Tuesday, August 13, 2019

My beef with magic in fantasy tabletop games

The magic system in D&D and its derivatives has problems. What follows are some of my rationales for why I don't like D&D magic systems. The articulation may be questionable, but I hope my readers find it understandable.

The magic system is ridiculously overpowered

Most of the time, magic-users in mythology, fairy tales and pulp fiction were plot devices. They were generally either enemies of the protagonist who ultimately got defeated or allies who provided miscellaneous magical assistance. When they were protagonists, such as Väinämöinen, their magical power did not allow them to instantly resolve any conflicts they encountered. They had to work to get where they did, because otherwise their stories would be really boring.

In the last century, wizards started featuring far more often in protagonist roles. With that came the need for authors to devise magic systems to explain why the wizard doesn't magically solve all their problems. So magic received explanations or, more accurately, limitations. Hence, Sanderson's Laws of Magic.

For example: In The Last Unicorn, Schmendrick the Magician has phenomenal reality warping power but cannot really control it. His magical mishaps set several subplots in motion.

Not so for D&D magic-users. Although their magic is limited to fixed spells rather than free-form effects, there is a spell for pretty much every situation. Mind control, invisibility, teleportation, breaking curses, etc. If you can think of it, then there's almost certainly a spell for it. Now that might not seem so bad if magic-users were forced to specialize within limited spheres of influence... but they aren't. A standard D&D wizard can potentially replicate the exploits of every magic-user in the history of human storytelling and more, even if any single one of those fictional magic-users couldn't approach even a fraction of the D&D wizard's power. The overwhelming majority of adventures are not constructed with magic in mind, either, so it is very easy for the wizard PC to break the adventure without even trying.

To add insult to injury, martial classes are pretty much limited to hitting stuff with swords. They're pretty much dead weight, while the wizard can solve every problem single-handedly. Martial classes are reliant on caster classes to adventure period. You need clerics to heal your wounds, bards to buff you, and wizards to blow up anything you can't handle. Being a muggle means you suck and the casters only keep you around because of tradition.

Possible solutions would be to restrict caster classes to limited spheres of influence and to give martial classes weeaboo fightan magic. There are a few high profile 3pp that do that, like Spheres of Power and Path of War.

The magic does not integrate with the world building

Much like the existence of superheroes in a realistic setting, the existence of magic should be a huge game changer for a medieval society as we know it. Healing magic alone would result in a population explosion. Every book on tactics, strategy, and logistics would have to be rewritten with magic in mind. Divination would completely change the nature of inquiry. Spells that create food and water would completely change economics. Et cetera.

The cookie cutter fantasy settings universally ignore this. Despite the existence of magic that should result in the complete restructuring of civilization itself, every cookie cutter setting remains stubbornly stuck in a faux medieval period. There could be dozens and dozens of max level wizards running around, but their ridiculous capabilities make absolutely no impact on the civilizations of the fantasy world.

Oddly enough, this doesn't affect fanfiction based on D&D. For whatever reason, the authors of amateur fiction put more though into their world building than whoever is in charge of writing official D&D books. In the fanfiction, either the magic itself is heavily restricted in some way to allow for a faux medieval setting... or the author depicts magic users as ridiculously overpowered munchkins who might as well be gods given what the rules let them do.

What world building does exist is inconsistent. Even when they do recognize the surface-level contributions of magic, most settings cannot agree on how prevalent magic is. Even an otherwise well constructed setting like Eberron often fails to account for the sheer scope of what D&D magic can accomplish. For example, the clone spell lets you build an army of casters but I have never seen it actually used outside of fanfiction.

The magic system never feels like magic

Although nowadays we believe magic to be fictitious, in ancient times people believed magic was very real. Magic was the creation of pre-industrial societies and it was heavily tied into religion and the precursor of science. Trying to perform magic was dangerous unless you were trained, and even normal untrained people could do magic in their daily life without even intending to. Wishing harm on someone else would cause them harm, and failing to appease the spirit of your hearth would cause it to curse you with misfortune. Magic was everywhere in the world, the paranormal was right next to you out of sight and strange things could happen at any moment. You could be possessed by a demon causing disease, or cursed with sickness for immortal behavior. Alchemists attempted to discover wonders like the universal solvent, panacea and the elixir of eternal life. Pre-modern societies invented the concept of a magic as a way to make sense of the often terrifying and unpredictable world around them.

Modern fantasy, even outside of gaming, forgets this and often depicts magic as something disconnected from the world as we know it. It's a glorified cheat code to the universe, basically. The D&D books make a big deal about how magic is alive and mysterious and so forth, but the mechanics contradict this. Not only that, but D&D relies on a weird pseudo-Vancian system that appears nowhere else in fantasy fiction except that fiction based on D&D.

The long and the short of it is that magic, at least as depicted in tabletop games, is tacked on. It isn't integrated with the world building, the religion, the philosophy, the science and so forth. It is a simple game convention with no critical thought put into it.

John H. Kim described five such pervasive assumptions made by many tabletop magic systems in his article "Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems." D.J. Butler wrote an article complaining that "Magic Systems Aren’t Magic." Victoria Hooper deconstructs the modern distinction between science and magic in her article "The Battle of Science and Magic."

Weirdly, one of the few areas of the fantasy genre that doesn't seem to suffer this problem in spades is in Eastern fantasy that features the concept of qi. A full explanation of qi is beyond the scope of this post, but suffice to say it serves as the theory behind certain Eastern magic systems. Everything contains qi. By studying and manipulating qi, a martial artist, alchemist, or devil can achieve impossible feats.

Putting it together

Kim suggested multiple alternatives to the assumptions. One of these was that the same mechanics would be used for healing, rather than artificially segregating it between mundane and magical healing. However, clever authors have actually highlighted this distinction to write interesting stories.

A conceit of the stories Chronicles of Everfall and Isekai Surgeon is that the availability of healing magic resulted in mundane medicine never developing. In the former, being without a healer means that you are screwed. In the latter, a surgeon from Earth is transported to a fantasy world dependent on healing magic and learns that mundane surgery can fix medical problems that healing magic cannot.

Research links

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