The Culture: Why Your Magic System Is Crap

Dragon Award winning author Brian Niemeier posted this article on Magic and Sacramentality the other day, wherein he defined both terms.

Here’s a handy formula to help you distinguish between the two:

• Magic = using preternatural means for natural ends
• Sacraments = using natural means for supernatural ends.

For a couple of examples under this model, consulting a fortune teller to find your car keys is magic. Having water poured over you to obtain remission of all your sins and new birth in Christ is a sacrament.

Yes, he goes on from there; read the article for more on the matter.

For our purposes in game design what this means is that "magic" is directly tied to cosmology; what is possible within a given practice of magic is defined by what supernatural presence the magic-user draws upon to achieve those natural ends.

You want to know why I object to the Cleric as a generic priest class? This is why; what a specific religion believes, and why it believes as it does (and therefore how and why it practices its religion as it does) is defined by the mythology that explains it. You don't get Fireball tossing tome-hunting obsessives from Van Hellsing In Plate, but you can from the Temple Cult of Molech.

(Yes, this means that the core premise of White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension is sound; it's everything else that turns it into a complete dumpster fire.)

This means that every form of magic-use needs distinct rules and procedures. Runequest had the right idea, and it is sad that this did not catch on in wider use in the hobby. It also means that games with multiple forms of magic use had better be designed with interaction in mind, that the rules of the game are the reality of the world (as we are well aware after 50 years that players certainly see it that way), and thus the cosmology behind any given practice of magic has to be mechanically reinforced or it will not be taken seriously.

This also means that some games present magic systems that players will not take into the typical adventuring party, but instead are only viable in strategic-level play due to what their magic does and how it works, and without the full array of play that the Real Game possesses these magic systems and their practioners cease to be obviously useful to the typical player. (e.g. you want an Alchemist in your strategic panapoly; you don't want one in your dungeon delving or commando raid team)

This explains why you can't have a generic fantasy game; the very rules you have for magic tell you what is and is not true about how things work. This also means that (A)D&D is not a generic fantasy game, and why every edition plays and feels different- they are different.

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N.B.: The Holidays page is updated; I have added a new Wish List on Amazon specifically for Appendix N literature.