Magic versus, uh, brain magic

[dorchadas]

A while ago I wrote about converting Dark Sun over to an Exalted-based system, and while the idea sat in my head for a while, I've since started working on it and gotten pretty far.

The basic premise of Dark Sun can be summed up with "What if Dungeons & Dragons was also Mad Max crossed with John Carter of Mars?" Blasted desert landscapes, ancient cities ruled by cruel sorcerer-kings, caravans hauled by enormous lizards, the oceans replaced by vast seas of silt, and the power of the mind being the primary supernatural power source. It's that last one that often grated on people, since psionics has always fit in kind of oddly with D&D. It was extremely unbalanced in AD&D 1e, slightly less unbalanced in AD&D 2e but still obviously bolted on, and then starting in d20 they just gave up and made psionics "magic, but like, mind-flavored."

In some ways, this is fair enough. Psychic powers are pretty obviously an attempt to find a scientific explanation for what our ancestors would have called magic, and its use in a lot of sci fi comes down to "magic, but like, mind-flavored," especially in settings like the Darkover or Deryni books. Reading those was why I, unlike a lot of gamers, never thought that psionics didn't fit D&D, whatever that meant. Please, give me more sci fi in my fantasy. Great tastes.

But, their implementation in D&D specifically has always been poor and it's all because of magic. The sphere of what D&D magic can accomplish is "literally anything"--see specifically Wish--and the further existence of spells like Detect Thoughts, Discern Location, Scrying, Telekinesis, Charm Person, Moment of Prescience, and so on means that there's really no conceptual space for psionics to distinguish itself other than through surface trappings. A wizard waves their arms around and a psion grabs their temples, but they do basically the same thing, except the wizard can do everything the psion can and more.

I really don't like the way D&D does magic, if you couldn't tell.

Well, I thought about that when I was writing and I wrote the psionics rules first, divided the powers up into separate "disciplines" with fantasy-sounding names like "The Discipline of Thoughts" (telepathy) or "The Discipline of Doorways" (teleportation), and only then did I go to the magic rules. I thought there should be some carve-out for what magic couldn't do--almost as important as defining what it can do when worldbuilding--so I came up with the following rules:

• Magic Cannot Affect the Mind: Probably the most obvious rule. No reading thoughts, no rummaging in memories, nothing. Magic can make people feel angry or enraged or sad, but only temporarily and all emotions end instantly when the magic does. Only psionics can have lasting effects on people's minds. Similarly, this means that magic cannot force anyone to do anything unless the spell puppets someone's body using force, or uses a threat like, "If you haven't returned the ring to me by the next full moons, you die."
  
• Magic Cannot Teleport the Sorcerer: Part of this is in Dark Sun, travel and survival is supposed to be a concern, but part of it is also that at least in AD&D, teleportation and movement was a whole branch of psionic powers, so I wanted space for that to exist without any overlap.
  
  There's a little cheating here, in that magic can let priests of air fly or sorcerers step through shadows, but there's always some restriction--needing an existing breeze, needing a shadow, diving into silt and emerging from the silt when there's a contiguous path, etc. Only psionics lets the user just disappear and reappear somewhere else.
  
• Magic Can Summon Only Things of the Netherworlds: Dark Sun is heavily entwined with the elements, and rather than priests of deities there are priests of earth, air, fire, and water (and sun, magma, silt, and rain). I called these other places the netherworlds ("other planes" being the traditional name) and ruled that magic can never create something from nothing, it can only call things from the netherworlds. So priests of water can summon water, and priests of air can summon a cool breeze, and sorcerers can summon darkness from the Black (a place of darkness and shadows), but spells like Major Creation don't exist. There's no making things appear without pulling it from somewhere else. That reinforces the resource-poor, dying-world feel of Dark Sun.

That's just a starting point, but keeping that in mind has helped make sure that magic and psionics feel different, and that there's a reason why they both exist as separate powers. I also tried to make mechanics that reflect how the power for psionics is drawn from within the user, but for magic it comes from outside.

I'm still tinkering with it and it's got a way to go, but it's getting there. And having to do this is a good reminder of how important defining what magic can't do is for a gameable setting.

Comments

[shadaras]

Because of when I got into D&D, I never actually knew much about Dark Sun other than the concept -- Eberron was the canon setting I actually got the sourcebooks for, because it was the big one released relatively soon after I was getting into it (and also I love magitech stuff like it leaned into) -- but I think it's fantastic you have so much Dark Sun stuff!

ahhhh that's super cool! :D

[dorchadas]

Eberron was the "what if we took the logical extension of all this magic?" setting with, like, Create Food and Water-based welfare systems and crystal ball telecommunications and so on, right? I never really played any d20 stuff--I had switched to White Wolf games by then--but that aspect appealed to me a lot.

I played up the magitech a lot in the years-long Exalted game I ran.

[shadaras]

Trains and magic robots and stuff like that, yeah. :)

White Wolf is fun too! I've never played Exalted, but I did a lot of Changeling: The Lost at college, and dabbled in some of the other related supernatural games.

[dorchadas]

Changeling: the Lost is great! I like it more than Changeling: the Dreaming, even though I tend to prefer the oWoD stuff over nWoD (due to growing up with it, mostly).

I was definitely a Vampire: the Masquerade kid, though. Next to Exalted, that's the WW game I have the most playtime in.

[shadaras]

Yeah, generational difference. :) I think Masquerade is the only oWoD game I ever played, and I had fun with it right up until it got tangled up with a bad relationship (that sort of frustratingly soured me on vampires in general).

Exalted is the one where you're sorta demigods, right?

[dorchadas]

Yeah, based on the sun (Solars), moon (Lunars), stars (Sidereals), elements (Dragon-Blooded), or void (Abyssals). The initial advertising painted it as the prehistoric past of the World of Darkness, which is why I picked it up, but it split off on its own pretty quickly after that. I picked it up in a game store while visiting greyselke during summer break and fell in love almost immediately.

I've written hundreds of pages of homebrew for it, including entire other settings based on the rules, and ran a six-year-long game of it. It's my favorite RPG of all time.

[shadaras]

That lore sounds fantastic! I've gotta get a copy just to read it someday, I feel like, even if I never play it. :)