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Comments
You must remember that I need my players to have some grasp of what magic is if they want to do anything with it. So there's that.
Such as?
^Oh yeah, it wasn't just Avada Kedavra.
Mages can draw mana into their bodies.In order to use this mana in a spell, you need to combine a Release and an Art.
Arts are just a form of expression of magic, saying how the magic will affect the world- Mystic Arts affect the world in ways typically ascribed to mages in legend, like throwing fireballs and calling lightning, while Sage Arts strengthen your body.
Each art has subsets- techniques linked to it. For example, a common example I use when explaining this is Time-Space Art: Spatial Distortion, which involves manipulating the distance between you and an area of your choosing to make it shorter.
Mages are born with several Releases of the various elements (Water, Wind, Fire, Stone, Plant, Lightning, Metal, Ice, Shadow). The typical number of Releases a Mage is born with is 2-4.
The Releases a Mage is born with defines their emotions. A Mage born with Plant Release is a nurturing person, often with a cruel streak, while a Mage born with Ice Release is generally a very cold person.
A Mage can generally grow within their various emotions- a Mage born with Fire Release may go from being intensely passionate all the time to being really warm- but they can't grow outside of their Releases, so a Mage born without Stone Release will never be particularly stubborn.
The more in-tune a Mage is with their particular emotions, the easier it is for them to convert their mana into their Releases, and the more powerful the resulting Release- and, thus, eventual Technique- is.
It's kinda weird, but it's still intrinsically tied to emotion.
That sounds interesting, actually. But why is ice separate from water? Ice is just the solid state of water induced by subzero temperatures. Same thing (well, not exactly the same but you get the idea) with stone and metal.
As mentioned, the penalty for spell failure in The Riddle Of Steel is character aging. When a character exceeds 40 years old, they have a chance to lose stat points, and that chance increases as they continue to age. Most TRoS campaigns won't go for long enough for aging to be a significant factor except for spellcasters, so the aging rule where characters have a chance of losing stat points was likely included as a cost for applying magic too frivolously.
Warhammer Fantasy has a regenerating, sometimes partially random magic pool per a turn. The more of this you draw on when casting, the more power you'll put into a spell, but the more likely a miscast is. So your chances of a negative effect scale with the requirements of a spell or the power you choose to put into it.
So in one case, the resource used in the casting of magic is potentially lifespan. In the other case, you're gambling against any kind of negative effect, and both scale their negatives with the power of the spell. This is logically consistent enough to be applied mechanically, but abstract enough to give those mechanics are magical, unpredictable feel.
States of matter. Consider that most "magical theory" is drawn from Classical Greek philosophy, which saw the elements as fire, wind, water and earth and heart. These don't mesh well with our modern scientific elements -- for instance, prometheum isn't even particularly flammable. Talk about getting it wrong, science! But what the Greek elements do align very well with are states of matter, so ice and water being separate makes a lot of sense. After all, fire is a plasma, wind a gas, water a liquid and earth a solid. And these are indeed the building blocks of readily-observable reality -- I can observe a sword, but I need to be taught that it has both iron and carbon content, otherwise it's just a steel sword to me.
So yeah. Taking into account the philosophy from which our fantasy standards are ultimately drawn, it's sensible.
^^ Because they're different emotions; water represents fluidity and placidness, while ice represents coldness. Similarly, stone represents stubbornness, hardness, immovability, while metal represents strength, sharpness, and solidity.
Technique-wise, all Releases have different effects. Ice Release focuses on the creation and manipulation of ice, while Water Release focuses on the manipulation of liquids. Similarly, Stone Release focuses on the manipulation of solid rock and stone, while Metal Release focuses on the creation and manipulation of pure metal.
In practical terms, this means that Ice Release focuses on external Techniques, such as Substance Art: Barrier, which in turn creates the technique Ice Technique: Wall when combined with Ice Release, while Water Release focuses on internal Techniques, such as Healing Art: Blood Replenishment.
Well aging is off of the table. I don't think my groupies would be very fond of that.
As for unpredictable effects...well, I'm not wholly sure. One one hand, it does employ an element of unpredictability in it and adds another check to gameplay balance. On the other hand, I'm not very partial to letting my characters be torn apart by a transmuted demon beast (which in my head is really inconsistent with the lore) early on in the game.
You don't have to use those specific ones, but they're examples of using a cost that isn't the usual magic points or limited castings thing. Like I said above, you should try to find a consistent theme for your system and create a cost based off of that, and the cost could be just about anything.
Vancian magic is bullshit. I agree with you.
I'm actually pretty partial to the mana concept myself, though. I'm not exactly trying to be original: this is for fun, remember.
Also you're wrong that's not even why I did it so ner.
Okay, other people have you covered on magic systems, so I'm just going to nitpick your OP.
I admittedly haven't played WoW in years, but when I did, its story was primarily designed around the goal of being as easy to ignore as possible. So...I dunno the extent to which ripping it off is a good idea. I've heard Warcraft as a whole has a better story, but you did say WoW specifically, so I felt the need to nitpick.
well ner ner to you then
jerk
Yeah, I meant the Warcraft setting as a whole.
Which rips off a whole other bunch of fantasy things, so yeah.
Ah, okay then.
The thing is that I already have a consistent theme for magic: knowledge. While not just everyone can use magic, it is primarily an art grounded in intellect and learning. It's a branch of science in itself, really.
And let's face it, knowledge is only limited by your capacity to learn and access materials. So yeah.
i like to think my reason is more tied into the whole theme of emotion within the magic though.
And the theme that, well, mages have no idea what they're doing really. They just know it works.
System Shock 2 lets you charge psi powers, and if they overload, you suffer psionic feedback, which is kinda similar.
@Eelektross: Out of curiosity, if you want it to be an "art grounded in intellect and understanding", why also make it something only specials can use? It seems like if you want to drive home the theme that it's about knowledge, the trope of magic that anyone can use but is really fucking hard to learn would be a lot more appropriate.
Specials are really fucking common in this universe. Like on average, one out of sixteen people is one.
I just find it really jarring when even Hogni the butcher can use magic.
So, on average, fifteen out of sixteen smart people can never study magic.
Then why even bother having them?
Changed my mind, that could work.
If we're talking about unpredictability, I might bring up Dresden Files RPG, which uses the FATE system.
Basically, if you use magic, you can have a set number of spells you can cast on-the-fly without special rolls or determination, because you've done it so often and trained so extensively with it that you know exactly what the spell needs, and what the effects will be. Muscle-memory, if you will.
But to cast any other kind of spell, you need to gather energy, bind it with your discipline, aim it, and throw it. Failure to properly control the energy causes Backlash, which you either absorb into yourself or let it just crash into the environment.
Also also, maybe everyone is capable of at least some kind of magic, be it faith, shamanism, or just plain stubbornness, it's just that a select few with the right mindset with the right resources and the right connections can learn to be accomplished mages. You know, like some people become physicists, some people become biologists, some people become criminologists, and some people make Myth Busters but they're all scientists to some degree.
As far as I know, that hasn't been used for magic, but it's an idea I've liked for a while.
That's really cookie-cutter and not particularly interesting, though. Unless an excess of knowledge had a Lovecraftian thing going on where too much was damaging to the psyche.
Alternatively, instead of going "right-brain", you could go "left-brain"; magic as an extension of art and expression, with magical movements and inspiration and influential sorcerers.
In fact, maybe there could be a mechanic for outright blatantly stealing your ideas from as many people as possible, while stealing from just a few would produce a more focused result, but would be attacked as plagiaristic and derivative and also slowly make you less capable at magic.
^^ To be honest, I think that's a bit of an excuse. If you and your group like fantasy classics, that's up to you. But then again, "fantasy classic" includes stuff like Earthsea, the Elric books, Tolkien's Middle Earth and a whole range of stuff with non-standard and unusual magic. D&D and its offshoot books aren't exactly in the same league as those particular fantasy classics, and if you want to take it back further, chivalric romances and then tribal folk tales are where it's at.
That doesn't mean it's okay for it to be boring, though.
But he wouldn't be able to if it was really really hard to do so he never learned it.
Also
Please don't do this. Do everyone a favor and at least try not to be generic. Otherwise why not just play in an established setting? It'll save you effort and the end result will probably be better anyway.
Didn't Harry accidentally turn a relative into a balloon once because he got mad at her? He didn't have an inflation spell at hand, he was just really angry. There's at least some emotion-based magic in the setting, no?