Getting away from Earth, Air, Fire, and Water

[tuftears]

Just some random noodling on RPG magic systems that don't involve the archetypal four elements. octantis complains correctly that the four elements see an awful lot of use - they're cliche, but we use them anyway because everyone understands them and recognizes what power these elements possess.

But what other systems could we devise if we got away from 'elements are the building blocks of magic'?

First, to make an effective magic system for an RPG - one that can be used by players, you need to be able to attack, defend, buff, debuff, and perform utilitarian functions with it. It should be obvious how you can perform these functions. With the elements, you can create some amount of an element that is magically charged, then manipulate it to attack the enemy or shield yourself. Stretching a point, you can use 'water' to heal yourself, because of the strong association water has with healing, 'fire' to energize yourself, 'earth' to make yourself stronger, or 'air' to make yourself faster.

The Arcane Element - here, magic is simply a force of creation and destruction. Your understanding of the key concepts allow you to control it better, some undefined affinity to magic allows you to summon more of it. This is pretty basic and boring, really, so in an RPG the designer's liable to pretty it up by throwing in concepts like 'Kaballah' or 'schools of magic' and 'complex rituals to build up power' - but the point is that there are just two variables - strength and cleverness.

Elemental magic is really just a subset of 'magic is a force'. Perhaps it's a statement - 'my character is of such a personality type so he'll naturally be strong in this kind of magic.'

Spiritual Invocation - I initially suggested 'Tarot' where players would be able to channel the powers of the Major Arcana, but really the root system is 'call on powerful spirits who embody archetypal concepts to assist you'. This system seems weak because it's unclear for many spirits - say, Hestia, goddess of the hearth - how you could use the powers granted to assist you in a fight. That's not necessarily bad though, you could say someone who was a devotee of Hestia is strong in defense and utility, but weak on offense. And you could allow players to choose several spirits that they could invoke. Still, I think it leaves players too much at the will of the GM for whether something they have in mind will work. GMs would have to give players a list of spells they know they can work, and balancing those lists with other players' capabilities could be difficult.

Avatars - Pokemon comes to mind as a good example where the PCs' powers manifest themselves through their guardian beasts, but also S-CRY-ed where PCs can conjure up entities that either stand apart or meld themselves with the PCs' bodies. This is something I'd like to toy with more in an RPG framework - if you could design your own magical guardian, what abilities would you give it, and what form? Actually form might almost be more important than abilities, as it's an outward manifestation of your PC's inner characteristics. Pokemon does feature strong elemental associations for its creatures, but the presentation is important.

Wild Magic - while it might seem incompatible with allowing players to choose what they want to do with magic, I think there's a certain appeal in building up the idea that magic is an untamed force; think of Schmendrick in the Last Unicorn, forever to be an apprentice, having difficulties casting even the simplest spells, but at the right moments, magic pours through him, he simply is the magic, and then great things happen. In an RP setting, potential would be balanced by control. The more control you have, the less potential. You describe what wondrous things you want to have happen and then the GM rolls a die, and if the powers that be like you, it happens. If you have luck points to spend, you can reroll them. The GM can also just make it happen if the GM really likes your idea.

Oddly enough, I'm not sure most PCs would actually want to be Schmendrick. It'd be frustrating to know most of your attempts at casting a spell would fail, and you might often get great successes only on trivial matters you didn't care about.

By default if you're a magician with great control over your powers, it plays out like The Arcane Element and then it gets boring again, but then your powers are limited too.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Well, what I'm kind of getting at is, how can we make 'working with magic' interestingly different? Magic is all about feel, so it should feel fun to play with magic - you should have an innate grasp of what you can do, and a lot of that is conveyed by saying that you can work with 'elements'. But what other systems could you do that with?

Now, you can also say 'you can create' or 'you can transmute' and such, and that makes a reasonably different system, but if you lock players into only being able to do one or two different types of magic, they're then lacking offense or defense or utility... And if players can do it all, you're back at the basic It's All Magic system.

Arguably you can say a mage who can create things can then create weapons, or create bolts of destruction, but then it becomes kind of a 'best person at powergaming wins' which is a little icky.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I haven't exhausted all I have to say on the topic, nor am I saying "Hey, let's go back to fire/water/air/earth!" I'm just working late at work, with the only occasional break, and there's only so much I can cram into an entry at a time, and so I'm addressing bits at a time.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

<3

I am curious what other magic systems spring to mind for you since you've played with a lot of them.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Might have to right an LJ entry when I get home. Afraid I'll overload the comments, and this is way too disjointed for me to seem the least bit coherent.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

One thought: Nonexclusive, overlapping "elements." Different "elements" for lack of better word, may have their own attack spells, for instance, and several might have protection, and several might have healing - but some fields are naturally *better* at certain areas.

AHQ offended my sense of fairness when they gave a healing spell to the Fire College, when certain Colleges had none at all. It made more sense for Jade (plant/druid) and Light (holy/priest), and perhaps even Gold (alchemy/alchemist). At least Light had a slightly *better* healing spell, though.

I was about to suggest that I think of how "traditional" superheroes usually have various stunts they can pull, but they're all justified by whatever physics-breaking central "super power" the character has. Flash is ridiculously fast. Iceman makes ice. Hulk is super-strong. The trouble is, the most iconic superhero of them all, Superman, fails to fit a decent theme; he just has a grab-bag of ridiculous powers that are only thematically tied because we've grown up associating them with Superman.

... oops, break over. More later.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Ars Magica works on a system with 5 types of action (create, investigate, alter, destroy, control) and 10 types of target (animals, liquids, gases, human body, plants, fire/heat/light, appearances/senses, sapient mind, solids, magical energy). Because generalists spread their points too thin, you end up with people choosing to be good at one or two actions and one or two targets.

You'd be *amazed* at how creatively people can apply a limited set of tools to a wide range of problems. The system isn't perfect (it's easy to come up with effects that should kill people a lot more easily than the difficult "kill outright" spell, for example), but it's an elemental-type system that ends up being very different from the usual 4/5 element scheme, despite being derived from it.

-Deuce

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

True dat. I kind of want to avoid systems where the object is 'out-clever the GM' though.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

More like "cleverly use your tools to the fullest"; the GM generally wants you to stay alive (after toying with you in a cat-like manner, of course). Both the GM and the players have a good idea of what the players can do with both orthodox and un-orthodox applications of magic, and the adventures are tailored to have at least one (and usually multiple) solution approaches that would work. Your mileage may vary.

Real PCs(tm) tend try to out-clever the GM no matter what, so I'm not really seeing the down-side };>.

-Deuce