The Elemental Empire - part 4 - What is Magic?

    One of the biggest things I have to consider for the Elemental Empire setting is, what is magic?  Magic is a big, wonderful, pain-in-the-***.  I love magic, I love playing wizards.  From a design standpoint however, I hate magic.  Magic is one of those things that is so hard to do well, it can easily become too over- or under-powered and destroy everything else you've created.  Just do a Google search on "wizards vs fighters" (ah, the liner fighter and quadratic wizard, I've read so many of those posts) and see the never-ending arguments about magic and how it works in the game.  Any game, while this is a favorite past-time of D&D players, any game with magic has the same potential problems.  So magic is something that needs to be carefully weighed and purposefully designed.  And it starts with a  simple question: what is magic?
    Well, there are so many ways to answer that question, but let me posit there is one fundamental core to any definition of magic: the ability to do super-human things.  Yeah, this covers a lot of things that are not considered "magic" per se, like super-powers and psionics and super-science.  Anything that is beyond the human normal is "magic" by this definition - but I think it's a vital starting point.  There is the famous Arthur C Clark quote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" which hits it on the head.  The thing that makes magic such a nightmare to design is that it allows the players to do things beyond the normal for humans - which means that the world we all know and expect and make decisions based on gets thrown out the window.  Highly advanced technology and comic book powers are magic for all intents and purposes, because they all take you out of the familiar and predictable world and take you somewhere else.  They break reality, and breaking reality is a tricky thing.  While choosing the Roman Empire for an inspiration is going to take players out of the world they know (if I do it right, of course) adding magic is an even bigger shift.  Changing how people act and think is a lot smaller than changing the definition of reality itself.
    Since I'm creating a setting with magic, I'm allowing reality to be broken, then how do I want it to break?  Having some good, strong, logical and consistent rules is going to be vital here.  Since this is a story first, it is a setting after all and all RPGs are Interactive Narratives at heart, then it might be good to ask: what story purpose does magic serve?  And that is a very interesting question.

    I've always thought that the D&D system of magic, typically called "Vancian magic" was a great and terrible fit for a role-playing game.  For the few who might not know, D&D magic is very similar (I've never heard that it was directly adapted, just similar) to magic in the "Dying Earth" stories by Jack Vance.  In this system, fundamentally, mages can only know a limited number of spells and they lose the spell when it is cast.  Think of spells as grenades: they are very powerful, they take skill to use properly, you can only carry so many, there are multiple types, and after you use one it's gone- but you can get more if you have the right supply.  Yeah, spells are grenades, I had never thought of that metaphor until just now but it actually works really well.  This feels like a great fit for D&D because of it's war-gaming roots.  Spells are artillery, fighters are infantry, it works.  But it feels like a bad choice to me for a role-playing game for one reason: in the RPG magic is common, but in the stories and the system itself, magic is rare.  Vance's stories are called the "Dying Earth" for a reason.  This is a far-far-far-future Earth of magic and super-technology, and both of those are being completely lost.  The spellbooks that hold magic have vanished, and once a wizard casts a spell it's gone, so magic has mostly disappeared from the world.  Nobody remembers how to use technology.  The world is decaying, and the "fire-and-forget" style of magic fits that theme perfectly.  If magic was a renewable resource then it wouldn't be dying, it would still be around and viable.  Which would kill the theme that Vance had set up.  So it's odd to fit that system into a world where magic is common, or like in the Eberron setting (which I like by the way) where it is literally everywhere in civilization.  The narratives don't quite seem to line up.  Want more proof of that, try playing the old computer games like the "Gold Box" SSI games Pool of Radiance or Neverwinter Nights and count just how many days really pass while you play.  Mages have to sleep to refresh their grenade supply, so there is a lot of sleeping in those games that faithfully reproduce the system.  Thank god there's no real time limit to defeat the evil dragon.  In the 4th Edition of D&D or the Neverwinter MMO they dropped the whole memorizing thing altogether to facilitate a more active style of play.  The mechanics of magic, the definition of how it operates, encourages a certain style of narrative.
    So I ask myself, what kind of narrative do I want?  Why is magic in the game, what kind of stories is it designed to tell?
   
    For me, magic is human emotion made real.
    While we often take it personally, Nature is impersonal.  There is no such thing as "Mother Earth."  Mothers have feelings, they care for their progeny because they feel love and nurturing.  While Nature does provide for us (would suck to not have food and air and stuff) it does not do this out of any feeling or desire, it just does it.  It would do it even if we didn't exist.  It, the world and the laws that drive it, doesn't care about us.  If you say it does, then you've just created magic - the literal existence of human emotion.  Emotions drive us, sometimes when we wish they wouldn't.  There is no such thing really as anger, because emotions are not things, they are movement.  You are angry at something, you feel fear towards or away from something.  Having an emotion pretty much by definition moves you, being hungry drives you towards food, being afraid of spiders drives you away from them, feeling angry provokes certain actions.  Emotions are dynamic, and they are targeted.  People often say they would "work any job" or "eat anything" but those statements are pretty much never true.  Would you work as a human crash test dummy?  Or a roller-coaser mechanic if you're afraid of heights?  Would you eat a human being?  Odds are not.  With that emotion comes the target, the thing we want to have or do to fully satisfy that emotion, though we might settle for something else if we can't get what we want.
    So why is magic in my game?  To tell the stories of when someone's emotions change the world.
    This happens anyways, right?  I mean the dictator's desire for power leads him to take over the country and create a repressive regime instead of a land of milk and honey.  Yeah, it does.  The only reason we change the world is because of some feeling to do so.  Because we want to do so.  But the nice thing about magic is how quickly we can show that impact, and how broadly we can create connections.  How many unexpected and unfamiliar ways we can change reality.  Because while taking people out of the world can be dangerous from a design standpoint, it can be great for creating feelings of wonder.

    Okay, with that really broad starting point let's start refining magic.  Another key question to ask is: what's the difference between magic and technology?
    As I mentioned above, it's quite possible to push technology into the realm of magic, so what's the fundamental difference between them?  I have some strong ideas about this.  While the "magic grenades" analogy works for D&D magic, I really wish it didn't.  If magic and technology work in the same ways, then why bother calling them different things?  Why bother having both of them?  There needs to be some fundamental differences between the two.  What do I want to be different?
    Technology is impersonal - it's possible to accidentally shoot someone with a gun, it's impossible to accidentally cast a fireball.
    Technology is repetitive/ mass produced - there are a million swords, there is only one Excalibur.
    Technology is stable, reliable and repeatable - a hammer always acts like a hammer, a spell changes depending on the caster's identity and emotional state.
    Technology is governed by scarcity, magic is governed by cost.
    That last one deserves more explanation.  A gun shoots until you run out of bullets.  You cast fireballs as long as you're willing to pay the price.  This is the biggest thing I think is missing in RPG magic.  In the Vancian system magic is governed by scarcity, you have so many spell slots/ grenades that you can use.  But there is no cost.  You automatically gain those slots and they automatically replenish.  I don't like that model because I think all the best stories about magic focus on the cost of using magic.  Just think about Faust and the "selling your soul to the devil" theme.  If magic is emotion, then what price are you willing to pay for your emotions?  So magic needs to be governed by price, by cost.  There has to be a cost to gain it, and a cost to use it.  And you have to be able to do anything as long as you can pay the price.  I think that's the most critical thing to bake into the system.

    Here's the thing that really ties my brain in knots though: does everyone need magic?
    If magic is emotion made real, then doesn't that make non-magical classes or characters somehow lesser, or more restricted?  It is possible to say that all player characters/ classes use magic, the Earthdawn game does that just fine.  And you could say that the fighter-types just use a more limited or less-cost system of magic compared to full wizards/ casters.  And that would make sense, not everyone wants to sell their soul, maybe just lease it, with an option to buy :)  If magic comes with a price, then some might want to only pay for a sensible, small car and not a full-blown luxury yacht.  And since I'm defining my Humins to be innately magical (to justify the half-breeds) then saying they all use magic to a lesser or greater degree works.  And the other races may not have the same flexibility in using magic, but might still have innate magic, more like limited super-powers instead of the "can do anything I imagine" of a caster.

    Okay, I think that gives me a good foundation for thinking about magic.  Well, to start with.  So let me wrap this up and let those ideas percolate though my unconscious, and next week we'll take a look at the other side if the coin: what kinds of technology do I want in this world?  Until then!