Free-form magic systems

[Foxwarrior]

Yes, those are the easy ones. Try Teleportation Circle or Alarm or Reincarnate or Speak With Dead or Magic Jar.

[Hiram McDaniels]

I didn't say it was bad, I said it wasn't high fantasy. If the optimal answer to "Oh, shit, a dragon!" is "mobilize the welshmen!" then your fantasy is not high, or rather, it is only high on controlled substances.

Which is fine, I don't mind, and I might actually rather enjoy playing a veteran of the anti-dragon bow battalions, but it's not the high heroic "shit there's a dragon! Call the adventurers!" fantasy that D&D has always, and continues to pretend to be.

I feel like the very presence of things like wizards, dragons, beholders, et al makes it high fantasy, even if a bunch of mobilized peasant shit farmers can ruin their shit. At least it passes the smell test for me personally.

Edit for On-Topic-ness: What do people think of hacking the d20 spells and metamagic stuff into a d20 "free form" system? I'm thinking something like reducing all the spells to first through third level, and then giving characters a bunch of free metamagic, maybe using spell points instead of vancian, and making more powerful spells with applications of metamagic?

Are you absolutely married to D&D's spell list?

I think that Legends of Anglerre (basically Fate's D&D clone) has a good paradigm:

Magic is separated into different "schools", each of which has a dedicated skill.

Each school (Elements, Death, Dimensions, Warding, etc.) has two tiers of effects: trappings, which are essential small, at-will effects, and stunts which have bigger effects but cost a fate point to use. These are listed as basic examples of things you could do with this power.

GM sets a difficulty based on what the PC wants to do, and things like range, area and effect are modified by the roll.

I'm suggesting the schools and effects lists only as possible templates, of course. Obviously the action resolution and fate points won't work for your purposes.

[virgil]

A while back, K had contemplated the spells of each level that had fundamentally new effects that weren't just "same as lower level, but bigger." That might be something to consider...if I could find the thread.

[Prak]

Yes, those are the easy ones. Try Teleportation Circle or Alarm or Reincarnate or Speak With Dead or Magic Jar.

Obviously there would need to be some more Metamagic effects for this sort of thing, and they'd need to be less restricted. Even building Fireball was a bit tricky at first.

[Blade]

A while back, K had contemplated the spells of each level that had fundamentally new effects that weren't just "same as lower level, but bigger." That might be something to consider...if I could find the thread.

IIRC, SLA Industries had this. This led to many many pages of spells description, with a lot of copy-paste.

As AH wrote, you can do worse than take a look at Shadowrun's spell creation system. It might take too much calculation and thinking to be used on the fly, but it's one of the few custom power/gear/etc. rules I've used that can't really be abused. At worst, a player will come up with something a little less costly to cast than the normal spell

Wulfbane, what you're thinking of is called an 'effects based system' and HERO is the best known example. However, it's not in any way a real solution because the appeal of 'free-form magic' is exactly getting results from MTP.

You could work around that problem by adding constraints. For example, if your mage can only affect an element (think Avatar's bending for example), then the player still has to come up with an interesting MTP solution to how he could get the effect he wants with his element.

[silva]

That still boils down to a difference of opinion about what constitutes an "epic" game though

Diff'rent strokes and all that.

Are you absolutely married to D&D's

Bingo!

You touched the two problems that Frank and co. usually commit:

1) Disregarding any preference or playstyle different than himself's.

2) Looking at all games under a D&D optic.

Now, its not everyone here that shares that behaviour. In fact, its just a handful or so, but it just happens that these handful tend to be the most vocal ones.

Tip: when reading the local reviews (called OSSR around here), focus on Ancient History parts, and take Frank parts with a grain of salt. AH is a much more coherent and unbiased fellow (besides being a great writer by himself).

[RelentlessImp]

bearva you really are committed lately to bashing Frank in every post you make. It's really quite endearing and amusing, dear.

[Ice9]

That "list of spells that do fundamentally different things" would be a useful reference whenever someone starts working on a component-based magic system. Because I've seen this happen a lot:
1) Hey, Fireball and Lightning Bolt and Magic Missile aren't that different, really. You could probably make them out of component parts and then have a freeform magic system.
2) Ok cool, got my damage element, my healing element, modifiers for AoE and what-not, the rest should be pretty easy to wrap up.
3) Wait, Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion?! That doesn't fit any of my components. Ok, well maybe if I just skip that one ...
4) On further reflection, I have to skip like 2/3rds of the interesting spells, this system mostly just covers blasting.
5) Optional: Be Paizo, call it Words of Power, sell it anyway.

Effect based systems work, but they're not an easy shortcut. Notice how HERO is thick enough to stop bullets, for example. Also, if I was going effect-based, I'd probably just use one of the several existing systems for that.


Personally, what I'd call a "cause based" magic system is a lot more exciting, if also a lot harder to make functional. Mage, for its significant flaws, was still a lot of fun just on the basis of thinking up interesting stuff I could do with the spheres I had.

And while difficult, when trying to make cause-based rules of magic that don't completely discard balance, you do have one big thing in your favor - it's magic. Making cause-based technology rules would be a lot harder, but with magic you can just decide that it works a certain way and then it does.

For example, if you want "magic can re-arrange matter, like Fabricate" but don't want "magic can re-arrange your nervous system so you die", you could solve that several ways. Such as:
1) Magic is about changing patterns of things.
2) There are higher-order patterns that impose themselves on lower-order patterns. Life imposes itself on Matter, for one.
3) You can't modify a pattern that's being imposed on, you have to target the top-most one.

Also, regarding free-form magic inevitably being broken and leading to excessively large power - maybe if you try to have unbounded magic that can do "anything". The tighter bounds on magic as a whole, the easier to balance it, even if it's free-form within those bounds.

[Prak]

That still boils down to a difference of opinion about what constitutes an "epic" game though

Diff'rent strokes and all that.

Are you absolutely married to D&D's

Bingo!

You touched the two problems that Frank and co. usually commit:

1) Disregarding any preference or playstyle different than himself's.

2) Looking at all games under a D&D optic.

Now, its not everyone here that shares that behaviour. In fact, its just a handful or so, but it just happens that these handful tend to be the most vocal ones.

Tip: when reading the local reviews (called OSSR around here), focus on Ancient History parts, and take Frank parts with a grain of salt. AH is a much more coherent and unbiased fellow (besides being a great writer by himself).

OH MY FUCKING GOD, SILVA, YOU FUCKING PONCE. WE WERE FUCKING TALKING ABOUT FUCKING D&D.

This wasn't just us not being able to resist rubbing our D&D dick on a conversation, you fucking fuck, we were specifically talking about D&D, as MOST threads here do.[/b

That still boils down to a difference of opinion about what constitutes an "epic" game though

Diff'rent strokes and all that.

This is part of a conversation that began with

Many are factual. Some are matters of taste. For instance, ONE of his criticisms about 4/5E is that it doesn't let you play at the same power level as previous editions. But this is only a problem for people prefer games with a higher power cap.

ie, 4e and 5e D&D. Hence why I fucking answered talking about what fucking D&D does. D&D is a high fantasy roleplaying game. If every problem can be solved by giving a bunch of peasants bows, it's not high fantasy. Wikipedia defines "High Fantasy" in two ways:

High fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy fiction, defined either by its setting in an imaginary world or by the epic stature of its characters, themes and plot

The former definition is nigh-useless. If you want High Fantasy to mean "takes place in an imaginary world" then FUCKING EVERYTHING IS HIGH FANTASY. If that's your definition of High Fantasy, then Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Veronica Mars are all equally High Fantasy, because their worlds are imaginary to some degree. The only stories which are not High Fantasy by that definition are 100% factual accounts of things that happened to people who existed.

Fuck. By that definition, this is a High Fantasy joke:

A man walked in to a bar after a long day at work. As he began to drink his beer, he heard a voice say seductively "You've got great hair!" The man looked around but couldn't see where the voice was coming from, so he went back to his beer.

A minute later, he heard the same soft voice say "You're a handsome man!" The man looked around, but still couldn't see where the voice was coming from.

When he went back to his beer, the voice said again "What a stud you are!" The man was so baffled by this that he asked the bartender what was going on.

The bartender said "Oh, it's the nuts--they're complimentary."

So we look at the second definition of High Fantasy, because that actually means something- "the epic stature of its characters, themes and plot." Throwing a bunch of welshmen at literally any problem and that being a viable solution means, by definition, that a game is not High Fantasy, because "able to be taken down by regular schmucks with bows" and "epic stature" are mutually exclusive.

It's not a question of playstyle or preference. I fucking hate Glorantha, but if you want to play in it, then whatever, you're as free to do that as people are to read 50 Shades of Grey. It's a question of fucking definition, just as Twilight isn't gothic horror romance, even though it has something it calls vampires.

Now, onto your next bit of idiocy-

Are you absolutely married to D&D's

this was in response to

What do people think of hacking the d20 spells and metamagic stuff into a d20 "free form" system? I'm thinking something like reducing all the spells to first through third level, and then giving characters a bunch of free metamagic, maybe using spell points instead of vancian, and making more powerful spells with applications of metamagic?

D&D is what I play. The only fucking chance I get to play something non-D&D anymore is when someone starts a non-D&D game here, because my live group is 1) very hard to actually get together, and 2) very resistant to learning something new. And if I suggest even the barely-different Mutants and Masterminds, I have to put up with my friend banging away about Hero again, even though I've made clear my complete lack of interest in a gaming system that can stop low-velocity projectiles and costs $80. So I put forth an idea I'd had the other day when I saw the thread title to get opinions.

Then you pop back up and bitch about us talking about D&D in relation to a specifically D&D oriented question I raised.

All because you have a stupid hate-boner for Frank because he says mean, but totally fucking true, things about shitty games you happen to like.

And that's not an attack on you. EVERYONE HERE has a shitty game they like. I have two, I will always have a soft spot for OWoD because it was one of my longest continuous games, and I love Rifts because it's fucking insane and unbalanced.

So we're not hating on you for liking Bear World. We hate on Bear World because it has an even worse system than World of Darkness for a tabletop RPG and because Vincent Baker is an indie hipster pompous dumbass. You can like whatever you fucking want, but that doesn't change the facts that-

• d% systems, like Runequest, are kind of bad, and Runequest's is even worse because of how it handles the inherent problem of d% systems
• Glorantha is a shit setting because the players have no valid expectations as they would in a setting that is at least nominally realistic beyond the addition of magic
• Bear World is a bad system for an RPG and at best a vague and suboptimal system for Storytelling.

Edit- Actually, I recant a bit. If you remove "Bear" with "Hound of Tindalos" then Bear World might be ok for something Lovecraftian, because at least Quantum Hounds of Tindalos make a sort of in-world sense.

[Username17]

If that's your definition of High Fantasy, then Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Veronica Mars are all equally High Fantasy, because their worlds are imaginary to some degree.

Stop being retarded. By the literary definition, Lord of the Rings is High Fantasy because it takes place in an imaginary world. Harry Potter and Veronica Mars are low fantasy because they take place in the real world with imaginary elements. These are not the same and importantly not the same. In High Fantasy, a reference to a real world person or place is a genre violation, while in Low Fantasy it isn't. That's the difference, and it's an important one, and you're being fucking stupid about it and should shut the fuck up.

That having been said, when speaking about role playing games, we don't tend to use that definition. On account of it not telling us very much about how our characters interact with the world, which is the big important question of RPG settings. As opposed to literary settings, where the big important question is "what elements can we bring in without straining suspension of disbelief?" That is why for RPGs, we go for the definition where in high fantasy the magic is a common enough element of the story that we expect it to follow rules, while in low fantasy the magic is rare enough that it's all Steve.

-Username17

[silva]

Cool down Prak. None of my comments were directed at you.

[DrPraetor]

My bad games are Rifts and Call of Cthulhu. I also enjoy Powers & Perils but of course I never got anyone to play it.

I've been wrestling with this intermittently while trying to write a magic system that:

Also, regarding free-form magic inevitably being broken and leading to excessively large power - maybe if you try to have unbounded magic that can do "anything". The tighter bounds on magic as a whole, the easier to balance it, even if it's free-form within those bounds.

I think that encapsulates the only-way-to-go, but literary issues are more important than mechanical ones to making such a system work.

That is, the issue is not primarily whether open magic systems are balanced. Closed magic systems are very seldom balanced, the games still limp along.

The problem is that open magic systems tend strongly to break storytelling constraints. "I kill all my enemies by teleporting a microgram of Ebola into them" is the obvious example of using magic to shortcut the plot and make the players with combat skills feel small in the pants, but mental powers, illusions, transformations and so forth are generally a problem because they break stories.

So I think you have to apply the same reverse-engineering approach that Frank uses in assymetric threat - take what you want magic to do, then reverse engineer from there some set of constraints (hierarchy of patterns is a good conceit) that enable you to:
[*] Move the plot along when needed. So you can discover that the house full of haunted rats (to take an awful example out of a recent review) contains some energy node or whatever the bumfuck that you need.
But DON'T
[*] Shortcircuit mysteries entirely by letting you mind-read the killer.

[*] Hurl purple energy bolts, have zombies or fire elementals as side kicks
But DON'T
[*] Just let you declare anyone you don't like dead without having a dramatic gun-fight.

[*] Enable you to infiltrate the Kultist Klan meeting.
But DON'T
[*] Enable you to simply teleport the sacrifice out of there, without staging a daring rescue.

And so on.

[Orion]

I doubt you could write a free-form system that preserved any conventional notion of game balance, or where everyone was happy about the solution space of things that can and cannot be done. A sufficiently rigorous designer writing a sufficiently large book could probably write a freeform system in which most players would agree on what could and could not be done, which would be a notable improvement.

To make the results as acceptable as possible, you would probably have to bake some kind of narrative imperative into the system. Have people get their power from the fates, or from capricious gods, or whatever, and then straight tell people that you can't kill people by materializing things inside them because that is "lame", but you can materialize swords and throw them because that is "awesome."

[Ice9]

To make the results as acceptable as possible, you would probably have to bake some kind of narrative imperative into the system. Have people get their power from the fates, or from capricious gods, or whatever, and then straight tell people that you can't kill people by materializing things inside them because that is "lame", but you can materialize swords and throw them because that is "awesome."

Narrative imperative makes things simpler (if not as interesting, IMO), and it might be required to balance some uses of magic, but not for a simple thing like that.

Quick metaphysics I thought of in a few minutes:
1) To make a change to the world, you must "own" the area the modification happens in.
2) You always "own" your own body, and a small area around it.
3) Claiming uncontested space temporarily - for example, the air right in front of you that you want to materialize a sword in - is easy and fast.
4) You can't materialize the sword inside someone, because they own that space already.
5) Claiming space which is closer to someone else than it is to you may be slower, and/or have an opposed check.

This produces pretty much the results you want:
* Materialize a knife and throw it - Easy.
* Materialize a cloud of knives around someone - Yes, but they get to resist the spell happening.
* Materialize a knife inside someone - No.

Added bonuses:
* Counterspelling is automatically defined - you're just claiming the same area as the caster, making it into a contested roll.
* Nobody else being able to modify area inside your body means they can't magically heal or buff you either. So - have truenames, which allow it. Telling allies your truename is beneficial, but having your enemies find out is a disaster, because now they can materialize knives inside your body.

[Orion]

You can do a lot with the AT fields from Evangelion, yes. I considered posting that as my suggestion. But honestly, enough problem cases will come up, probably many of them unrelated to combat, that I really do think narrativium is the way to go.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Maybe some sort of Perfect Defense limited by charges, for PCs, and NPCs who aren't a hundred Welshmen or Captain Hobo, so if you matter, you can't die or otherwise get fucked over in the span of a single ZA WARUDO.

Nobilis has Miraculous HP for soaking a big spell effect, Miraculous effects of equal level being able to push each other back like two ki beams, and an explicit tiering system where mundane actions are always trumped by miraculous. Nobilis has the Warfare stat, which lets you say All According to Keikaku to any number of sudden, unexpected, annoyingly creative applications of superpowers.

[Orion]

LOL at Silva calling Frank incoherent. I really doubt anyone would accuse me of being part of some cult of Frank (actually, I'd genuinely like to know if anyone has that opinion of me), but whatever flaws he may have, I feel confident saying that "incoherence" isn't one of them. He's a pretty good prose stylist in his idiom, and it's generally very clear where he stands on an issue. Then again, knowing Silva, he may have just thrown "incoherent" thinking it was a synonym for "biased" or "parochial." Look, Silva, if you really want to go out on a limb to try to throw Shade on Frank, you gotta pick a burn that's at least vaguely plausible. And show some creativity. I recommend you try "hypocritical" and see if you can get something going there.

[Prak]

Hm... I know Silva lives in Brazil (or around there), so I'm not sure how fluent he is in English, which may cause some degree of miscommunication between him and Frank.

I mean, it's not the sole factor, but it's there.

[silva]

Yep, Im brazilian. And no, Orion is not one of Frank cultists (neither is Prak or anyone who posted in the last page at least).

And Orion is right. Frank is totally coherent in its stupidity.

[momothefiddler]

To make the results as acceptable as possible, you would probably have to bake some kind of narrative imperative into the system. Have people get their power from the fates, or from capricious gods, or whatever, and then straight tell people that you can't kill people by materializing things inside them because that is "lame", but you can materialize swords and throw them because that is "awesome."

Narrative imperative makes things simpler (if not as interesting, IMO), and it might be required to balance some uses of magic, but not for a simple thing like that.

Quick metaphysics I thought of in a few minutes:
1) To make a change to the world, you must "own" the area the modification happens in.
2) You always "own" your own body, and a small area around it.
3) Claiming uncontested space temporarily - for example, the air right in front of you that you want to materialize a sword in - is easy and fast.
4) You can't materialize the sword inside someone, because they own that space already.
5) Claiming space which is closer to someone else than it is to you may be slower, and/or have an opposed check.

This produces pretty much the results you want:
* Materialize a knife and throw it - Easy.
* Materialize a cloud of knives around someone - Yes, but they get to resist the spell happening.
* Materialize a knife inside someone - No.

Added bonuses:
* Counterspelling is automatically defined - you're just claiming the same area as the caster, making it into a contested roll.
* Nobody else being able to modify area inside your body means they can't magically heal or buff you either. So - have truenames, which allow it. Telling allies your truename is beneficial, but having your enemies find out is a disaster, because now they can materialize knives inside your body.

Ooh, I'm intrigued. Now I kinda wanna start a thread for brainstorming metaphysical rules of magic and then trying to break them (example: how is 'your own body' defined? If I have a stint stent, can you materialize (very small) swords inside it? If I cut my hair and make a net out of it, can I block your sword materialization with it? What happens when people's small areas overlap? When people's bodies overlap - if I sneak some of my hair into your food, do I gain the power to transform it into swords?)

Ice9: if I decide to do that (and/or if someone gets around to it before me) can I throw these ones in there?

edited bc i fucked up at doctor words

[Orion]

Avoid arguments about stents and prosthetics by having the personal integrity field extended several inches beyond the skin. Or several feet. I was serious about stealing the AT fields from Eva. Actually, let's go further than that.If the effects you can produce are freeform and thus largely unrestricted, then the things you do them to should be tightly controlled. Don't assume you can manipulate anything and produce things anywhere that's not specifically protected -- assume that you can only manipulate things and conjure in spaces that you've actively earned the right to affect.

[momothefiddler]

I don't know anything about Eva or AT fields, but assuming it requires positive user permissions on the space, that still leaves me the ability to earn the right to wreathe my sword in flames, stab you with said sword, then pull it out and leave a sword made of fire in the gap.

...You know, I'm gonna file that under working as intended.

[Orion]

Been a while since I watched EVA, but here's what I think I figured out.

An AT field is a mental and sometimes physical barrier that protects the integrity of your person. Everyone has one, but a normal person's is unexciting and in fact undetectable. It keeps them from experiencing other people's thoughts, it keeps their body from melting spontaneously, and so on. Giant monsters and advanced biotechnology can generate/project physical AT fields that appear as a shimmering force barrier which absorbs incoming attacks. It's possible to breach them with overwhelming ballistic assault (tactical nukes don't work, but ultra-high-power railguns do) or by cutting through them with a sharp knife and a lot of pressure, but the easiest way to break them is with another AT field. If yours is stronger than theirs, you can press up against the enemy's field and then tear it open with your bare hands.

In this hypotehtical game, normal human AT fields would be huge

[souran]

Honestly, with any magic system, free-form or not the most important thing to determine is what can magic do.

In many ways, the most "free-form" magic system out there is D&D vancian magic. I am honestly not trolling.

The Basic Unit of magic in Vancian D&D is the "Spell" spells have lots of mechanical rules about how they can be cast, but the content of D&D spells have basically NO rules at all. There are guidlines for what effects come on-line at what powerlevel, but beyond that D&D magic can do literally ANYTHING. Compare that to say shadowrun where magic is powerful but you can't make an enchanted gun because magic just doesn't work that way.

In most fantasy stories, even fantasy described as high fantasy, the magic has VERY EXPLICT things that it just cannot do. In Tolkien Gandalf was brought back from the dead, and this is an effect that impresses his companions because it was outside the rules of what even the mightest magic was supposed to be able to do.

In most tellings of Alladin (including the disney version!) the genie makes a point that he has limitiations. Usually he cannot bring people back from the dead or remove another persons free-will (sometimes explained as life and free will being gifts from Allah).

Wheel of time has a magic system that is extensively explored in the books and even the lich-like villians from the time of mighty magic admit that there are things the one power cannot do. Terry Goodkind, in his not-fantasy-novels about important human themes went into extensive detail with "addative and subtractive" magic and what could and could not be done with those. Scott Lynch has a low fantasy world where he has said that magic works "like poetry" and wizards are just better people than everybody else...but even then they have real limits on what can be done.

D&D has NO limits on spell content. Other than picking the right "level" for spells they can do whatever you imagine. Now obviously, in play most DMs restrict the spells allowed to those in published materials, but D&D also has an systems for "researching" new spells and developing your own magic.

Anyway, free-form or not, determining what magic can and can't do should happen prior to developing the system.

[silva]

Souran, my 2 cents about your post:

1) I think what you mean there is determinjng the (meta)physics of magic. Like in Shadowrun where magic has a antagonic nature to machines, or in Planescape where magic is affected by planar properties.

2) I think when people call free-form magic they mean magic that allows you to come with an assortment of creative effects on the fly wihout having to resort to a list containing dozens of spells and specific rules for each one.

So, going back to D&D magic, one can say its pretty open from a (meta)physics point of view, but its far from free-form in its on-the-fly utility, because its dependant on discrete listings of dozens of spells and specifics to work (its pretty "closed" in this respect). These two things are different, IMO.