Doc Democracy

So, propaganda rather than art. It will not endure.
 
 
I have my suspicions, but this is likely not the thread to discuss them.
 
Thank you for the warning. And it is sad, because the magic system does sound interesting.
 
Dean Shomshak

I like the idea of it affecting the Concentration Limitation or adding a roll to an existing ability to use it.
 
I suppose it could also act as a bonus to the Interrogation skill. I think the Cruciatus Curse from Harry Potter got used that way in the books, but I can’t remember for sure.

And he did this re-arming in the face of serious opposition from people who did not want to consider going to war again and when there were very serious demands on the nation's finances to recover from the Great War. 
 
In my Golden Age campaign, he is a Professor X type character, building up the UK's superhero programme as a hedge against not having enough mundane war materials and aggresively delaying the onset of war by forcing Hitler to engage with appeasement overtures, wasting the nazi's time by giving them easy wins that appear to humiliate the British while furiously working behind the scenes to deliver a core resilience.

And he did this re-arming in the face of serious opposition from people who did not want to consider going to war again and when there were very serious demands on the nation's finances to recover from the Great War. 
 
In my Golden Age campaign, he is a Professor X type character, building up the UK's superhero programme as a hedge against not having enough mundane war materials and aggresively delaying the onset of war by forcing Hitler to engage with appeasement overtures, wasting the nazi's time by giving them easy wins that appear to humiliate the British while furiously working behind the scenes to deliver a core resilience.

And he did this re-arming in the face of serious opposition from people who did not want to consider going to war again and when there were very serious demands on the nation's finances to recover from the Great War. 
 
In my Golden Age campaign, he is a Professor X type character, building up the UK's superhero programme as a hedge against not having enough mundane war materials and aggresively delaying the onset of war by forcing Hitler to engage with appeasement overtures, wasting the nazi's time by giving them easy wins that appear to humiliate the British while furiously working behind the scenes to deliver a core resilience.

And he did this re-arming in the face of serious opposition from people who did not want to consider going to war again and when there were very serious demands on the nation's finances to recover from the Great War. 
 
In my Golden Age campaign, he is a Professor X type character, building up the UK's superhero programme as a hedge against not having enough mundane war materials and aggresively delaying the onset of war by forcing Hitler to engage with appeasement overtures, wasting the nazi's time by giving them easy wins that appear to humiliate the British while furiously working behind the scenes to deliver a core resilience.

I playtested this scenario the other day. I had to change a few things to make it viable. The shrews were all 1 hit point creatures, but they automatically got initiative in round 1 and got +1 to initiative rolls after that, as per Basic D&D rules. A successful hit by a shrew prompted a save vs death by the target, where failure meant the target lost his/her attack that round (instead of running away in fear). No gigantic shrew as per the MMO, but that's in the works. The victory condition was that the first to get 10 kills won the contest (50 extra xp); I think I'll allow 20 rounds and everyone who gets 10 kills succeeds in the quest. But the first one who completes it still gets a bonus. Shoes will give 1d4+2 damage. Boots for the biggest shrew get 2d4. Strength modifiers apply.

Yeah I have a system like that in my game.  Spirits that devour spent mana (and transform it into usable mana).  The spirits can be activated by beliefs, spirtuality, and magic use to manifest as elementals, fae, etc.

Another option might be to give the upper entities a Variable Power Pool dependent on the fear factor in the area. This means that the more fear around the more changes to reality they can create.

I’ve done something like this in several games. The Fey (raw magic) exists, but is manipulated by enough people believing in it, practicing it (religion), etc.
 
If parents in the village all tell their children to be good or the boogieman will come and take them, and enough of the children believe it, the boogieman will manifest as a result of the Fey being manipulated.

I was flicking through my Deadlands books the other day and was taken (again) with the mechanics surrounding the fear in the area. 
 
Supernatural creatures in an area have their abilities boosted when fear in the area is higher. Heroes can reduce the fear factor by defeating creatures and then visiting local communities and telling tales of that.
 
It means that the big, powerful creatures in high fear areas cannot be tackled directly because they are too powerful.  Heroes need to engage with minions, slowly whittling down the fear factor.  Only once that fear factor is reduced could the heroes consider taking on the local big bad.
 
I reckon this is a great mechanic forcing players to engage with the broader issues and communities.
 
My thoughts are that the supernatural creatures are bought with abilities that grow in high fear areas.  The environment will also deliver penalties to PCs, giving a double whammy of impacts.
 
I reckon this supernatural effect could be translocated to more mundane effects.  Taking on the local bandits is difficult because everyone is too scared to stand up to them and their confidence is high. As they begin to suffer defeats, that fear and confidence begin to diminish making each opponent that much easier to defeat.
 
It could be a magical thing, with wizards, or something to do with the Fey.
 
Not sure I am asking anything, just felt the need to share...
 
Doc

I reckon we should avoid a discussion of social justice here, the moderators might object.

Writing that last post reminded me: In many RL magical traditions, the powers are also persons. The magician isn't a scientist or engineer, confident that if they use the right tools on the right materials in the right way, the desired result must inevitably happen. Magicians deal with forces that have wills of their own. They negotiate, cajole, bribe, browbeat, bully, grovel, or outright lie to get their way. This is most explicit in dealing with spirits, of course, but may be implied in other cases.
 
In HERO terms, this might supply alternate Skill Rolls for magic. Like, the Chinese sorcerer needs a Bureaucratics roll to make his magic work. (Or Bribery -- spells often involve burning an offering of gold-paper. As with mortal bureaucrats, the spirits are supposed to do their duty to you when appealed "according to the statutes and the protocols," but act with greater alacrity when you grease their palms.) A Hermetic summoning a demon to extort a service threatens dire consequences for failure to appear and obey, delivered not merely by himself but by Almighty God -- Interrogation, perhaps (if seen as intimidation or outright torture rather than shrewd questioning). Shamanic negotiations might suggest Trading. If not a Magic Roll itself, such Skills might be complementary; or perhaps be called upon when the Magic Roll fails, in hopes of mitigating or redirecting the Side Effect of an angry spirit's appearance.
 
Dean Shomshak

I always liked the idea that Narosia used, to make a Contact roll the way to wield divine powers. If you make “magic” a type of Contact, it gives it a different feel.

I sometimes chide people for ragging on D&D in ways I think are unfair. Nevertheless...
 
For me, magic in D&D feels utterly un-magical. One reason is that despite multiple sources and modes of magic, it all works exactly the same way. Another is that while great effort is made to describe the tactical effects of every spell, the game remains sketchy and incoherent about what magic is and why it works. (Maybe setting books go into this. I've only read the Forgotten Realms Gazetteer, which has some blither about a "Weave" that left me unimpressed.) Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't find resource management enhancing my sense of wonder. Well, what do you expect. D&D began as a wargame, and that remains written into thre game's DNA.
 
I hope I have at times achieved sense of wonder in my own D&D games, but it came from my work, not that of the game designers.
 
For me, at least, part of what makes magic feel magical is the context. Like, let's take Incantations. Fine: It's a -1/4 Limitation, because if something prevents you from talking you can't use the Power. But what are the incantations? For an example, let's say the mage is conjuring that stereotypical fireball.
 
The Hermetic or Kabbalistic magus uses secret names of God to invokes Gabriel, angel of fire, and Phaleg, angel of the fiery planet Mars, to burn his enemies.
 
The Satanic sorcerer calls on Xaphan, who fans the flames of Hell, commanding him by Lucifer and Beelzebub as well as divine names such as Elohim Sabaoth and the Tetragrammaton -- blasphemously treating names of God as arbitrary tokens of power that don't actually mean anything. Or he just uses "barbarous words" -- pure gibberish, void of meaning, but you have to speak it all letter-perfect anyway because you're embracing pure superstition.
 
The Hindu sadhu chants a short mantra that distills both a prayer to Agni,m god of fire, down to a few sacred syllables. He has told the prayer 100,000 times, and the force of his ascetic meditation and ritual is such that even a god cannot deny his will.
 
The shaman has met a spirit of fire in his visionary journeys and made a treaty with it. Tapping his drum, he chants an appeal to the spirit and reminds it of their bargain.
 
The Taoist mystic writes the name of Yan Di, the Blazing Lord and Minister of Fire, on a spip of paper and stamps it with his seal of authority. As he holds it up, he demands that a lesser spirit of fire work his will: "By imperial order, in accordance with the statutes and the protocols!"
 
The Finnish sorcerer sings the story of how fire came to be. Knowing its origin asserts his power to command it.
 
In Earthsea, the graduate of Roke knows the true name of fire. In fact, he knows the specific true name for an explosive ball of fire, and by saying that name he calls it into existence.
 
And so on. Whatever the system of magic, the magic words mean something. Not that the player and GM have to come up with anything. It's enough to extablish that that the mage character is indeed calling on some special knowledge to access something deep and powerful in the world.
 
Dean Shomshak

I like systems where the roll can be more than a binary result.  More than do you succeed or fail.  In the Modiphius 2D20 system, the player rolls 2D20 by default which can result in 0-4 successes.  The player can add more dice (up to 5D20) to achieve more effects.  The drawback is that rolling a 20 causes a complication, the action can succeed but there will be one ir more complications and the more dice you roll the more likely it us to have a complication.
 
With magic in their Conan game, every failure (not just 20s) is a complication.  The conceit is that magic is inherently difficult, dangerous and ultimately evil in Hyboria.
 
This adds a level of risk and reward and brings in that concept if nagic having a cost.  Sometimes the complication will just be a physical/spiritual transformation that marks out the sorcerer as a sorcerer.

Environment can be more than one thing, fear can be a very hard thing to overcome but it can also be the climate environment. From '80 till 2000 I ran adventure's every other weekend, then I got a promotion at work (or as one of my friends called it a demotion with higher pay) and had to work every weekend from April till the end of September and sometimes into the end of November. I have always used the weather as an antagonist in my adventures. I would keep a weather diary actually 4 or 5 such. Tempreture, precipatation, wind conditions and severe weather having to face a blizard in May can be a bit of a schock. With the Change Environment Power maybe not so much anymore although, a 3-4 tornadoe might just play havock with that too. Having your party wet, cold, misarable can and will affect thier ability to function. I created at one point a table of weather effects on melee, ranged and spell casting, I wasn't capricious with the weather, I would have friends or relatives send me a daily weather report on thier locale conditions. I would use those offset by a year, to handle weather in the campain. Then there is the political environment laws, culture, prejudices and locale mores. It enrich's your world. 

The Change Environment ability seems to fit the bill. Just need to tack on appropriate limitations and advantages. For example, you could have a big bad that has a massive adjustment going on as a megascaled one, but it is dependent on the fear level going on.

I do like that concept, and I'll probably work something like that into my Dearthwood aventure whenever I get back to working on it.  But I agree, environment is a major part of adventure and play that doesn't get touched on often and is an exciting part of play if handled right.

Appreciate the effort Chris.  I think it is easy to talk about game styles you don't like as long as the Game Police are not going to break down your door and make you use it!  😄 
 
I think this is some of the stuff that the complication idea I had might trigger.  It should not be every time that the GM has to decide, that could get tedious, but if the magic roll contains a complication THEN things go awry.
 
I might want a bunch of broad things to impose, like the SFX significantly changing (very much like the Spellsinger novels) or ignoring detailed management of physical components until a spell complication destroys everything being carried, making the spellcaster scrape things together (and risk more complications) until he can properly reprovision himself.
 
Those things are helpful too.

Most of what magic feel magical in Hero is focusing on the special effects and description rather than mechanics.  I mean you can buid all the D&D spells with Hero, but there's a big difference between "8d6 blast vs ED (fire) Area Effect Radius Explosion -3 to Magic Skill roll" and "a spark of fire flies from his fingertips and erupts into a gigantic ball of flame!"

Problem I have with this one is that it adds more work to the GM which can make combats incredibly slow, especially if you have multiple magi. Now a random side effect that is rolled by the player may be an idea. But even with this it still could make the combats long and should a magi always pay a penalty for casting a spell, why play a magi?

Well, with skill rolls, attack rolls and damage rolls involved, I would submit that a spell is very limited in its repeatability.
 
Other than Ars Magica and the various versions of the Storyteller system, the Amber system was the only other one that seemed mysterious to me.

As for non-replicable, what I mean is less that you cannot do the same thing twice as that its not science, it cannot be broken down in a lab an analyzed.  So its not so systematic and well understood that you can break it down to its components, and sometimes it just doesn't work no matter how careful you were (skill roll, for instance).

Hero being an effects-based system helps here. 
 
I know I'm on record as pooh-poohing the idea, but I'm going to make a good faith suggestion. 
 
You'll want the following:
SFX decided by the GM. The spell is a Blast, let's say, but the GM decides what form it takes.  It takes some amount of Extra Time, either to cast or to strike.  Not so much that it would make a combat spell useless, but it might not hit in the Segment you cast it in.  But if your combat roll to hit succeeds, then the spell will hit them. The GM rolls your Magic Skill Roll behind the screen, and doesn't tell you whether it's objectively successful, instead describing the result in-character.  The time at which the spell would take effect is when the caster will know success or failure; the GM should describe what the caster senses about it on every Segment until it hits.  SFX would still happen: the winds might gather, maybe even kicking up dust, inflicting a minor OCV penalty on ranged attacks from friend and foe alike. Optionally, a Side Effect decided by the GM at casting time.  "All magic comes with a price!"  It might not be paid by the caster right then, but it will come due at some point, and if the caster can't pay it at that time then it will be extracted in some other way. How do these sound?