travel through time
3) Can't create matter
4) Can't raise the dead
5) Can't affect people you can't either see or have a connection to (Voodoo Doll, etc.)
6) Bad at dealing with technology

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

So it's not that Shadowrun is perfect or anything, it's that Shadowrun is at least well-defined enough that separate groups can come together on the internet and swap stories without re-enacting the Council of Nicea just to determine the canon.

When it comes to RPGs, being "good enough" is usually enough to land you at the top of the heap. So a part of the reason Shadowrun's magic works well is because people can have the same conversations about it in and out of game, because there are actual defined rules for how all this shit operates and everybody knows them?

Different types of magic use different stats (charisma, intuition, or logic) to resist taking damage from your spells, and they summon different types of spirits (5 out of 10-ish types), but otherwise magic works the same for everyone. Someone's air spirits might appear to be angels, while someone else summons Amelia Earhart, and a third an air elemental, but they're all the same mechanically.

It seems like another part of it is the divide between fluff and mechanics. The underlying "rules of magic" are the same for everybody who use them, but you still have enough variation for PCs to be super special heroes who summon giant snowflakes to freeze their enemies to death or something really out there. It's also important to have definitions for what most magic is capable of and what's completely impossible, because people have been arguing for years as to how the fuck D&D Illusion magic works, and the answer is

This stuff... doesn't sound that hard to do? I get the impression that a sufficiently-motivated (read: paid) group could slap together a coherent magic system in about a week or so. Or does it just look like that because we're standing on the shoulders of giants?

[Foxwarrior]

Most of the actual spells in Shadowrun are really simple things like "Stun Ball" or the incredibly insulting to Street Samurai "Increase Attribute". Having a list of things magic can't do is merely an okay substitute for having an interesting but shortish comprehensive spell list that the players can have just read from cover to cover and can refer to when trying to figure out what's really going on.

The most interesting parts of Shadowrun's magic system in practice are the bits where all mages run on a nerfed but more nuanced form of the wish economy: each mage can bind half a dozen spirits, each individually equal in power to himself, but can only give each one a small number of fairly simple commands before they wander off, so being a mage is an exercise in coming up with short but precise ways to say what you want your spirits to do.

[Trill]

SR has clearcut rules of sorcery, which means that you can instantly know if a spell fits into SR or not:

• Sorcery Cannot Affect Anything to which the User Does Not Have a Magical Link.
  Any sorcery a magician wants to do has to be done through a magical link. Usually LOS suffices, though you can use sympathetic links. Not only does this prevent the situation of just spamming spells on hidden targets, but it also gives a possibility of affecting such targets nonetheless (and giving some ideas for runs). And in spontaneous situations it gives easy ways to counter awakened: make them blind. Which gives mundanes a way to defend themselves. Mage around? Hide!
  
  Sorcery Cannot Alter the Fabric of the Space/Time Continuum.
  Sorcery Cannot Raise the Dead
  Sorcery Cannot Divine the Future with any Certainty.
  The three biggest problems (effects of teleportation and time travel on the setting and consistency, the deterministic manner of divinity and resurrection) neatly curbed.
  
  Sorcery Cannot Summon or Banish Spirits.
  Sorcery Cannot Create Magical Items
  Prevents one skill from being used in sorcery, summoning and enchanting at once.
  
  Sorcery Cannot Create Complex Things
  Disables duplication schemes while still allowing things like fireball and Napalm to work.
  
  Magic Is Not Intelligent
  Limits magical effects to what the caster can easily write down. Not only does this prevent abuses through magical servants, but it also means that spell effects are necessarily simple.

but one of the most important is the following
Sorcery Cannot Bridge the Gap between the Astral and Physical Planes
because it shows the most important part of the SR magic system: the ease of understanding the actions done by the spell.

When I take a spell like Invisibility and try to write down what it does I can do so:

1. Put mana into affected living creatures
2. Erase the image of the caster from their perception

If I take a spell like Astral Clairvoyance I can do so as well:

1. Send mana to target place
2. Take astral information around target
3. Send data to caster

And the important thing is: I can explain why I have to be astrally active for it. Because I know that no part of it is "Move mana from physical to astral".
With each spell I can make such a list and check if it fits with the other rules.
Can I make a spell that seeks out the targets biggest idol and makes the caster look like it? No, it violates the rule of magical intelligence. You could make a spell that shows you the targets biggest idol. You can make a spell that makes you look like a person you can visualize. But not both at once.


And similarly, I can explain why a weapon focus is only useful in melee: Because it works like a lens or a funnel. And only if it is in contact with my aura I can shove mana through it to form it. If it's not touching my aura I can shove mana through it as well as I can pour water through a funnel on the other side of the room.
This conciseness of actions is in my opinion the reason why the system is so stable: Because if you can't explain it in such a way you can't use it.

[Whipstitch]

This stuff... doesn't sound that hard to do? I get the impression that a sufficiently-motivated (read: paid) group could slap together a coherent magic system in about a week or so. Or does it just look like that because we're standing on the shoulders of giants?

They could, but I think it's pretty demonstrable that they almost never bother. Part of it is the simple fact that freelancers get paid peanuts and a lot of people likely wouldn't bother with the industry at all if they weren't allowed to shoehorn their own ideas into the Official Canon of their favorite gaming franchises. Such people are almost inevitably more interested in expanding the setting than taking a hard look at what should and shouldn't be included to begin with. Cranky bastards like Frank who sign up for the job thinking "Alright, let's prune some of the dumb shit" are a rarity.

[Kaelik]

I am, unsurprisingly, more in line with Fox, I don't think Shadowrun Magic is so great because of some hypothetical list of things it can or cannot do, but I actually do think there is something interesting about the mechanics besides Spirits.

Because of the way Shadowrun operates, everything is a roll of attribute + skill and very often resisted by someone else's attribute or attribute + skill. This inherently means that people can process shadowrun magic and it's lists of spells in terms that make sense to them based on non magical things. 5 net hits on your magic is LIKE 5 net hits on your gun shooting or crafting, or piloting, or whatever so there's a real sense in which people's brains can conceptualize what people SHOULD be able to do with a certain skill level, and how much skill someone is showing, a thing that most games have a great deal of trouble helping players conceptualize for things without real world analogs like magic or future hacking.

[Iduno]

This stuff... doesn't sound that hard to do? I get the impression that a sufficiently-motivated (read: paid) group could slap together a coherent magic system in about a week or so. Or does it just look like that because we're standing on the shoulders of giants?

A bit of both, but it sounds like you've mostly got the idea. Part of it is also that D&D wants to keep things simple by not having many rules (despite having many rules anyway), so for D&D not having an answer to how things work, or if a spell can or can't do something is considered fine. For a game that's expected to last longer or allow interesting problem solving with magic, you want actual rules and a fleshed-out system.

[Username17]

Shadowrun actually gets away with a lot in its magic system because it takes place in the near future and people have cars and guns. The basic attack spell is called "Mana Bolt" and it straight kills a single living thing out to line of sight and it usually works. Nobody really cares because people have guns and straight murdering a fool by looking at them funny is only situationally superior to spending the same amount of time letting an Uzi rip on full auto. And you can do that second thing as Gangster Mook #3.

Similarly you can have amazingly powerful spells like Trid Phantasm and Control Metal that are uncompromisingly powerful and do straight up crazy things that D&D wizards would wet themselves over. But the ability to Magneto your way through a ferrocrete wall or control the vertical and the horizontal in a six meter sphere isn't a whole lot better than just having some bombs - whether those bombs are demolition charges to go through the wall or flash bombs to take out people's vision. The bombs even have additional utility in the fact that they can be lobbed over obstacles or detonated from around the corner and you don't need literal line of sight to make them work.

Another issue is that mages in Shadowrun don't actually have a lot of spells. Having six spells is considered kind of a big deal.

So I would put the relative success of magic down to the following in no particular order:

• The high power intrinsic to a science fiction setting means that player characters can be given access to objectively powerful effects and thus the power disparity between powerful spells like Control Metal and crap spells like Overstimulation don't matter. People take the good spells and it's just accepted and acceptable that that is the power level when people use magic to do things.
• The low number of individual magic powers per character is low, so most magicians still end up using mundane methods for most actions and it's plausible for the GM to actually know what every character in the party can do.
• The way magic 'works' is well laid down and the restrictions are reasonably iron clad if not particularly onerous. This means that you can work around the limitations of magic. For example: you can't cast any spell on a physical object that is 7 meters away and obscured by a dust cloud or a curtain. These kinds of simple but firm parameters mean that you can have rational discussions about magic precautions and security systems and so on and so forth.
• The effects of individual magic things are clear and concise and immediately interact with normal physics once their effect is realized. I know exactly what happens when an object stops Levitating or you use Ignite to set a dumpster on fire.

There are certainly things about Shadowrun Magic that I think are mistakes. The fact that you can't use a magic sword without Chosen One DNA means that a lot of things that could be checks on the power of big demon summoning actually isn't. But it's a system you can describe the edges and boundaries of and as such it's one where you can have meaningful discussions about its effects on the world.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

In addition to what Kaelik and Frank said, and what I said in another thread, the Drain system and how the mechanicas of spellcasting works with the rest of the system is very elegant. Not quite Euler's Identities elegant, but pretty close.

Another thing I really like about Shadowrun spellcasting is that specific care was taken so that spells don't break the genre. Even shit like Move Earth and Trid Phantasm don't require the GM to call a time out so he can rethink why the economy is the way it is if a Magician can just wave his hands and replace an entire industry, like they can do in D&D or a superhero game.

The only thing that triggers DMs more than the wizard taking out an entire enemy team with Color Spray is the cleric invalidating the desert adventure with Create Food and Water. While spells like 3.0E Haste and 4E sleep get whined about for being quote/unquote unfair, DMs absolutely hate it when the base assumptions of magic break their setting. You can do something about saving throws and spell range and scry-and-die, but you can't do anything about Fabricate and Teleport. Well, you COULD, but then you'd end up with a game like 4th Edition.

YMMV on whether player-enabled casual genre violation is a good thing or not, but nonetheless it's still poor game design. I'd rather have a game where the magic system was built with the genre in mind rather than having to line-item veto genre-problematic spells.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

There are some interesting points that have been brought up that are going to be really helpful for me in the future.

Let me try to summarize everything into a simple list that I can refer to later for design notes (let me know if I missed anything):

How to make good magic

- Define what magic is fully capable of and the limitations it has
This one's pretty obvious, but to elaborate: Magic should be capable of doing cool/interesting things and, in most games, quick enough to use in a fight. Its limitations are useful for explaining major aspects of the setting and stopping players and NPCs from dominating the world from their tower on another plane while summoning a factory's worth of iron every day.

- Don't make it overly complex
I think this is where games like Mage fucked up, right? You've got Arcana and they intermingle with different planes and there's spheres or something and you have to worry about Paradox popping you out of existence and so on and so on... It's all very baroque to me as an outsider, but maybe that's because WW and their fans have a gift for gab. The Shadowrun stuff is all relatively intuitive and more akin to physics than most magic systems: rarely is the answer to a question "??????". Being able to actually explain what the fuck you can do to other players is valuable and helps make you feel like you're actually in another world playing a big green dude dressed like a Soundcloud rapper, instead of trying to cheese magic for infinite power or some stupid shit that makes you wonder why nobody else in the setting has done it.

- Magic should roughly be at parity with the capabilities of other PCs
Obviously if you're playing a game where you're all wizards and non-casters are explicitly shit-eaters, then you can make magic as utterly bonkers as you want, but the majority of the time you don't want people to feel outclassed at their own fucking jobs by the party nerd. If other players can get explosive or guns relatively easily, then blowing shit up and killing people should be within the same ballpark for the magic user. Conversely, if the magician can teleport 50 fucking miles away at a whim, then other people also need a course of recompense along those lines or else they'll feel like their dick's too small and start wondering why they're still playing with you.

- Magic cannot solve all problems
Magic should be more like a swiss army knife than an omnitool: You can't chop down a fucking tree no matter how hard you swing an army knife. One of those chinese shovels, maybe, but not a knife. Now, this shouldn't be as bad as the good old "I cast Sleep and now I'm gonna sit back and shoot crossbow bolts all day" issue, but in order for mundanity to have any real meaning, there have to be problems that can only be solved through mundane means.

- Magic should FIT YOUR FUCKING SETTING
I'm just gonna say "D&D" on this one and call it a day.


Kaelik, yours is the only post I don't totally get, but that's probably because I don't play Shadowrun. It sounds like everything runs off of attributes + skills and I get that, but where I run into problems is that 5 hits on a mana bolt is like 5 hits on an uzi, but how is that different from swording a guy in D&D for 30 damage and fireballing him for 30 damage? Or are the problems with D&D spells the sort of spells that have their own individual ruleset like Wish or Polymorph? I believe that's what you're talking about, but I just want to make sure I get where you're coming from.[/b]

[Kaelik]

Kaelik, yours is the only post I don't totally get, but that's probably because I don't play Shadowrun. It sounds like everything runs off of attributes + skills and I get that, but where I run into problems is that 5 hits on a mana bolt is like 5 hits on an uzi, but how is that different from swording a guy in D&D for 30 damage and fireballing him for 30 damage? Or are the problems with D&D spells the sort of spells that have their own individual ruleset like Wish or Polymorph? I believe that's what you're talking about, but I just want to make sure I get where you're coming from.[/b]

So part of the point is actually about Fireballing for 30 damage versus swording for 30 damage.

In D&D, if you fireball does "30 damage" because you rolled 30 on your xd6, then what about the AOE nature versus single target, what about daily limits versus All Day, is ROLLING 30 damage on your fireball something a Wizard does with just as much effort as a Barbarian ROLLING 30 damage? Or is it DOING 30 damage? Should those two character be the same level? How much effort IS this for the Wizard?

In Shadowrun, you know that a guy rolling 5 hits on his Manaball is putting in as much effort/showing as much skill as a guy rolling 5 hits on rewiring a door panel or shooting an assault rifle.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Oh shit, okay, now I get it. It seems to me that's more of a function of the system itself rather than the setting. For some reason, I have a hard time articulating that... system/setting integration? I can wrap my head around it, just not enough to formulate good words to vomit at people.

On a (mostly) unrelated note, I remember a conversation I had with a game dev where they outright derided the idea of verisimilitude being SUPER FUCKING IMPORTANT when it comes to RPGs. It kind of blew my mind. How can a game feel meaningful if there's no sense of internal consistency and your mechanics aren't enough to support a world?

[Emerald]

YMMV on whether player-enabled casual genre violation is a good thing or not, but nonetheless it's still poor game design. I'd rather have a game where the magic system was built with the genre in mind rather than having to line-item veto genre-problematic spells.

- Magic should FIT YOUR FUCKING SETTING
I'm just gonna say "D&D" on this one and call it a day.

It's not really that Shadowrun's magic system fits Shadowrun's genre and setting and D&D's doesn't fit its own genre and setting, it's that D&D doesn't have a single genre and setting to fit.

From the very beginning, D&D has been an eclectic mix of swords-and-sorcery, high fantasy, and pseudo-Medieval pseudo-realism, with dashes of post-apocalyptic far-future sci-fi, New Age-y woo, and cosmic horror thrown in to spice things up, and the three original campaign settings--all developed and published concurrently with one another with basically no communication between them--were wildly divergent in genre and tone (Blackmoor was a sci-fi/fantasy fusion with lots of lost ancient high technology and time-travel shenanigans, Greyhawk was a tongue-in-cheek high-fantasy pastiche, and Mystara was a retro-pulp kitchen sink of pirates plus vikings plus dinosaurs plus Aztecs and such).

Coming up with a single magic system that would be "in-genre" for that kind of mishmash was impossible, so Gygax and Arneson didn't even try and instead came up with (or, really, sketched the barest outlines of and left to be filled in later) magic flavor that deliberately didn't exclude anything and would mostly kinda sorta work for whatever setting you wanted, leaving it up to the DM (as they did with so many setting-related things) to tweak and restrict things to taste.

The takeaway here, then, is that designing a magic system is a very different process depending on whether you're doing it for a single focused setting vs. a single broad setting vs. multiple similar settings vs. a kitchen sink and so on.

The more focused and internally-consistent the setting, the more you can fit the magic system to that setting and make it similarly focused and internally-consistent, but the harder it is to adapt to other settings (e.g. Shadowrun, where the magic system is amazing but can't really be ported to Forgotten Realms or Star Wars or whatever because the balance considerations and metaphysics are totally different).

The looser and broader the setting, the more you have to either make specific decisions that potentially make things wonky or nonfunctional in some cases (e.g. GURPS, where you can theoretically use the same magic in any setting but point costs are assigned assuming "standard fantasy" settings, and fireballs and divinations lose out to grenades and cell phones in a modern setting) or avoid making specific decisions and leave a lot up to the GM or to setting-specific material (e.g. D&D, where every setting has its own caster classes, spell list divisions, forms of magic, and "here's how magic works flavor-wise in this setting" sidebars).

That doesn't mean that single-setting magic systems are inherently good (Vampireis built around a single setting and its magic system is pretty terrible, and for a literary example Harry Potter's magic "system" is utterly incoherent beyond the superficial details) or that kitchen-sink magic systems are inherently bad (D&D's magic system can work basically the same way with basically the same fluff in settings from magipunk to D&D IN SPACE! to gothic horror, which is an advantage if you want to sell a bunch of settings or setting-hop within a campaign), just that single-setting systems are much easier to balance, reason about, and extend consistently, which is definitely desirable but may not override all other concerns.

On a (mostly) unrelated note, I remember a conversation I had with a game dev where they outright derided the idea of verisimilitude being SUPER FUCKING IMPORTANT when it comes to RPGs. It kind of blew my mind. How can a game feel meaningful if there's no sense of internal consistency and your mechanics aren't enough to support a world?

On the one hand, yeah, it certainly sounds like that dev is one of those types who believes twee rules-light games are the height of RPG design, thinks internal consistency is a four-letter word, and couldn't math their way out of a wet paper bag with a GPS and a lightsaber.

On the other hand, if one is feeling very charitable, one can assume that dev wasn't implying that verisimilitude in and of itself wasn't very important, but rather disdaining the naive kind of "verisimilitude über alles" approach many new homebrewers and designers fall into that sacrifices balance and fun on the altar of "realism," fills up chapters in setting books with tends of thousands of years of ancient history no one cares about at the expense of actual usable plot hooks, and so forth.

Which is a perfectly legitimate complaint, but one that often has to be spoken of indirectly outside of places like the Den, lest it come out sounding like "you suck at game design and your ideas are cliché and terrible," which tends to ruffle feathers.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It's not really that Shadowrun's magic system fits Shadowrun's genre and setting and D&D's doesn't fit its own genre and setting, it's that D&D doesn't have a single genre and setting to fit.

Well, that's basically what I meant, but that's what I get for being vague. D&D magic can do all sorts of wild shit that breaks most settings outside of... what, Eberron? It didn't really have to, but I can cut Gygax and Arneson some slack because pretty much everything they did was slapped together ad hoc. I can't say the same for the people who continue to put out spells that don't have much thought put into them because "tradition". Don't get me wrong, I like wild, high-powered shit, but crap like "you cast Wall of Iron and win the D&D economy" probably shouldn't happen, and cutting the spell is a coward's answer.

I bring this topic up in the first place because I find myself in an interesting position: I have a game system. There's stuff in it that's totally magic, but because the game is based on a licensed property, they can't really elaborate more on it beyond what the source material has done and none of it is ACTUALLY called magic. I could elaborate because I don't give a shit about the source material, but (most) other people ostensibly do. I also have a setting, because I fucking hate the original setting and wanted to pursue heroic fantasy instead. On the mechanical hand, I have clearly defined effects to reach towards, and on the fluff hand... I guess I can do whatever since it's my setting and I can change anything, but I still have a quasi-Hindu cosmology to start from. The problem is that middle part, where the mechanics meet the setting and fall in love and have cute babies together that are really smart and hot and good at tabletop games.
So if I seem overly fixated on a single setting, that's why. Just wanted to put everything on the table.

On the one hand, yeah, it certainly sounds like that dev is one of those types who believes twee rules-light games are the height of RPG design, thinks internal consistency is a four-letter word, and couldn't math their way out of a wet paper bag with a GPS and a lightsaber.

It'd odd, because the game they made definitely isn't rules-lite... but their new version of it is. It's baffling. You are right in that it's very possible that he meant that pushing hard for REALRIZMS is a bad way to approach game design or DMing, but it's hard to tell on a platform like fucking Discord, where everybody just comes off as kind of flippant and clique-y. I cannot fucking stand that so many RPG communities have made their home there, where good discussion can't really take place because you're in an unjumped chatroom.

[Kaelik]

Oh shit, okay, now I get it. It seems to me that's more of a function of the system itself rather than the setting. For some reason, I have a hard time articulating that... system/setting integration? I can wrap my head around it, just not enough to formulate good words to vomit at people.

I did specifically say that it was a mechanics issue.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Fair enough, I say redundant shit sometimes just to make sure I actually know what's going on.

[Emerald]

D&D magic can do all sorts of wild shit that breaks most settings outside of... what, Eberron? It didn't really have to, but I can cut Gygax and Arneson some slack because pretty much everything they did was slapped together ad hoc. I can't say the same for the people who continue to put out spells that don't have much thought put into them because "tradition". Don't get me wrong, I like wild, high-powered shit, but crap like "you cast Wall of Iron and win the D&D economy" probably shouldn't happen, and cutting the spell is a coward's answer.

Eh, the "wizards instantly break the world's economy over their knee" thing is somewhat exaggerated. I mean, yes, creating tons of material ex nihilo will certainly make a bunch of merchants really happy and a bunch of economists really pissed, and it'll really wreck an unprepared DM's day if a wizard PC suddenly pulls that without any prior discussion, but 3e does have rules that at least try to deal with stuff like that.

For wall of iron, f'rinstance, if you want to sell the raw materials, a single CL 11 casting nets you about 7960 lbs of iron, assuming this math is correct (it looks right, but I'm too lazy to double-check it at the moment), which works out to 796 gp per wall given the cost of commodity iron.

Sounds hefty, but paying someone to cast that CL 11 wall of iron is 710 gp by the Spellcasting Services rules, though, so that wizard is only making 86 gp profit per slot by carving up and selling said iron compared to casting the wall for someone else and letting them deal with it, or 136 gp profit compared to casting any ol' 6th level spell someone wants, and demographics rules have mid-level arcanists being reasonably common in larger cities, so it's quite possible that either the PC has easier money-making options or that other wizards would undercut his prices. And that's assuming the DM doesn't use the A&EG rules on commodity scarcity and the increased supply of iron wipes out the profits entirely.

If you want to fabricate thousands of gp worth of stuff out of the wall (and can find something that's pure iron that's possible to craft and people will pay for), you start running into community gp limits, and then if you start teleporting around to sell to multiple cities you start running into lots of logistical issues on the player side and math/merchant NPC creation/plot hook generation/etc. on the DM side, and once the PC and DM have both crossed their t's and dotted their i's it basically looks like either you move the campaign into Logistics & Dragons territory and start setting up merchant empires and planar trading strongholds--which, score, the magic system has enabled a campaign style the party likes and other games don't handle as well!--or the DM says "Huh, I guess this wizard trading network is how cities always seem to have tons of random weapons lying around to equip your followers" and suggests that the player isn't making a major dent in the market and would be better served going adventuring again.

Really, any game system that gives players both the ability to make things at certain costs and the ability to sell and buy things at certain prices is going to run into similar problems, D&D isn't all that special in that regard. Only the chain-binding-genies-for-wishes or wishing-for-a-staff-of-wish stuff really gets out of hand, and that's due to the unbounded and/or self-perpetuating nature of those particular issues, and those are relatively easy to spot fix (which doesn't make them not a problem, Oberoni-style, just not an unfixably setting-breaking one).

I bring this topic up in the first place because I find myself in an interesting position: I have a game system. There's stuff in it that's totally magic, but because the game is based on a licensed property, they can't really elaborate more on it beyond what the source material has done and none of it is ACTUALLY called magic. I could elaborate because I don't give a shit about the source material, but (most) other people ostensibly do. I also have a setting, because I fucking hate the original setting and wanted to pursue heroic fantasy instead. On the mechanical hand, I have clearly defined effects to reach towards, and on the fluff hand... I guess I can do whatever since it's my setting and I can change anything, but I still have a quasi-Hindu cosmology to start from. The problem is that middle part, where the mechanics meet the setting and fall in love and have cute babies together that are really smart and hot and good at tabletop games.
So if I seem overly fixated on a single setting, that's why. Just wanted to put everything on the table.

You might want to make another thread on that particular topic for people to toss ideas around. I don't recognize the setting you're referencing, but someone else might and might have some suggestion, and in general "how to make this fluff and that crunch line up" discussions are always fun to have and to watch.

[jt]

In Shadowrun, you know that a guy rolling 5 hits on his Manaball is putting in as much effort/showing as much skill as a guy rolling 5 hits on rewiring a door panel or shooting an assault rifle.

I'm still curious about this. I get how it works for a numerical scale, but I'm curious whether magic/mundane comparability works for other setups. Does D&D 4E also accomplish this with its at-will/encounter/daily thing? Like, a fighter using a daily sword strike is using as much effort/skill as a wizard using a daily spell, is that enough to get this benefit?

Maybe that's meaningless because D&D 4E powers live in their own little mechanical bubble that doesn't want to interact with the rest of the world. If your Jump skill granted at-will/encounter/daily feats of jumping, would that be enough to know whether trying to use a daily casting of Wind Wall to blow yourself across a chasm works?

(Yeah, I know this is probably tricky to parse out from underneath the pile of shit that 4E is. Sorry about that.)

[Username17]

In Shadowrun, you know that a guy rolling 5 hits on his Manaball is putting in as much effort/showing as much skill as a guy rolling 5 hits on rewiring a door panel or shooting an assault rifle.

I'm still curious about this. I get how it works for a numerical scale, but I'm curious whether magic/mundane comparability works for other setups. Does D&D 4E also accomplish this with its at-will/encounter/daily thing? Like, a fighter using a daily sword strike is using as much effort/skill as a wizard using a daily spell, is that enough to get this benefit?

Maybe that's meaningless because D&D 4E powers live in their own little mechanical bubble that doesn't want to interact with the rest of the world. If your Jump skill granted at-will/encounter/daily feats of jumping, would that be enough to know whether trying to use a daily casting of Wind Wall to blow yourself across a chasm works?

(Yeah, I know this is probably tricky to parse out from underneath the pile of shit that 4E is. Sorry about that.)

4e powers don't work because they don't interact with the skill system at all. If you activate a utility power, how good is that supposed to be compared to rolling a 17 on a similar skill? I don't know, and you don't know. And Rob Heinsoo and Andy Collins don't know. It's not something the system can answer because power-based actions and skill based actions don't use a comparable system with comparable outputs.

It's one of the things that made the "skill challenges such a fucking joke. If you can't even say what it means to cast invisibility during a "stealth challenge" you basically don't have a system at all.

the Spellcasting Services rules

I'm gonna stop you right there. The Spellcasting Services rules are pretty much totally incompatible with characters actually using their spell slots for mercenary purposes because the amounts of money are relatively speaking titanic. Our hypothetical wizard may get 660 gold for using a 6th level spell slot, but they also get 550 gold for using a 5th level spell slot. If they were able to sell all their non-cantrip slots for the day at supposedly market prices, they'd take in 10,670 gp each day in service fees.

No D&D economy can have someone working a normal job that pays 27 pounds of gold per hour. That's just not a thing the D&D economy can support. Also too, there's be no reason to adventure, because 3e treasure piles are much smaller than that.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Even if you were to use the service casting, that really only is intended to apply to the PCs. Something like a 'court mage' is supposed to be a thing, and if you're on retainer, it seems that demanding you cast the spell regularly is a thing that can happen.

So why would you have dwarf miners?

The things that are cool in the world involve people engaged in a fantasy life that the players interact with. A lot of the magical spells obviate those 'cool things'.

How iconic is a 'wizard tower'? But once you have Magnificent Mansions, shouldn't every wizard retreat to their more secure extra-dimensional space?

Magic has a problem with a Categorical Imperative. If very few people do it, it is probably okay, but if EVERYONE does it, it isn't. Since there are powerful incentives for EVERYONE to do it, the better option is probably to make it so NOBODY can do it.

That isn't to say that you couldn't have a lot of the spells you do; they just don't need to work the specific way they do. Wall of Stone and Wall of Iron could be 'wall of Earth' and have a duration where the hardness/hit points apply, after which it returns to normal earth. Ie, if the hardness/hit points/area of the wall are dependent on your CL, the spells can be combined.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Since there are powerful incentives for EVERYONE to do it, the better option is probably to make it so NOBODY can do it.

And if you do this enough times and you get 4E D&D.

[deaddmwalking]

Since there are powerful incentives for EVERYONE to do it, the better option is probably to make it so NOBODY can do it.

And if you do this enough times and you get 4E D&D.

My point was that you can make magic useful and helpful and capable of changing the game world without actually breaking the game world.

The point of a spell like wall of iron is supposed to be to help you in a dungeon. You block off half the enemies so you can deal with them a bit at a time. For that purpose, having a duration is fine (even though it could be dispelled) or having it be made of 'extra strong stone' would be fine. If you want the spell to be about building castles of iron, you would present it differently. In that case, there's no reason not to have a massively long casting-time.

It turns out that the spell is intended for combat-time but some of the benefits outside of combat time are 'problematic'. Considering what the spell does outside of combat isn't a bad thing. If the spell has a duration (for instance) you can still use the wall of iron to cross a chasm or potentially save the party from a cave-in or landslide. You can still interact with the world outside of combat - so you're not playing 4E.

I think D&D needs some clear metaphysics. One of the things we do in our game is insist that magic is not intelligent. A lot of D&D spells know when a triggering condition is met. You can set a spell that only activates when good-aligned orcs enter an area, meaning the spell has to be able to distinguish a dwarf from an orc and determine alignment. The magic isn't fooled by the disguise skill like a human guard might be. That probably means there are a lot of things you can do in 3E that you can't do in our system, but those are the types of things that we don't WANT magic to do.

If you want to fabricate a couch with magic, you have to know how to make a couch - the magic is a tool that might let you do it, but it won't do anything for you on it's own. Flying magic swords attack the people you tell them to attack, but they don't attack if you don't tell them to - you can't order them to attack any person they 'see' because they don't 'see' and they don't 'recognize' creatures - a magically animated sword is just like a regular sword except in the manner you wield it.

[Mord]

On a (mostly) unrelated note, I remember a conversation I had with a game dev where they outright derided the idea of verisimilitude being SUPER FUCKING IMPORTANT when it comes to RPGs. It kind of blew my mind. How can a game feel meaningful if there's no sense of internal consistency and your mechanics aren't enough to support a world?

The pursuit of verisimilitude is not the only means to achieve internal consistency or to support a world. If you view an RPG as a "plausible real life outcome simulator" then yes, you need to work towards verisimilitude, but who actually plays games that are meant to emulate plausible real life outcomes?

If your group is making a story where the protagonists go on a fantasy adventure, you want a system that is designed to support the elements of fantasy adventures. Repeat for heists, encounters with cosmic horrors, slasher flicks, high school dramas, space operas, low comedy, gothic horror, gay vampire romps, whatever. The system that suits your story best is the one that offers the best genre emulation. Verisimilitude is not even fifth on the list of things that makes a given system most suitable to support a given game.

This is also part of why "universal" RPG systems are a dead end. Different genres have fundamentally different expectations for basic conflict resolution and consequences. Compare a game seeking to tell a story in the style of Top Secret! against a different game trying for a more Casino Royale vibe. Both of them are likely to have a hero thrown out a window by a bruiser, but the consequences need to be very different.