Science is cool and good. Science built nearly everything good in my life. But I don't really "like" science. I respect it, I bow to it. But I don't read about hydrology for fun.
I like magic. I like the numinous, the fleeting, the wondrous; the fear and awe and loathing and trembling; the sublime. A person standing before a sorcereress should be like a person standing before a tsunami, or a quaking volcano. He shouldn't be thinking "what level spell can she use?" or "How many mana points does she have left?" If you see a the rules of reality bending before you, you shouldn't immediately start thinking about math.
Magic should be magical.
And of course, there should also be charlatans and hucksters, selling snake oils and meaningless invocations to the gullible. There should be fears of witchcraft; there should be mysterious old ladies living in the woods who the villagers go to for help but shun in the daylight.
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I recognize how this is a problem for a game system. Unknowable, "soft" magic may be well and numinous, but that's not exactly something you can put in a rulebook. Almost by definition, my idea of magic is unplayable.
Which is why I generally don't want players playing magicians, and in my more recent D&D game outright forbid it. (Don't act scandalized; my players are very familiar with my odd campaign restrictions. It works! I wouldn't do it if they weren't on board. Instead they were all barbarians and it worked *beautifully.* Sometime I must say more about "unbalanced parties" and how fun they can be.)
At some point, though you want to play magician, and I don't want to say it simply can't be done. To that end I've been looking at other people's approaches and trying to come up with my own.
I started with Prismatic Wasteland's, explained here: https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/blog/spell-lists-are-not-magical His complaints are pretty much identical to mine, and he has a lot to say I agree with! He also identifies some helpful directions to explore.
From there I jumped over to Elmcat's, https://elmc.at/rub-my-body-in-goose-fat-daddy-i-want-to-fly/ ; who writes up the system I'm most inspired by, Wolves Upon the Coast. (Luke Gearing himself told me about it, because every time I have an idea that I think is cool, it turns out he's already done it. Luke Gearing, if you're reading this: bruh stop.)
And of course I always refer back to my first love, Call of Cthulhu; where learning a spell takes weeks to months and tends to mark the beginning of the end for your character. I like that too.
I'm still playing with ideas. I like the idea of a magic system driven by bizarre fetch quests, a la Wolves. I like the idea of magic being chaotic and risky, and even taking tolls on the magicians. I also like it being ritualistic; in the sense that a magician is only ever a conduit for alien intelligences, whether gods or demons or something entirely alien, more negotiating for a desired outcome than casting a spell. (DnD Warlocks are, in theory, this, though in practice it doesn't come up all that much mechanically. It's incumbent on the DM to make the patron particularly relevant and, I suspect, most really don't; as the warlock is a set of mechanics more than an RP choice.) (I hate Warlocks.)
I'm sure I'll come up with my final ideas just after Luke Gearing does.
I sympathise with your views on magic, and your struggle with making them gameable. I loved hard magic systems as a kid, and still have some affection for them. But as I read more I found myself more drawn to the mysterious, the wondrous, the mythic, and yes, the numinous. If magic doesn't inspire awe and wonder, then what's the point of magic?
ReplyDeleteSo, in my fiction resding I love a strange, fuzzy magic system.
(I would never deny my players access to magic, but that's just personal taste.)
One fix I tried with decent results was in a homebrew, rules-light system that's very focused on story and character traits; fey creatures have some ingrained magical abilities, but human magicians have to make a bargain to perform an act of magic. Every bargain is unique, and the payback is not necessarily or often immediately clear. A magician might sacrifice their voice to be able to make their final speech supernaturally compelling, or to break a very powerful enchantment. They might call the Sun to appear at midnight, but the Moon will have its revenge on them.
I also like the idea of magicians being weird. Knowing magic changes you in ways knowing engineering does not. It's not just a list of spells. Magicians may have eyes of gold or emerald, they may speak the language of birds, (perhaps just certain types of birds), flowers may grow from their footsteps, or the wind may croon their name when they're sad or howl it when they're on the warpath. They may see into multiple worlds at once, making them very wise but extremely vulnerable to surprise attacks in the mortal realm.
Other ideas are that magic is always a negotiation with spirits, that magic is inherently corrupting or mutating, that a wizard has a finite amount of magic in their lifetime, that magic is just about knowing the true names of things.
If you wanted to take inspiration from SFF fiction, I have a few suggestions. Your current approach resembles classic Sword and Sorcerery, so I'll assume you're well versed in that. Titles worth checking out include A Wizard of Earthsea, The King of Elfland's Daughter, Mythago Wood, Faerie Tale, The Maid and the Crocodile, The Poet Empress, A Stranger in Oolondria, Gogmagog. The Chinese classics Creation of the Gods and Journey to the West showcase a different view of magic to the standard D&D, but quite gameable. And there's a couple of 20th Century Arthurian novels that show Merlin as very strange.