Musings on Modular Magic

A lot of newer OSR systems (most famously Bastards, I think?) allow you to create spells by combining verbs and subjects - e.g. Speak with + Stone, Become + Fire.  It's a cool system!  Not intrinsically better than D&D's typical pre-written spell selection, but definitely bringing its own unique strengths.

In this blog post I wanted to spitball some things I would do with a modular magic system which I think would be fun.

Note: for the purposes of the following discussion, assume that each given magic word (not pair; word!) can be used once a day.

Rearranging spells on-the-fly

So I think the assumption with most instances of modular magic is that once you roll the components of a spell and jam them together, they're kind of set in stone.  I know in Bastards you can rearrange your words when you level up, but for the most part they're static.

This is perfectly fine, but I think it would add some tasty strategic depth if wizards had the option of taking their spells apart and rearranging them more frequently.

This adds a variety of gameplay wrinkles. Say a given wizard has the Verbs Connect, Become, Enlarge and the Subjects Flesh, Emotion, Fire.  At the start of the day they have to try and predict the coming challenges and decide what would be most useful to them.

Should I pair Connect and Flesh so I can heal my friends?  Or should Flesh go with Enlarge so I can make my buddy Thurg bigger?  Wait, but I also want to Enlarge Fire so I can make torches explode. Hang on - what would happen if I Enlarged Emotion...?

This already is so much more deep and engaging than simply picking what spells you have prepared from a list.  And it gets more interesting if you allow Wizards to rearrange their spells during the adventuring day, but at a cost - e.g. spending a Turn in the dungeon to rearrange conjures a lovely mental image of a wizard frantically working arcance kludge by sputtering candle-light as his allies watch the doors, knowing an orc patrol could walk by at any moment.

What if we up the tension even more?  A wizard can rearrange his spells instantaneously, in the midst of combat even, but doing so this rapidly and carelessly risks a catastrophic mishap.

Wow, this ambush is going badly.  Enlarge Fire would be really nice right about now, but Enlarge is tied to Emotion.  I could cast Enlarge Fire anyway, but... do I want to risk blowing myself up?

Rearranging spells is complemented nicely by a Mausritter-style item card inventory system.  You can have a card for each magic word and just join them into pairs using a paperclip or Blu Tack.  Easy peasy!

The final thing that I think makes this cool is that I would feel a bit like an actual wizard tinkering with magic and experimenting, rather than just picking premade things off a list.  Which would be neat!

This is kind of by-the-by and not really about modular magic per se, but I kind of prefer magic systems where you can use each spell once a day, rather than having an interchangeable fuel like spell slots that you could theoretically spend entirely on one spell over and over.  Most tables I've been at have spellcasters that spam fireball over and over, which is BORING.  Making every spell single-use means you have to actually adapt as the adventuring day proceeds and can't do the same thing over and over.

Enchanting Objects

So obviously rules for creating magic items have always been part of D&D, but I've just never found them satisfying. They're somehow simultaneously fiddly and vague?  Not providing sufficient depth or interest but also being a bit of a headache to use. Bah.

Here's something much cooler: a Wizard can spend one week implanting a Verb and a Subject into a mundane object, rendering it magical.  For example, they could jam Connect Mind into a pair of rings that allow the wearers to communicate telepathically, or they could imbue a bottle with Conjure Water so it produces infinite water.

This replaces a boring check and balance (how much gold will this cost?) with a fun one (what if I need these magic words for something else?).  You're essentially making your spellcasting slightly less flexible in return for creating a more persistent effect that your allies can make use of, which is a cool trade-off to think about.

We can also do the same thing, but in reverse.  A wizard can spend a week destroying a magic item in such a way as to extract some of its power in the form of a magic word.  Take the classic flaming sword as an example.  It contains the spell Conjure Fire.  A wizard could break it down and gain either the Verb Conjure or the Subject Fire.  I would probably only let them pick one or the other, or else this could possibly be a bit too strong...

Wizards vs Sorcerers

So all this chopping and changing and tinkering is all very well for the scholarly and technical wizard, but what of sorcerers?  Their magic is a part of them, not a spare part to be picked up, rearranged, used or discarded.

In this system, each sorcerer has a single magic word entwined with the very essence of their souls - their Quiddity.  A sorcerer's Quiddity could be a Verb (e.g. Invert, Combine, Steal) or it could be a Subject (e.g. Beast, Appearance, Fire).

Sorcerers can only cast spells that contain their Quiddity, but they can use their Quiddity as much as they  like (rather than once a day like normal magic words).  If that's Fire then they do stuff with fire, and that's it.  This obviously makes them a bit inflexible compared to wizards, but it's fantastic if you really like using fire (a wizard with the word Fire would only be able to use it once per day).  Also, I'm picturing magic words as taking up an inventory slot each, but a Sorcerer's Quiddity obviously would not count towards encumbrance.

I've not thought too deeply about it, but I would probably make Sorceror magic a bit more potent than Wizard magic (e.g. affecting more targets, doing more damage, lasting longer) to compensate for the decreased flexibility.

Clash: Artifacts of Chaos and Weird Social Powers

So I'm currently making my own pointless fantasy heartbreaker, Coin & Candle, and a problem I've come up against is finding good ways to differentiate non-magical characters.

The idea is that each PC, besides an ability score array, has one little extra talent that they can do that no one else can.  I have some loose rules that I'm following for these talents that will probably be familiar to anyone in the OSR space:

• Horizontal, not vertical.  It's not good enough for the talent to make you numerically better at something any character can do.  It ideally should open up a new avenue for problem-solving altogether. So "+2 to sneaking" is absolutely not good enough.
• Active, not passive.  This is somewhat related to the above.  Your talent has to be a thing you can choose to do at any point, not something that is attached to another course of action or, heaven forbid, a die roll.  This is just more engaging and exciting for players, and makes the talent more likely to come up in play.
• Tools, not weapons.  Talents are intended to be utilities first, and only have a function in combat if used inventively.  This is because my system is mostly about exploration and lateral problem-solving, and the threat of violence informs/flavours that, rather than it being the main focus.
• Diegetic, not mathematical.  Again, related to the above, the talent should be something it's easy to model with narration.  Its applications and implications should be easy to picture and ideally not require any maths.
• Mundane, not magical.  This is because Coin & Candle is more about encountering weird things than it is about being a weird thing.  PCs are assumed to be relatively normal unless they're a Warlock (more on those in a later blog post), and I want a really clear, obvious delineation between Warlocks and everyone else.

To illustrate the above principles, here are some example talents I've come up with:

• Schemer. Once per session, you can retroactively declare that you took some sort of action in preparation for the current situation - e.g. bought an item, arranged for someone to meet you, set a trap, did some research, donned a disguise, or whatever else is plausible.
• Contortionist. You can fit through any gap larger than your head, and scrunch yourself small enough to fit in a backpack.
• Ugly Bastard.  Something is really wrong with your face.  You wear a mask, normally, but if you remove it any NPCs who can see your face must make a morale check. PCs who can see your face, meanwhile, have disadvantage on everything because they are crying and vomiting.
• Clockworker. You can craft palm-sized clockwork devices that serve a variety of functions. They can do anything clockwork devices in real life can conceivably do: walk a preset path or distance, vibrate, carry small objects, make noise, strike a match, etc. They can be rigged to start operating after a set amount of time has passed, or in response to being touched or moved or even in response to vibrations in the ground.

So for the most part this was going well... at first.  It's that final principle that has started tripping me up.  It turns out it's quite hard to come up with talents for PCs that are impactful, relevant to adventuring, and don't require magic or some other weird superpower.  There are only so many ways to use the human body without straining credulity.  I had hoped to stock perhaps a d50 table of talents, and stalled out around 18...

Clash!

,,, until I played Clash!  And here we finally get to the point of the post.  For the uninitiated, Clash is the third game in the Zeno Clash series of beat-em-ups from the Chilean studio ACE Team.  I highly recommend it: it has a compelling story, satisfying gameplay, and a delightfully weird art style.  But the part that's important today is one specific mechanic/plot element: the Ritual.

The Ritual

So the idea of the Ritual is that nearly every combatant in the setting of Clash has agreed that, before attempting to bludgeon each other to death with their fists, one can challenge the other to a fun little dice game.  The winner of the game gets to impose some kind of penalty on the loser in the coming fight.  Some examples would be covering the loser in bait that attracts monsters, restricting them to a particular area of the arena, forcing them to come to the winner's aid in a later fight, or even just getting one free hit on them with a big stick.

So, a fun little wrinkle on an already fun brawler.  But here's the brilliant twist: the Ritual is not magical or supernatural in the slightest.  The only reason it can have the mechanical effects it does is because every character involved consents to participate and abide by its rules.  The Ritual is important more or less solely because they decided it is.  Breaking the laws of the Ritual doesn't place a curse on you.  You aren't struck by lightning.  It's not a geas.  People just go along with it because they feel they have to.

Weird as it sounds, this isn't too unrealistic.  The reader has probably already noticed parallels between the Ritual and real-world social institutions like the concept of money, or marriage.  Things that have any real-world effect at all solely because people act like they do.

Oh yeah, this was about D&D

Anyway.  How does this relate to elfgames?  Well, playing Clash gave me another perspective on talents for Coin & Candle.  Specifically, it made me realise that I could create "talents" that were just exploitations of customs and social institutions.  Done right, this would adhere to all of the principles I outlined above. I haven't been able to come up with a better name for these than "weird social powers", but here are two I have come up with so far.

Example 1 - Truth-Priest

You are a priest devoted to a God of Truth.  Your creed prohibits you from intentionally telling explicit lies, or even trying to mislead people with white lies.  Everyone knows this about you, and therefore they will believe anything you tell them, without exception.  But if you ever break this code, you will be hounded to the ends of the earth by holy assassins for the rest of your (short) life. And the Church has spies everywhere...

So this one initially just seems like a pure detriment - but then you realise that, used correctly, it actually has powerful utility.  You have more leverage in negotiations because the other party knows you'll hold up your end of the bargain.  You don't have to convince sceptical authority figures that the problem you've brought to them warrants their full attention and powers - they'll just believe you.  You can broker peace between factions that don't trust one another because they at least both trust you implicitly.

The players can also have fun trying to game the rules.  What if another PC impersonates the Truth-Priest without the latter's knowledge?  Would that count as breaking their code?  Probably not, but it would certainly earn the Church's ire (but that's tomorrow's problem).  Or what if a PC lies to the priest and the priest innocently repeats the lie? This talent not only helps solve OSR-style challenges, it begets them itself.

Finally, this is cool becaue the priest basically has a once-in-their-life megapower to get anyone to believe anything at all: they get to lie once.  Kill a Dragon by telling them the world is a simulation and the only way to wake up is by drowning themselves.  Tell the archmage that they love you like their own son and would do anything to aid you in your quest.  Tell the king that your comrades are actually innocent of all the crimes they committed in broad daylight in front of a dozen witnesses.  Basically, lying gives the Truth-Priest temporary social omnipotence at the cost of them, you know, getting assassinated five minutes later.  Seems like an epic way to retire a character to me.

So with one short paragraph we have a talent with (in my opinion) utility, depth, and flavour.  And no magic required - just the diegetic knowledge and beliefs of the characters.

Example 2 - Fallen Noble

You're the last scion of a destitute noble house.  You have no money or political influence, but you can still utilise an obscure by-law that no one has repealed yet.  Namely, you can command anyone to do one thing for you, and they have to obey or risk arrest and prosecution.

There are restrictions, though.  You can only use this once on any given individual.  You can't command people to commit crimes.  And obviously, people who don't care about the law for whatever reason (e.g. they're wealthy enough to bribe judges, they're too stupid to comprehend the consequences of their refusal, they are already wanted criminals, they are too personally dangerous to arrest) may refuse.

One thing I quite like about this talent is how it's kind of self-balancing.  Something that has warped ability design throughout D&D's history is the question: "But what if this trivialises a fight with a dragon?".  This has necessitated mechanical fixes like 5e's Legendary Resistances, or brute-force immunities to charm and poison and what-have-you, or certain spells only working on people with fewer than x HD.  These things clutter rulebooks and systems and can be easily forgotten.  This talent's limitations are built into the fiction, with no mechanics required.  Unlike a Charm Person spell, its contours are intuitive and obvious. You can't forget that this power won't work on a dragon because the dragon can't be arrested and prosecuted, because it's a giant fire-breathing lizard with plate-armour scales.  No non-deigetic rules, no numbers.  Just common sense.

Setting impacts

So one thing about weird social powers which may be a strength or a weakness, depending on your tastes and needs, is that each says something quite strong about the game's setting.  So they may or may not work for you in that respect.  Personally, though, I'm really quite excited about the potential these represent and I'm probably going to spend the next couple weeks coming up with more.

Sacrifices must be made!

Like many people, I am (laughably, pointlessly) engaged in writing my own OSR ruleset. My particular one is called Coin & Candle, and one of its defining features is the Sacrifice mechanic. It's very simple. Basically:

If you fail [a roll], you may volunteer to Sacrifice something. This lets you roll again and treat the best roll as the real one.

A Sacrifice could entail (for example): losing or damaging equipment, losing Hit Points, getting Impaired, making noise, wasting time, becoming Deprived, or anything else you think up. The important part is that the Referee considers it a meaningful cost in the circumstances.

Why do I think this is good?

1. It's simple.

If you're like me, you like the idea of resolution mechanics with more granular outcomes than a pass/fail binary. Mixed successes or critical failures can move things forward in delightfully unexpected ways. But if you're even more like me, then you've found that sometimes you really have to strain your brain to come up with complications to a player's success. It turns out that, in many cases, life really is a pass/fail binary. This increases the cognitive load for every roll and potentially slows things down.

The Sacrifice mechanic avoids this problem by, basically, making degrees of success opt-in. Rolls are simply binary unless the player declares they want to make a Sacrifice and proposes specifically what they will give up. After that, "success" becomes partial success and a "failure" turns into a critical failure, basically.

The fact the onus is solely on the player takes pressure off the referee. Of course, the referee is free to suggest what a Sacrifice could be if something occurs to them, but the fact they don't have to makes their life easier.

2. It's active.

A side-effect of Sacrifices being a player's choice is that... well, it's their choice. They are still actively engaged after the die is rolled, rather than passively receiving a narration of their fate. They're still making mechanical decisions! They have more options! It gives them agency and makes them feel more directly involved.

A side-side-effect is that this will (I hope) take some sting out of partial successes and critical failures. It's easy to feel mocked by fate when you roll a critical fail in other systems, but when it happens in Coin & Candle you know you went into it with your eyes open, and it feels less arbitrary. They have ownership over the outcome and so it doesn't feel as bad.

3. It's associated.

Sacrifices are meant to be diegetic. So if you Sacrifice to succeed at picking a lock (a "partial success", basically), that might mean you had to use a bit of force, meaning the lockpick breaks or it's obvious someone has tampered with it. What this means is that the choice faced by the player and the PC is the same. None of this "You get the chest open, but because it's a partial success a guard coincidentally enters the room!" bollocks.  I just like this because it helps you get inro the head of your character a bit more.

4. It makes combat less deadly without diminishing the sense of danger (and also makes it more dynamic).

This one is more a matter of taste, but I think Sacrifices particularly shine in combat. In C&C, no one (especially a PC) has a lot of HP. On paper, it's not that improbable that you're just one-hit killed without having the chance to do anything (something true of many OSR systems). Some people love this; I know for a fact my players hate this (they made sure of that).

Say an enemy rolls really well and a PC is lined up to take 5 damage. They have 2 HP. The player can choose to, I don't know, drop their weapon in return for a reroll.  They do so, and as a result only take 1 damage. The referee narrates how the PC makes a desperate dive, and the blade aimed at their heart merely gouges their arm. As a result, they lose their grip on their sword and it lands at their opponent's feet.

The ability to Sacrifice makes immediate death less likely, but the sense of danger is not decreased because:

1. you were still put into a bad position;
2. you saw how much damage you were about to take, and know how narrowly you avoided it; and
3. when you Sacrifice, you can still potentially fail!

Two things are accomplished: the player was given an interesting choice, and the fight developed in an exciting and unforeseen way instead of simply ending. Much better than a simple hit or miss, in my opinion.

Combat Sacrifice Table (d10)

Because of how frequent combat is likely to be, I thought it would be wise to have a random table of potential combat Sacrifices. Just to ease mental load, keep things moving, and keep things unpredictable.

1. Something in one of your hands is broken/dropped.
2. Your pack is torn open, and the contents spill everywhere.
3. You are knocked down.
4. A random item in your pack/belt is damaged.
5. Your ankle is sprained.
6. Dead arm (one arm useless for the rest of the fight).
7. Foes are enraged. They focus fire on you next round. If they were already after you, their attacks get a +1 bonus.
8. Blinded until you spend an action clearing your eyes.
9. Winded (you may only move or act next round).
10. Stunned (you cannot do anything next round).

Perhaps if the player can't think of a suitable Sacrifice they can consent to roll on this table.

5E Only Has One Class

I want to preface this by stating, as clearly as possible, that I don't think 5e's hyper-fixation on violence is immoral or unhealthy or harmful. It's only make-believe, after all. You might get that idea, reading this post, but it's not the violence per se that bothers me. It's the way violence fills up the whole experience and eclipses everything else.

Anyway...

This essay disorganised rant was prompted by a blog post I read a couple weeks ago that I can't find anymore. I think it was by Prismatic Wasteland? Anyway, the post was about something unrelated but there was a tangent at one point where the author opined (committing OSR heresy) that 5e is Good Actually, and in particular Good because players feel like they have a ton of flexibility to create the kind of character they want to be.

This gasted my flabbers.

Now, while 5e isn't my personal cup of tea, I don't begrudge others for liking it. But I was astonished someone would describe flexibility in character creation as a strength of 5e when the lack of that flexibility is one of 5e's defining flaws, in my opinion.

I guess at first glance it seems like your imagination is the limit. You can be a swashbuckling swordswoman! A wizard who commands fire and lightning! A phantom assassin! A brilliant weaponsmith! An invincible berserker! An infallible sharpshooter! A holy crusader! Et cetera, et cetera.

But do you see what all those have in common? Those are all characters defined by the violence they can inflict. Yeah, you can kill with a sword, or a fireball, or a bear, but the end result is the same. All of 5e's classes are just subclasses of the Big Class that all PCs belong to: Killer.

This inflexibility is everywhere once you notice it. Most of the class and subclass features make you more effective in combat. Most of the spells are variations on "gun" or "bomb". Almost all characters made with point buy are combat-optimised and thus interchangable (i.e. main attribute high, DEX and CON just behind it, everything else as low as possible).

So I guess it's true that you can make whatever kind of character you want, provided you want to make a superpowered warrior of some kind. Which, hey, might be enough freedom for most people (I do not mean that condescendingly). To me it just feels like such a narrow band to work in.

The result is that PCs don't feel distinct enough for me (mechanically, at least). You can't really have a team of diverse specialists like a classic heist film; everyone is a violence specialist differentiated by their secondary skills.

Now, the (non-Bethesda) Fallout games? Those had freedom in character creation. You could, if you wanted, be hilariously incompetent at fighting in all its forms and get by solely on hacking skills or having strong friends or cheesing the casinos and buying your way to victory. You never have to put skill points into guns. You can forgo all combat-related traits and perks. And that character's journey through the wasteland will be fun and interesting in a completely different way than that of a character with maxed-out Melee and the Slayer perk.

Compare 5e: everyone has weapon proficiencies, whether they want them or not. Rogues have to have Sneak Attack. Druids have to have Wild Shape. Spellcasters always have the option to take combat spells. 

Yeah, I guess you could just ignore your combat abilities in actual play. But if an ability is on your sheet, it's informing your character even if you don't use it. Here's an example: your rogue technically can do big damage with Sneak Attack but always chooses to lie or evade or bribe instead. But that's not quite the same as in Fallout, is it? That rogue isn't not a killing machine, they're just a killing machine who has sworn an oath of pacifism.

5e can't give you the completely different experience of being a noodle-armed weakling who avoids fights because they have to,  who relies on wits and guile because they have to. The closest it can give is being a big-dick swaggering badass temporarily dwarfed by an even bigger-dicked dragon. (what the fuck am I talking about?) You can't play as a grandma who specialises in brewing potions without that granny also being able to fuck up the average bandit effortlessly. You can play a craven, silver-tongued conman only if that conman is physically able to go toe-to-toe with an owlbear and not die instantly.

Am I making any sense? Removing options can give you more freedom! (really though, what the fuck am I talking about?)

So I guess that was a very long way of saying that I disagree with the idea that 5e gives you lots of character options and, in fact, I find 5e character creation chafingly restrictive.

... why did I spend my whole morning writing this?