Magic! (Patreon)

How does magic work in this game? Good question! That is something we’ve been struggling with for (checks watch) a year! 😀 So it must be a thorny problem, let’s talk about it.

Hey folks, Matt Colville at your service. This post comes after whipping up a new Mage prototype (i.e. How I Spent My Saturday Instead Of Taking A Day Off And Playing Baldur’s Gate 3) and I’m pretty excited by it and I think it will work. But then, we always think that; that’s the purpose of testing. Disabusing us of our lofty fantasies.

I know how magic works in Orden, our fantasy setting. Spells are words, phrases, and sentences in High Draconic (need a better name for that. Looks great written down! Then you say it and everyone thinks you’re talking about a new conic section that’s shaped like a hydra). The First Language is baffling, almost impossible for mortals to master, but wizards make a go of it and some of them get pretty far!

Under this model, what does a Mage do in our RPG?

Well one way you could do it is give the player a bunch of words and let them make actual sentences by putting the words together however they want. Subjects, Verbs, Objects. But that doesn’t really work because that’s not how spells work. Or rather, if it were, it would be just Subject and Verb because the Subject is always “I” the spellcaster doing the Verbing. I can already hear the cascade of clacky keys from folks who want to argue about this. 😀

Indeed this is close to how spellcasting works in the classic Ars Magica rpg except not really. There are five verbs:

• Creo=Create
• Intelligo=Perceive/Know
• Muto=Change
• Rego=Move/Control
• Perdo=Destroy

And then five objects:

• Animal=Living Animals
• Aquam=Liquids
• Ignem=Fire
• Aurum=Air
• Corpus=Humanoids

You might imagine your character is speaking sentences on the fly, combining verbs and objects however you like! But actually no. 😀 “Creo Ignem!” is not a spell you cast that “creates fire,” it’s a school of magic that includes lots of bog-standard fantasy spells like Heat of the Searing Forge or Lamp Without Flame. Cool names though!

We could do that! And we did! And we didn’t like it! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Ars Magica is a really cool game by the way, tons of cool ideas in there.

Another game that really does give the player the power to dynamically build unique spells including a single word, short phrase, or whole sentence, is Epic Spell Wars which is not an RPG, but rather a beer-and-pretzels card game that’s a lot of fun.

In Epic Spell Wars, spells have a Source, a Quality, and a Destination and as long as you don’t use more than one of the same type, you are free to combine them however you want up to three. You can cast a single spell, be it a Source, Quality, or Destination, or combine two or three.

And you get spells like… Midnight Merlin’s [S] Ballsy [Q] Meatier Swarm [D]! Which is very silly and fun. Each of those is also a spell, so you could just cast “Ballsy!” and it does something. But stringing three words together creates an… epic… spell. Epic Spell Wars. Good name! And it sounds a lot like how magic works in Orden!

But that doesn’t make a lot of sense in an RPG. Whatever else is true about Mages in this game, their kit is broadly as useful as everyone else’s and if you CAN cast a Word, Phrase, or Sentence then in some sense those things need to be balanced against each other. A competitive game like Epic Spell Wars doesn’t need to worry about that.

But if a single-word spell is about the same as a normal ability from another class, how then would a three-word spell NOT be like taking three turns all at once? It’s not that simple, there are ways to skin this. For instance, we built a Mage prototype that we figured would work and it looked like this:

With the Mage’s class resource being Eloquence and as they gain eloquence they can cast more “complex” spells.

If you read through this you might notice that there are single words, like Burn! And then short phrases like Burning Light and then longer more complicated phrases like Summon Fire Elemental. And if we translated all these names into Latin… I mean, Draconic, you’d see the same elements in different spells. All spells that summoned something would use the same Latin root, all fire spells would use the latin word for Fire or whatever.

But otherwise, this class works sort of like any other. You don’t really “spend” your resource, it unlocks more spells as the battle rages, but otherwise these abilities are very like all the other class abilities.

It’s worth taking a detour here to explain: what we’re testing right now are not “first-level characters,” we’re testing archetypes. A first level character will be much simpler than the characters we’ve been previewing here. Still more competent and heroic than your average d20 Fantasy hero, but not THIS competent. Not “summon a fire elemental at level one” competent!

Anyway, that mage is what we tested and it worked, in that you could play it, but it did not work when it came to delivering on the fantasy of being a Mage.

That was the feedback from the Mage player. “It worked, but I didn’t feel like a wizard.” Fair enough!

Why!?

Why is this such a pain in the ass? We had a whole round of mage testing with a Spell Misfire Chart you rolled on when you mispronounced Draconic and it didn’t matter how we implemented it, people assumed we meant “Like a Wild Magic Table which everyone hates.” Ok, well… that wasn’t what we were doing but starting from a negative position where you have to argue with people just to get them to look at your design is not a great way to start.

Another version of the Mage, we had basically reinvented the Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards problem. Great. Good news for people that like bad design!

The same playtest where we debuted this new Mage, we also debuted the Shadow, and Lars was the Shadow player. He likes playing rogues in video games and never liked the rogue in 5E, so I specifically wanted him to try the Shadow, and he liked it a lot. I was another player in that game and it was really cool to watch Lars use my design in novel ways I hadn’t imagined but which worked great.

Fury, Conduit, Tactician, Talent, Beastheart, Shadow, no problem. It was FUN to prototype these. Why is the Mage different? Why can’t it be like its siblings?

The Core Fantasy

Pretty disgusted with myself and my inability to crack this problem, I took a step back Saturday morning and thought.

This is a minor point but sometimes thinking about problems on your day off? You get different answers. You’re not working, so you’re free to think about problems without feeling like your ideas need to bear fruit.

So, take a step back, forget Orden and High Draconic, what is the core fantasy of being a Wizard? Because that’s what’s failing right now. We proved we could make a Mage that worked but was boring and the reason it was boring was: it worked like all the other classes. Thinking about that feedback, this answer popped into my head:

“Wizards break the rules.”

THAT is what people expect, I think. They mean “the rules of reality” but that often translates to “the rules of the game.” A, 18th level Wizard in 5e costs just as many “levels,” just as many experience points as an 18th level Fighter, but one of those classes is WILDLY more versatile and powerful. Eventually d20 Wizards can alter reality with a word while their fighter buddies are…swinging a sword! Cool! For the wizard.

Another way of looking at it is: wizards are the exception. Maybe they don’t break a rule, they just use it in some way no other class does. Ok but what rule?

The Buffalo

There’s a design principle I know as “use all the parts of the buffalo.” Which is also good advice for writers and it’s sort of the Writing/Design version of Occam’s Razor. Occam says “Do not multiply entities unnecessarily.” In other words, IF you can solve a problem with your story by using some existing character? Do it. Don’t invent a new one. This would have probably been one of the Classical Unities if Aristotle had been a playwright instead of a critic.

And there’s a moment when I’m writing a novel, or designing a game, or writing the story for a game, where suddenly you realize you have more solutions than problems and you can use THIS existing thing to solve this other problem.

That feels really good, that moment. That is when you know you’re onto something, it’s gonna work.

This principle is always in the back of my head and I started to wonder if there was anything about our game I could use to make the Mage more mage-like. And I literally started going through all the rules. Is there any rule we already have, that the Mage could use in a novel way?

Initiative

I pretty quickly hit upon Initiative and then I got a VERY radical idea. A lot of grognards are gonna laugh their asses off if this turns out to be how our Mage actually works. 😀

So you all already know how initiative works. “Who goes first” is basically random, a roll-off between the Heroes and the Enemies. Whoever wins gets to PICK someone (or a group, in the case of the Director) to act, from those characters who haven’t already acted yet in this round.

This is working. It does what we want and we’ve seen it work. And it gives us this interesting “end of round” space. So some abilities last until the end of my next turn, or my target’s next turn, but some–like triggered actions–reset at the end of THE round. We like this. Might not last! But right now we like it.

So…what if, right, what if…the difference between a Word, Phrase, or Sentence in spellcasting is…how many TURNS it takes to cast. Not how many rounds! That would be insane. But imagine an encounter with five heroes and five groups of goblins.

The wizard goes first and uses their action to begin casting Summon Earth Elemental. It has a casting time of 6 turns and the wizard using their action to start casting it is the first of those turns. (So spells with a casting time of 1 turn are your cantrips, or at-wills. They cast with a single action).

Now the Goblin Snipers go. That’s the second turn.

Another hero goes. Turn three.

The Goblin Shaman goes. Turn four.

Another hero goes, turn five.

A Goblin Spinecleaver goes, that’s turn six, so at the end of that goblin’s turn, the wizard summons an earth elemental. And this all happens in the span of a single round!

THAT is exciting to me. I think it might work? I don’t know what the range of “casting times” might be, that’s something we have to dial in, but I think at MOST it would be “one and a half rounds worth of turns.” So SOME spells you start casting now, might not fire until the next round? But those would be edge cases.

Also, this seems...natural. It seems well-adapted for our game because, since we don't have the d20 "Do I Lose A Turn" die, a LOT of stuff happens in a single round, Battles feel more compressed than a d20 fantasy game. Waiting rounds to cast a spell would be basically impossible, but turns creates a LOT of interesting gameplay where "keeping the mage alive" is suddenly actually important!

I wrote this up along with a lot of other rules about…what happens if you take damage while casting, can you decide to stop casting in the middle, and I think we have good and fun answers for this, but it needs to be tested!

This may not work. It might create weirdness. Weirdness like…at the beginning of the encounter when everyone’s alive, a 5-turn spell happens in a single round! At the end of the battle, when most of the enemies are dead, 5 turns might be TWO rounds!! ‘Cause most of the goblins are dead so they’re not taking turns!

Well, maybe that’s not really a problem. Probably if the battle is in that state? You’re not trying to cast epic spells anyway.

What if a battle only HAS a few enemies in the first place? Now spells take longer to cast in terms of “rounds” because people are taking fewer turns per round, because there are fewer people!

But I’m not sure that’s a real problem. Remember that Villains go many times in a single round. And we’re not imagining spells that take…fifteen turns to cast. I think 6 is a lot! So I suspect the actual edge case is; few enemies in this combat for whatever reason, so now some spells finish next round instead of this one. Not a huge deal. But we don’t know!

It might create weirdness where the mage always wants to go first and other characters object! Yeah that sounds like it might happen. But I’m not sure it’s actually a problem. It might be a feature! Suddenly, who goes first is an important choice! Whereas in d20 fantasy, there IS no choice.

No choice is a lot simpler! But this might be more fun? Might be miserable. Might be fun for some, miserable for others. We already know some groups don’t like our initiative system because they can’t decide who should go next and just argue about it, but we think the Director can handle that if we provide them some useful advice.

And if mages end up fighting to go first all the time? Well, we can give them a trigger that lets them start casting a spell as a reaction to someone else going. Does that trigger mean now 1-turn spells are FREE? I dunno, depends on the wording of the trigger. Maybe the trigger makes it explicit that you’re “stealing” your action from your own turn and so when your turn comes, if you used that trigger, now you only have a maneuver. Which we’d have to do anyway otherwise that trigger would let you get two “spellcasting turns” in one round. Game design folks!

So, it's weird, it's cool, it might suck, we don’t know. So we’re gonna test it soon. No one will be surprised if it doesn’t work, but we can only try to fix it once we know WHY it didn’t work.

The reason I think grognards will find this hysterical is…this is how ALL of AD&D was supposed to work back in the late 70s. ALL weapons and spells had a “number of segments” it took to cast/use where a Segment was a division of a round. Greatswords take longer to swing than daggers! I don’t personally know anyone who played with Segments and Weapon Speed. I know folks who sorta used these rules, but not as they were intended.

So it’d be funny if we end up stealing Segments from AD&D by way of convergent evolution. 😀

Anyway

We got a lot more posts percolating. We took our game to a local convention in Los Angeles and demo’ed it to some of our LA friends and some random passers-by, you’ll get a post about how that went. I still got a post on Negotiation I need to finish. I need to revise how Weapons work in our game and that’ll turn into a post eventually. AND we’ve spent quite a lot of brainpower on the Resource Economy that’s going to turn into an epic post at some point once we’ve had time to test it.

If you notice a drop in posts here it’s only because we’re at the stage where we need to start testing whole adventures and that takes a lot of time. We’ve got the single-encounter experience pretty-well dialed in and now it’s time to see how adventures with many Rests in them work.

But we still got lots to talk about. I gotta go revise how Weapons work now that we’ve lived with the design for a while and I’m excited about that. And I think this week we start testing a Big Adventure to see how our resource economy works.

Lots to talk about!

Thanks To You

Lastly, I want to thank everyone reading this for your support. This patreon (plus sales of our products) is funding the development of this game right now, which is an enormous privilege. What it means, practically, is that we don’t have to go to Crowdfunding right this second. And that means, once we do go to crowdfunding, A: the sample adventure and pregens will be a LOT more polished and close to final design. B: the time between going to crowdfunding and finishing the actual game is shorter. Because some of that development time is happening now!

That’s only possible thanks to you, so I really hope you’re enjoying reading this stuff! It’s SUPER cool for us to see folks in our discord talking about the design and how it's evolving. It’s very rewarding to see more and more people thinking like game designers and discovering the nuts and bolts (mostly nuts) of actually figuring all this out.

So, thanks again folks! More cool stuff soon!

Peace, out!