Magic system (MTG)

[matt439miller]

I'm for stealing the mtg five colors, simply because I think it's the best. The middie polygon was cool, (3 axis) but probably too complex, and the opposed 8 schools of dnd was simply too many. Alignment (two axis) has been done and is boring. So the sweet spot seems to me five "factors" for magic. Gives you ten axis to use to classify spells into schools. Using five also enables elemental mapping (Greek or chinese). Death, life, order, chaos, nature, intellect, etc. Makes it possible to create distinct.. not classes, but topologies of magic users. Including universalists, who master all five magics, focused practicioners who use one, fundamentalists that use all but one, etc, and a whole slew of folks using two adjacent and making that opposed to both forbidden. And of course, profane synthesizers who pull from the opposed or enemy colors--think blue-red or green-black.

[jakesower]

MTG certainly has a good system. I think about it often as well. What would you call the ideals other than colors?

• White = order, spirit, life
• Blue = control, balance
• Black = death, corruption
• Red = chaos, raw energy
• Green = nature, life

Right now I have most spells with Magic A/Magic B checks. So a Death Magic/Order Magic spell would let the caster roll a number of d6s equal to their Death Magic skill, and likewise d10s for Order Magic. I felt like this vibed well with the ideal system, but there's no reason the MTG system would be any worse for it.

One thing I liked about the ideal system is that it nudged you to choose one half of each ideal. Going both "life" and "death" didn't help you so much because there were no spells that used both. Rather, if you chose "life" it could combine with any ideal other than "death." The MTG system can favor sibling colors (for White: Blue and Green) over distant colors (for White: Red and Black), but I don't like that as much. So much of MTG was mono color. Having spells be a single skill is a path to min-maxing.

[matt439miller]

Hmm. Mtg based on a book, the 'master of the five Magics" where the land thing comes from. We say black mana, but originally, it's 'swamp magic'.

[matt439miller]

If, to avoid min maxing, spells need to be dual skill, that's a very important design consideration. Have to think on that one.

[matt439miller]

Mtg alt is declare an 'enemy color', and that color is dead to you. So all spells using that color are off limits. Assumes all spells would be dual color.

Middie axis equiv being you can only take one half of the binary.

[matt439miller]

On reflection, best way to do this seems to be five ideals arranged in a star,and each pair combinations forms a school, for ten schools. One set made up of allied colors, one set of enemy colors. Assume we keep the rule that you can't cast unless you have at least one rank in both ideals in a school. So investing in two ideals gets you one school, three ranks gets you three, four gets you six, costs five ranks to get minimal access to all ten schools.

[jakesower]

In this setup, there's no such thing as allied and opposed colors. It's a big circle with 10 lines drawn through them. I'd like to hear what the actual colors/ideals/effects/whatever there are. I think MTG terminology works for now, but it'd have to be converted at some point.

Possible schools:

White/Blue: Warding, some enhancements like with time, counterspells White/Black: Necromancy White/Red: Short term boosts, illusions White/Green: Healing Blue/Black: Mind control Blue/Red: Consistent attack spells (order), fate, scrying Blue/Green: Summoning, wild taming Black/Red: Chaotic attack spells Black/Green: Debuffs, banishments Red/Green: Buffs

I'm reading through the WoD spells, which uses a vastly different system than this. I'd like to see the inevitable bits of WoD that don't fit this rubric.

[matt439miller]

Terminology can come almost last. That's user testing as much as anything. Mtg works for now.

[matt439miller]

Did you ever read the Recluse books? Good take on the nature of order vs chaos, and their fundamental inseparability. Lot of the binaries work that way-- ant have light with out dark, and increasing light increases dark, etc.

[matt439miller]

Thing I like about mtg is that each color has multiple aspects. So you can think up a spell and then code it by colors. Lightning could either go blue green (nature water) or blue red (water fire). Healing can go white (restoration) green (growth) or black (drain). Red white is chaos order so restoring 4 HP is a white spell, while restoring 1d8 HP a read spell. 'Soulburn' is red black dealing fire plus necrotic at d8, while 'siphon soul' is white black for 5 points. Illusion to me is probably blue white, or blue black depending on the spell. Maybe blue red, for phantasmagoria, while the blue black illusion is a delusion, mind affecting. A fey maze spell would be blue green. So we really do have a schools where the color combo is mostly about flavor. Point is to have two attributes per spell and to gate access, trading off between wide and deep. Key is to not permit mechanically similar spells in two schools.

[jakesower]

Never read the recluse books.

Mage did a lot of duplication of spell effects over their arcana (schools). Like they all have some kind of armor spell or another. I don't mind that so much. The Mage spells were identical, but I think we can do better than that. 4 HP healing vs 1d8 healing as you said.

Illusion always struck me as red based (despite it being blue in MTG). I feel like there are some effects that don't fit well into a two color MTG scheme. Maybe I'll bring some spells across from Mage and we can try to classify them.

[matt439miller]

There are a limited number of mechanical effects, so assigning mechanics to a color unilaterally agenerally a bad idea. Even in MTG, you will sometimes see blue direct damage--it's just rare and costly. So perhaps all the schools/ideals get direct damage, but it's a lower level/tier/circle for some.

[matt439miller]

I mention the Recluse books because the whole magic system is based on order/chaos. Order magic having to do with the making things stronger, more reliable, etc. while chaos is a 'price of entropy' as exposure to chaos magic causes quasi-cancer. Penric's demon, about a man who becomes a 'sorcerer' by becoming possessed by a semi-friendly chaos demon. And all the many uses to which chaos can be put, from destroying tumors, to destroying ships. Of course, chaos = destruction, but chaos also equals entropy, so it can be used to do fun things like supercharge the metabolism to enable haste effects.

[matt439miller]

So, maybe the colors are energy: Red is thermal, blue is tidal/wind (gravitational), white is solar/radiant, green is chemical, and black is... mechanical? Where there is a lot of X going on, the area is thus rich in the relevant energy type. (Alt for black is fusion--the very death of molocules... but not a whole lot of that going on. Could just gloss black as 'decay', which overlaps with green a bit. So maybe black is the 'static' chemical energy, embodied energy like oil (which we release by burning, so nah). Decay the natural one, the collapse of matter into energy. While green is growth - energy used to make matter. So green/red united by chaos, and maybe black/white an order pair - fusion and fission, in a sense.