Flexible Magic - Impossible?

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Slightly tangential to the topic: if someone conversant with both Hero and M&M wouldn't mind, could they please perhaps share an example or two of situations more effectively modeled in the former? If it's necessary to remain germane then one might consider the advantages of a VPP as compared to a Variable effect of the same descriptor, or variable-lites such as Inventor/Artificer/Ritualist.

[Drolyt]

Slightly tangential to the topic: if someone conversant with both Hero and M&M wouldn't mind, could they please perhaps share an example or two of situations more effectively modeled in the former? If it's necessary to remain germane then one might consider the advantages of a VPP as compared to a Variable effect of the same descriptor, or variable-lites such as Inventor/Artificer/Ritualist.

Well, I'm not nearly as familiar with M&M as I am with HERO, but one thing VPPs do that I don't think you can do with a Variable effect is differentiate between total amount of powers you can have (the "pool") and how powerful each individual power in the pool can be (the "control"). For example, you could have a VPP with a 150 point pool (so you can have a number of powers whose total cost adds up to 150 at any given time) and a control of 80 (so no power individual power in the pool can have an Active Point cost higher than 80). This would be highly appropriate for, say, a Green Lantern Ring type power where you could be doing several "level appropriate" (what's an analogous term for point based systems?) things at once, but you don't want to be able to pour the whole 150 point pool into one uber power.

One use for this is to give your character versatile but low powered abilities (think prestidigitation, but potentially higher level). For example, if 80 active points is "level appropriate" for your game, then a wizard might have a VPP with a 30 point control. The wizard would then have the versatile magic you would expect of them, but it wouldn't be unbalancing because only their signature spells, bought separately, would actually be strong enough to affect "level appropriate" opposition.

Speaking of Active Points, this might be debatable given my relative lack of knowledge of M&M but I think HERO System's method of balancing powers by Active Points is much more sound than M&M's ranks. In general two powers with the same Active Point total are equally useful, and while you can break this in various ways (usually through advantage stacking) it is better than any other point buy system I've seen.

As a final note, here's a challenge for anyone who might want to argue that M&M is as versatile as HERO, try to emulate the following:

Magic VPP, 52 Point Pool, 50 Point Control, Magic Only (-1/4), Spellbook (-1/2), Charges (-1/4), Focus (-1/2), Gestures (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4), Total Cost: 60 points. This basically emulates vancian casting, you can only prepare spells with access to a spellbook and at least an hour to study, you can prepare up to 52 points worth of spells, no one of which can have more than 50 Active Points, and all of which must be charged (that is you can only use them so many times per day), use a focus or material component of some sort, and require gestures and incantations (aka verbal and somatic components). You can of course add additional limitations to each individual spell.

[momothefiddler]

As a final note, here's a challenge for anyone who might want to argue that M&M is as versatile as HERO, try to emulate the following:

God damn. I can't emulate that in M&M. I can't emulate that in GURPS. Well, I can, but it would take Accessibility (which is straightforward and fairly easy but arguably wouldn't count because it's sort of a custom modifier) or a combinatorically large number of Modular Abilities as Alternative Abilities of each other (which would be stupid).

---

Laertes, where did you go.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I'll take a stab at it.

Pseudo-Vancian casting: Variable Z (Magical Descriptor, Flaws: Slow, Unreliable (5 uses) OR Fades, Quirk: Z-1 ranks max applicable/individual effect*
Cost: 4 points for first rank, 5/additional

Complications:
Power Loss: requires V/S/M components to cast, Spellbook to reconfigure

This provides a pool of 5 points/rank, requires an hour to switch loadouts, has a usage limit, and affords opportunities for hero/victory points. Additional flaws that could easily be added would be Activation(move or standard action) and Check Required: Expertise(Magic). Check Required can lower total power cost by 2PL-1 when set to the maximum DC, and helps make Artificer and Ritualist more cost-effective.

*A conversion of a VPP with a larger pool/control difference could arguably go from a flat -1 point Quirk to -2 or -3, or even a limited effect (-1/rank) for ranks above the individual effect limit.

50 Point Pool, 52 Point Control

Please tell me these are transposed, and the VPP cost is 52(pool)+8(control:25/3, rounded down)=60. I otherwise wouldn't mind a bit of hand holding.

[kzt]

VPP control cost often gets a lot higher than the pool costs. They are very powerful, but very expensive.

[Drolyt]

50 Point Pool, 52 Point Control

Please tell me these are transposed, and the VPP cost is 52(pool)+8(control:25/3, rounded down)=60. I otherwise wouldn't mind a bit of hand holding.

Er, yes, I switched them for some reason. Fixed now.

VPP control cost often gets a lot higher than the pool costs. They are very powerful, but very expensive.

Sure, for Cosmic VPPs, but not with very limited ones.

[Hicks]

Speaking as one who played several VPP mages in HERO, you want at least a -3 modifier on your pool (focus, somatic, incantations, requires a skil (to activate)) so you can have at least three and preferably four or more powers running simultaneously, and always have a cosmic pool with a RSR to switch out, then you can do stupid things like have multiform as one of the powers in your VPP, and get x5 the points in that slot to get 5 more powers, like a Xd6 ranged killing attack and Duplicate and flight/teleportation and two defensive powers and be an army of one with the killing power of an army.

You start considering stupid things like applying the mega distance advantage to Teleportation and sending problems into the sun, or to another galaxy, or into a blazar. You're Angel Summoner and every chump with a multipower is a BMX Bandit.

[Drolyt]

Speaking as one who played several VPP mages in HERO, you want at least a -3 modifier on your pool (focus, somatic, incantations, requires a skil (to activate)) so you can have at least three and preferably four or more powers running simultaneously, and always have a cosmic pool with a RSR to switch out, then you can do stupid things like have multiform as one of the powers in your VPP, and get x5 the points in that slot to get 5 more powers, like a Xd6 ranged killing attack and Duplicate and flight/teleportation and two defensive powers and be an army of one with the killing power of an army.

I'm not 100% how your setup is supposed to work, when you use multiform you don't get to keep your untransformed abilities.
Edit: Perhaps you are relying on it being quick to switch between forms?

[Hicks]

The trick is versitility, your specifically defined multiform is actually in a customizable VPP. Instead of paying 60 points for a specific power and losing access to the rest of your character, you switch the multiform on the fly to better suit your needs, like in the episode Ben 10 met his future self, Ben 10,000.

The limit on the VPP is that you can do anything, in fact it's a chore to think of something you couldn't do, whatever you do but you can't do 5 different things simultaneously (easily anyway). You always need a movement power, you always need one or two defensive powers (incorporeality, armor, shield, flash defense, mntal defense, whatever is most generally useful then is specifically applicable to the opposition) and you absolutely must have a force projection power (Energy blast, ranged killing attack, mind control, whatever) to actually remove problems.

[Korgan0]

Regarding the Ars Magica PbP talk: I'm setting up one right now, waiting on me getting back from vacation since my schedule is in flux right now, and I'd be open to consolidation in some sense.

Regarding the actual Ars Magica talk, Frank is being disingenuous here. The fact that Laertes described an apparent theory that has never been mentioned in the Ars Magica book nor in any medieval physics that I've encountered has nothing to do with some kind of polyvalence in the rules; it's like saying that 3.5 is problematic because someone read AC bonuses as being added to 20, not 10. More generally, Frank's horniness objection doesn't work, as under Aristotelian biology it's part of a human's essential nature to not have horns, and therefore is neither Creo, nor Perdo, nor Rego, and is therefore Muto. If you're trying to remove the horns, it's either the result of a magical effect, a demon possession, or unabalanced humours. The first would be Perdo Vim, the second Perdo or Rego (to destroy or post-hoc ward against the demon), and the last Creo Corpus as healing (Aristotelian forms are teleological, remember).

More generally, Ars Magica is capable of functioning as an open-ended magic system that isn't purely concieved of in terms of game mechanics because there's an actual comprehensive metaphysics underlying it, one with literally tens of thousands of pages dedicated to explaining it. For what it's worth, the developers seem to be pretty adamant about sticking to medieval metaphysics (I noticed they haven't taken a side on the realism/nominalism debate, but I'm guessing they lead towards the former), as evidenced by the fact that magically shot arrows were errataed to (in the societates book iirc) bypass magic resistance since medieval metaphysics has an account of how shot arrows travel that utilizes the air or something. The problem with this is that medieval metaphysics and philosophy in general is considered difficult and esoteric by actual professional philosophers, who are both fluent in latin and read this shit for a living. Asking your average gamer to be familiar with Aristotle, Ockham, Galen, Duns Scotus, and Boethius is honestly asking a great deal, especially if you're asking them to be familiar enough with the system to adjudicate rules conflicts. Reading Ockham was painful enough in a classroom setting; I wouldn't wish reading it for rules adjudication on my worst enemy. However, I'd say that ArM does a fairly good job of figuring out an internally consistent interpretation of the medieval consensus in such a way that it facilitiates the kind of games it's designed for, and while there are edge cases, I think they're the kind that can be resolved through appeals to the metaphysics themselves, and successfully/easily at that.

[Username17]

More generally, Frank's horniness objection doesn't work, as under Aristotelian biology it's part of a human's essential nature to not have horns, and therefore is neither Creo, nor Perdo, nor Rego, and is therefore Muto.

First off: go fuck yourself. Secondly: the game does not tell me that I have to read Aristotle to figure out how the magic works. In fact, if you read the "Mythic Europe" section, it specifically and emphatically tells me that I don't have to read period literature to play the game. Essential nature, as defined by the book, is a relatively few specific things that are mostly concerned with what you get flaw points for and where you have keratin deposits is absolutely not on that fucking list. Thirdly: Aristotelian Essence does not preclude having a cutaneous horn, because having a keratin deposit on your skin doesn't stop you from being you.

This is my fucking problem with open ended magic systems in general and Ars Magica in particular. So far three people have stepped up to explain where and why they would put the horns on head example I pulled out of my ass. And all three of you fuckers have gotten it wrong! Every one of you has relied on a misunderstanding of something that is not even in the book!

Laertes went off on a rant about the weight of sin, HTH went off on a rant about how cutaneous horns aren't a real medical condition, and Korgano went off on a rant about how skin disease violates Aristotle's concept of Essence. And none of that shit is true! Not in the real world, and even more importantly not in the Ars Magica book either.

Back in the nineties, I gave up on the spontaneous magic system altogether. When I made a mage character, I always, always, always took the flaw that traded your spontaneous magic out for more known spells. Always. Because I found that it was simply impossible to find a storyguide who would let you use your spontaneous magic without throwing up bullshit roadblocks based on their misunderstandings of the real world, the game world, or the guidelines for the magic categories. I never found one storyguide who wouldn't dick with the players based on their own misunderstandings, and it just wasn't worth having the inevitable arguments when I wanted to cast something spontaneously (that is: the middle of the fucking action).

And you know what? Three people have stepped up to prove me wrong, and every fucking one of them has proved me right. It's been twenty years, but Ars Magica fans haven't changed. And the biggest tragedy of all here is that when you take Spontaneous Magic flaws in 5th edition you no longer start with extra known spells.

-Username17

[momothefiddler]

And the biggest tragedy of all here is that when you take Spontaneous Magic flaws in 5th edition you no longer start with extra known spells.

-Username17

To be completely incapable of Spontaneous Magic, you take the Flaws Weak Spontaneous Magic (Major) and Difficult Spontaneous Magic (Minor) for a total of four points.

I'm not sure because I haven't finished the book, but I think you could then spend those four points on four instances of Mastered Spells (Minor) for a total of 200 extra xp "to spend on mastering spells that you know" or "to spend on your spells". Does this give you extra known spells? Is there a definitive difference between "spells known" and "spells not known" beyond simply "spells with xp allocated"? I don't fucking know and I can't find the appropriate rule. So there's that. But even if they have to be ones you already have points in, you can put your 120 starter points into 120 spells and then use the 200 to increase them to whatever.

That shouldn't have been so hard to figure out.

In older editions did the Flaws give you points for Virtues and known spells? Because that's cool I guess.

[Username17]

In older editions did the Flaws give you points for Virtues and known spells? Because that's cool I guess.

Yes they did. Some of the virtues and flaws move shit around, like if you have Mercuric or Druidic magic in 5th edition things go up and down. In 3rd edition, if you took the flaw where you didn't spontaneous magic, you straight up got more points for learning spells as part of the package.

So you got to bypass the literally bottomless well of Storyguide powertripping and fuckery that was trying to make up new spells spontaneously and you got more spells that actually worked because they were written down ahead of time. Win/Win.

-Username17

[momothefiddler]

Fair enough. I can certainly see the benefit in that.

AM (5th, at least) seems to be trying for a strict delineation. That is, every given effect falls into at most one Technique/Form pairing (with maybe three other Forms because we couldn't pick what element hail was in because it's water so aquam but solid so terram but cold so ignam but weather so auram jesus christ). Mage, on the other hand, seems to be a bit calmer about allowing overlap. Admittedly not much, but basically anything can be used to cause direct damage, for instance.

Point is, if you went farther in that direction and made it explicitly clear that just because something can be done with A is not a valid reason to prohibit it being done with B, would that mitigate the problem? It wouldn't solve it entirely, of course, but it seems that'd put a lot more of the power in the players' hands and your comments on "powertripping" seem to indicate that that's a good step.

[Username17]

Fair enough. I can certainly see the benefit in that.

AM (5th, at least) seems to be trying for a strict delineation. That is, every given effect falls into at most one Technique/Form pairing (with maybe three other Forms because we couldn't pick what element hail was in because it's water so aquam but solid so terram but cold so ignam but weather so auram jesus christ). Mage, on the other hand, seems to be a bit calmer about allowing overlap. Admittedly not much, but basically anything can be used to cause direct damage, for instance.

Point is, if you went farther in that direction and made it explicitly clear that just because something can be done with A is not a valid reason to prohibit it being done with B, would that mitigate the problem? It wouldn't solve it entirely, of course, but it seems that'd put a lot more of the power in the players' hands and your comments on "powertripping" seem to indicate that that's a good step.

Yeah, Ars Magica tries and fails to divide things into discrete non-overlapping magisteria and it's a clusterfuck. If the game were just fucking OK with things overlapping and you had a number of schools of Magic and you simply accepted the red magic, blue magic, and yellow magic could duplicate some effects from each other, it would be a lot better. The verb/noun thing can't work, because every change is a creation of a new state and a destruction of an older one. Although even if we allow schools to overlap heavily, that only reduces edge cases, we'll still have some. Sure, we'll no longer have arguments about whether an effect is Rego or Muto, but the school of Red is still going to have some sort of limits and those limits are necessarily going to be fuzzy and prone to MC fuckery.

But even if you clean away all the arguments about whether you can use Rego to make someone's skin produce extra keratin, we still have HTH's piece of fuckery to worry about. When you make a new effect, it's going to have a difficulty and a cost, which is going to be set by necessarily vague guidelines. HTH set the base difficulty to 3 (which is really quite high), on the grounds that cutaneous horns didn't exist. Now, they do, provably, exist. They are a real thing and people have them. So HTH is wrong and his reasoning is wrong. But it's also extremely typical. MCs are going to set the difficulty or cost up by miscategorizing the effects you want to pull off by failing to understand the world or the game all the time. And that's obviously going to be a source of friction and argument.

I simply don't think a source based spell design system is appropriate for spontaneous effects. If you're going to design a new enchantment or necromancy effect, that's going to require a fair amount of discussion between the player and the MC. And that is something which is entirely appropriate for downtime, but not appropriate at all for mid-action shenanigans.

-Username17

[momothefiddler]

To be fair, I doubt keratin exists in AMLand, and I bet people with horns have it because of some sort of warping or... whatever. I'm not an expert on Paracelsus, but I doubt he believed it was in the Nature of Human Beings to grow horns.

Of course, all this does is shift the blame for not having a consistent, clearly defined metaphysics from the MC to the system, so it's not actually any better and is, perhaps, worse. I mean, if you're expecting things to work out basically how you would expect them to in the real world, but you're playing in a world based on an Aristotelian model, there are gonna be clashes, because the Aristotelian model does not adequately describe the world where you live and what's more it does not have enough detail, in this rulebook or probably in all books on the subject, to build a comprehensive, internally consistent world of its own and you have to have inconsistencies or gaps.

HTH was probably right that, in AMLand, people don't naturally grow horns. But that doesn't actually say anything good about the system; it in fact makes it worse. I'm reminded of your comment on how Stalin being worse just makes Communism better, but in reverse. Paraphrased, of course.

[DEBO]

Point is, if you went farther in that direction and made it explicitly clear that just because something can be done with A is not a valid reason to prohibit it being done with B, would that mitigate the problem? It wouldn't solve it entirely, of course, but it seems that'd put a lot more of the power in the players' hands and your comments on "powertripping" seem to indicate that that's a good step.

I wouldn't think so, it just changes whose bullshit you need to deal with. In a discussion about using a spontaneous effect type system for a 'Last Airbender' game, putting a big emphasis on players making 'creative' use of bending and not being limited by what was in the show because "Toph invented Metal-bending!", I saw people justifying, amongst other things, firebenders freezing stuff and healing people, earthbenders 'bone-bending' and waterbenders setting things on fire. I personally thought having anything do anything aslong as you could justify it was pointless, others disagreed.

That argument got heated enough that Mods stepped in to make fun of 'fanboys' and tell people to stop disagreeing with their friends, and I wouldn't want to deal with that at the table in the middle of a game.

[angelfromanotherpin]

If you're going to design a new enchantment or necromancy effect, that's going to require a fair amount of discussion between the player and the MC.

Something that frequently gets lost in the shuffle, but which I think is germaine, is that the Ars Magica model of Troupe-style play assumes that the player is also an MC, and so is every other player at the table. They may not be actively MCing while they are playing, but they will be MCing at some point. And that really does put them on a different footing when it comes to these sorts of judgement calls. If the current MC sets a base effect higher than the rest of the group feels is reasonable, the group has excellent grounds to just outvote them on the matter.