Making Spells More Scientific

There is a scene that sticks with me from childhood from the D&D cartoon series. Dungeon Master (the little bald dude) is teaching the principles of magic to the cowardly cavalier. The lesson is that summoning a spring of water to quench your thirst deprives another part of the world of water. 

This seems an important moral about maintaining balance in a self-contained system. But of course, it has nothing to do with how magic actually works in the D&D role playing game. I’ve never read a version of the create water spell that mentions its contribution to desertification. But could magic in an RPG work more like this?

Magic as Science

This blog talks a lot about prioritising the game world in RPGs. This is partly about the world ‘pushing back’, in limiting the character’s agency to determine outcomes. Magic as a principle would seem to fly in the face of this. It’s fundamentally about manipulating the world, going against the natural limitations we face in everyday life. 

I’ve argued that 5e D&D embodies idealist poetics, which can be summed up in the principle that “thought determines being”. With magic, the wizard’s thoughts can determine being in a quite literal way – as with the Mould Earth cantrip. Take this idea too far and the whole game world becomes little more than a wizard’s malleable plaything.