Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Antimagic in a setting made of magic

My campaign setting and associated cosmology, which I have not yet given a name to, operates on the conceit that magic and nature are one and the same. More specifically, nature is a subset of magic as I outlined in a previous post on the "winds of magic." This means that antimagic effects and spells like detect magic cannot work the same way, since there are no magical effects separate from non-magical effects.

I originally wrote this post without re-reading the chromatic magic system, so I am presenting the new chromatic update first.

Handwaving the issue with chromatic magic

Colours of Magic: Blue 5e places spells like detect magic, magic weapon, dispel magic, antimagic field, etc the purview of the blue color. Basically, "magic" and "antimagic" are manifestations of blue magic rather than magic as a whole. This does not solve the ontological issue so much as waive it away.

The description of antimagic field claims the area of effect is "divorced from the magical energy that suffuses the multiverse." This is the paradigm under which magic operates in typical fantasy settings: an "energy" separate from nature. Under the chromatic magic system I use, this description is just plain wrong.

Blue magic covers symbology, which is basically metamagic or, IDK, metaphysics for a magical universe? A blue magician is able to selectively interdict the fundamental forces of the universe, preventing certain effects without severing them completely (and thus melting because their protons flew apart). Without an arbitrarily magical energy separate from nature, these spells have been researched and developed over arbitrarily long periods of time to sense and affect certain parts of the universe but not others.

For example, detect magic only detects things defined as "magic" by the parameters of the spell itself. This just so happens to match the mistaken assumption that this "magic" so affected is separate from the natural world as described by modern science.

Another example: crafting weapons is an inherently magical process, rather than taking an ordinary sword and adding a special property of magic. Thus, what happens when a magic sword is subject to antimagic field? The field is cannot suppress the magic of the sword, so it must degrade the quality of the sword.

Nowhere is this quality of blue magic most obvious than in counterspell. I took the advice from Sly Flourish and made counterspell awesome. Basically, a counterspell has awesome SFX which resemble an opposing effect to the spell countered, such as water dousing a fireball or red beams melting a lightning bolt. This raises a question: how is counterspell able to seemingly replicate the effects of other spells, but only for the purpose of countering another spell? Blue magic does that because it argues semantics to let it cheat this restriction under that circumstance.

The semantic argument put forward there fits perfectly with my use of blue magic to handwave the issue of antimagic in an innately magical universe.

The more complicated way around

The simplest solution for the continued usage of blanket spells like dispel magic and antimagic field is to disallow them. Players will be forced to rely on, or research into existence, other abjuration spells with more specific targets. I suppose it should be possible to sever specific winds of magic, but this would have detrimental effects because the winds are integral to reality. For example, severing the yellow wind of life would cause living things to rapidly wither and die.

Monster traits like resistance to nonmagical attacks, magic resistance and magic weapons are more difficult to adjudicate. A compromise could be that such traits must specify the power source of the "magic" they specify. For example, in the TV series From Dusk Till Dawn Xibalban demons are resistant or immune to mortal weapons but Xibalban weapons affect them just fine. The game rules already include precedents such as the lycanthropes resistance to non-silvered weapons. However, this would require making numerous changes to the rules and ultimately be more difficult than fun. So I have to think of another alternative...

My winds of magic cosmology includes a distinction between the mundane and divine existences. The non/magical weapon distinction could be re-fluffed into a mundane/divine weapon distinction fairly easily without having to make changes to the rules, and is close enough to the standard fantasy fluff for players to easily wrap their heads around.

A number of monsters have "magic resistance," or advantage on saving throws against spells and magical effects. The easiest solution would be to re-fluff the definition of "spells and magical effects." As it stands magic resistance only really matters against spell casters and then only against spells which allow saving throws. This is extremely situational: only around 40% of spells in the PHB allow saving throws, and over half of those that do are conjuration, enchantment or evocation spells. But magic resistance applies to any and all saving throws, such a Dexterity save to dodge a fireball, so re-fluffing it would require some extensive mental gymnastics... if martial characters had any class features which allowed saving throws, which they typically do not. It is easy enough to re-fluff magic resistance as an all-purpose resistance to reality warping, which is what flashy D&D-style magic basically is anyway.

If at some point there was a Path of War equivalent for 5e and the new martial classes had special powers which allowed saving throws that did not count as magic, I could re-fluff magic resistance as a resistance to specific power sources. Power sources in this case being caster classes, martial classes, etc.

The rakshasa's spell immunity is a whole other can of worms.

Miscellaneous research links

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