Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The shoulders of giants

  If you know me at all, you know that I've been playing games since I was, well, it's been a while. I started with Dungeons & Dragons red box basic edition and moved on to expert, then Advanced 2nd edition and 3rd edition. I've also messed about with GURPS, Warhammer Fantasy, Toon and others. But I've never been 100% satisfied with any of them, especially when it comes to the idea of Magic.
 Magic is one of those ideas that's hard to deal with in a game "simulation" like D&D and I understand that. The problem, in my opinion, is that of "here's the spells that exits and you can choose up to x number of them". What? Magic shouldn't have rules like that. As soon as you say "if I have A, say B and do C I get result 1" that's science; A+B+C=1 is science, not Magic. If 'real' magic did exist, it would be shaped and colored by the person accessing it. Even if there were similar end results, like a magical bolt of pure force, your would be accessed differently than mine and the results could look very different, even from casting to casting as it could be shaded by emotions and such.
 It is for this reason and others that I am being dumb enough to try to modify a game to work the way I want. No set spell lists, just a resource pool that you can tap and use in whatever way you want.
 It is going to be a HUGE job. I know this. Especially since I will be pulling ideas from at least five different sources.
 There are pieces that will be lifted directly from other games so this will likely never be published. Too many legal issues to be worth it. If it ever done, it will only be for myself. But I'm going to try.

 Stay tuned.

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