>>36549600
The issue there is that it makes a comprehensive spell list moot. If magic is handled like art, then you could more or less do anything at any rank. Moght as well just have a "Magic" stat, an MP limit, and when you want to cast a spell, you roll Magic at a DM-determined diff.

there are 3 dicks in this picture, that's it?

>>36551831
I'm with the guy. Needs more dicks.

>>36551344
There's more interesting ways to do it than that. What if magic required special rituals you had to perform, or components you had to use?

What if you built "spells" like GURPS characters, through a mixture of rolls and a selection of advantages, disadvantages, and quirks?

What if magic still had rules of thumb you had to follow, like the Laws of Contagion and Similarity?

40% Art
30% Willpower
10% Science
20% Showmanship
10% Miracles
-10% Science
15% Beard
85% Magic
0.4% Potassium

>>36549600
>bump

Theres a website that goes into detail about this, using terms like 'scientific mage'. The just of it is that folkloricly, magic behaves unpredictably and obtusely, and that everything, not just spells is magic. Birds fly, fire is made, weapons are smithed, healing poultices cure ailments and more through a rudimentary understanding of magic, fireball slinging is just the upper echelons of that. The traditional D&D mage that casts a fireball six times per day, and has that spell behave the same each time, is performing scientific magic; where it can be reproduced multiple times in a controlled environment with the same result. That kind of magic is shit.

Does anyone have links to the article im thinking of?

>>36551905
>What if you built "spells" like GURPS characters, through a mixture of rolls and a selection of advantages, disadvantages, and quirks?

That actually sounds interesting.
"Well, I can get Teleport, but to balance it out I need some kind of anchor on the place I'm going to...I've got a high affinity for fire, so I can get a few extra points to stretch the range if I need a source of ignition ... ooh, bad spellcraft roll, looks like I can't teleport anywhere it's raining..."

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>>36555915
I want this, but I have to go to bed so I can go earn money tomorrow.

THIS THREAD BETTER BE UP WHEN I GET HOME FROM WORK

>>36555915
How would this work? Would you build your spells beforehand or would you have a list of benefits and flaws, like some sort of rune system?

Runequest has something kinda like this.

>>36556344
I imagine a way that it could work is somewhat like the way functions are handeled in transistor. You have a pool of abilities you can equip, with different effects. Once you equip you can then modify it with other abilities from your pool, changing its behavoir, rather than just adding to its stats. It is quite scientific though.
Perhaps it would be more akin to wordplay, in that you can covey roughly the same message in a variety of ways , each with its own subtleties of meaning.
For example

> make that tree burn
> ignite that tree
> engulf that tree in flame
> reduce that tree to embers
> let bane of wood end that tree

>>36556344
List of benefits and flaws, I think.

Like, I want a spell that'll let me shoot lightning. I make a few rolls and I've got so-and-so points to build it with. My particular style of magic involves words, so if my spell needs a mantra to cast, I get a few extra points that way.

I grab the Lightning spell type, and I want to be able to release it, so I take Blast and throw enough points on it to get me decent accuracy and damage.

Now that used up more points than I had, so I take Focus - I need a specific item to cast it - and Storage, which means I need to "load" the spell beforehand, and put Ritual (level 1) on top of that, so it's actually slightly involved. I've got a decent affinity for storms, and I get more points if the prepwork requires an "unpredictable" event, so I chose to load my spell with captured lightning from an actual storm - I have to leave the focus (I picked a pot, which is better for Storage) out in the middle of a storm, say a brief mantra over it, and let it collect lightning.

I also take Mantra (short) - I have to say a quick word before opening the pot and letting the Lightning blast out.

That actually leaves me a few extra points surplus, so I take an additional bonus to let me control the lightning's path, bending it like a rope.

I roll badly while finalizing the spell, so I end up with a few random quirks: The spell requires a piece of wood, and - ooh, that's a bad one - requires Willpower or it'll turn on me. Those are easy enough to fluff, though: Everyone knows lightning never strikes the same place twice, so a branch from a storm-struck tree is used as the handle of the pot to prevent it shocking me. Still, lightning hates to be bottled up, and if I lose my control over it or mispronounce it's Name, it will strike me down in revenge as it escapes.

>>36557037
I want to write some some on this, so I'm bumpan in the hope that it'll still be here in the morning.

>>36555915
Anything in which a single roll impacts permanent utility forever instead of influencing the individual action the roll is for is a bad design choice

INB4: "Rolled stats and hit-points are a staple of the genre"
....yup, and also a bad design choice.

Admittedly it's an instance where I'll sometimes begrudgingly put up with the bad design because of social momentum.

>>36552006
>Weak willed, unartistic, faithless, beardless adolescent with a diet consisting solely of bananas
>Uses sorcery to steal more bananas
>Uses sorcery to build a fortress on the moon
>Mines moon for more potassium
Arnold the Bananamancer, Overlord of the Moon

>>36551905
Then it becomes like a science

>>36556382
I love magic in runequest.
It's just some old fools dancing in a tent, pretending to be gods.
Or are they?

>>36559018
Possibly, but the ability to not quite control how your spells turn out might fit into the idea better.

But you are right that the quirks you get randomly shouldn't be that severe.

>>36551831
i only see 2. where's the third?

>>36564094
>Main massive throbbing central body dick,
>The body dick's distressingly turgid and upward-bent dick.
>The Body Dick's Tail which is also a dick.

>>36564154
Hadn't even noticed the dick tail.

Still, I've seen furry porn with a higher dicks/person...thing ratio, so I'm not impressed.

>>36557037
This sounds really interesting. I'm guessing these would be built beforehand then?

It makes magic much less scientific, since it's very unlikely any wizard could build the same spell twice, due to the random quirks added onto it. The result is that each wizard's spells have a personal touch, and no two fireballs are exactly the same.

>>36557037
I like this

>>36557037
So basically, the "advantages" are what you want the spell to do, which basically come in the form of a bunch of broad domains like "Lightning", "Blast", "Entrapment", whatever. These cost some kind of points. (There are suggestions for what actions could go in what domain, but if the player can come up with convincing fluff or rationale for why it can go under another, it's treated as that. The GM may increase the cost if the player's analogy seems strained.)

Also under "advantages" are things like range, accuracy, damage, duration, et cetera. (These might actually be under the "verb" domains). Increasing them costs points.


"Disadvantages" are the sacrifices and costs you need to power the spell, the equipment or tools needed to cast it, and assorted difficulties in the process like needing magic words, a ritual, or a specific time or place (a full moon, an eclipse, stormy weather...). They are also pretty vague, and can stack on top of themselves (with diminishing returns) - a spell could need to be prepared beforehand, it could need to be prepared beforehand with a ritual, it could need to be prepared beforehand on a lunar eclipse with a ritual including a long, complex mantra ...

Other "disadvantages" include things like costs (in willpower, blood, soul(drains CHA), material components).

Disadvantages can be taken at several "levels" with different point values - needing an uncommon material or unpredictable event is worth more than a common material or regularly recurring one, needing a long ritual with several components is worth more than quick meditation, needing mistletoe cut at midnight under the light of the full moon with a left-handed golden sickle is worth more than needing wood ash)

There are also "quirks" , small bits of weirdness, side effects, or quirkiness that can be positive, negative, or neutral; they only cost a very few points or give very few points and mainly exist to add flavor or eke out / soak up a few more points.

>>36564478
And then there are "affinities." These are sort of a measure of "fit."

As a magic character, you have affinities already - perhaps your favorite school of magic prefers words, or storms, or bargaining with nature, or whatever.

Disadvantages which match well with your affinities give you more points (if you are adept with word magic, you may be able to do with a syllable what others need a sentence to do, and do with a sentence what others need a material focus to do).

Again, affinities are not hard and fast, and if you can find some way to fluff your spell so it fits your style and affinities - for instance, pointing out that storms and lightning are closely related, making your ritual require a storm, et cetera, the GM may give you bonus points. (Think of Exalted's "fluffing stunts for stat bonuses")

This is the other purpose of quirks - making your spell more flavorful so the fluff fits together better and closer to your magical style and thus the GM gives you some more points

Items also have affinities - if your spell involves storing something, a pot is better-suited (and will give more points) than a wand, meteoric iron is uniquely suited for blasting magic, things similar to or made from part of something will have a higher affinity as per the Laws of Contagion and Similarity, et cetera. These, again, come with tables of suggestion, but anything will work if the player comes up with a cool enough explanation for it and the GM is convinced.

And, throughout, you make rolls which may add quirks and may (rarely) add disadvantages.

>>36564214
Yeah. I think the combination of random quirks, the emphasis on personal affinities and using what you have, and the free-association of things together to create coherent fluff, could all combine to create a feeling of magic being more art than science.

Yeah, you'd prepare these beforehand, possibly through research, experimentation, drug-fueled vision quests, intense mediation, prayer, et cetera. Or you'd learn GM-prepared spells from word of mouth and ancient grimoires.

And spell creation would not always start advantages first - it might be more like "I, have the time for a ritual, a big chunk of moonstone and the time to carve it into something, and I want to put some kind of enchantment on this sword ... what can I do with that?"

if you try to create a magic system with physic like rules you obtain a big fat boring shit that will fill your narration/book/RPG with plotholes.
books like Eragon are the best example of this crap: the protagonist can kill an army with just a thought by cutting veins in their brain with little to no energy. where has the fun gone?

if you can summon a wall of fire can you also cast fireball? why can't you just summon fire *on* your enemies without having to wait for them to step into your wall? or even better just summon fire into their stomach?

well fuck everything, the spell just works in that mysterious way, has its own strict rules and i can't use it differently.
this way you can have kinetic shields that deflect arrows but not sword blows and other nice shit.

as for the casting process i think it should be a midpoint between the magic-ewakened wizard studying magical runes for years and the gypsy magic where by just holding peppermint and snake's blood into your hand and saying a formula you can make stuff happen without any study at all.

I have magic as something accessible to everyone. A series of genes encodes a receptor linked to the immune response. Under extreme mental or physical duress one's fight or flight response releases a chemical messenger that binds the receptor, allowing the mage to cast spells of an offensive or defensive nature.

>magic triggered by chemicals

do you hate souls and other metaphysical crap?

hormonal stuff controlling magic sounds so cheap.

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>>36551344
>If magic is handled like art, then you could more or less do anything at any rank.

You´re implying that everyone and their mother have a perception honed enough to passably draw from real life.

>>36564981

Magic is only "magic" when there is no understanding of the mechanisms responsible. Its fine if you have yet another dark ages setting. By giving sorcery a genetic component, you take away the "specialness" that makes magic the providence of the few, and give everyone an equal footing for understanding those mechanisms. Metaphysics are the domains of the Progenitors, or incidental gods.

>>36566173
This makes magic less of a gimmick and more a mundane tool with practical and widespread application.

>>36566173
Magic with understood mechanisms is just psi powers.

>>36565100
you're implying that art somehow isn't totally fucking subjective.

Wait guys.
What if magic was also decidedly subjective?
Like some niggas just don't get burnt by massive firebolts but if they see you prestidigitating some camel piss they very well may explode

>>36566238
More like an augmented immune response, given that a threat to the individual sets off the cascade of reactions producing the cellular response converted into, say, a jet of magma (if this is what's communicated by the natural killer cells).

FUCKING OP IS SHOWING HIS GREAT FAGGNESS.

IF YOU CAN PREFORM AN ACTION AND REPLICATE AN AN ACTION GUESS WHAT FAGGOT, YOUR DOING SCIENCE.

STOP CONFUSING ONE BRANCH OF SCIENCE WITH ALL OF IT.

ART AND SCIENCE ARE NOT INCOMPATIBLE.

ARTISTS ITERATE OVER TIME TO GET THE RESULT THEY DESIRE.

TECHNIQUES ARE HONED OVER YEARS.

TO GET THE FUCKING RESULT THEY WANT FAGGOTS.

>>36566487
>you're
fucking having to correct myself

>>36566487
Calm down man.

>>36566717
Sorry ignorance annoys me.

>>36566888
Well, OP also said he wanted it to be MORE like art than science, which implies that science would still be somewhat present.

>>36567072
If art is science then having more art is having more science. You can science anything man, anything.

Now that doesn't mean exact numbers and precise measurements, which I believe is what OP is referring to.

>>36567791
>>36567791
Also, he might want:
>Poor control: Magic, like art, is very difficult to get exactly what you want. What you get is always different than what you were aiming for.

>Poor predictability: Magic is very un-physics-like (although rather more chemistry-like): It's very difficult to predict what, exactly, will happen when using it or how it will interact, although there are rules of thumb (with a massive number of exceptions).

>Poor reproducibility: Magic works differently for everyone - no two "experimenters" can count on getting the same result. The rules and laws I discover may not apply to you.

>Psychology: Magic is actually strongly influenced by the people around it. This makes it essentially impossible to run controlled experiments and leaves "magic-science" in a state somewhere between psychology and parapsychology in quality-of-experiments.

All of these would not make it *impossible* to do science to magic, but the actual practice of magic would still be vastly more like an art form than a form of engineering.

>>36566888

Art isn't a hard science like bio or chem. Art is a good ritual for primitive tribes with no concept of biochemistry.

>>36567897
Or just
>Magic MAY follow consistent rules and be science-able, but scientific culture in this setting does not exist or is in its infancy and nobody's figured out the rules yet. And no, you can't figure them out and write the Grand Unified Thaumic Field Theory, for the same reason you can't invent gunpowder.

>>36567897

Reproducible results in response to external stimuli is the basis for the magic that I am grounding with biochem.

>>36567941

What is the reason?

>>36567987
That'd be, in almost all cases, metagaming. Your characters have no particular reason to invent gunpowder, as they've never heard of it and would be staggeringly unlikely to stumble upon it by accident.

However, since you the player know about gunpowder and want it very badly, it is almost certain that you are discovering gunpowder not out of roleplaying, but from a desire to use metagame knowledge.

>>36564691
>>36564478
This could be a cool system, but seems overcomplicated. Wouldn't it get clunky and take forever to craft your spells?

>>36549600
I liked the way Dark Souls did it, where Pyromancy was the sort of magic you describe with all of it being about honing your "inner spark" and unleashing it on the world around you and all the teachers were swamp dwelling hobos while Arcane Sorcery was more "traditional" magic with schools and shit devoted to it.

>>36568093
With DnD its the Sorceror/wizard seperation. One has innate magic that it blasts out in fury, the other studies secret geometries and incantations for years and learns not really magic, but now to perform spells.

Like the difference between an Ork Mek and A techpriest of Mars

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>>36555877
http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html

this is probably what you mean

>>36567897
>>36555877
That makes sense and implies that magic is less developed than it could be otherwise.

As tech would have levels so would magic.

If we look at it this way then one could say that dnd has a very high magic level but a very low tech level. Which is likely what leads too caster dominance.

Scale back the magic understanding and make it hard/impossible for one person to use another persons magic and you have a far more artistic magic level. Science is still involved but massive amounts of numbers will not necessarily lead you to anything. Feeling it out becomes more important.

However there is still fucking science to it otherwise you would make a fireball with no idea how you made it. Unless you don't control what the effect is.

>>36568440
At that point, you're stretching "science" to the degree it doesn't mean anything. Some element of predictability and control is required for a universe in which intelligent beings can even exist.

(Although there are universes TOTALLY immune to science - old WoD Mage was like that. There were no 'real' rules at all - anything enough people thought should happen, happened. Science did not discover new rules, but a giant conspiracy created them and then fed them to scientists to publicize and solidify them. All science would do is tell you what enough people believed hard enough, or confirm your own beliefs if you had the power.)

>>36568600
Science is literally the process where you can understand the result that will happen, though actually wild magic from the obsidian trilogy is a good example of the magic the op is talking about. The magic gives you what you want but it doesn't tell you how you get it and the price you pay is not exactly predictable. I could see that being the kind of magic they mean.

However that you can breath in and then know you are able to breathe out is science. Its very universally usable, do not confuse that with stretching it.

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>>36566304
I like it. Negation of magic bases entirely on being unimpressed by anything your enemy does.

Or maybe magic is all about impressing some cosmic force, bonus points if it isn't sentient.

Bump

>>36568053
I think so for initial creation. Afterwards though, it's there when needed.

I don't know the system for GURPS, but from what has been destribed, coming up with a list of basic domains to start with should be easy. There are of course the basic elements. Fire, water, and whatnot. Then there are things like life for healing and revival. Death for necromancy and anything else do to with manipulating the dead. Divination, Protection.

Necromancy, in the original divination meaning, can be really diverse. Summoning spirits to directly communicate, ouija, adding in fire to get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone, etc.

>>36559823
Seriously underrated post

>>36564929
>magic-ewakened wizard studying magical runes for years and the gypsy magic where by just holding peppermint and snake's blood into your hand and saying a formula you can make stuff happen without any study at all.
I dunno, I like both of those but separately. Like if you want a very specific and clear thing to happen, runes make it work right. But if you don't mind it being a little touch-and-go and the result being sort of uncertain (ie folk magic) then go for the peppermint and snake's blood. Like Eragon, the difference between normal magic and dragon's magic

>>36571718

There's a webserial called Pact that has the basis of magic being formation of a pact between the practitioner and the 'spirits' (think Shinto style spirits are everything crap). The practitioner basically tells them that he will never lie and the spirits (being dumb as shit) believe him. So when the practitioners says that he's making a fireball appear the spirits know that he will never lie to them so they make the fireball happen.

One of the most useful ways of attacking a practitioner in the setting is catching them in a lie and then basically yelling it out for everyone to hear. The spirits then judge whether the guy has lied and to what degree. If it's a small lie, they punish him through not doing as much for him (regarded as losing power). If it's a big one he loses the ability to use magic entirely.

More on topic though, magic in general is very artistic in nature. Theatrics and symbology are more important than knowing the rules when it comes to casting magic (though higher end stuff does tend to be more limited due to the things you have to do to gain greater amounts of 'power'). There are very few hard and fast rules to the system; like can be used to repel like, though opposites do it better. Even classifying monsters is difficult because what affects one goblin may not work on another and symbolic acts can give you an advantage over things that would otherwise be unbeatable.

Decent story and well written, if a bit depressing. I want to adapt the magic system into an RPG once it's finished being written (3 updates per week in the 7-10k words per chapter range as well). I think it would do well with a system similar to Unknown Armies.

My favorite take on magic so far is this guy's idea for redoing Dr Strange.

http://mightygodking.com/2009/04/09/this-discussion-seemed-to-be-necessary/

>>Since most people don’t have the time or patience to learn how to do magic directly, then you go to the second easy way to do magic: favour trading. Guys like the Vishanti, for example, or Watoomb, or Ikonn – all of them will cheerfully let you ask them for a spell. (Asking for a spell is just a long-distance telepathic communication, so you’re effectively using the easy mind magic that anybody can do to get access to the tough stuff.) They grant you what effectively acts as a license to use the tricky stuff, and they’re all specialized: Watoom, for example, is great for weather magic or transforming the very air itself, whereas Ikonn is the master of illusion magic, and so on.
>>Now, there’s always a cost – and in this case, the cost to Joe is that he now owes the Seraphim a favour. These favours can be stored up by the allotting power (which, as Dr. Strange himself can inform you, is much like maxing out your credit card in order to increase the maximum balance so you can withdraw more money), or alternately in order to get the power permanently they might ask for a special one-time favour in advance.