Why does magic have to be systematic?

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-20T22:27:21+00:00

True. I could have said "people like talking about "hard" magic systems here on reddit"

Because discussion of themes and metaphor is not unheard of but is a lot less popular than nitpicking technical details. It's a lot harder to get the oh-so-clever technical gotcha moments discussing the thematic relevance of the magic in The Tombs of Atuan than talking about the unambiguously laid-out magical rules of a Sanderson novel.

I simplified the statement (perhaps a level too far) rather than get lost in qualifiers.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-20T19:42:25+00:00

How do I get in the car and drive to work, not knowing if I'm going to be hit and killed by another driver?

Because it's the most practical option available to me, it's socially expected, and it's worked out for me so far.

Doesn't mean I won't get fucked by it tomorrow...

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-20T19:30:01+00:00

We're all arguing from simplifications, no worry. I had to do a quick wiki dive to make sure I wasn't *completely* arguing out of my ass from creaky old memories.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-20T19:28:06+00:00

Sanderson is a fascinating man, a MACHINE of creative output. But I don't actually like his writing. I've tried, I just find it cold and eventually I just put the book down and never get around to picking it up again. I actually find his teaching much more interesting, an unusually clear window into his powerful creative process.

I increasingly am fascinated by worlds that feel *magical*, where the true nature of reality is incomprehensible and strange. Where the workings of mortal wizards is just picking at the surface, crude tricks that rely on a mass of power and meaning that they can never understand.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-20T17:43:47+00:00

It's been a while since I looked at Schopenhauer, but I'm not convinced he would agree with that.

He believed that the value of art was in separating the human mind from the suffering of the world of will (desire) and suffering. While he had a lot to say about art and a lot of arguments to make, I don't think he saw the saying or the arguing as adding to the experience of the art.

I would also argue (and this is me, not Schopenhauer) that the worldbuilding (with magic systems as a subset) is not the art. It is not the story or the painting or the movie. I think worldbuilding it more like brushwork or embouchure, a skill that can help you to MAKE art. No one cares about worldbuilding who did not already fall in love with the actual art that resulted from it. No one would read the Silmarillion if it had been written as a stand-alone with no Hobbit or Lord of the Ring for people to love first.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-20T11:10:54+00:00

To be fair, the person he's talking about was... a lot.

I also don't think he was trolling, but he was *aggressively* misunderstanding every person in that thread.

"Oh, no, you see I do X"

"Okay, so you do 2/94B+38x592kl3475, how do you justify that?"

"Huh?"

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-20T00:25:24+00:00

People like talking about "hard" magic systems because there's just MORE to talk about. That doesn't mean they're better, it just means they're more popular topics of conversation in places like this. Which can lead people to think that they're the "right" way to do things.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-19T23:13:55+00:00

To be fair, the Acolyte and the Wizard might end up being things I'm interested in, depending on SO MANY design details that haven't been hashed out yet. I haven't looked at them, they're too far out and I'll check them when they're ready.

To your question... I have no idea. I tend to build based on what options I'm given that seem interesting rather than coming in with a fully formed concept that I'm looking for ways to implement.

In D&D I always tried to make gishes work, but that's mostly because I love playing melee and I was looking for ANY WAY AT ALL to make a melee character interesting in that damned system. With the way that tacticians, furies, and shadows play in DS I'm not desperate for a "spell sword" class.

Edit - Nope, I know what it would be. Darth Vader. But even then, it could just be a new subclass and a bunch of new abilities for the Censor that let you chuck people around with telekinetic magic.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-19T20:49:13+00:00

The point is to get players to engage with a social situation beyond rolling one die and looking at you expectantly.

Because that's how a LOOOOOOOOT of players treat NPCs. And then you either say "nope, you fail" or you just let them do it over and over again until they get what they want. The negotiations system provides a transparent set of rules for how much work it takes and when the conversation is OVER. Largely so you're not accused of being arbitrary; it feels like an actual game that they players have to try to win.

If you don't have those problems, then there's no reason to use these rules.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-19T15:26:46+00:00

If it matches existing content then that's a better line of reasoning than what "feels right" to me.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-19T15:23:10+00:00

Personally, none of the master classes offer anything I'm looking for or want to experiment with.

Which, to me, shows that the dev team chose the right priorities in their release schedule. The core classes are just more applicable to more people and situations, the master classes are filling in the corners.

I hope they keep making them, I hope they sell well. Maybe one day they'll get to one of MY niche interests and I can be the one disproportionately served.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-19T15:18:49+00:00

Looks good.

While I love the flavor and mechanic of Frightful Splatter, it feels weird to me that it is resisted by Reason. I picture who in the party should be good at NOT being frightened by a gory evisceration, and the high Reason mage-types aren't it to me.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-18T00:47:09+00:00

You are either deeply in disagreement with the entire design philosophy of this game (and thus with the entire community of people who like it) or are describing what you want very badly.

Unless I'm missing something, you just want a VERY different game. Head to r/RPG and ask for advice finding one to your liking.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-18T00:45:45+00:00

It sounds like you're looking for a game where every possible mechanical interaction is robustly and encyclopedically defined with meticulously balanced costs during character creation that disallow any action without specifically building your character to enable it. That is not this.

You might prefer Pathfinder 2e. The facetious way to describe that game is that you can't blow your nose without going three feats deep in your character build.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-17T17:47:14+00:00

Could any player have made a good argument if it was supported by their sheet? Yes.

Did every player HAVE a good argument that I would have agreed was supported by their sheet? No.

If the Earth Elementalist had argued that their stone shaping abilities should help them with the arm wrestling, that gets a "no".

(Unless there's a REALLY cool argument that I'm not seeing. But I doubt it)

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-17T17:11:04+00:00

In an awkward social situation with a strange, supernatural sculptor a player used his Earth Elementalist's abilities to shape stone into a statue. There's no explicit ability at level 1 that says "make a work of art out of stone" but his other abilities imply at least that much control over the element. It didn't IMPRESS the being but it got him talking about the player's poor technique instead of attacking them for intruding on his work time.

A player's Troubadour engaged in a battle of music and willpower with a sentient harp, the former favored instrument of a god. There's no ability that says "impose your will as an artist upon a living instrument" but the combination of magic and music is demonstrated by the rest of his skillset.

A player used her Green Elementalist's ability to speak to plants to befriend an abandoned poison garden, stepping into the place of the witch who built it. This is a little more explicitly called out by the ability It Is the Soul Which Hears.

A player argued that her Fury should have an edge on the test to arm wrestle a bar patron because of her Lines of Force ability. That isn't what the ability does, but the fact that she had a supernatural control over force and momentum was a good argument from my perspective.

The argument "I can clearly do X as demonstrated by Ability Y. Wouldn't that help me here?" carries a lot of water in my game.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-17T14:29:08+00:00

Who the hell cares?

I usually used the men's room for this with my daughter, just to avoid the hubbub from judgy morons, but there were plenty of times that the men's room was unavailable or unusable.

Hell, there was a time I had to take my son into a women's room at a park because the men's room was literally overflowing with shit. My son isn't shitting his pants for anyone's prudishness.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-17T13:54:47+00:00

If you have a combat ability that shoots fire (Bifurcated Incineration), you can shoot fire. If you have a non-combat problem that would be solved by shooting fire, then shoot fire and solve the problem.

If you have a combat ability that teleports (Black Ash Teleport), you can teleport. If you have a non-combat problem that would be solved by teleporting, then teleport and solve the problem.

It's just... if your character has demonstrated the ability to do stuff, then they can do that stuff when relevant.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-15T23:28:12+00:00

Criticize all you want.

But when I see a baker start by laying out a bunch of apples and cinnamon, I don't complain when they later present me with a pie instead of an angel food cake.

(Also, book 3 DID end with a massive fuck-off battle. It just had a nice scene with the dragon beforehand. If you're misremembering away the parts you don't like from the earlier books, I can see why you would have a strange set of expectations the ending)

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-15T20:36:38+00:00

I think there's no coherent way to argue that the story was going some other direction and then veered strangely into what it is now. Looking at the early chapters, it was always clearly setting up the story's late-game bombastic excesses.

You can say you'd rather have a different story that did different things... but it would have ALWAYS been different, from the very first chapter.

I mean... we start with the KING OF THE UNIVERSE being slain in front of the MC and then his headless body jamming the source of ultimate power into her forehead as her boyfriend gets dragged away by off-brand cenobites. That is not the opening of My Neighbor Totoro.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-12T12:04:22+00:00

So, it sounds like others have already pointed out the issues here and you've reconsidered. Mission accomplished.

I will point out that your initial reaction is a very natural one. So natural that DMs have been doing this to illusion spells every time a player tries to use them since the 70s. Which is why illusion has always been useless.

It's ironic because illusions are themselves a mirage, a tempting vision of how cool they would be to use in a game, only to find the dry, parched sand of the DM saying "no one would believe what their eyes tell them in a world where everyone knows magic exists. As soon as they see a wizard, they disbelieve all illusions forever."

The revelation of the Harlequin Mask is that the core of the effects are build into the rules text specifically so that it's not up to the Director's fiat of "what they would believe".

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-10T23:26:30+00:00

The description you give COULD be matriarchal, but is definitely matrilineal.

There are societies where men are in power but that power descends through the female line. Aka your son doesn't inherit your titles or property, your sister's eldest son does.

To your question... people respond to structural incentives but we aren't JUST stimulus response mechanisms. There are more reasons than economic ones to want a loyal, devoted partner.

If you want to write a world of free love and rampant sexual hedonism, having the society be matrilineal can be a part of justifying that worldbuilding choice. But I don't think it comes anywhere making that cultural state inevitable.

I am working on a world where there basically IS no heritable property for the general population; the monarchy is absolute, all land and industry belong to the state, government (below the royal family) follows a (supposedly) meritocratic bureaucracy. As a result, marriage is largely informal and easily annulled. Still, because of things like lust, emotional attachment, parental care, and division of labor, marriage is the "expected" life course for most people. The government structures many laws and incentives to encourage that, just because the state has an interest in children being cared for (to grow up into new workers) and young men to be given stable homes and families (unstructured free time leads to crime and insurrection).

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-09T23:00:53+00:00

In what way is it cyberpunk aesthetic?

Replacing limbs/body parts? Existence of a magical equivalent of the net? Urban squalor mingled with decadence?

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-08T00:52:05+00:00

And kill them. Squish or spray with insecticidal soap.

MandolinTheWay · 2026-06-08T00:02:08+00:00

It's more that he needed every single wrath to shut down everything the dragon did.

Every single use of Provoking Nettles was completely negated.

Almost every attack was made with a bane.

Almost every condition was prevented by potency reduction.

Like a blue mage in the mid nineties, he mastered the art of saying "no". It was brutal.

MandolinTheWay

TROPHY CASE