Non-artificial ways of limiting access to magic...

[NickMiddleton]

OK, spun out of recent discussion in the Q&A thread (and as a counter to the ludicrous inference that ALL such rules are solely artificial game restrictions to balance warriors against mages) - what settings have people used / considered that coincidently restrict the frequency of mages / magic use in play?

I always liked the Stormbringer 1st edition INT+POW > 32 idea: that to be a Sorcerer you just fundementally had to be exceptionally intelligent and strong willed / magically attuned (an dthat to progress to higher power levels you had to become inhumanly Intelligent and Powerful).

Another idea I'd really like to try in a BRP game comes from the D&D setting the Scarred Lands - arcane magic taps the raw stuff of magic and thus casting spells releases a LOT of heat and even having spells memorised raises ones body temperature. So casters in the setting never wear armour or even heavy clothing (providing a neat explanantion for all tha tFrazetta art work...), even in cold climates and there are rules for penalising characters who do with fatigue from over-heating.

I've toyed with converting the D&D Dark Sun setting to RQIII for a while. Sorcery in that setting is powered by bio-magical energy gathered from the living entities surrounding the caster (primarily plants but really powerful, sophisticated sorcerers can draw energy from living creatures). Drawing energy too quickly kills the organic life and sterilises the area (hence the sobriquet "Defiler" for Sorcerer's who cast so brutally). Since "Defilers" are hated (and feared) in the setting, using Sorcery (even as a "Preserver", who casts carefully, such that they draw energy slowly enough that the surrounding life is NOT destroyed) is a risky proposition, and achieving high power effects highly dependent on the surrounding flora...

My Ulfland RQIII campaign used the RQIII rules pretty much straight, but also emphasised the importance of literacy in learning Sorcery, and it's scarcity in the setting - with very few people able to read, and reading being an essential underpinning of the Sorcerer's art there were just very few Sorcerers.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

[soltakss]

I always liked the Discworld (books not RPG as I've not seen the RPG) approach that you can either do it or you can't. That and the idea of chain-smoking, mysoginistic, 100 a day wizards who live for the next meal and don't have to pay in shops ("Pointy Hat Sir? That'll do nicely.")

You could make magic use dangerous, culturally taboo, illegal, difficult to learn, restricted to certain families, available only to those who are talented or whetever you want, but what happens when a player says "I really want to play a Sorcerer/Priest/Wizard/Magic User/Whatever"? Do you say "No, they are very rare in this setting" or do you set out a certain number of goals that the PC must do to use magic?

After all, PCs are very rare. They are adventurers and are the rarest kind of adventurers as they are, by and large, successful ones and don't end up eaten or naked in a ditch. So, Magic Users are rare, PCs are rare, therefore PCs are ......

Whaddya mean it doesn't work that way?

Look at modern day fantasy fiction. Magic use may be rare in the books, but one of the Heroes is invariably a magic user. That's what people like to play.

No matter how often people try to move away from stereotypes, people still want to play the same kind of characters. In our game, one player really loves playing shamans, another loves playing trader/scouts, another loves playing fighters and I love playing berserkers.

Magic Users are one of the broad stereotypes that people like to play, so I don't see why you'd want to restrict them.

Unless, of course, it is a question of restricting magic in general. But, even then you have the problem that as long as there is some magic in the world, some people are going to be able to use it and PCs are going to want to be in that group of people. Knowing PCs the way I do, if a PC wants something then a PC is going to get it despite what the GM wants.

So, perhaps banning it completely is the trick, but that restricts the fantasy element quite a lot.

Just Say Yes to Magic Use and have spells being bandied about left, right and centre. It's far more fun that way.

[Trifletraxor]

I think a good reason to balance magic users against other characters, is that those who are not interested in playing magic types are put totally in the shadow. Play aint that fun if one character is extremely more powerfull than the rest of the group. In BRP though, not wearing armor is pretty lethal, at least if you don't have some roundt the clock magic defense spell up.

SGL.

[NickMiddleton]

Originally Posted by soltakss

...They are adventurers and are the rarest kind of adventurers as they are, by and large, successful ones and don't end up eaten or naked in a ditch...

We obviously play very different styles of BRP...



Nick Middleton

[NickMiddleton]

More seriously I agree with both of you: one needs lots of setting detail to explain why Mages haven't utterly dominated the setting (unless of course they have...), but those ar eseparate from addressing what its like in play.

Now I think you can make a wildly imbalanced party work quite easily - some of the most fun I've ever had in RPG's was playing mundane humans around mages in Ars Magica and many other games have some degree of discrepancy in PC power level. Magic free PCs are not a problem either: I've had no complaints from players in various Fafhrd & the Mouser-esque BRP games I've run where basically none of the PC's had any significant access to magic, but it existed in the setting (an dit's FAR easy to control th epower level in such circumstances of course).

What I most like with "magic" is that it feels part of the setting: the little wrinkles that evoke its particular world. And I dislike "ubiquitous" magic where it is ubiquitous to the point it ought to radically affect the culture (most D&D settings). frankly, any man can pick up a sword or bow - I like mages being a bred apart. Of course, I also like the whole "simple prayers to the Spirits" feel one can doing with RQIII style near universal access to Spirit Magic as well...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

[Enpeze]

Well if one sees magic like in a D&D setting as technical tool to achieve the groups goals then balancing may be necessary. But if at all, its only for D&D fans or such groups which play a D&Doid game just with a different rule set

I prefer the other way. First comes the theory behind magic, then how the people see magic and only finally (the least important part in magic creation) comes the spells or whatever the magic looks like in this particular setting. Thus I can avoid unlogical inconsistencies like "balancing" in my games.

I think stormbringer1st ed. is an excellent example how to present magic:

-the theory behind magic is that chaos enables it
-every anti-chaos force therefore should shun magic
-only an elite can use it - 32 POW+INT is really difficult to roll for humans
-if you are one out of 100 PCs who rolls this and who is pro-chaos then you can use it. The problem is that you have to practice it in secret in most YK nations or maybe hide it to other (lawful) PCs and in the end you will have lost your soul to the chaos gods.

the above example is if the GM wants to use the rules as they are written in SB1. These rules let sorcerers be very rare in SB and while more powerful than other players there are serious inherent trade offs and its not clear if a PC wants to that magic power at all, even if he fullfills the other requirements.

[Nightshade]

Well, with BRP most of my use of the system has been RQ varients, and of course in RQ, mages in general _aren't_ rare. When using an alternate system for magic (a skill based color magic system), the primary way was to have multiple skills, and the skills be quite difficult (I don't have the issue some people have with skills being of varied difficulty); it still tended to make some low-level dabbling common, though. If I wanted to take a different approach, I'd probably have magic be like weapons; have a certain level of Int minimum, and if you didn't meet it you'd have substantial penalties on using magic even compared to someone who had the same theoretical skill level as you; you had some of the same academic understanding, but simply couldn't think clearly and fast enough to deal with the practical variables as he could.

[Agentorange]

In terms of stopping magical arms races you could go down several other routes:

1] don't bother with magic points but assume that magic is reliant on the 'life force' of the caster, every time you use it it drains your strength, the more powerful the magic the more it affects you, so small magics drain Fatigue points/levels/whatever !, larger ones might knock off hit points or possibly even CON. Of course baddies will sacrifice other people ( whilst cackling evilly of course ). there's no point casting a mega powerful spell if you keel over dead the next minute.....

2] maybe the only magic that doesn't do this comes from the gods i.e divine magic, which of course has a whole load of restrictions built in, eg don't observe the right moral structure of your religion ?, haven't been down the temple recently ? well maybe your magic isn't going to work after all...

3] maybe magic is simply unreliable yeah it can be powerful, but as often as not it simply doesn't work,or goes wrong. You might spend mucho magic points for the whole spell to go 'whimper' rather than 'BANG' or possibly it goes BANG

and you're just a charred mass ( as is every thing in a 20ft radius ), so maybe it's just easier all round to learn how to use a sword.......

[RMS]

Originally Posted by Trifletraxor

I think a good reason to balance magic users against other characters, is that those who are not interested in playing magic types are put totally in the shadow. Play aint that fun if one character is extremely more powerfull than the rest of the group. In BRP though, not wearing armor is pretty lethal, at least if you don't have some roundt the clock magic defense spell up.

SGL.

In theory, I certainly understand this POV. However, SB1-3 is the most unbalanced RPG I'm familiar with and yet it provided more hours of fun than any game, other than RQ, that I can remember. So my experience is that balance between spell casters and noncasters isn't really that big of deal in practise.

[RMS]

Out of all of the ideas for limiting magic that I've seen, I like the attempts that Corum made for corruption from exposure. I like the idea of having bigger magic effects have greater and greater chances of permantly warping the character mentally or physically. I'd allow stats to modify that chance, so that there's a natural reason to want a really high INT/POW to mitigate the odds of something nasty happening to a spell caster, but still have that chance hanging there. If you want more magic in the setting, make it so that small spells have no chance of corruption and that it kicks in at some predetermined level.