Magic spells outside RPGs

[Rodin]

"Story-breaking" powers are only story-breaking if the author makes them so (in a novel) or the DM lets them be so (in a game); if the bad guys are idiots and the whole world is low level and lets the heroes walk all over it, yes, you're going to have a problem, but if the PCs aren't super-powerful relative to the world and people use their powers intelligently, it works out just fine.

Take Wheel of Time as an example. The series is actually a pretty good model for a D&D campaign full of powergamers, if you assume each book roughly corresponds to 2 levels: plucky heroes with swords and cantrips in book 1, everyone taking the first few level of signature PrCs by book 3, common teleportation by book 5, Leadership and Landlord abuse by book 7, spamming wish at plot-based casting penalties by book 9, treating ten thousand orcs and a tower full of mid- to high-level clerics as speedbumps by 11, epic spellcasting ritual abuse by book 13, and "Okay Rand, since you have a +204 Channeling modifier and can crush anything with stats, even all my overpowered homebrewed NPCs, let's resolve the final boss battle by MTP" for the finale.

The heroes in WoT get every story-breaker power mentioned (multiple PCs can use a gate/teleport hybrid, the major BBEGs are resurrected several times before the PCs figure out how to perma-kill them, one of the PCs is basically an Eberron shifter so has some pseudo-polymorph going on, etc.), several more powers that are considered strong spells in D&D (plane shifting, mind reading and domination, illusions, weather control, etc.), and some that are even overpowered by D&D standards (destroying things back in time!). Yet they don't "break" the story at all, they change the story: when everyone can use gateways, they don't suddenly solve all their problems by teleporting around, they need gateways just to keep up with all the problems they have to deal with regarding ruling multiple nations, transporting armies, etc.

Good point about teleporting in Wheel of Time, I hadn't thought about that so much. It does all tie into the overall point I was trying to make - how you handle powerful spells in your story is the important thing. There's nothing about D&D's magic system that makes it incompatible with story-telling outside a game. Any bits that are incompatible with the story you want to tell can just be cut off.

[Yora]

It's not that it can not be done or that there are inherent problems with it. But in practice very few writers do so, even when they are writing stories set in a D&D world. There must be reasons for that.
(One possibility being of course, that they just plain don't like it.)

[SiuiS]

I separate magic sorcery and psionics into different types of supernatural power, but its quite often that something called magic fits into the psionics category (D&D's sorcerer class is pretty much the opposite of how I'd use the word).

Based on the lore and the mechanics, in D&D I posit that psionics is True, and Magic is just a bunch of superstitious ritual dogma attached to Psionics. That's why you get someone with mental potency who can generate spontaneous explosions of energy, and you get someone who can generate spontaneous explosions of only a specific energy type after a specific ritual format.

Sorcerers are what happen when psions are born and raised by people who believe in magic but not in psychism. It puts a fun spin on the tropes.

Splitting audiences isn't the problem, its when people use their taste for a particular type of story as some kind of arbiter of quality.

Yes. That is what I was hoping to say, but bungled. Thanks.

Magic shouldn't be about the caster's "power" it should be about their "knowledge".

Merely providing "power" as another conceit that the current generation assumes as true and valid without introspection or critical thinking. Nothing more.

Gandalf isn't mysterious and powerful because magic is mysterious. He's powerful because he knows more than you, and he has to be mysterious because if he wasn't then you'd know as much as him. You might say his power comes from him being a supernatural being, but that just makes him closer to the true nature of the world.

"Mystery" doesn't mean there isn't an answer, it means the answer is known to an elite but it something that you in theory could learn.

Ha!

Actually. I find that Gandalf is mysterious because he is powerful and also powerful because he is mysterious. Both traits feed into one another. With only one or the other, you cannot get a Gandalf. My default explanation is to tell people to try and "play" Gandalf; they end up with an unsatisfying and stymied experience of running around and rolling knowledge checks and making FBI-style flow boards to connect clues, and it's not until someone takes that and provides an external POV does it even remotely resemble awesome and powerful. To them you left and came back having shifted the entire game board, but to you it's just a few spells and a few skill rolls.

That's more about the trope d the mysterious and powerful party member than about wizards in general though. This applies as much to the Doctor as to Gandalf; not nearly as fun to play.

[MLai]

Great thread guys, thanks!
(The overlong argument over the semantics of Sanderson's 1st Law, not so much.)

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, HIDE IT WELL.

Merely providing "power" as another conceit that the current generation assumes as true and valid without introspection or critical thinking. Nothing more.

Wait, you just said something above that completely ridicules what you said below:

My default explanation is to tell people to try and "play" Gandalf; they end up with an unsatisfying and stymied experience of running around and rolling knowledge checks and making FBI-style flow boards to connect clues, and it's not until someone takes that and provides an external POV does it even remotely resemble awesome and powerful. To them you left and came back having shifted the entire game board, but to you it's just a few spells and a few skill rolls.

That's more about the trope d the mysterious and powerful party member than about wizards in general though. This applies as much to the Doctor as to Gandalf; not nearly as fun to play.

You just got done saying that merely providing power is brainless. Then you say playing Gandalf as a thinker rather than (I assume you imply) an asskicker spamming fireballs is less fun.

[Dusk Eclipse]

"Story-breaking" powers are only story-breaking if the author makes them so (in a novel) or the DM lets them be so (in a game); if the bad guys are idiots and the whole world is low level and lets the heroes walk all over it, yes, you're going to have a problem, but if the PCs aren't super-powerful relative to the world and people use their powers intelligently, it works out just fine.

Take Wheel of Time as an example. The series is actually a pretty good model for a D&D campaign full of powergamers, if you assume each book roughly corresponds to 2 levels: plucky heroes with swords and cantrips in book 1, everyone taking the first few level of signature PrCs by book 3, common teleportation by book 5, Leadership and Landlord abuse by book 7, spamming wish at plot-based casting penalties by book 9, treating ten thousand orcs and a tower full of mid- to high-level clerics as speedbumps by 11, epic spellcasting ritual abuse by book 13, and "Okay Rand, since you have a +204 Channeling modifier and can crush anything with stats, even all my overpowered homebrewed NPCs, let's resolve the final boss battle by MTP" for the finale.

The heroes in WoT get every story-breaker power mentioned (multiple PCs can use a gate/teleport hybrid, the major BBEGs are resurrected several times before the PCs figure out how to perma-kill them, one of the PCs is basically an Eberron shifter so has some pseudo-polymorph going on, etc.), several more powers that are considered strong spells in D&D (plane shifting, mind reading and domination, illusions, weather control, etc.), and some that are even overpowered by D&D standards (destroying things back in time!). Yet they don't "break" the story at all, they change the story: when everyone can use gateways, they don't suddenly solve all their problems by teleporting around, they need gateways just to keep up with all the problems they have to deal with regarding ruling multiple nations, transporting armies, etc.

Just popping in to say that this post sold me on The Wheel of Tie series, thanks PairO'Dice.

[Closet_Skeleton]

Based on the lore and the mechanics, in D&D I posit that psionics is True, and Magic is just a bunch of superstitious ritual dogma attached to Psionics. That's why you get someone with mental potency who can generate spontaneous explosions of energy, and you get someone who can generate spontaneous explosions of only a specific energy type after a specific ritual format.

There are some psions Espers in a setting I designed who believe that. It leaves them woefully unprepared to fight demon summoners (they continue to insist that the demons are psionically created by humanity's subconscious and not actual extra-dimensional creatures right to the end, while the mages believe that the Espers are actually just really ignorant tiefling equivalents and that all psionics is demonic in nature).

Sorcerers are what happen when psions are born and raised by people who believe in magic but not in psychism. It puts a fun spin on the tropes.

That's pretty much the only logical conclusion of a world which has psions and D&D sorcerers, which I why I prefer to just ditch the sorcerers and have psions and mages. I just use the word Sorcery to refer to pre-prepared magic, not to deliberately confuse D&D players but to be closer to real world historical usage of the terms (there's no etymological justification for the 3rd edition sorcerer/wizard divide). I'd rather say 'adept in sorcery' than 'master of the arcane arts' for tone reasons.

In fiction magic and psionics will always be arbitrary categories.

This applies as much to the Doctor as to Gandalf; not nearly as fun to play.

If I have a mysterious character in a story, they only way I can think of using that character's point of view is to create a side-story where they have a completely different role and all their motivations and limitations are very closely examined. Their actions in the original story where they were mysterious will be revealed to have been completely misunderstood and their actual capabilities will be a lot lower than appeared.

In an RPG group, you can just give the mysterious character to the player interested in role playing.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, HIDE IT WELL.

Most hilarious real world 'spell book' ever.