Flexible Magic - Impossible?

[momothefiddler]

Okay, so HERO is like I thought the first time around.

The complaints are that it has a lot of pieces and... no damage types? Or just that you can theoretically take three levels of Fighter and call yourself a necromancer even though you don't do necromancing?

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Anyway, I'm not sure that's "flexible" in the way I was referring to in my original post. I mean technically spell research makes D&D flexible in that way; I was meaning more like time-of-cast flexibility (unless that's there too and hasn't been explicitly mentioned/I missed it.

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the more creative and comfortable with said set of lego blocks players are, the more unpredictable results become, something that can potentially throw out of the window all expectations of what should a caster or manifester be capable of at which level. The consequences of this in a zero-to-hero game with (relatively) solid metrics for challenge ratings and level progression can be disastrous.

I don't really get level-based systems, actually, but that's probably a separate discussion. It's just that if you have "this spell cannot output more than x units of Things You Want", which seems to be the general limiting factor for a level-based thing, then why have magic as a force multiplier anyway?

As any effects-oriented system, the more open it is, the more it relies on a gentleman's agreement, and the better a GM must be at knowing both when to say yes and when to say no.

This seems... reasonable in theory. I did point out earlier that my reticence to trust my effects to the MC might be a matter of past experiences.

[MGuy]

Even in a game without 'levels' there is a 'power level' you want people to be working at if you care about any semblance of balance at all. You may not want to throw that all outta wack.

[MGuy]

Double.

[Drolyt]

Okay, so HERO is like I thought the first time around.

The complaints are that it has a lot of pieces and... no damage types? Or just that you can theoretically take three levels of Fighter and call yourself a necromancer even though you don't do necromancing?

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I'm not sure what you mean. HERO has special effects, which covers damage type. It also doesn't have classes or levels.

Anyway, I'm not sure that's "flexible" in the way I was referring to in my original post. I mean technically spell research makes D&D flexible in that way; I was meaning more like time-of-cast flexibility (unless that's there too and hasn't been explicitly mentioned/I missed it.

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HERO has a few mechanics for in game flexibility. The most versatile is a Variable Power Pool, which lets you make up new powers on the fly. It is usually limited to a specific special effect.

This seems... reasonable in theory. I did point out earlier that my reticence to trust my effects to the MC might be a matter of past experiences.

Effects based systems don't leave it up to the MC for the most part.

[DSMatticus]

The complaints are that it has a lot of pieces and... no damage types? Or just that you can theoretically take three levels of Fighter and call yourself a necromancer even though you don't do necromancing?

Hero is a classless and levelless point buy system with a ton of fiddly little levers and dials. So... yes, it has a lot of pieces, many of which are fiddly, but no, you can't take three levels of fighter, because you can't take any levels in anything. You can call yourself a necromancer without doing any necromancing, but it would be a lot like me calling myself an astronaut - it only works until you start asking me what I do that makes me an astronaut.

Also, it does have damage types - the fluff for an ability isn't optional, and you're supposed to give them sfx keywords like "fire" or "ice" or "psychic" or whatever. Some characters will have special defenses/weaknesses that apply to certain sfx keywords.

Anyway, I'm not sure that's "flexible" in the way I was referring to in my original post. I mean technically spell research makes D&D flexible in that way; I was meaning more like time-of-cast flexibility (unless that's there too and hasn't been explicitly mentioned/I missed it.

Drolyt already said it, but Hero has a thing called the variable power pool (VPP). Basically, you set aside a bunch of your points that you can then use to build powers on the fly. Depending on how much game time it takes to rebuild your powers (ranging from instantly in combat to days of downtime or more), it will either be more or less expensive.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

In all honesty, as a GM/player of Ars Magica for 16 years, the spontaneous system works well with a GM who actually knows the rules. There are relatively clear guidelines and a lot of stuff to memorize, which IS a weakness of the system, but necessary for the relatively simple parameterization of how the system works. The caveat is for 5th edition. 3rd and 4th ed had inconsistent rules for the various technique+form combinations.

The two problem I see at my table with spontaneous magic are:

1.) that it actually takes a specialist (who probably already has actual formulaic spells in that category) or end game characters to cast high enough level spells spontaneously to do something interesting - otherwise people are getting off level 5, 10 and 15 spells which aren't very interesting most of the time

2.) The time it can take to set up the spell at the table.

In general though, the system is quite robust. In order to cast a spell, identify:

1.) What you want to do.
2.) How far away you want to affect the target (Range)
3.) How big the target is (Target)
4.) How long you want to affect the target (Duration)

The bigger the spell the higher the level.

I guess some people could interpret the guidelines provided differently, and since I'm the GM, I usually win such arguments. But it's certainly much more defined and clear than Mage the Ascension.

Honestly, if casting spontaneous magic spells in Ars Magica is like arguing with a capricious God, there are far more likely to be problems with either the player, the GM or the player and GM than the system. Problems being:

1.) Reading comprehension
2.) Not being able to recall enough of the actual rules and doing too much on the fly and NOT using the actual rules
3.) Player or GM simply do not understand the system & want to be specail snowflakes.

Ars 5th Ed went through 3 or 4 rounds of play testing, which seems to more than 95% of RPGs can claim for their corebook. A lot of stuff got cleaned up. It also requires a lot of memorization and system mastery to GM well.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Oh and consider me interested in an Ars Magica PbP game.

[Laertes]

Cool. I will be deeply intimidated to run for a sixteen year veteran, but will also be honoured to have you in the game.

That's three "consider me interesteds." New topic time to discuss this? I would be extremely happy to make space in the game for anyone who's spoken ill of Ars Magica but wants to play it to actually see what it's like.

[Username17]

I guess some people could interpret the guidelines provided differently, and since I'm the GM, I usually win such arguments.

I think you should take a step back and notice that this is essentially the argument of both Laertes and yourself: that you get to be the storyguide and therefore it's totally obvious that people get to achieve the effects you think they should be able to and not other ones. Do you not see the problem with that? The person whose opinion counts about whether a system is being run consistently and fair is not the person who gets the final word, its the person who has to abide by that final word.

If a system boils down to a game of Mother May I? with the MC, I am totally uninterested in the stated opinion of that MC that the game is awesome and completely fair. Because the MC in that situation is in no way a neutral observer and would have to criticize themselves to admit any flaws. Most people simply lack the self awareness to do that.

But it's certainly much more defined and clear than Mage the Ascension.

That is not saying much. Mage the Ascension is probably the most incoherent magic system ever put on paper. But you are correct that Ars Magica is not even in the fucking ballpark of how insane Mage the Ascension is. Ars Magica is mostly functional, and even though I'm very down on the spontaneous magic I will admit that it almost works. Mage the Ascension magic does not almost work.

-Username17

[MGuy]

I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to have all your magic in a game have clear outputs for your inputs. I never played Ars M. (played Mage but that game is nuts so I don't count it for anything) so I have no opinion on it but based purely on how some of the ill-defined spells and abilities in D+D work. Every time an ability that isn't clearly defined comes up it is a problem. How well I handle it is immaterial, it just is an issue.

[Drolyt]

I guess some people could interpret the guidelines provided differently, and since I'm the GM, I usually win such arguments.

I know Frank already tackled this one, but wow. You basically negated the entire rest of your post with that one sentence. I have never played Ars Magica so I can't really say how the spontaneous magic system works, but your post is if anything a good argument that it doesn't.

[Laertes]

I think you should take a step back and notice that this is essentially the argument of both Laertes and yourself: that you get to be the storyguide and therefore it's totally obvious that people get to achieve the effects you think they should be able to and not other ones. Do you not see the problem with that? The person whose opinion counts about whether a system is being run consistently and fair is not the person who gets the final word, its the person who has to abide by that final word.

Now sober but hungover, I must disagree with this.

There are two possible states here that I think you're conflating, and this ends up with a fallacy.

a) The GM sets the goalposts, and then those goalposts are something that both the players and the GM can rely on fairly and consistently without them being further shifted.

b) The GM reserves the right to shift the goalposts at any point during play, and thus there is no fairness and no consistency.

These are separate states. (b) turns the game into Mother May I. (a) however consists of having a solid set of rules and precedents which you can then build on, in a manner that is no different from having those written in the core book, because those are now the rules and the GM needs to follow them as much as anyone else does.

Every game, not just Ars Magica, needs to make this distinction. It's one of the basic tenets of being a good GM.

[MGuy]

I think you should take a step back and notice that this is essentially the argument of both Laertes and yourself: that you get to be the storyguide and therefore it's totally obvious that people get to achieve the effects you think they should be able to and not other ones. Do you not see the problem with that? The person whose opinion counts about whether a system is being run consistently and fair is not the person who gets the final word, its the person who has to abide by that final word.

Now sober but hungover, I must disagree with this.

There are two possible states here that I think you're conflating, and this ends up with a fallacy.

a) The GM sets the goalposts, and then those goalposts are something that both the players and the GM can rely on fairly and consistently without them being further shifted.

b) The GM reserves the right to shift the goalposts at any point during play, and thus there is no fairness and no consistency.

These are separate states. (b) turns the game into Mother May I. (a) however consists of having a solid set of rules and precedents which you can then build on, in a manner that is no different from having those written in the core book, because those are now the rules and the GM needs to follow them as much as anyone else does.

Every game, not just Ars Magica, needs to make this distinction. It's one of the basic tenets of being a good GM.

What? A does not mean what you think it means. In A and AND B you're still following the whims of some guy who gets to make a rule that you didn't get to know about in advance. Both are worse than having a clear cut rule to begin with and there are no benefits to doing it that way.

[Laertes]

Both are worse than having a clear cut rule to begin with

I agree entirely.

and there are no benefits to doing it that way.

I disagree entirely. That is total bullshit.

Do you know what Ends of the Matrix is? Do you know what Tome is? They're nothing but a GM saying, "Yeah, we're going to play the game, but we're going to use this set of rules to patch the places where the rules as written don't work." They are nothing more than what I said, a set of GM calls written and codified so that players can rely on them.

Saying that there are no benefits to using fixes like Ends or Tome, or any other set of thought-out rules calls and patches is well beyond wrong and deep into the realms of the bizarre.

[MGuy]

Both are worse than having a clear cut rule to begin with

I agree entirely.

and there are no benefits to doing it that way.

I disagree entirely. That is total bullshit.

Do you know what Ends of the Matrix is? Do you know what Tome is? They're nothing but a GM saying, "Yeah, we're going to play the game, but we're going to use this set of rules to patch the places where the rules as written don't work." They are nothing more than what I said, a set of GM calls written and codified so that players can rely on them.

Saying that there are no benefits to using fixes like Ends or Tome, or any other set of thought-out rules calls and patches is well beyond wrong and deep into the realms of the bizarre.

Those are rules that someone made, not at a single moment at the game table, that can be looked at and agreed to in advanced. You can choose to use those rules or not as a group because the group can know about it ahead of time. Both of those are not someone deciding at the point of 'something' propping up to make a rule for it. So yes, you can use ruleset A or ruleset B and I won't call bullshit on that. But you can't say that using a ruleset vs someone coming up with a new rule on the spot then deciding to keep that rule later as the same thing.

[TiaC]

Saying that you can set the goalposts ahead of time for something that is inherently spontaneous and unpredictable seems to be a contradiction.

Some player is going to come up with some crazy idea that the GM never considered and then you're back to "Mother may I?"

[Laertes]

Speaking as a player for a moment, rather than as a GM: I tend to navigate games by the overall sense of the world. This sense of the world is created by the rules, because mechanics matter, but it's mostly created by consistency and verisimilitude. For example, if Ares Predator pistols are clearly better than Ruger Redhawk pistols, then I expect every NPC in the world to know this, including the ones who work for Ruger, and therefore they will take a decision on whether to continue manufacturing the Redhawk in the face of a competitor's dominant product.

When "something comes up", for me as a player, it isn't because the GM is frustrated with a player who's found a way to win. It's because the setting's verisimilitude is broken, and with it is broken my sense of immersion and my ability to enjoy that setting. If someone found a way to do infinity damage when doing something nobody has ever done before, that's great, that happened in real life and we called it the Manhattan Project and it changed the world and every country which had the infrastructure to do it started to use that rules exploit. That doesn't damage the setting at all, quite the opposite. But if a guy walking down the road one day found a way to hit people with his hands in just such a way that it did infinity damage, that's bullshit. Hitting people with hands is a well-understood problem. By now, humans have been hit with human hands in every possible permutation of ways, and nobody has ever done infinity damage with it. If it is possible to do that in a game, then that's bullshit and that reduces the amount of fun I have as a player.

Therefore, if "something comes up", I expect the GM to leap in right fucking then like Superman and go "NOPE" and for it to be fixed then and there. On the spot. We can discuss it later and come up with an elegant fix that everyone agrees upon and implement that in a way that works for everyone, but right now? My game's broken and my fun's draining out, and I expect the GM to be Mr Game Plumber and fix it. Not next week. Now.

That's not "Mother, May I". That's a recognition that sometimes there are problems, and problems need to be fixed so that we can all go back to playing a game where the rules work. And if we don't spot those problems until they occur? Yeah, that's how the world works. Welcome to real life.

[Antumbra]

Some player is ALWAYS going to come up with some crazy idea that the GM never considered. It doesn't matter if it's magic or a plot to kill the king that involves tying together a lot of rats by the tails and hiring a travelling acrobat. The GM still ends up ruling if it works or not, with varying degrees of directness.

Spontaneous magic systems are an agreement or negotiation between the player and GM. That's totally "mother may I" - but it doesn't matter in the slightest in the specific situation where the players are actually on-board with it, agree to abide by the GM's rulings and the GM isn't a control freak who makes opaque decisions and jerks off to his authority.

If part of the system is literally "have some guidelines, make the final effect up yourself and ask the GM if it's cool" and you consider that a valuable attribute... then Ars Magica or Ritual Path Magic is as good as you're going to get.

[Username17]

The thing is Laertes, you already lost this argument with this:

"Horns from the head" is a shitty example, but I understand your point. For what it's worth, that's very definitely Muto Corpus Animal.

Now, this may be a little subtle, but by claiming that popping horns out of someone's head is "very definitely" Muto and not Rego or Creo, you lost the game. Because the entire point is that I don't agree. And assuming for the moment that we're both reasonable people, this means that reasonable people disagree about what the arcana are capable of. Which means that i am right and you are wrong.

For what it's worth, cutaneous horns are a real thing that normal people can grow. Their skin already contains keratinocytes and the horns are made out of keratin. They are formed from a base which is genetically pretty much the same as normal skin. On the other hand, fruit is not. Fruit is formed around seeds, which are the result of fertilization, which means that the underlying seed is no closer related to the tree which spawned it than is a brother or a mother. Indeed, the seed is a daughter, not a fingernail.

Which means that as a biologist, I know for a fact that the kinds of control given as a literal and explicit example in Rego are in all ways identical or more extensive than forcing a horn to grow out of someone's skin. So if I came to your game with a Rego specialist, I would fucking well expect to be able to control someone's skin to pop devil horns out of their forehead. And when you would respond that obviously that would be Muto rather than Rego, I would be pretty fucking pissed off.

Which is the bottom line. You're claiming that there is general agreement about what the different words of power are capable of, but you already proved beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that there fucking isn't by being outright wrong about an offhand example I pulled out of my ass at the beginning of the discussion.

-Username17

[Laertes]

Ah. I see where we've been miscommunicating.

Frank, you're applying real world biology to Ars Magica. Which is fine and all in games which are set in the real world, but not Ars Magica. See, Ars Magica is set in Mythic Europe, which doesn't run by real world science but instead runs by the rules the people at the time thought it ran by. Which means that the physics are Aristotelean, the cosmology is Ptolemean, and the biology is by Galen and Paracelsus.

You understand biology. You know what Galen and Paracelsus were like. They were full of stupid stuff which sounds reasonable to someone who didn't know any better, but which is totally ridiculous to us because we know about stuff that they didn't. Which sounds stupid but remember that this is a world in which a guy can totally learn to cast fireballs by reading a book and chanting in Latin, and if that's not stupid then nothing is.

I trained as an astrophysicist. I understand that in the world we live, the solar system looks like this:


But in Mythic Europe, the solar system looks like this:


If I cast a teleport spell in Ars Magica that will get me up 200km above the earth, I will not enter orbit. Instead I will fall back down, because there's no such thing as orbit and since I'm sinful, gravity will pull my sinful ass back the fuck down to earth with a thump.

Similarly, trying to grow a horn out of someone's skin is not simply a manipulation of keratin because in Ars Magica there is no such thing as keratin. Horns are made of horn and skin is made of skin. God designed humanity without horns, and he designed buffalo with horns, and therefore to make a human have horns you need to use Muto Corpus Animal. Humans can't have horns without magic or faeries or demons or the divine acting on them. Those things run around a lot and do stuff and so you will see humans with horns, but you will not see them happening naturally. Which means it isn't Rego.

Similarly, trees grow fruit because God decreed that that's what trees do, so you can make trees grow fruit with Rego Herbam. You can create mushrooms with Herbam magic because fungi are plants, but you can't cure a yeast infection with it because yeast infections aren't caused by fungi - they're caused by imbalanced humours, and that needs Corpus magic.

There's an entire book they put out called Art & Academe, which explores the implications of how the academic theories of the time work with magic. It is pretty awesome.

I've read your posts. You're a smart guy. You understand that games happen in worlds where the laws of physics are different from ours, and the implications of that. This is a world like that. It is internally consistent and its rules are understood by all the NPCs inside the world, but trying to bring our out of game knowledge into it can get you into trouble. As in this case.

Edited to say: This is why I will remain of the position that it isn't a case of "Mother, May I?" It's a case of "Aristotle, May I?", which is morally no different from "Rulebook, May I?" and if you find that to be overly constraining then I think we have no common ground on which to continue this discussion.

[MGuy]

Speaking as a player for a moment, rather than as a GM: I tend to navigate games by the overall sense of the world. This sense of the world is created by the rules, because mechanics matter, but it's mostly created by consistency and verisimilitude. For example, if Ares Predator pistols are clearly better than Ruger Redhawk pistols, then I expect every NPC in the world to know this, including the ones who work for Ruger, and therefore they will take a decision on whether to continue manufacturing the Redhawk in the face of a competitor's dominant product.

Laer, I could really try and break down the rest but this is all I need to make my point. What 'I' believe is consistent and logical and what you believe is the same is going to be different. As Frank pointed you pretty much have to have everyone on the exact same page in order for this shit to work out smoothly. That's often times not the case. What's more even if you have a GM who can remember every 'ruling' he makes that doesn't mean that the ruling will be good. You referenced Tomes and alternate Matrix rules but those took time to make and wasn't just a GM ass pulling something in the moment. Nothing about ass pulling will be better than just having rules made in advance that work.

[Drolyt]

If part of the system is literally "have some guidelines, make the final effect up yourself and ask the GM if it's cool" and you consider that a valuable attribute... then Ars Magica or Ritual Path Magic is as good as you're going to get.

How could you possibly consider that a valuable attribute? What you describing is a cooperative storytelling game where one player gets to tell the whole story and everyone else can only make suggestions.

[Laertes]

Nothing about ass pulling will be better than just having rules made in advance that work.

I agree. I agree entirely. We are on the same page here. However, there is no game that's ever been made which doesn't occasionally need patching, and we both know this to be true. When that need for patching crops up, then you need to:

a) Apply an emergency patch right now. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than an obviously broken situation.

b) Go back and think about everything and talk it through with people and come up with something that's tested and that works better.

You need to do these steps in order. You can't just demand that because step (b) is possible, step (a) is unimportant. Yes, (a) involves ass pulls. But the alternative is worse.

[Laertes]

It occurs to me that I've derailed the thread. My apologies.

It also occurs to me that Frank and I may have stumbled on the basic answer to the initial question, though. How does one make a magic system which is flexible without being merely a source of constant GM fiat? How do we handle the fact that skin and horn are both made of keratin, while fruit are biologically distinct from the trees that grow them?

Science. In the same way that Ars Magica cleaves faithfully to the underlying laws of its world, we make our magic system cleave faithfully to the underlying laws of *our* world.

So you have Life magic. Life magic says something like "you can make bone do A, when you get to level B you can make bone do C instead. Meanwhile you can do D with keratin and E with other types of tissue." I'm not a biologist. I don't know how that works.

But I am a physicist. I do know how physics works. I can tell you how much energy you'd need to make a fireball, and how quickly it would dissipate. I can tell you about what a lightning bolt is, and what else you could do with the stuff that you would need to have in order to make a lightning bolt.

Or invisibility. Or flight. Or whatever.

Then it's just a matter of deciding how granular versus how abstract we want the system to be, which is far from an easy choice, and then making the system be like that. It's just maths. It's not hard.

So yeah. That's how I'd do a flexible magic system. By actually using real physics, or whatever the physics of your world is, and letting you genuinely create the effects based on how they would actually work.

[DSMatticus]

Instead I will fall back down, because there's no such thing as orbit and since I'm sinful, gravity will pull my sinful ass back the fuck down to earth with a thump.

It is internally consistent and its rules are understood by all the NPCs inside the world, but trying to bring our out of game knowledge into it can get you into trouble.

Do you realize you just described a theory of gravity that has inanimate objects levitating away into space, and then followed that up with a declaration of internal consistency about the game world, which I am 100% sure does not feature inanimate objects levitating away into space under their own power?

I'm like 99% sure the sin theory of gravity was never a thing, mind you. I can't tell if that specific theory is your's or the book's, but it doesn't really matter, because either way it's a sufficient fuck up to prove Frank's point about the game being driven by making your on the spot asspulls sound reasonable. In that that was obviously an on the spot asspull by somebody to whom it sounded reasonable at the time, and it turned out to be super sketchy and highly debatable (or just plain wrong).