Magic in Video Games
- Thread starter ReverseEngineered
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It's not technically magic, more like The Force, but the closest thing to what you described would probably be the psi powers from Psi-Ops.
These are great ideas on the presentation side, but things can be done on the mechanic side as well. Fire could cause your character to flail around until he puts it out, poison could limit your vision (which is as much presentation as mechanic in how it affects your control), ice could slow your movement or freeze you in place (while perhaps increasing your damage resistance). Yes, they still all include damage over time, but they also include secondary effects that increase the amount of variation between abilities.Cheeze_Pavilion said:
As for how this pertains to magic being any different than the others, mechanically there doesn't have to be a difference. Magic doesn't have to be inherently different than any other mechanic, it just has to feel like magic to the player, and that's what Geldon and I have been discussing.
Earlier on, EvilMaggot suggested Diablo II as a good game for magic. I tried it out and I must say, it does feel more like magic than other games. I can't buy better spells -- I learn them through skill points as I level. When I cast a fireball, I actually feel that rush of power, unlike when I swing my sword. It works differently from regular weapons, it "looks" magical on the screen, and (as one may come to expect from magic in RPGs) I can do a big burst of damage quickly, but can't sustain it. That's pretty much the staple of magic in RPGs.
Good luck making enough gold to make magic weilding fesiable.x434343 said:
I always liked the original Final Fantasy approach.
You have the redhead with a sword who can steadily whittle away at hordes over a period of time, or you have the (Insert any dialogue of Black Mage from 8BT) who kills everything in one fell swoop.
If you'd be willing to look at something different, there always is Magic Pengel, but thats mostly brightly-colored rock-paper-scizzors.
Have you ever tried programming?JMeganSnow said:
Programming can be mystical even to those with computer science degrees (like myself). The difference between mystical and mechanical are our levels of understanding. To an experienced programmer, computers rigidly follow carefully planned systems of rules. To a layperson, computers are magic -- that often blows up in your face.I don't agree with you that the addition of anything unreliable or random is not fun. People play gambling games all the time and enjoy them, despite their entire (if not always obvious) inability to affect the outcome. Some of the most enjoyable (and hilarious) abilities in games are the ones where you're never quite sure what will happen. There's a difference when that random factor is a glitch or otherwise inconsistent with the world (e.g. headshots miss sometimes even when you are dead on accurate), but if magic were modeled with random variation (not entirely random, just somewhat), it would add an extra level of risk vs. reward. I'm not saying you (or any particular person) would enjoy it, but many people like taking risks.
The reagent part is obviously not necessary, but it does well for realism and for balancing issues. You can completely do away with it if spells are no more potent than every other type of combat, but that's boring. Allowing something like resurrection or the fireball-to-end-man is really enjoyable, but doing it all the time ruins balance. Adding an inherent limiting factor (mana, concentration, endurance, reagents) is a game necessity to limit things like that. At least reagents are typically more believable than "mana".
As above, I don't buy your assertion that you can't have mysticism with an underlying rule system. You just have to hide the rules enough that they aren't obvious. Then it feels almost random, even if it's not.
I'm afraid that calling it a deus ex machina is a confusion of terms. In a deus ex machina, some completely unexplained, unexpected external force (the god in the machine) resolves the otherwise unresolvable plot. It's considered a poor plot device because it allows an author who has twisted an unresolvable web in his plot to suddenly break it apart without any real effort. It comes as a total shock, and without any logical explanation, leaves the audience unable to suspend disbelief.
Compare that to a magic system that includes both user control and some level of random variation. It's easy to explain why: magic is unpredictable and we don't fully understand how to control it. Sometimes it doesn't do exactly what we want. This is no different from firing a gun -- the bullet never lands exactly where you aim. It's logical, internally consistent, and doesn't have to come unexpectedly. Sure, it can be made into a deus ex machina (the player's fireball -- which normally throws a ball of fire with more or less accuracy -- instead turns the unbeatable monster into a chicken, because magic is funny like that), but it doesn't have to be.
I whole-heartedly agree. Hack-and-slash games are a dime a dozen. We should be able to do more in games than just kill stuff.
Like David Copperfield making an elephant disappear, all it takes is a little misdirection.
On second thought, I didn't make the point I was intending to make (though the point of the previous post still stands).Cheeze_Pavilion said:
The problem is as you said: they both have the same effect in the rules. So if we want them to be different, we change the effect!
Let swords or guns be their boring old selves, dealing damage (and perhaps taking a limb every now and then). Give magic more varied effects: damage over time, buffs and debuffs, utility, and other external things. To me, that's a major part of what makes magic magical -- it's more than just damage.
Yes, yes I have.ReverseEngineered said:Have you ever tried programming?
The type of randomness involved in making magic in a game feel more "mystical" is not die-roll randomness, which involves the hard and fast rules of probability. It means, ultimately, descending to the level of "GM fiat" at unpredictable times when the magic would just stop working or not work properly. It's *barely* possible to mimic this in tabletop games where there's an actual human on hand to manage the non-system. It won't work at all in a computer game.
A given magic system may *feel* mystical at the beginning when you're still figuring out the rules, but ultimately you're going to figure them out and it becomes yet another technological, mechanical system. The shrines in Diablo were a good example of this: they seemed cool and mysterious at first when you didn't know what they did, but eventually you figured out which shrines did what.
A magic system that you can, literally, *never figure out* would make a game a painful exercise in confusion.
Instead of talking about mysticism, however, what you can focus on are achievable goals like adding more *variety* into games. This can even come about through simple things like the fact that your fire spell set a building on fire. It's more effort to code, but the sheer unexpectedness of actually *setting a building on fire* in an RPG would be pretty impressive.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Eternal Darkness. While the magic was pretty basic, you made all your own spells. You found various runes (as well as codex's that told you what they did (though they weren't necessary), you then took one alignment rune, one for effect, and one for a target. Alignment meant that it affected sanity, magic, or health, target could mean items, yourself, or enemies, and effects ranged from damage, to repairing, and other things. I never had a real chance to play with it due to it not being my copy of the game, but it seemed very interesting.
I've thought of a system where magic is something that player can attempt regardless of skills/knowledge. Rather than having Fire Lv1, the player can choose where to cast a spell, how much power they want to put into it, etc. The power would draw from their magic pool, and then more would be drawn upon to control the spell. If they failed to have enough magic to control it, it would backfire, and could harm them, go out of control, fizzle, or whatever. As a player repeatedly used the same kind of spell, they would eventually become better at it, meaning if the used the same kind of control on a spell, they could cast more powerful versions of it for less magic. This would lead into perks, allowing the player to use their magic skills to make life easier. I envisioned this in a FPS type game, where, if the player had enough magical ability and used telekinesis properly for long enough, they could soon reload with it, allowing them keep a hand free to use a pistol or something.
The players can find books, scrolls, and teachers that will teach them new concepts that will inform the player of ways to cast magic to make it more efficient. The character wouldn't need to read these scrolls for it to work, but it would be harder and more prone to backfire until the character had knowledge of them. Players could also enchant things to let them cast a spell through it, making it take less magic and less chance of a backfire, however, their skill with that spell might deteriorate and they wouldn't be able to modify it on the fly. Enemy magicians would soon learn of your style of magic and develop counters to it, forcing the player to think up new ways to harm them.
I've thought of a system where magic is something that player can attempt regardless of skills/knowledge. Rather than having Fire Lv1, the player can choose where to cast a spell, how much power they want to put into it, etc. The power would draw from their magic pool, and then more would be drawn upon to control the spell. If they failed to have enough magic to control it, it would backfire, and could harm them, go out of control, fizzle, or whatever. As a player repeatedly used the same kind of spell, they would eventually become better at it, meaning if the used the same kind of control on a spell, they could cast more powerful versions of it for less magic. This would lead into perks, allowing the player to use their magic skills to make life easier. I envisioned this in a FPS type game, where, if the player had enough magical ability and used telekinesis properly for long enough, they could soon reload with it, allowing them keep a hand free to use a pistol or something.
The players can find books, scrolls, and teachers that will teach them new concepts that will inform the player of ways to cast magic to make it more efficient. The character wouldn't need to read these scrolls for it to work, but it would be harder and more prone to backfire until the character had knowledge of them. Players could also enchant things to let them cast a spell through it, making it take less magic and less chance of a backfire, however, their skill with that spell might deteriorate and they wouldn't be able to modify it on the fly. Enemy magicians would soon learn of your style of magic and develop counters to it, forcing the player to think up new ways to harm them.
JMeganSnow said:
I might have to disagree.
I've been trying to put together a magic system for games (not one game, but whatever game could take it) which was built on a set of runes. Each rune would have a certain energy attached to it, and learning a rune would give you both what it looked like, and what energy was attached to it (One rune would be fire, another enhancement, etc).
Using runes one at a time, or even in pairs would be straight forward. However, each rune would effect each other rune in different ways: Air Fire might create smoke while Fire Air causes heat damage in an area. Thus, chaining many runes together would have powerful effects, but not necessarily what you wanted.
Worse, environments would have a small effect on runes: deserts make Fire, Sun, and other such runes more powerful, while a cave would make Earth, Dark, and similar runes more powerful. This wouldn't be enough to effect most simple spells (few runes), but as your spells got more complex, the risk of being surprised in a new environment would grow.
As such, figuring out most basic spells would be easy: Fireball is Fire Blast, and the more Fires you start with, the more it hurts, and the more Blasts you finish with, the bigger it is. However, when I chain my Summon Fire Sun Life Light Fire Air: Summon Sunhawk, I might have to worry when I enter a cave, and the Fire, Sun and Light runes aren't doing what I want them to do, and the Air rune is doing more than I want it to.
However, if you want a game that does it well already, I'm not sure there is a good one. The only one I can name is GURPS, and that's a tabletop game, and it still falls victim to making it fit in with everything else.
That's lovely, but from what I've seen introducing something to make the player "worry" does not add to the fun of the game--they're already worried enough about staying alive. Either they'll give up on using the spell (if the variation is too wide) or they'll treat it as though it's always going to be the least-effective value (if the variation is small). You might get the occasional obsessive player who buys the strategy guide and obsesses over maximizing their spells, but the sane people will consider it an enormous pain in the ass.ZacQuickSilver said:
Of course, magic could be a completely optional subset of the game available to those that want to learn how to use it. The more simple minded players could preoccupy themselves by smashing or stabbing things with a large stabbing or smashing implement.JMeganSnow said: