Quote from: Calithena on December 31, 2024, 12:14:59 AMAlong with 50 years of D&D we have 49 years and 11 months of this complaint. I like the retro criticism though.

Maybe you can do a video on how you can make combat more realistic with parry and dodge rules next.

Lion & Dragon and Baptism of Fire both have parry rules.

Quote from: Calithena on December 31, 2024, 12:18:49 AM

QuoteWell, I heard from a pretty credible source that originally Gary Gygax didn't want to let players play magic-users in D&D.

You mean like his own character, Mordenkainen? Or his son's character, Tenser?

He eventually got over it.

Chaosium released a supplement with rules for sorcery and alchemy inspired by occultism, Enlightened Magic.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 31, 2024, 10:51:49 AMChaosium released a supplement with rules for sorcery and alchemy inspired by occultism, Enlightened Magic.

I've never read it, but I'm willing to bet that Invisible College is better. And in fact, it's better than anything Chaosium has done since at least 2014.

Quote from: RPGPundit on December 31, 2024, 04:49:32 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on December 31, 2024, 10:51:49 AMChaosium released a supplement with rules for sorcery and alchemy inspired by occultism, Enlightened Magic.

I've never read it, but I'm willing to bet that Invisible College is better. And in fact, it's better than anything Chaosium has done since at least 2014.

I think you should read it before making any conclusions.

The basic conceit is simple. There are two magic systems in the book, sorcery and alchemy. Both have three ascending circles and all spells have an elemental association.

The first circle of sorcery is casual and allow the sorcerer to perform simple spells that affect 1 target and last no more than one round or 10 minutes depending on balance. This circle is mostly useful for sensory spells. The second circle of sorcery is ritual and allows the sorcerer to target people outside visual range using magical connections. The effects here are more powerful, including remote scrying. The third circle is even more powerful, allowing you to manipulate politics, control the weather, or cause heart attacks. Sorcery is subtle and doesn't allow you to transmute matter.

Alchemy has three circles, but these determine the type of target rather than the power level. The first circle involves creating materials in a lab that can be applied to a target to create the desired effect, or to alter the target in the lab for a more powerful effect. Effects are purely limited to physical phenomena, including transmuting led into gold or transforming someone into a duplicate of someone else. The second circle involves creating a work of art that produces a desired mental effect in witnesses, such as sharing a dream or making them more or less agreeable. The third circle involves the alchemist meditating and then casting the effect by touching or gazing at the target to affect their soul. This circle allows the alchemist to see the bonds between people, cause or cure insanity, or give souls to inanimate objects.

I found it pretty flavorful myself. It's not quite authentic to real occultism, but I liked it.

Quote from: ForgottenF on December 30, 2024, 10:07:36 PMInteresting suggestion. Why would you pick that one?

  Well, again, this was assuming you wanted to stay in the d20/modern D&D framework, and FantasyCraft is one of the only versions I'm aware of that doesn't assume magic as a fundamental part of PC abilities.

  You could go rules-light/OD&D, as you suggest, but once you hit the AD&D level of the game, I think PC spellcasting is too baked into most versions unless you're willing to do a lot of additional work.

Quote from: ForgottenF on December 30, 2024, 03:57:27 PMI've been toying with the idea lately that in order to keep magic in a fantasy game (for lack of a better word) "magical", you simply cannot let PCs have access to it. As soon as you put magic in the hands of PCs, you have to make it obey consistent game rules, and that necessarily disenchants the game world. Maybe the most you can do is let the players get hold of magical artifacts they don't even really understand the use of, but giving them the spell rules I think always cheapens the magic to a degree. On top of that, I don't think you can ever really have a "low magic" game world if your players can easily access magic, and if you can make a magician at character creation, that's easy access as far as I'm concerned.

I've been considering trying to put this into a practice and run a fantasy campaign where PCs simply cannot be spellcasters, but I strongly suspect the expectation of being able to play a wizard is so entrenched in fantasy gaming that I would not be able to get players for it.

You can have magic using player characters and still keep magic mysterious. Professor DM made a great video featuring how magic works in his campaign.

1) All magic users must have a mentor. Spells are learned only from this mentor.

2) Players do not get to see the spell lists. Magic users understand only magics that they have been taught. They do not know exactly what other powers there may be until their mentor instructs them.

3) The DM gets to decide which magics are introduced to the game and when. Any problematic spells can be altered or removed from the game.

4) Mystery is maintained by the players not knowing what powers exist or exactly how they work. If the players cannot simply look up spells in a rulebook then they will be eager to find out what magics exist as they advance and learn more from their mentor.

5) The DM is encouraged to alter standard spells and add in non-standard ones. The rules on how everything works should be kept in the DM's notebook, not in a document the players can peruse.

6) When a magic user is taught a new spell by their mentor don't just give the player the stat block. Give them the basics of how the spell works and how to activate it. Let the player discover other aspects through trial & error. Max range, # of targets, saving throw, and other limitations can be discovered in play.

7) Without access to the entire spell list, strange magical effects abound! NPC casters hurl magic power that is actually mysterious.Players can't be sure if the spell that was cast is a standard spell or something strange cooked up by that particular wizard.

I like these ideas and may implement them in my next fantasy campaign.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on December 31, 2024, 06:48:05 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on December 30, 2024, 03:57:27 PMI've been considering trying to put this into a practice and run a fantasy campaign where PCs simply cannot be spellcasters, but I strongly suspect the expectation of being able to play a wizard is so entrenched in fantasy gaming that I would not be able to get players for it.

I think there are limits to how much you can "get away with" for most players, and that does necessarily take out some of the mystery of magic.  Plus, it's just a plain hassle for the GM in many cases, whereas I'm always looking for ways to put things back on the players--where it doesn't hurt too much.

That said, there's no reason to take things to the infinite conclusion, either.  Oh well, magic isn't perfectly mysterious, so we'll make it utterly bland--so "scientific" that's it is more rigid and symmetrical than real world science.  I think there's a happy excluded middle to play in.

Having totally non-D&D-esque magic is not an unplayable extreme or an infinite conclusion, though. The implied spectrum here is where one extreme is by-the-book D&D magic and the other extreme is totally non-D&D magic.

I don't think there is such a linear spectrum. D&D-esque magic is only one tiny corner in the broad map of all the possible magic systems. There's nothing wrong with having systems close to D&D, but there are also lots of different possible and playable games that have magic completely unrelated to D&D.

Examples include Lion & Dragon, Stormbringer, Ars Magica, and Amber Diceless are all far apart from each other while also being quite different from D&D.

The 4th edition _Fantasy HERO_ sourcebook had a great section of developing campaign-specific magic systems, which is useful even if you aren't using the HERO system in play. It's about characterizing what magic is like, and how things work. For example, I played in a T'ang dynasty China game that had weird Taoist and Buddhist magic - and also an urban fantasy game with more fae/spirit magic.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on January 01, 2025, 12:55:10 PM2) Players do not get to see the spell lists. Magic users understand only magics that they have been taught. They do not know exactly what other powers there may be until their mentor instructs them.

3) The DM gets to decide which magics are introduced to the game and when. Any problematic spells can be altered or removed from the game.

On 2: Players should have an in-game "common knowledge" of the general uses/effects of magic in the game world. Especially if they have a mentor.

But a general idea/common knowledge is very different from being able to read the spell list. Still LOTS of room for how things actually work in play.

On 3: This should be handled by a random chart. If the PC occasionally wants something specific, there should be another chart that you roll to see if the Mentor knows it.

I have become very pro random table about stuff like this lately, as it gives the GM a useful degree of separation from determining himself what happens to the PC.

A lot of what Professor DM says are very good ideas, but they must be filtered through the fact that he essentially homebrews everything he plays.

I dont know if you know that but there is other novel that have magic more like D&D. but that novel were launched after D&D. like harry potter or brandon sanderson novels.

Quote from: antonioGUAK on January 05, 2025, 03:16:49 AMI dont know if you know that but there is other novel that have magic more like D&D. but that novel were launched after D&D. like harry potter or brandon sanderson novels.

I haven't read Sanderson, but the magic in Harry Potter doesn't have anything like slots that are memorized once per day and forgotten after being cast.

A lot of fiction both before and after D&D has practitioners cast spells with similar effects -- like fireball, lightning bolt, etc. But the structure of casting and magic is different.