When Magic Becomes Mundane In RPGs
I was playing Dungeons & Dragons Online the other night, through a particular adventure narrated by "Guest DM" Gary Gygax. Having never met Gygax in person, all I could think of when hearing his voice was his guest appearance in Futurama: "I am ... "(throws dice) "... pleased to meet you."

One of the central features of part one of this sequence of adventures was... well, lots of undead, which irritates me as a rogue (rogues can't do sneak attack damage against undead). But another was a slew trapped rooms which would seal off the moment someone crossed the threshold of the room, splitting the party. Monsters would magically appear (apparently digging out of the ground) and attack the members trapped inside the room. The doors wouldn't reopen again - no matter what anybody did - until the last monster was killed OR until after a pre-determined time limit. It was certainly challenging and entertaining, especially when I, the poor useless rogue, made the mistake of stepping over the threshold of a room I thought we'd already cleared. I spent the next thirty or sixty seconds tumbling like mad to avoid being hit by two wraiths and a half-dozen arcane skeletons, until the doors would reopen.

Dancing around the room like my hair was on fire, chased by a bunch of deadly monsters which could reduce my poor rogue to a dessicated husk in seconds, I got to pondering.

How the heck do these doors know when the last monster has been killed? What bit of ancient technology is at work here? Doubtless it is based on the same technology that allowed the ancient native Central American savages to detect when Indiana Jones had broken a beam of light. Stone weapons and photoelectric sensors, baby! (Nevermind the question of how the trap managed to reset itself when nobody was looking...)

Of course, the default answer is simply, "It's magic."

Tracy Hickman, best-known as the coauthor of the original Dragonlance novels, once spoke about his fantasy writing at a symposium I attended, and stated how he thought the whole "It's magic" explanation was a cop-out in fantasy. I tend to agree. Sure, magic may be the enabling power, but still, one expects the world to follow something vaguely resembling natural, physical laws. Better still magic itself seems to follow some consistent pattern and internal logic.

Hickman's example was a particular series that had islands floating in the sky. He had to determine just how they managed to float. Of course, the ultimate answer was, "It's magic." But he wanted to rationalize things a bit further before forcing magic to step in and take over. His initial answer was, "They are light." To make them light, he made them highly porous. At that point, he also realized that they had another problem.... they leaked. They wouldn't hold water. That drove some more unique characteristics of the floating islands and the people living on them that would help drive the verisimilitude (if not exactly "realism"), to make the world more believable. I never read the book (sorry, Tracy), but the hope was that while magic was there, it wasn't so uniquitous that it became a catch-all for everything. It (hopefully) kept magic from becoming too mundane.

Dungeons & Dragons is a little notorious when it comes to trivializing magic. How many times have you discarded a +1 sword in favor of an upgrade? While D&D was loosely based on Lord of the Rings (originally), can you imagine Gandalf going into Ye Olde Magic Shoppe and trading in Glamdring for a more advanced model? Frodo telling his companions, "Guys, I've been stuck with this Mithril Shirt for something like four levels now... I've got dibs on the next suit of halfling-sized magic plate mail we run into!"

(Gah, I hope Shamus hasn't already tackled that in DM of the Rings... I've missed a few strips and I'm gonna feel like such a copycat if he did...)

The Eberron setting (which Dungeons & Dragons Online is based in) takes it even further. While I'm not extremely familiar with the setting, as I understand it kind of takes up the idea that magic is the technology of the world. They've got locomotives powered by summoned elementals, sentient robots that were mass-produced for some ancient war, and so forth. Now, to some degree I'm alright with that. How do the trains work? Oh, by enslaved elementals. Cool. I don't need to break down the internal logic of "what is the physiology of a creature that is living air?" The magic can break down to a few component parts that I accept at face value, and I'm cool with that.

Now maybe it's the rogue-fan in me, or the software engineer in me, but when you get to the really "gamey" aspects like the automatic doors which "just work" with some monolothic and inviolate force, it starts to bug me. How is it supposed to work? Are the doors sentient? In a world where wizards are supposed to be able to detect magic, and rogues are supposed to be able to detect and disable even magical devices, why can't we find some way to spoof or tamper with or work around the magical-door-with-buried-monster trick? I mean, we KNOW it's going to happen, so why can't we just jam an extra sword (maybe one of those useless +1 swords we're just gonna sell because we already own better) into the door's mechanism to keep it from closing.

Alas, the answers are:
#1 - Because the designers WANT to force you to brute-force your way through it.
#2 - Because it's easier to program this way
#3 - Because it's an MMO and so the first time ANYBODY figures out how to get around this trick, it will no longer be effective against anybody but a party of newbies for the rest of the game's existance, and the developers just don't feel like throwing away that much effort.

And perhaps most importantly:

#4 - Because players don't really care about things being believable, they just want it to be interesting.

That reason #4 is why we have such weird Laws of FPS Worlds. And yes, devotion to realism can get boring. But come on, guys. It was one thing back when games had to abstract so many details --- it didn't bother me. But in the new games, you tease me with interactivity and realism, but then don't let me take advantage of it when it matters? (I never played Doom III, but I hear that it was notorious for this).

But okay, even if that's not an option... there's this whole "attention to detail" thing. Rather than just forcing the player to accept "Oh, all these dungeons are FULL of magic and that's why everything does stuff you can't detect or prevent," could we at least have some explanation as to the why's and the how's of things? A little more rationale for WHY there are monsters hiding in an unassailable position under the floor? Sorta like the book they found in The Fellowship of the Ring explaining briefly why the dwarven city was overrun with goblins, orcs, trolls, and a Balrog?

Sure, 90% of the players would just skip it. But to me, a world in which everything just magically "happens" actually feels far less magical. The magic has become mundane, and I feel like I'm just being manhandled by a lazy game designer.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:45 AM (Permalink)