Dictionary.com: Magic, necromancy, sorcery, witchcraft imply producing results through mysterious influences or unexplained powers.

NOTE: You can basically replace the word 'magic' in the following paragraphs with 'technology' or something similar to apply these arguments to a non-fantasy setting.

Magic is everything unknown, mysterious, and supernatural. So why do most RPGs make it so mundane and boring? Most of these games give the player three general paths: fighting, thievery, and magic. Each path is given equal weight. Though the paths may have different gameplay and sometimes different stories, they have roughly equal difficulty, and magic is presented as nothing more special than sword-fighting or picking locks. This means that magic, the supernatural, the divine, is no different from swinging a piece of iron.

Why???

Magic offers itself as a hugely engaging story element. We game designers should make proper use of it.

Imagine a game where the player is one of a rare class of people with magical abilities. In this game world, magic is a thing so rare that it is essentially mythical to most of the inhabitants. Your average NPC may not even believe in it, except as some far-fetched superstition. Magic users are rare and far-between, and magic items are the stuff of legend. The player begins the game without any ability or knowledge of the existence of magic or his abilities in it. A big part of the game's story is then the player's journey to discover what he is. This unknown factor in magic is what makes it interesting, and it is what will draw the player in. Spells come gradually, and their effects may not be entirely revealed all at once, and may change with time (or perhaps the player can modify them). Magic items are the objects of epic quests and are essentially priceless.

This also introduces an interesting social aspect to magic use. Since most NPCs hardly even believe in it, the player must be careful where he uses magic. If your average medieval Joe sees you flinging fireballs around, he may just think you're a witch and decide to burn you at the stake... or worse...

We need to draw the player into our world, and with this sort of magic system, we pique his curiosity, about the nature of his character, about the power and potential of his spells and his enchanted items. We also force the player (in a nice way) to consider the social impact on NPCs. If we've brought the player this far, then we're half-way there already.




PS - On a slightly more specific note, I think mana/magic points/force points should be done away with. Magic should simply drain stamina, just like using your muscles. This is both simpler (easier) and makes more sense (to me, anyway). One possibility of modifying spells could then be: Charging a spell up to provide more powerful effects but use more energy. Say you need to light a torch: Use just a smidgen of your fireball spell. Say you need to roast a troll: Charge up for a second or two and throw a horse-sized fireball at the beast. At the same time, you have to be careful, because if you push too far, you'll pass out from exhaustion, or worse, die (which could be used as another cool story element).

Sounds like a sound game plan, although I'm not sure it hasn't been done before. It does sound rather familiar. Do you have any plans of actualy making something like this? Or are you just venting ideas?

To a degree, it's been done before. Like in most Star Wars games, a big part of the game is your development and discovery as a Jedi. Still, the thing with Star Wars in particular is that most people already know roughly what "The Force" can do, so it's not as mysterious or unexpected.

I have a concept for a sort of "RPG to end all RPGs", which is really just a collection of ideas I've accumulated over the years. In my mind it's grown into a very big project, so maybe someday... On the other hand, the only reason I want to make it is to play it, which is why I'm posting my ideas up here. If something gets picked up and used in a game, great!

To be honest, the thought has got stuck in my mind too. The problem is, so many other concept gameplay ideas have too

Anyways, idea about Magic was that it is a form of energy drawn from around you, and with your will you bend it into the manifestation you want. Therefore magic can take any shape as required by the user.
The idea for my game was that you have "spell components", or rather key sequences on your favorite controller. Each sequence represents a specific aspect of the magic you are performing at that point. Basically, you can draw energies from sources, move energies and transform energies, and release energies. By transforming energy you can apply pressure to objects, conjure objects, and transfigurate matter. By moving energy around you can specify the targets of your spell. Energies can be drawn from any sources. There is a lot of free energy around, but if you direct your source of energy from a specific place, you can alter charges of objects, like freezing items by drawing heat, redirect lightning, that sort. By collecting free energy and storing it into an object will again heat it.

Things like casting a fireball is thus done by collecting all the energy needed and contain it into a small space, change it into heat energy, then sending that energy off to release the containment at some point in the not-so-distant future.

Those are some cool ideas.

I've also thought a lot about how to make a modifiable magic system. It's always tough to make such a system both easy to control for the player, interesting and complex enough, and balanced. For a while I was thinking about a system using neural nets or something similar; A player would modify some numerical inputs to the net (which would be dubbed earth, air, fire, and water, or something like that), and the net would output a set of effects to take place in the gameworld. The problem is that this is exceedingly hard to balance, and I'm not sure that players will really want to spend loads of time fumbling around with such a complex system.


I like that idea of channeling certain energies for certain spells. If producing fireballs requires drawing heat from the surroundings, perhaps using too many in one area will cause the surroundings to begin freezing. That'd be an interesting side-effect, if while fighting your enemy, you and your party, or other things around you, start freezing and taking damage. Conversely, freezing something would cause you or your immediate surroundings (wherever you're drawing the energy from) to heat up or burn.

Perhaps to heal someone (or yourself), you must draw the life energy of something or someone else.

You could also include light as an energy-type for certain spells. So using them causes your surroundings to darken or become pitch-black for a time.

Another possibility would be to - and this is borrowed from Star Wars - have ambient light (good) and dark (bad) energies, which are required for different spells. So using a "good" spell will draw such energy and actually result in the surroundings being more evil!

Ah, lots of possibilities, I like it. This sort of system is also well set up explanation-wise to allow for some areas in the game where there's a lack of these energies, thus relegating the player to relying on his normal skills in those areas.

I actualy had an idea on this concept a while ago, which is similar to what's posted above. Those who have read the Wheel of Time series written by Robert Jordan, will be familiar with the "weaving" of 5 primary elements (Air, Earth, Water, Fire and Spirit) to get certain effects. A basic fireball for example would be Fire with just a bit of Air, while something as complicated as Healing requires a difficult pattern of all five elements. I had a rough idea about having 5 buttons to add more of a certain element, and use the mouse to make a pattern, thus creating a simple to opperate interface which can be used to make very complicated combinations. Another idea was using some kind of wheel consisting of 5 parts, each one representing an element, and making a pattern with a mouse on top of it adding elements by drawing the line through the respective part. (see picture below showing a pattern representing a spell requiring all five elements). These where just some ideas i had based on Jordan's way of viewing magic, which is quite good, considering that it uses a very simple base with which almost anything can be done. Tell me what you think of it.