Okay,

so we all know about how Wizards can ignite anything flammeable or light pinecones to turn into explosive fireballs to toss at Wargs, spells to 'shrivel you from tail to snout', enchantments to make beer (or maybe any foods) taste especially good, as well as stupendous spells like being able to fly (sans broom), summon demons and create fantastic items of immense power. But what about practical magic? Sure, at least in 1E AD&D there were Cantrips and Orisons that could clean clothes, dry wood for a fire and the like. But, alas, the latter are basically 'not applicable' to most situations. And sure, AD&D really is a fantastical combat simulation, but even practical 'flavor' magic has its place, I think.

Take the recent anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End where the Elf Frieren is noted for her love of discovering all sorts of 'Folk Magic'. Such spells, like one to make your clothes spotless, are considered contemptible and 'beneath what a Wizard should aspire to' (at least according to Mages like Serie, one of the other immortal Elves). Or spells that allow you to see past a person's clothing (played for laughs, but honestly, it would be useful incase you think someone's got a hidden dagger on them), a spell to remove mold (could it possibly even work on deadly molds?), a spell to remove oil stains (weird, but could possibly remove an area slicked with oil), etc. 

And I get it. Some of these are more 'low magic' geared, though one might wonder exactly how someone could call Lord of the Rings (for example) low magic when its clearly not. Yes, we only meet 3 Wizards, but the fact 'Hobbits never learned magic' and 'I once knew every spell [for opening] in all the tongues of Men or Elves or Orcs' would seem to imply there are way more than just the 5 Istari running around who know how to use magic. What use is a spell that can scratch the itchy parts of your back, turn a red apple into a green apple or make sweet grapes into sour grapes is...well...novel but not 'interesting'. Or really useful ones like a spell to ward away rain or one to stay warm no matter what the temperature (basically a spell that is a Ring of Warming).

Still, such folk magic might make for an interesting play experience.

I see this as a great way to use cantrips in game world with apprentice magicians or self taught low level village mystics doing little things with their magicks that normal people in all but the most high-magic-as-ubiquitous-technology settings would still find very useful and practical.  Dragon magazine #59 (available on an archive that you can find with a quick search) has a lengthy and informative article with tons of example practical cantrip spells for practical uses.  Obviously as you go up in level, the practical abilities of higher level spells increase exponentially beyond just an endless flame street lamp.

Five Point FUDGE did this very well with how it implemented hedge magic. Basically blurred the lines between innate, natural talents and magic; it was an enhancement to an existing skill. This is pretty much how I think Tolkien elves thought about "magic"; they just did things that seemed magical but it was part of their nature. Overt displays of power were from the dark lord. Anyway, worth looking at.

http://www.panix.com/~sos/rpg/fudfive8.html

The book you're looking for is Master of the Five Magics, by Lyndon Hardy.  In it, wizards have fundamentally transformed the medieval society by organizing into guilds and systematizing their magic.

GURPS Magic has quite a few handy spells like Hair Cut and Mend.  There's also the GURPS Magic the Least of Spells which is somewhat like the first edition AD&D cantrip list.  I had a player actively boycott a Harry Potter campaign because he didn't want to learn them in the first year.

The problem I have with long lists of cantrips like "Mend Hair" is that it can bog down the game to add in dozens more special-purpose spells.

In general, I think it's good if when designing spells, the designer thinks more broadly about the setting, and not just about "What are fun powers for an adventurer to have?" There are a handful of spells that could have massive social effect, like AD&D1's "Continual Light" -- while many others would have little to no social impact.

That sort of thing makes magic seem trite and commonplace instead of the rare mystical power that it could be in the world.  Of course that's just my two copper pieces and not some proclamation from on high. 

Quote from: jhkim on March 19, 2024, 08:26:39 PM
The problem I have with long lists of cantrips like "Mend Hair" is that it can bog down the game to add in dozens more special-purpose spells.

In general, I think it's good if when designing spells, the designer thinks more broadly about the setting, and not just about "What are fun powers for an adventurer to have?" There are a handful of spells that could have massive social effect, like AD&D1's "Continual Light" -- while many others would have little to no social impact.

Greetings!

Yeah, Jhkim, there are indeed some very important considerations there for the GM to marinate on.

I have always thought that with the presumption of magic, that the vast majority of people would be deeply interested in mundane, utilitarian spells and magic that actually has an impact on their everyday lives--rather than hyper-specialized magic that is tailored to the particular needs of a band of adventurers crawling into muddy, subterranean dungeons.

However, there is an inherent danger with embracing utilitarian magic too much. In a similar discussion with a friend of mine, he cautioned me, saying,

"But SHARK, yes, going by the rules, it makes sense that uber wealthy and powerful empires would exploit magic to the absolute extremes. However, regardless of how much sense that makes--if you embrace that, the entire culture, economy, warfare--that all irreparably is transformed to resemble something far more hyper-modern and even weird futuristic themes, than anything resembling a medieval world. Your much-loved Medieval and Ancient world flavour for such a setting would go right out the window relatively quickly."

I always remember that, and I often wrestle with it still. On one hand, uber-ubiquitous magic would be pursued and exploited. On the other hand, you do that too much, and you no longer have a Medieval game world. I try to embrace it to some degree, but restrain myself with embracing whatever expedient explanations and obstacles to keep such a dynamic reigned in and suppressed. I have found a somewhat happy medium in letting it run in limited areas of my Thandor world, while stonewalling it from spreading too widely to other areas of the world. Under the hood, yes, doing so is a kind of compromise, and not necessarily totally realistic, but in the interests of maintaining the integrity of an Ancient and Medieval-flavoured world--and avoiding being irrevocably thrown into a modernistic hellhole of magic and unimaginable weirdness, I have reconciled myself with enforcing such a dynamic, and it has been generally satisfying and, most importantly, maintaining the integrity of the Ancient and Medieval flavoured world.

As you may recall though, I have cheerfully wrestled with this problem for many, many years now. It is very alluring and seductive, to be sure, but I always encourage extreme caution with embracing it too much. Yeah, I remember writing extensively about this exact topic back on EN World in...2003 0r 2004. TWENTY YEARS AGO. The fun and fascination of this topic and the problems it presents never gets old! *Laughing*

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

A lot of this comes down to just what exactly magic is in a setting and how it works. This is probably the single most important question to answer about a fantasy game, and it's depressing how few RPGs seem to have put any thought into it.

Tolkien plays things extremely cagey when it comes to the nature of magic, but I think the best reading of Middle Earth is that since the world itself is fundamentally supernatural in nature, "magic" is really just an expression of superior knowledge or skill. That makes sense of quite a few things, including the fact that elves don't consider what they do magic, the unclear question of whether there are human magicians, dwarven craftsmen being able to make what in any other setting would be magic items, Aragorn's "hands of a healer", etc. It's very noticeable that Tolkien rarely uses the word "magic" (usually he prefers "craft", "skill", "power" etc.), and even more rarely talks about specific "spells". I love this approach, but I don't think I've ever seen it replicated in an RPG. The "magical successes" system in Free League's LOTR RPG is a valiant attempt, but doesn't hit the mark for me. You rarely even see this approach in other fiction, though some Shonen manga/anime (Dragonball comes to mind) come close.

Though there's a lot of middle ground, this contrasts well with the approach to magic exemplified in Jack Vance, where magic consists of a series of identifiable "spells" which are either mystical formulae or in more extreme cases, entities with their own semi-independent existence (as in "Dying Earth" and arguably Final Fantasy VII's materia). This category represents the majority of magic systems in fiction, and the vast majority of magic systems in games.

Lots of fantasy fiction is intentionally vague on this, and like I said there are lots of middle ground cases. Examples would include things like The Force and almost every fiction based on chi. The magic is a universal quality of the setting, but there are identifiable techniques which can be performed using it. The Discworld series uses both systems, with Wizard magic being of the spell-based kind, while Witchcraft is more about knowledge and technique.

The reason I suspect that the latter form of magic is much more common in games is that it is much easier to game-ify. Freeform magic systems have been tried, and are famously difficult to make work in actual play. Meanwhile, it's a lot easier to write up a list of set spells or powers, which always work the same way, and then assign them a limited number of uses per day or an MP cost. What gets annoying to me is when the magic system and the world don't match. The classic example is trying to apply the D&D rules to Middle Earth, but you also get cases like Faerun and Dark Sun, both of which have unique logic for how magic works in the setting, but still uses the Vancian magic system because it's a D&D setting and those are the D&D rules.

Coming back more nearly to the topic at hand, the reason most games don't bother with these kind of utility spells is probably because they don't have an appreciable game effect. JHKim's comment kind of hints at this, but to put it more plainly, players aren't going to bother with a spell to darn their socks if having holey socks doesn't effect the game. And if no player is going to use a spell, why waste development time on writing rules for it? An interesting counter-example is Ryutaama, which actually has several of these kind of mundane everyday-use spells. The one that sticks in my mind creates a magical umbrella. But that likely exists because getting rained on negatively affects your character's performance in that game.

Reflecting on my last comment, it is almost entirely off topic, so let me try and bring it back around to the point of setting consistency.


Under the Tokien-esque assumption (which is I think the more folkloric one), yeah, this kind of mundane magic might be everywhere, because it's just knowing a little more about how things work than your neighbors. If memory serves, Tolkien even refers to Hobbits' ability to hide from humans as "everyday magic".

Going, as most games do, off of pseudo-Vancian assumptions about magic, there I think the relevant question is how difficult is it to invent or learn new spells? The presumption is generally that this is a difficult/costly/dangerous endeavor. If you take the additional common assumption that wizards of any significant power are rare, and therefore tend to be wealthy and influential, it's easy to see why they wouldn't consider it worth the cost of inventing mundane-use spells when they could as easily have their servants do the same task. That runs up against the fact that in a lot of the same fantasy games, there are hedge wizards, hermits, or low level magicians all over the place, who might presumably be more motivated to come up with these kinds of things.

From what I've heard, the Mystara setting has a nation in it (the name escapes me now) wherein magic is so common that magical utilities (lights, plumbing, food preservation, etc.) are commonly sold to the population. If true, I'd say this exposes one of the unspoken assumptions underlying a lot of RPGs, namely that while PCs are restricted to the spells in the book, NPCs are free to come up with whatever spells or magical effects the GM or writer can think of. This is odd, but I think everyone just accepts it as part of the willing suspension of disbelief.

Your aside about a spell to see through clothes raises another one of those questions which I think we've all quietly agreed not to consider. Namely, how would magic be used sexually? If it existed and was readily available, it absolutely would be, but in ways most of us would rather not contemplate (or more likely, would rather not admit to contemplating). You don't have to get into Book of Erotic Fantasy-tier weirdness, here. Just the potential implications of Charm Person are sketchy enough.

EDIT: I guess all I've really done here is restate what SHARK said above. Start to explore this too thoroughly, and you transform the setting into something other than the recognizable semi-historical medieval fantasyland most RPGs are going for. There's merit in that, but you better be sure it's what you want

Quote from: Svenhelgrim on March 19, 2024, 09:05:43 PM
That sort of thing makes magic seem trite and commonplace instead of the rare mystical power that it could be in the world.  Of course that's just my two copper pieces and not some proclamation from on high.

This would be my take as well. At least for early D&D, I see magic users as pretty rare and even their spell magic was pretty sparse. There was no such thing as "at will" spell casting and a level 1 magic user, who probably had a decade of training, could cast 1 spell per day. Eberron dramatically changed the world setting and I think how the magic was represented in that world better reflected it being more common. I'm not really sure how Forgotten Realms really works with the magic bloat in we have in 5e.

Mythras does this, to some degree - you have sorcerers and shamans and priests and mystics running around, but anybody could know a few Folk Magic spells. And although some seem like stock adventuring magic (bladesharp, alarm, incognito), many are much more situationally useful to your typical PC (appraise, breath, cleanse, tune). There are various comfort & around-the-house utility spells, and in typical Mythras style these are going to be things that are passed down in families or guilds or clubs or temples (but not the inner mysteries of the priests' Miracles); nobody's likely to know a dozen, the area of effect tends to be personal, etc.

Oddly enough, I think the 'At Will' casting of Cantrips in 5E isn't a terrible mechanic. I would just change it to not how many are known overall, but how many can be 'actively retained' at any time. In fact, I think a hybrid of Vancian-style magic would work like that: You can know every spell ever created, assuming you were intelligent enough, but you can only keep so many of each level in your mind at any one time. The 'fire and forget' aspect never really made much sense to me when you are literally channeling energy through your body by opening a connection to either the Positive or Negative Energy Plane to do so. And, yes, while Gandalf is far from being an AD&D-style Wizard, I just prefer my Wizards to be more Gandalf-y and less Cugel the Clever-y.

Quote from: Insane Nerd Ramblings on March 20, 2024, 04:20:24 AMThe 'fire and forget' aspect never really made much sense to me when you are literally channeling energy through your body by opening a connection to either the Positive or Negative Energy Plane to do so.

I feel like most of early D&D was just a bunch of people literally stealing ideas from all over the place and shoving them into the player manuals. Some of the early monsters were ripped off from 1960's era plastic dinosaur toys. I'd bet Vancian magic made it into D&D purely because it seemed cool to someone at the time. I find it interesting that mana systems never really caught on more in tabletop fantasy. I'm not sure if that's because people just got used to Vancian and it "feels" right, or if Vancian ends up working better for real life play vs fantasy video games that nearly all use mana systems.

Quote from: Dracones on March 20, 2024, 12:17:27 PMI find it interesting that mana systems never really caught on more in tabletop fantasy. I'm not sure if that's because people just got used to Vancian and it "feels" right, or if Vancian ends up working better for real life play vs fantasy video games that nearly all use mana systems.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I could swear that was basically Arneson's suggestion for how to handle Magicians in the prototype for D&D. I'm not sure if that is how Mages worked in Blackmoor (I don't think they're that way in either First Fantasy Campaign or The Lost Dungeon of Tonisborg). Gygax instead went with the Vancian system.