A lot of RPGs have magic in them, and it's handled very differently in
different games. Magic systems in a lot of games leave me very
unsatisfied. I really think a lot more thought need to be put into
magic.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
In The Golden Bough, Frazer defines magic as a technique by
which one seeks to affect the world by one's own power. He contrasts
this with religion, by which one seeks to invoke some external power
(such as a deity or spirit) to affect the world in a way which one
desires.
In this essay, I do not observe this distinction. I refer to both
these things as 'magic,' since both of them are involved in techniques
called 'magic' in a lot of games, and drawing a distinction between the
two would add nothing to my arguments but confusion. For instance, in
many games magic-users are able to summon elementals or demons to do
their bidding. Under Frazer's definition this would be religion not
magic. But in the context of this essay, saying that such a practice
is not magic would only confuse things.
RARE OR COMMON?
How common should the use of magic be? The basic choices are:
Very rare: Only a very few gifted individuals have the
power. Most people will never meet a magic-user.
Rare: Only a small proportion of the population will be able
to use magic, but enough that most people will know a magic-user.
Each village might have its own magic-user, and a large town would have
several.
Common: Many or even most people have some magical ability.
Universal: Everyone has some degree of magical ability.
In the real world, most people have some sort of spiritual, religious
or magical beliefs which they practice on a daily basis. This usually
includes an attempt to affect the world. This could mean praying to a
god for some desired event to happen. There are societies where,
before a warrior goes into battle, he always says a charm intended to give
him success. There are societies where rituals are performed to
promote fertility.
The point is that in the real world, most people believe 'magic' in
the broadest sense to be universal. A Christian farmer praying for rain
to water his crops, and a shaman performing a rain dance, are both
doing essentially the same thing, however externally different the
forms may seem: they're using a magical technique to get what they
want in life.
HIGH AND LOW MAGIC
Perhaps it's necessary here to make a distinction between different
forms of 'magical' practice. Imagine a game where everybody in the
world has religion (they pray to gods), most people practice folk charms
(spells to bring luck, fertility, etc), but only a few people are
'wizards' who can use magic that immediately produces obvious results
(by this I mean typical D&D-style magic, like throwing fireballs, flight
and instant magical healing).
WHAT MAGIC IS USED FOR
People use magical techniques to try to get what they want. In
pre-industrial societies, fertility is very important, and so a
lot of magical practice in such societies revolves around promoting
the fertility of crops, herds and women. Harvest festivals still
go on in Britain today, although they are much less involved affairs
than they were in the eighteenth century or before, when they were
openly involved propitiating figures like the Corn Mother or the
Corn Man. In other parts of the world, fertility rituals with
obviously magical intent are practised.
In societies where battle
is common, magical practices that promote victory in battle are
important: as late as the twentieth century, chaplains would bless
the soldiers in Christian armies before going into battle, and
invoke God's help to bring victory. (I suspect that this is still
an important rite in many armies.)
Throughout the world, people offer prayers or perform rites intended
to bring them long life, good health, good luck and prosperity. This is
as much part of 'advanced' religions like Christianity ('Give us this day
our daily bread') or el-Islam as it is of more 'primitive' beliefs.
Finally, many spiritual belief-systems involve rites intended to
procure some benefit for the soul after death. People living around
the Mediterranean basin have, for thousands of years, taken this belief
so seriously that they have suffered constant hardship in this life in
the belief that after it ends its finite span, there will be an
eternity of happiness as the reward for their devotions. The
Egyptians were doing this thousands of years before Christ, and
Greek philosophers like Diogenes denied themselves worldly
pleasure for the same reasons. Christian monks have continued this
unbroken tradition of material denial to this day.
The problem for me is that many games are only concerned with
magical effects that will be useful in 'adventuring' situations. This
means that they're big on battle magic, but generally very weak
on everything else. Also they generally only have spells with
short-term effects. They have spells for instant healing, but nothing
for the promotion of longevity over a longer time-span. They might
have spells that make a fighter stronger in the short term, but nothing
with a permanent effect.
MAGIC IN DAILY LIFE
In the real world, people who believe in the effectiveness of magic
or ritual or spirtual practices use them in their everyday life. Thus
Christians have their Sunday ritual every week, Baha'is are supposed
to recite scripture for a certain length of time every day, and Jews and
Muslims have set prayers to be said each day. The idea seems to be
build up something over the long term. The theory of what you're
building up varies (it might be the accumulation of spiritual energy,
or getting in God's good books), but the idea of magic being practiced
regualarly, rather than just when needed in an acute situation, is
common.
MAGIC AS SELF-IMPROVEMENT
In some systems of belief and practice, regular performance of
rites is thought to lead to a gradual improvement. This is common to
several Asian schools of ritual exercise, including tai-ji-quan
(whose purpose is to correct the flow of life-force around the body)
and certain forms of yoga. By practising the exercises daily, you
make your body more free from imperfection. Essentially it's a magical
work-out to make the mind and body function more effectively. (Often
the means of doing this is making the spirit function more
effectively, as the spirit is seen as affecting the mind and body.)
In game terms, I would render this as way of modifying stats over
time. This could mean that a character who performs a ritual regualarly
many times will eventually get permanent stat increases. Another
possibility is to grant characters stat increases that stay only if they
keep up the rituals.
EXAMPLE: Imagine a game using a system like Basic Roleplaying
(the Runequest/Cthulhu system, with primary stats 3-18 and
skills as percentages). There is a ritual which
increases Dexterity over the long term. The character who uses this ritual
has a bonus to his DEX which always applies to it, but is recorded as
something separate to his main DEX stat (so a character might have DEX
12+2, giving him a working total of 14 as long as he keeps the bonus at
+2). Now, the character has a skill in this ritual. At the end of each
month that passes in the game, the GM rolls for the player's ritual
with the following bonuses:
+2% for each hour of time during the last month that the character
has spent performing the ritual.
-20% for each point of bonus that the character currently has.
If the roll fails, the character's bonus drops by 1 (though
it may not go below 0). If it succeeds by less than 30 points, the
bonus stays the same. If it succeeds by 30 points or more, the bonus
increases by 1.
So, for a character who currently has a bonus of +2, with a skill
of 35%, who has spent 40 hours in the last month performing the ritual,
the chance of success is 35 + 80 - 40 = 75%. Therefore, if the roll
is 76-00, the bonus will drop to +1. If the roll is 46-75, the bonus
will stay at +2. If the roll is 01-45, the bonus will rise to +3.
As you can see, this is time-consuming work. Someone who devotes
his life to performing the rites will be able to get very good bonuses at
the expense of his free time. (This has happened in real life: some
Indian lords, freed from the need to do any kind of work, would devote
hours of each day to practising yoga.) If the one character has to perform
different rites (eg. one for each stat) then he has to choose between
concentrating on the one, or splitting his attention between the many.
MAGIC INSPIRING AWE
A very different approach is to make magic something which inspires
emotions like awe, wonder or fear. It's easiest to do this when magic is
a rare, remote thing which few understand. It's hard to do in a game
when magic is common. While, for a true believer, the performance of
ritual may be a very moving spiritual experience, it's hard to convey
this in roleplaying. So here it's best to keep it mysterious.
I think the qualities which can make magic awe-inspiring are these:
Make it grand: When you see magic being performed, it should
be pretty impressive. Stuff like scenery, atmospherics, costume and
props can be important here. A ritual performed on a mountain peak
drenched in moonlight, with chanting acolytes and burning braziers
and rams' skulls on poles, is the kind of thing I mean. Flashes of
lightning and visitations by demonic messengers from the nether realms
wouldn't hurt. Read Jack Vance's Dying Earth books for ideas on
this kind of thing.
Vast energies: Give the impression that some great
disturbance of nature is happening. As the spell is cast, the whole
house shudders. The elements are thrown into turmoil, and a tortured wind
howls outside with shuttered windows. The candles all turn blood-red and
the flowers in the vase begin to sing with the purest of notes in some
unfathomable vegetable language. These are all simply side effects of
the great energy of the spell passing through the area.
The price: You may want magic to have a price which it
demand of the user, or at least a risk which the user takes. Use of
powerful magic could lead to some unwanted attention from supernatural
beings, or to permanent and disturbing changes in the user's physical
appearance.
MAGIC AS THE 'PHYSICS' OF A GAMEWORLD
One option is to make magic so common that every action anyone
ever does has a magical element to it. A good example of this is the
Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson. The people use magic for
everything. The workers of stone, when they make something, use magic
to mould the stone into the shape they want. To light their homes they
enchant stones to make them glow.
The wood-workers do similar things with wood.
This is true even for the most basic of jobs, like making
a plate for eating from. It never occurs to anyone to make a chisel
and carve stone by hand, because such techniques never developed
in this society. Magic developed instead.
When I write a game with magic in it, I want to understand why
and how that magic works. This is best achieved by building a magic
system
from the ground up.
This lets me know what that magic can and can't do.
I can predict the effects of trying to do a certain thing with magic.
This does not mean that the players have to know how magic works.
For instance, in a game I wrote called
The King's Men, all magic that
works is based on two things: manipulating life-force, and invoking
spirits. Forms of
magic include Meditation (which allows the user to increase his
stats, by harmonizing his own lifeforce in certain patterns),
Death Strike (which disrupts the flows of lifeforce in an enemy's
body), Healing (which harmonise the flows of lifeforce in someone's
body into a more healthy pattern), Divination (which allows a
character to talk to the spirits of his ancestors, who will give him
helpful information if they can), and Earth Sacrifice (which feeds
the spirits in the earth with lifeforce so that they make the
earth fertile and the crops grow).
Now, knowing as I do why magical
effects can be done, I can see whether certain things would or
would not be possible by magic. For instance, summoning rain would
be possible if someone could find a way of propitiating the sky-spirits.
There is no obvious way that shooting fireballs from the hand would be
possible. Maybe life-force could be fired as a directed form of energy,
but the amount needed to shoot destructive bolts from the hand would
be so great that the user would have to be virtually a god before this
became possible.
If a magician wanted to project fire, a more profitable line would be
to try to persuade some fire-spirits to do his bidding, and set fire to
things at a distance. But fire-spirits are flighty and short-tempered,
so it would be a risky business at best. Also, since fire-spirits
normally dwell only where fire exists, then to get the fire-spirits to
show up in the first place he would have to build a fire. A magician
could always carry around a burning torch, of course, but that small
fire would hold only quite a weak fire-spirit. Another problem would be
that spirits see the material world very weakly, so trying to direct
them to the specific thing that you want setting on fire would be
difficult: you'd have to mark it in a way that the spirits could
recognise (which basically means leaving a marker that contains
life-force, one thing that spirits can see very clearly).
The upshot of this is that firethrowing is impractical - while
a small amount of firethrowing might be possible with a great expenditure
of effort, there are simply better ways of achieving the result of killing
your enemy. The important point is that because I understand how magic
works from first principles, I can look at any potential use of magic in
this way and assess whether it would be practical to do. How many games
can make that claim?
In a lot of fictional and game magic systems, the use of particular
words, names, incantations and ritual actions is necessary to doing magic.
I don't like this because I don't see how just saying a particular
combination of words can be effective. This should only work in a universe
where words have a magical power - and then, all words should have the
potential to have magical power. See also
Little Details.
I think the idea behind a lot of this is symbolism: to affect the
symbol of a thing is to affect the thing itself. This is a form of
sympathetic magic, seeing the symbol and the thing symbolised as suffering
the same effect. (In The Golden Bough, Frazer labels this
system of thought 'homeopathic magic'.)
Thus saying a name in a certain context affects the
being who is symbolised by that name; burning a voodoo doll burns the
person who it symbolises. Now, in a world where homeopathic magic
actually operated, we would expect a lot of things to be happening
all the time as results of it. If every object in some way is linked to
all other objects of the same kind, then when one is affected, all others
should be affected. This has huge implications for the world: when one
apple anywhere in the world falls, all others should fall by homeopathic
magic. Unless your game-world really works like this, then homeopathic
magic should not work.
One way around this is to say that homeopathic magic does not
normally operate, but the wizard's art is the ability to make it
operate. Thus, using magic makes two things equal to each other, so that
what affects one affects the other. So, for instance, if a wizard
wants to kill Robert Jack's Son, he takes an object and tries to make
it sympathetic with the heart of Robert Jack's son. Then he stabs it.
If his magic has been successful, the heart of Robert Jack's Son is
also pierced, and he dies. The spell is easier to do the more closely
similar the object is to the heart of Robert Jack's Son. If the object
was a piece of clay molded into a heart shape, the similarity would
be very slight and so the spell would be very difficult. If the object
was an ox heart, it would be more similar - the heart of a living
creature - but still not close. If it was the heart of an unrelated
human, that would be fairly close, but still the relationship is
quite unspecific. If it was the heart of his brother Harry Jack's Son,
then it would be a specific close relationship: both are hearts of
sons of Jack. This would make the spell much easier.
Another justification for ritual is to say that it puts the magic
user into the right state of mind. This is fine, but in this case
ritual should only aid in casting the spell, it should not be
necessary to success. For instance, in The King's Men, when people
sacrifice to the earth-spirits, they say ritual prayers which go along
the lines of 'Come here, earth-spirits, and accept this sacrifice.'
Now the spirits cannot hear, but they can sense mind, so when the people
say this prayer the spirits feel the intent in their mind rather than
hearing the exact words. In fact, educated people generally just
form the idea in their head rather than saying the words aloud, which
they rightly believe is just as effective.
Entering specific body-poses during spellcasting can be justified in
these terms: the body acts as a conduit for magic, and it must be formed
into a certain physical shape in order for the magic to flow in the
right way.