{"id":416,"date":"2015-03-30T19:24:11","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T19:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/flash-bang-magic-part-1\/"},"modified":"2023-02-26T00:01:19","modified_gmt":"2023-02-26T00:01:19","slug":"flash-bang-magic-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/flash-bang-magic-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Flash! Bang! Magic! Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before I get into this week\u2019s blog, I forgot to mention last week that I recently the newest installment of my series of role-playing articles on HubPages<\/a>, \u201cSeven Rules Every RPG Player Should Know<\/a>.” Also, just yesterday Hex released our first novel, Carter Newton\u2019s Suicide\u2019s Run: A Tale of the Hobomancers<\/a>. Carter does a great job of bringing the world of Hobomancer<\/a> to life, so it\u2019s a must-have if you\u2019re a fan of \u00a0the game. We\u2019ll be posting a 3-part interview with Carter here on the Death Cookie starting Wednesday. Next week, we\u2019ll have an interview with Jeffrey Johnson, who illustrated the novel.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, a poster on the not-quite-abandoned QAGS subreddit<\/a> asked for tips about using flash-bang style magic in a QAGS<\/a> game. As he correctly pointed out, the system from Magic Rules!<\/a> (and the variations on the theme that have appeared in Zoe the Zombie Hunter<\/a> and a few other supplements) are really written for ritual magic and aren\u2019t a great fit for the \u201cwizard chucking fireballs\u201d variety of spellcasting. That\u2019s by design. As I am contractually obligated to point out, the \u201cflash-bang\u201d style of magic found in most games has no precedent in real-world magical tradition (at least as a force that can be harnessed by regular humans), and even the magic in early fantasy fiction was usually much more subtle than the kind of magic you see in a typical RPG. The Magic Rules! system was designed to encourage magic that mostly manifests in subtle ways that aren\u2019t necessarily verifiable as the result of magic. Overt magical manifestations are difficult to accomplish, unpredictable, weird, and a little terrifying.<\/p>\n

\"Stardust\"<\/p>\n

Sometime in the 20th Century, fictional magic started getting more overt and predictable, and wizards began to act more like scientific experts or master craftsmen than crazed weirdos who harnessed (and made deals with) powers beyond human comprehension. I don\u2019t know the exact timeline, but I suspect that Jack Vance and comic books were key influencers early on, and the popularity of D&D did the rest. By the time we reached the era of fantasy video games and D&D-derivative fiction, flash-bang was the default style of magic. Today, even stories that aren\u2019t directly descended from the 20th Century fantasy mainstream of Tolkien, pulp, comics, D&D derivatives, and video games tend to use flash-bang magic. Take the Harry Potter series, for example: Rowling\u2019s main influences seem to be fairy tales, mythology, and earlier young adult fiction, but take away the wands and pseudo-Latin and Harry and the gang would fit in as well at Xavier School as Hogwart\u2019s.<\/p>\n

So, since magic-as-superpower is a thing now, how do we handle it in QAGS? That\u2019s simple: Just like any other Job. If restrictions on magic aren\u2019t dictated by the genre, setting, tone, or style of the story you\u2019re telling (which we\u2019ll discuss more later), there\u2019s no reason to treat wizardry differently than any other profession, at least mechanically. Warriors slice people up and bash their heads in, thieves lurk about and steal things, and wizards cast spells. If a wizard wants to cast a spell, he makes a Job roll, just like a con artist would make a Job roll to sell somebody a bridge. Usually, there are mechanics for doing something similar to the spell\u2019s effect without magic that can be used if you need rules: mind control is really insistent persuasion, invisibility is ninja-level stealth, and a magic missile is just a bullet with better special effects.<\/p>\n

For the most part, the idea that magic needs its own specialized rules to keep wizards from becoming \u201ctoo powerful\u201d is a gamer superstition wrapped up in the myth of game balance. Once you accept that game balance isn\u2019t real, the necessity of specialized magic rules mostly falls away. We don\u2019t worry that giving a gunslinger too much ammo will make a character too powerful or make a hacker list which programming languages he knows, so why worry about how many Magic Missiles a wizard can cast and make him keep a spell list?<\/p>\n

There is still one pitfall of treating magic just like any other ability: its versatility. For most Jobs, there\u2019s a certain baseline understanding of what a character can do based on fictional and real-life examples, usually across a wide variety of genres and settings. A warrior\u2019s job is to kill things regardless of the genre, so the only restrictions necessary are genre and style conventions that we trust the player to follow and, if necessary, the GM to enforce. The Bride can decapitate a whole circle of ninjas with one sword swing, but John McClane needs a grenade or machine gun to kill a bunch of people with a single attack. Since magic differs considerably from story to story, there\u2019s a lot less consensus about what it means to be a wizard, so the \u201cwizard\u201d Job can come dangerously close to \u201cJack of All Trades.\u201d We know a cop fights crime and thief separates people from their valuables, but there\u2019s no common theme for a vanilla wizard\u2019s abilities. He might talk to a ghost one minute, shapeshift into a giant eagle the next, and set a bunch of people on fire a little later.<\/p>\n

While characters don\u2019t have to be \u201cbalanced\u201d in terms of power, a story about group of characters does require each character to play a role that differentiates him from the other characters and justifies his inclusion as a protagonist. Audiences tend to notice redundant characters (*cough* Merry & Pippin *cough*) and it can take them out of the story. In RPGs, making sure each character has a clear role also helps keep \u00a0players from stepping on one another\u2019s toes. A character without a niche makes the other characters seem redundant or comes across as either a universal understudy or a portable deus ex machina. \u00a0While abilities aren\u2019t the only things that define a character\u2019s role, they\u2019re often the starting point, so sometimes it is necessary to limit an extremely versatile character type to make that character fit the story and the group.<\/p>\n

If the players all have similar sensibilities about what constitutes good fantasy, or if you\u2019re playing a game where magic is closely modeled on an existing ficton, you can rely on the same kind of mutual agreement that keeps John McClane from going all Wushu. For example, if you\u2019re playing a Buffy game, it will usually be obvious to everyone involved whether a particular spell is par for the course or veiny yellow crayon territory, as well as whether a spell can be cast with common household items or requires searching for ancient urns on ebay. If the players can\u2019t trust one another to act in good faith (and talk through any disagreements like adults), your group has problems that all the rules in all the games won\u2019t solve.<\/p>\n

So what if you\u2019re playing a game where the parameters of magic are too nebulous and the players\u2019 preferences are too varied to rely entirely on mutual understanding and good faith? Fortunately, fantasy authors realized early on that having a character with the power to alter reality made it difficult to build conflicts that couldn\u2019t be solved with some Latin and bat guano. To keep their stories from falling apart, these authors built limitations on magic into their fictons. Some of these limitations were based on fundamental laws of the universe, some were based on the way humans interacted with or learned magic, and some were based on societal, cultural, religious, or professional rules, taboos, and traditions. While these limitations varied considerably from story to story, there were some common themes, and most of them can be easily adapted to a game setting. \u00a0Since the discussion of how to do that gets pretty involved, I\u2019m going to save that for next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before I get into this week\u2019s blog, I forgot to mention last week that I recently the newest installment of my series of role-playing articles on HubPages, \u201cSeven Rules Every RPG Player Should Know.” Also, just yesterday Hex released our first novel, Carter Newton\u2019s Suicide\u2019s Run: A Tale of the Hobomancers. Carter does a great…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2062],"tags":[1565,2308,2307,2306,2268,2153,2149,2083,1705,1678,1677,43,1331,1118,1104,1103,872,220,211,121,69],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-gaming-articles","tag-jeffrey-johnson","tag-wushu","tag-zoe-the-zombie-hunter","tag-flash-bang-magic","tag-jack-vance","tag-fuqit-games","tag-tolkien","tag-mages","tag-hubpages","tag-suicides-run","tag-carter-newton","tag-qags","tag-magic-rules","tag-dd","tag-wizards","tag-spells","tag-hobomancer","tag-x-men","tag-harry-potter","tag-john-mcclane","tag-magic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3095,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions\/3095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}