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.

Below, I'll be looking at three approaches to magic in RPGs.  You’d have to be somewhat joyless, in the context of a fantasy game, to trash on magic for making the impossible happen. Admittedly, the joy might be turned down a notch in what follows. But my hope is that a more grounded, “materialist magic” could be a thing, without wringing all the wonder out of the concept. 

1. Magic as the Weird

I’ve recently been reading a very big anthology of Weird Fiction. The preface (by Michael Moorcock) characterises "the weird" as strange events that resist being grounded in consistent explanations. An encounter with a floating orb might be weird, but it stops being so if explained in terms of a novel invention. To quote the book’s introduction, to be weird such explanations must remain “maddeningly unreachable”.

The term “weird” seems applicable to magic in a setting which lacks a consistent rationale for its effects. Magic is weird to muggles in the Harry Potter books because of their lack of familiarity or understanding of it. It is not weird for Hogwarts students or us as the reader because we understand its place in the internal logic of the book (I stole this observation from a recent Hexed Press video).

In terms of RPGs, Into the Odd (ItO) captures the weird sense of magic very well – the clue here possibly being its title. Of importance seems to be the absence of a magic system in its rules. Magic instead resides in objects encountered in the game called Arcana. The game does a great job making these feel strange, even to those familiar with fantasy RPGs (the bone magnet springs to mind). 

  Weird art work from the original edition of Into the Odd

Arcana form part of the game world, placing them outside of the player’s knowledge and control, rather than a canonical list of powers they can level up to. The weird is also reflected in the monsters and encounters in ItO. It is far more a factor in making the world dangerous and unpredictable, than it is a tool for characters to exert their will on the world. 

Other RPGs, including D&D, frequently take inspiration from Weird novels such as H.P Lovecraft. But it does not follow that magic in these games retains the quality of weirdness. The Call of Cthulu RPG includes magical abilities inspired by Lovecraft, but these fail the weird test in so far as they can be known and mastered by characters in the game. No longer is an understanding of magic something “maddeningly unreachable”.

2. Vancian Magic

“Vancian” is a term used to describe the magic system of D&D, due to similarities with magic in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books. Magic here is no longer something baffling encountered by characters, but a tool to be mastered and exercised in manipulating the world. In D&D, this translates into a complete canonical system, to be perused by players while making their characters.

Vance’s novels ascribe rules to magic, which serve to reign in the level of power it conveys to its users. A wizard must spend time committing spells to memory, which are then expended after a single use. Due to the mental strain involved, the most a wizard can have prepared at one time is four. This still leave wizards as powerful individuals, but not to the extent of wiping out whole armies, becoming vulnerable once their resources are expended.

D&D followed the Vancian principle of making magic a restricted resource. But the reigns are loosened by progressively increasing the spell slots available to a caster as they rise in level. The path is open to becoming a regionally significant power, the equivalent of a setting’s Gandalf. Gary Gyax’s own wizard character Mordenkainen achieved this status in the Greyhawk setting.

D&D’s spell level system does serve to restrict the influence of magic by effectively “nerfing” the power of low-level spells. All spells in the Dying Earth books I’ve read are dramatically impactful. Comparatively, OD&D’s first level spell list is far more restrained. Keeping foes at bay with Hold Portal seems to fit well into the context of a gritty, OSR style dungeon crawl.

Fast forward to an 18th level wizard with the Wish spell in AD&D1e, the game world is beginning to feel a bit more like the character’s plaything. Gary Gyax seemed aware of this problem from the quote below:

"If magic is unrestricted in the campaign, D&D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly, or the referee is forced to change the game into a new framework which will accommodate what he has created by way of player characters."  

                                                (The Strategic Review, April 1976)

One of the measures taken to address this will be looked at in the next section.

Magic as Science

Science is the study of the natural world. Magic is by definition supernatural, or at least goes against our “realistic” understanding of the natural world. One natural law it regularly seems to violate is the conservation of energy. In OD&D, a huge ball of fire can be created through a mere gesture or muttered incantation. There is no proportionality in the energy invested in casting a spell and its relative effect.

This is one reason wizards can easily become overpowered in an RPG. Magic is presumably tapping into a supernatural energy source, yet it is typically affecting the natural world in a major way. This goes against the idea of materialism in RRGs I have talked about here. Characters gain the ability to shape the world, without needing to draw upon the world for resources, in the way we need fuel for a car.

I’ve looked at how AD&D1e made character advancement more materialist through its training rules, and a similar move was made with respect to magic. This is through the addition of material spell components as a requisite for casting spells. Someone casting a fireball now needs to get hold of some sulphur & guano.

AD&D 1e is hardly consistent in its allocation of components to spells (there is an excellent account of this here). Sometimes, these seem little more than flavour, as non-bulky common components are assumed to be held in a wizard’s pouch. Of course, they could become a relevant factor if the wizard were imprisoned with their gear removed.

Sometimes, the goal seems introducing balance to gameplay rather than the game world. This is likely why the 1st level spell Identify needs a 100 gp pearl to cast, to prevent players knowing the properties of every magic item they find. Yet this seems inconsistent too, with the potentially campaign disrupting Wish spell requiring no material components at all.

A&D1e components are a step towards grounding magic in the game world, but its basis is too inconsistent to resemble anything scientific. There is a basic lack of equivalency between the effect of spells and the material inputs to cast them. This is not necessarily a matter of obeying real-world laws, but having some kind of internal consistency in the logic of the game world.

Summary

I think an important part of OSR game design is deciding which material conditions are to be accounted for in the game system. As tabletop RPGs lack processing power, this requires a high degree of focus. As a rule of thumb, those game aspects which convey most power to characters seem particularly relevant candidates.

D&D has primarily used slots and levels to constrain the influence of magic, but this places it mainly in the realm of the players, in so far as they have discretion over their character’s advancement. Shifting some of these constraints onto material components integrates magic better into the game world. It potentially becomes a factor in the politics of a setting, as spell components would likely be a strategic resource.

There does seem room for both a weird and scientific approach to magic in the same RPG setting.  Magic in an RPG does not need to represent a complete canonical system.  Leaving room for the unexplained helps magic retain a sense of wonder.  The Dying Earth novels combine this well, by leaving many spells lost in the wreckage of a prior civilisation.  

In a future post, I intend to develop this magic as science concept further. This will be through a comparison with a further approach to magic – magic as chaos, as represented by the GLoG RPG.  Also, I've just discovered magic as science was a big part of Campbellian Fantasy, which I'll be learning about further.