Felix Pleșoianu said,

I’ve encountered the topic before in the context of world building. I would add that in a world where magic is real, you’d see all kinds of small manifestations thereof in nature, much like with electricity in the real world. And any magic people do would run a chance of affecting more than they want… or realize.

One author who gets it right is Brandon Sanderson. He loves making up magic systems which clearly obey some laws yet manifest in many ways, while not being so powerful as to break the setting if you stop to think about the implications. On the minus side, I suspect most roleplayers would reject them as too weird. 😛

Bad Sector said,

Now that’s weird 😛

I finished reading Matt Barton’s Dungeons and Desktops a few days ago and it made me want to play some oldschool RPG games i had around. So i played a bit of Daggerfall (which although i progressed much more than the last time i tried it, i eventually stopped playing it for the same reason i stopped Oblivion – too much random “same” stuff), Baldur’s Gate (i *so* don’t like the bird’s view, but it somehow makes me want to continue my game – and unlike what i initially had in mind, it doesn’t take itself too seriously…) and Might and Magic 6 (which i had progressed in a while ago but forgot to keep the savegames after a format).

Anyway, the above put me in some sort of oldschool gamedev mood. My GPU is almost fried and shuts itself down when i try to use any sort of 3D acceleration (even a triangle causes the whole screen to go full garbage and after a couple of seconds the GPU shuts down followed by the rest of the computer, requiring a full restart) so this rules out any development for the moment, but still it is in my head.

Now this morning i went out to meet a friend of mine and it was about a month since the last time i left the house (for a reason not related to buying stuff like food and such). He’s also a game developer (artist) and we started talking about several stuff and i mentioned him how i am considering making a game like some old RPGs, although probably smaller in scale and more hack and slash-y. The conversation turned to a Flash game i started a while ago, Kryfo, which never went much beyond the “idea testing” phase.

I mentioned the game in the forums actually 🙂

If you remember, the whole idea was about disappearing knowledge with monsters appearing while in some places there were “oases of knowledge”. In these oases there would be actual magical devices that would cause the people’s intelligence to not be affected (or increase) and in every other place the intelligence would lower – in some places even to the point of getting a behaviour no more than of that of an animal.

My major problem with that was why would that happen and what the motive would be. Also another problem was that i wanted to focus a bit more on the action side of things and… that i like steampunk so i wanted to put some of that in there :-P.

So i thought a story (non really concrete, as i said this was mostly in “idea” form with few things written – mostly in mockup game script form) where magic was abundant and everyone and his dog would have access to it. Thanks to magic, the society would have developed to have “magical machines” with arcane/magic and science fused to one thing (like many modern machines depend on a combination of different sciences – most prominent being the computers we use :-P) and thanks to premature industrialization, common people would be able to use magic.

The problem was that only few people would really understand magic and the rest would use premade recipes – sometimes meddling a bit with them without knowledge. As demand for more and better magic devices increase, it would only take a while for things to turn bad with people “messing with powers they don’t understand” (around this point you can start noticing at holes on the idea :-P). However, with the major forces being centered around making more money (magic sells after all), one couldn’t expect that the magic industry would suddenly decide to stop itself – which wasn’t helped that many influential people didn’t even believe or understand what the problem was. It was an unstoppable race downhill.

So some sorcerers decided to take the matter at their own hands and formed a society to find a solution to this problem. Since they couldn’t demand from people to stop using magic or police magic use (which would need aid from people that had no interest in policing it) they decided to make people “forget” about magic by casting a world wide spell on the earth that would drain the intelligence of human beings. Special devices would counter the intelligence drain effect and those special devices would be placed in areas where these sorcerers would be after the spell.

The idea was that the spell would only last for a while, but to cast it they needed tremendous effort and the society had to use people that weren’t as proficient as their members were and some of them didn’t had the most altruistic reasons to cooperate with the society. Even within the society, not everyone agreed with the idea – some even thought that the spell would be a good chance to not just police spellcasting but totally make magic something that only themselves would have access too, eventually making them the same as gods.

Of course, as expected, people messed with the spell and the whole thing backfired, making the whole world a land where intelligence is permanently something that is found only in areas where these devices were originally placed. The sorcerers quickly separated (they were already all over the world, as needed to cast the spell) since everyone had his own goals and regrets (not all of them) about the whole thing – and it didn’t took long to for them to start backstabbing each other.

Well, this is in some extra detail than i originally planned when i started typing this comment the idea behind Kryfo. Actually this is just one of the ideas, another one was about “intelligence poles” that were created by sorcerers to increase their own powers. To do that, they would need intelligence to be drained from other areas (using some sort sort of power “saturation” around these poles) and this would create the problem. The whole “sorcerers try to gain more than they could chew” idea is a constant part though 😛

In any case, the player would simply wander on an abandoned village (the one in the demo i showed in the forums) where such a device (or pole) was in effect and gain consciousness for the first time (…probably). In the story i had mentioned above the village would be abandoned because the wizard and his assistants that lived there was killed by another one. In the pole story, these poles would be carriable and one of the villagers would routinely wander off in the forest to find other people which were still in an animal state (and most of them would end being dead since we humans can’t really match up to other animals in wilderness :-P) and the player would be one of them.

In any case, i never went more with this idea because at some point i thought that it if people aren’t interested in playing a simple FPS game like Rombo, then there is no way they would play a turn based first person Flash RPG. Ok, some would play it, but after almost a million play sessions for three games, i’ve only made about $140 over the course of two years. So basically i thought that it isn’t worth the effort 😛

That would make more sense as a downloadable, but i’m not sure if i can make such a game myself :-P. Although trying to come up with a story was interesting since every story i had in the games i’ve released so far were as cliche as they could be (not that the one above is soaked in originality but it isn’t “bad wizard is bad, go fetch the trinked that would kill him” like in Rombo or “princess is kidnapped by monsters, go rescue her” like in Dungeon Knight :-P).

It still is tempting though… 😛

Tariq Kamal said,

You know, I’m not sure if I’ve shared this link with you, but it’s an article from James Maliszewski about something called “Gygaxiam Naturalism”:

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/gygaxian-naturalism.html

Basically he talks about how Gary Gygax, in designing D&D, didn’t just slap on a magic over Ye Olde Medieval Landes: he treated his creation as a living, breathing world, and not just a obstacle course and resource pool for his players. So while yes, you had obvious things like how hard it was to kill a creature, and how effective that creature was in killing you, and what its death would give you, the player, he also made sure that creatures were part of a living, breathing world.

It’s a lesson that more often than not is missing in a lot of games and fantasy works.

Modran said,

Add to that the fact that in most games, magic is for fighting. You’re lucky if you have a spell for flying, and one for teleporting, but you have 5 of fire, 4 of ice, and so on, and so on.
If I had access to magic, I would use it just as we use technology: to make my life easier :p.

xenovore said,

The word I was looking for which sums up the final paragraph there: coherence. A magic system should feel coherent — like, maybe it doesn’t all make sense but it’s still in harmony with itself. For example, if you can summon dogs, you should be able to summon cats. Or badgers. Or weasels. Or any other small mammals. Or any mammals at all. Or if not any mammals at all, a clearly defined reason for why only small mammals (e.g. too much mass takes too much power). Anyway, I think you get what I’m saying here…

WCG said,

I must admit that I’m tired of magic. There’s too much magical-thinking even in real-life, and in fantasies, it’s just a way to do whatever you want, without thinking about it.

I still play fantasy RPGs, of course, but I’d love to see more SF RPGs (NOT first-person shooters!) which use technology, instead of magic. A sufficiently-advanced technology can do anything magic can do, but it has to make at least SOME sense.

And the user of that technology doesn’t have to know how to make it, but only how to use it. That means that anyone can do it, but training and experience still matter.