Setting ‐ Magic - Arcanorum/rogueworld GitHub Wiki

Design guidelines

This page outlines the design philosophy around the use of magical abilities in Rogueworld, both in terms of setting and mechanics.

Magic users should not be godlike

Due to their nebulous nature and the flexibility of the concept of magic, in many RPGs magic users can have a vast array of abilities, covering functions around:

  • Offence (direct damage dealing (fire balls, lightning bolts), conditions (burn, freeze, stun/shock)).
  • Defence (damage mitigation (various enchantments/wards/charms)).
  • Support (healing, buffs (various enchantments), resurrections).
  • Utility (summoning creatures, conjuring items, revealing information).
  • Mobility (teleportation, speed boosts).
  • and others depending on context.

This causes them to often play an outsized role within the context of the game world, being revered as godlike entities relative to many other inhabitants.

Measures will need to be in constant consideration to prevent pure magic users from making other classes redundant, which would work against The Tribe pillars of Specialisation and Purpose, for example, they could be weakened in other areas, such as reduced survivability (lower hitpoints & defence, fewer armour options) and mobility (lower movement speed, longer dodge cooldowns, rooted while casting), and/or have drawbacks placed on their abilities, such as longer cooldowns, and more situational effects (elemental resistances/weaknesses, making many spells more or less effective depending on enemy type).

Magic should enhance the tribe

Magic should be used to give each class more options for how to interact with other players, supporting The Tribe pillar of Purpose, instead of magic just allowing each class to be more self-sufficient, which goes against The Tribe pillar of Dependency.

Magic should be something that many other classes can incorporate into their own play, to give them additional options that suit and enhance their archetype fantasy, and allow them to still be relevant, even in the presence of a specialist magic user, while still allowing primarily magic users to have a special place within the team.

There should be reasons to not just have an entire team of wizards.

Basically, when designing any kind of magic user class, there should be a good answer to the question of

Who wouldn't want to be a wizard in this world, if magic is so useful?

Magic should have some mystery

Magic should be largely mysterious, but still have an internally consistent set of rules for the ways in which it can manifest. The game should not go to great lengths to try to explain away or rationalise how magic works, as this can quickly devolve into taking away an element of the player's imagination and personal interpretation of the world, and giving an explanation to something that doesn't really need an explanation.

Less Wizarding World with flashy active spells, and more Middle-Earth, with magic being more abstract and passive in its effects.

The closest class to being a pure magic-user is called "Occultist", and not "Wizard" or "Mage", as I think when people think of those words, they think of fireballs and lightening bolts, which is not what magic is about in this game.

Not giving pure magic users too many direct offensive capabilities prevents them from being too similar to other ranged damage dealers. In many games with wizard classes that can deal large amounts of projectile-based ranged damage, they end up competing a lot with classes like archers for a particular role to excel at. Allowing wizards to just be a walking damage hose doesn't feel very "magical", and reduces their magic usage down to a damage formula to be optimised, which erodes their intended depth, intrigue, and mystery.

Magic should seem simple at first, but have depth with time

easier to pick up for new players, but still have deptch, just locked behind the specialist magic classes, expose the magic system gradually to players through incorporating parts of it into other classes that are gradually unlocked, don't just let them pick pure mage right away

complexity that emerges from simple systems that layer on top of each other, combinations to create new possibilities avoid option overload right at the start

Pillar of accessibility

Magic should be for high-level play, for more skilled players, prevent new players from overwhelming themselves with things they dont understand and givng themelevs a bad experience.

Universe

  • Magic can be used to some extent by anyone and is not hereditary. Magic aptitude is strongly associated with certain personality traits, in particular things like creativity, inventiveness, and curiosity, their ability to conceive ideas in their head, or how vivid their "mind's eye" is if you will, given that magic is regarded as the practice of someone projecting their ideas about the world onto the world itself. That is not to say that anyone else cannot become better at magic through training and practice, though they will struggle to match those with a natural proficiency in it.

  • Magic falls into two categories based on outcome, enchantments (also called blessings, boons, buffs, or similar, the essence of positivity), and curses (also called hexes, malediction, bewitchment, or similar, the essence of negativity).

  • Magic can be targeted by the user, ranging from being very localised and affecting a single object, such as a person's body or an item (such as a weapon), through to having more spread out effects and affecting everything within a given radius (up to around 20 metres in diameter or so for a practiced magic user) like an aura. The actual effect of the target affected object or aura is determined by whether it was imbued with enchantment or curse type magic. For example, a weapon could be imbued with an enchantment that improves the wielder's strength, or an aura could be imbued with a curse that drains the willpower of everyone in the area.

  • Most spells are not typically directly physically destructive. There are no fireballs or lightening bolts or similar depictions of magic used in combat in fiction.

  • Using magic can be a strenuous activity for the user and can take some amount of time to cast (depending on the complexity and intensity of the spell), and someone can easily become exhausted quickly if using magic a lot in a short time. For this reason, in combat people still typically use traditional weapons, such as swords and bows, with magic being used situationally and sparingly as to avoid over-exertion, or even not at all with some fighters preferring to focus exclusively on their own martial prowess.

  • Spells that have a continuous effect over time only last for so long before they eventually fade and stop working. This can range from seconds, to minutes in some cases, but not hours or days.

  • People have a dedicated part of their memory associated with the storage of spells and how to cast them, and how adeptly they can cast them, like a form of muscle memory. Individual spells take up a large proportion of this memory for a person, with an average person who uses magic only casually able to memorise 1 or 2 spells, with the most dedicated and advanced magic users still only able to memorise up to 4 or 5 in rare cases.