Could be because they're too powerful, too different, too complicated or any other reason. Just whatever you struggle to include, also preferably say what you struggle with about them
Do summons seem either too powerful or utterly redundant? Does precognition make your head spin? Do elements seem pointless if they aren't the basis of the system?
Asking from a watsonian(in universe) perspective, why mages fight with spells that can be dodged or won't immediately end a fight?
Assuming there's some kind of fireball or somewhat standard spell with similar properties to one in your system, why is that the default instead of something like turning people into newts or mind control?
A fireball can be dodged, if there are spells that are instantaneous, why aren't they the standard, even if it were just setting people on fire by looking at them
Fire burns but a burning opponent can still fight back, why don't mages completely remove opponents from the fight?
To be clear for anyone confused, I understand that the doyalist(out of universe) reason is to make things more interesting, both by making fights more than a death note quickdraw and add variety in powers
I've recently been inspired on a way to incorporate skill progression into a part of my system in the form of how far from iron can they move on the periodic table, separate from power progression which is mostly about scale, so a skilled but weak alchemist can make a small amount of gold and a powerful but unskilled one can make mountains of iron
In part because I'm looking for inspiration for other parts of my system, how does progression look in your systems?
So my system is based on what's basically mana(I have a different name for it but I don't think it's relevant here) that comes exclusively from oxygen atoms(it's an everyone breathes the same air kinda thing)
That mana can be used to create other elements with much less energy than other existing methods, with the exceptions of oxygen and basically any element that could make a nuclear explosion(because I don't want "nuke wizard" to be the optimal strategy)
Up till now I'd not even thought of antimatter factoring in, but now that I have I've decided that mana can't create antimatter, but anti-oxygen has anti-mana that can make non-oxygen antimatter
So with those rules to my system understood(there is more to the system but I suspect this is all that's super important for now) the setting is effectively the modern world but magic spontaneously began existing one day, with it being very apparent to everyone that at least something was going on
My plans had been that much of the information on magic systems would come from online discussions between people with a lot of free time, governments and corporations would attempt to do research but beurocracy and red tape would result in them taking forever to learn stuff that'd been figured out weeks ago online. Part of how I justify this is that nothing in my magic system requires scarce resources or anything, so similar to how with enough time and some basic tools theoretically anyone can derive all of Newtonian physics anyone with enough time can discover all of my magic system
However this new idea with antimatter I can see the countries or whatever other type of entities able to produce antimatter or more specifically anti-oxygen being in a much stronger position because of the energy they could produce
So if anyone here knows these things, who currently has antimatter production capabilities and who has the most? Do they currently have agreements with others and might they change with magic existing? And what are the main difficulties of building antimatter production?
I will be googling these, especially the last one as I may be the best equipped to see how my magic system can make construction easier
Recent double bald experiments but the university of very real facts found that pure liquid gold was able to cool computer servers three to five times faster than water and was cheaper to run
The CEO predicts this will lower the price of gold as humanity now has an actual use for the useless shiny metal people will want to get rid of their gold for the betterment of the ai revolution
I have a relatively coherent magic system with a lot of rules that I at least think would make sense to most people they were explained to, however I have some rules that somewhat intentionally break from the otherwise coherent logic, both because I think they make it more fun and because I want people in my setting to be confused and come up with their own explanations for them.
The setting is modern day with magic just appearing/beginning relatively recently
Rule 1. Anything magical made for cutting can be blocked and pushed against by another magic cutting tool or a mundane blade. This is basically the sword/lightsaber rule. Does it make sense that fire you already released from your wand can apply force back on your wand, just because it's kinda sword shaped? Not really, and that's kinda the point
Rule 2. Any food conjured via magic will taste off and/or bland(kinda like replicated food in star trek), with the sole exception of garlic bread
Rule 3. Unlike most other elements from the periodic table, fissile nuclear material requires as much energy to create via magic as it will generate through fission(this might not be questioned as much as they are unstable so might just seem difficult to make, nuclear isotopes are on the table just really only the ones for like RTGs and stuff)
A fey spirit offers you a deal
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You can have any singular superpower you want(the powers of X character doesn't work)
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The power can come with necessary secondary powers like the ability to survive high speeds without protection or special clothes, but they'll only be active when necessary and only do what they need to. So running into a wall at super speed will hurt similarly to doings so at your normal top speed and stuff like that
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No powers that amount to all other powers like omnipotence or reality warping(this is more for creativity than power level)
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But before you get very good with it you will be contacted by every country you know of all working together.
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They'll have agreed to all work together in mutual defence of eachother but will only act in response to you attacking one of them. Whatever your powers are they'll convince you that they can counter you(if you can destroy the world they have indestructible bunkers with big red buttons that kill you, if you have mind control they have people wearing mind control proof hats with mind control detectors. If you have weaker powers the minimum they threaten you with is combined conventional military action no matter how overkill that is)
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In addition to that there are some things you could consider benefits:
- You'll have the option to go public with your power if you want and even run a business with it if you want without fear of being kidnapped. Or you could keep your power a secret from the general public if you like provided you don't cause issues big enough for the governments(i.e don't cheat at the olympics or commit crimes that are a national issue)
- Your own government will want to get on your good side to either use your power as is or attempt to replicate it. The more they can benefit from your power the more they'll be willing to do what you want with things like changing laws or giving you personal benefits. Generally they will be more interested in non-combative uses for your powers as to deploy you in combat they need to assume everyone else that you'll stop at a given point
Edit: you won't be kidnapped by any government and if you go public they'll protect you from being kidnapped by non-government entities. I thought this was sufficiently implied by your own government wanting to be on your good side but it seems that didn't come across to everyone
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Do you take the deal? If so what power do you choose and what do you do with it?
I'm only just learning about SWN after it was suggested as a somewhat rules light sci fi ttrpg(rules light in comparison to d&d 5e) just so it's clear where I'm coming from
I personally dislike psychic powers being considered a sci fi thing, which is why I'm asking this. I've skimmed some of the rules in the free version of the revised edition, I don't know exactly what is in the paid rules so I don't know if there are more classes, if not having only 2 classes and a middle ground between them seems not very fun, especially since psionics seem to have some of the more complex mechanics
I was thinking of reflavouring psionics as nanite programming, like nano-technology would be a super common level 5 tech but the programming has stopped working so to use them you need to hack in and figure out how to reprogram them yourself. The most difficult stuff to reflavour seems to be metapsionics, unless all nanite users have them inside their bodies or control chips in their brains but that seems like it'd overlap with cybernetics (edit: which I'm looking at rn)
I also can't think of how to reflavour torching, how essential is it to gameplay balance? If it can be removed I might be able to reflavour metapsionics as hacking someone else's nanite controller or the nanites themselves
Besides characters that seemingly could just not doing so, how do you keep certain abilities from immediately becoming the central focus of any conflict they're involved with?
For example earthbending from ATLA, I somewhat recently head someone ask why earthbenders don't just immediately trap their opponents in tight holes, they occasionally do so for comedy but asside from opposing earthbenders who may be able to escape, why not immediately suck firebenders into the ground where they can't move their arms? Sure there are situations that you can't do this, but that doesn't give a reason not to in situations where you can
Another is teleportation, there's always the question of what happens when you teleport to where something already is, sometimes the answer is telefraging, where the object already there blows up with the new object completely unharmed, regardless of any defences the existing object had. So why is this not the primary weapon? Why is fighting not entirely about how to counter telefraging? Like how trenches are the first answer we had to machine guns and artillery
Summoning or multiplication. These basically do the same thing, if you can magically increase the numbers of your side why not do that every time? I think naruto dealt with this in multiple ways, shadow clones are mostly prohibitively expensive for anyone not named uzumaki and usually vanish with a single hit. Summons I may have been mislead about but as I understand it they can only have as much chakra as you spend on summoning them, meaning they're mostly useful for expanding your tool kit by using abilities of your summon that you don't have, like flying by summoning a bird, your summon having jutsu you do not or them just being really big. There's also the edo tensei summoning which basically removes the chakra restriction and does become the central focus when it gets used
Mind control. Honestly I can't think of any system with an interesting answer to this, several seem to basically have it be impossible to mind control someone stronger than you or at most better at a particular skill that's usually better the stronger someone is so sometimes you can control someone slightly stronger than yourself
So how do you balance these or any other abilities that would seem to demand immediately attention, like setting anyone you look at on fire(specifically where there's no beam or projectile to block, just immediate ignition for anyone in your field of view)
I have my system's answers to some of these in this post, if you could please go and interact with it I would appreciate that https://www.reddit.com/r/magicbuilding/s/CxaOAbTmvY
There are many other things that can be done in my system that have certain nuances but I want to keep this kinda short
My system runs on essentially mana particles, but they aren't stored in the body, they're just in the environment and you use muscles to manipulate them, each muscles essentially having mana specific telekinesis and getting tired as it's used
Where I think this gets interesting is how mana needs to be used in fights because of this, because both you and your opponent can manipulate mana attacks that are too straightforward(and boring to watch) are very ineffective, for example if someone were to try force chocking like it's star wars you all you have to do is disrupt the mana they send towards your neck. The force you can expert on mana depends on your physical strength but also on it's proximity to you, the latter working somewhat like leverage, this does however leave some room for especially powerful people(mostly villains) to still force chock others to show their power, somewhat like lifting something with a single outstretched arm
To elaborate on the way this affects fighting, this means telekinetic type powers can mostly just throw things and not really crush opponents unless it's with a long object where one end is closer to the user than the opponent. You can't just set someone on fire you need to make a fireball outside their mana catching range and let if fly over to them
Teleportation is somewhat of an exception to this, you can teleport stuff by just using mana where it is without needing to also use mana on where it's going, this is mostly balanced by teleportation being very exhausting
Mind control is also extremely difficult for this reason as well as how mana actually does useful things. Mana is actually 2 particles, positive and negative, and they only do things when they collide with each other and it's at that point of collision that magic happens, unless directed by the intent of a mage mana collisions just make harmless sparks. This is used to protect against mind control by circulating mana particles around one's self, in some way alternating between positive and negative so any mana intended to control you will collide with the shield instead and just turn into sparks
Mind control does still have some use but mostly to control animals. Though there are some more details I could go into if asked
Creating portals requires an amount of magical energy(for simplicity we can call it mana right now but there are some differences) and as things pass through a portal that mana is used up in proportion to the volume(not mass) of things passingthrough. More mana can be added to a portal to keep it open longer. Portals can be made to only allow certain things through in order to improve the volume that can pass through per mana used
A portal can be manually closed and anything solid inside the portal can be cut however doing so uses up about as much or more mana as cutting the object by other means would. If a portal runs out of mana it will automatically close cutting off whatever is inside, however when this happens the portal's creator will essentially be in mana debt and unable to create new portals until they pay back twice as much mana as would have been necessary to close the portal manually. A portal can also be manually closed by going into mana debt
Portals are treated as a type of object and can be attached to a surface or be free floating. There is a separate teleportation power that can teleport one end of a portal or an object one is attached to which brings the portal with it
It's been a while since I read it but I have some thoughts on the magic in skulduggery pleasant. This may be a bit of a ramble, feel free to comment without reading past this
Some details established early on seem to hold up relatively well, like elemental magic being the most common, not because I counted the number of characters who use it but because other magics seem either very limited or come with big downsides. Bone breaking both only works through fingertips and needs skin contact, energy throwing needs 2 hands and honesty seems no better than a fireball, necromancy is pretty versatile but requires an item you can be separated from, but elemental magic, no Achilles heel and 3 decent tools you get access to with earth mostly being a last ditch panic button unless you have the same kind of character privileges that let you learn how to fly
There are other details that clearly get retconed, namely Tanith's lock picking ability was all but stated to be related to her wall walking and incompatible with elemental magic, but it was later explained as an optional thing pretty much separate from whatever magic you choose to stick with, so an elementalist could totally have that lock picking ability(unless it was clarified at some point I didn't get to) it wouldn't surprise me if other stuff like making magic clothes were similar optional magics that didn't conflict with your main magic, the second elementalist in the series was a tailor after all
(Not a quality judgement) the power level of the magic seemed relatively low, enough that picking up a second gun can be presented as a significant power up, as well as hand to hand fighting being a pretty constant feature and not even magically enhanced hand to hand aside from Tanith confusing people by fighting upside-down. Though I think after the end of the last main book I finished I wouldn't be surprised if some power creep began to occur
This may be that I just misunderstood at the time but the exact strength of the fodder soldiers called hollow men seemed a bit inconsistent, mostly in that they actually beat a couple cleavers(magic super soldiers basically) like sure a cleaver probably isn't as strong as a main character but they're still something the main characters run from, so I don't see how they could be beated by something weak enough to be taken out by a teenage girl whose only combat skills comes from watching some adults for maybe a week
Also I hope there isn't some controversy with Derek Landy
I've been thinking about my system's teleportation lately and my current working numbers are that an average person teleporting themself or an identical volume(teleportation in my system cares about distance and volume but not mass) any distance takes as much energy as running that distance across flat ground
Similarly I'm thinking that telekinetic abilities can move an average person's mass at a given speed with the same energy as that average person riding a bicycle at that speed
As you can probably see the resource in my system is a person's physical stamina. Though there are ways to improve efficiency in my system, usually at the cost of casting time/difficulty, allowing for the same effects at lower energy costs
I think the go to thing is to tie the character and their power together(applies to chosen power systems too but arguably less so) so do you make characters first and figure out powers for them or make interesting powers then figure out what kind of characters fit them?
Do you decide on their role in the story first? Like "I need a mentor character" or do you make them and figure out the role they can take? Like "I have all these characters, now let's see, yeah they can be a mentor"
Do you set standards of power/complexity for most of your powers or just make what you want and say some people are just luckier?
The way teleportation works in this system is you need to apply mana to 1 side of the teleport, you could for example apply mana to an object in your hand to teleport it far away or apply mana to empty space above your hand to teleport a far away object to your hand
The mass of what's being teleported is irrelevant, mana expenditure is determined by volume as you need your mana to cover/fill the space of the teleportation target/the space the target is teleporting into
A particular aesthetic or vivid descriptions?
Certain mechanics or tropes?
Examples of possibilities within the rules?
Personally I look for some level of non-combat utility, some option for healing otherwise permanent damage, and one's power and destiny not being ultimately decided by the circumstances of their birth
So my system kinda makes it exceedingly difficult for governments to maintain a monopoly on minting money, this caused most economies to crash a while after magic began(my setting was normal modern day until magic just became a thing one day) after that people began using barter but it soon became apparent that the most valuable goods were magic items(also called impossible items) and the most valuable service was maintaining those magic/impossible items(because the magic degrades with both time and use) this lead to the development of items that restored other items and the use of said restoration items as the medium of exchange
These magic/impossible items gradually standardised into small pieces of corundum in various colours and geometric shapes to denote their value, with the pieces reshaping themselves and changing colour when they degrade below the threshold of a given denomination
The denominations of corundum are:
- 0, transparent and flat(could be a disk, square or any other 2d shape, mostly exist for visually impared folk to know when one is used up)
- 1, green tetrahedron
- 5, blue cube
- 10, white octahedron
- 20, red dodecahedron
- 50, yellow icosahedron
- 100, black sphere
The greater number of smaller faces on larger denominations is intended to reduce the chance of fractures shattering large sums of money(also you could legit play d&d with your money)
Other materials like different crystals or shapes are used, but also once these denominations were standardised the then struggling government began taking them as taxes which stabilised them and added reason to preference this system. I am speaking about the government of the country in which my story takes place, others have additional denominations like orange triangular bipyramids or rhombic triacontahedrons as 2 or 200 denominations respectively or some variety of grey or metallic colours
As stated the government doesn't have a monopoly on minting, anyone can make money on their own if they so choose, you might think this would cause uncontrolled inflation or nobody would work but remember they're also used to essentially power any other magic/impossible item. This money can be used for almost anything with the right item which uses it up deflating it in addition to it's natural decay over time and the people "not working" are essentially performing the service of maintaining these other items
Also the reason I keep mentioning impossible as an option for the name of items is because the way they're made requires the person doing so to think about what they're doing defying physics or being "impossible" but magic is also not wrong as a description
What type of crystal minerals would be best for a currency?
I'm doing some fantasy world building and I want to use some kind of crystal for a currency in the world, using different colours for different denominations(yes, strongly inspired by the zelda rupee)
I'm been thinking of corundum because I know it has a wide variety of colours, but really because I already knew it's mineral name
The main thing I think needs considering is probably durability, I've heard beryl(specifically I heard this about emeralds but you know) are very fragile so I assume not very good for day to day handling, and diamonds too I understand are very hard but brittle, though I'm not sure if a drop from waist height to pavement would chip or shatter them, but is that just something all crystal minerals suffer from? Are there any crystals that are particularly resistant to both drops and scratches?
If it changes anything I'm thinking of the crystals being roughly coin size, but understandable if they can't be that shape. Bonus points I guess if they can be lab grown because that's basically how they'll be made in setting(I assume most if not all can be with only a few colourations we haven't figured out yet)
Either give an original idea or name and describe one from pop culture and I'll do my best to replicate it in my system. However a couple things
No abilities that relate directly back to their magic system of origin. So no abilities to copy other abilities or counterspell or anything, those aren't a thing in my system outside certain emergent details of my particle physics and kinda the creation category
If what exactly the spell/ability does is too unclear I'm likely to ignore it because it could probably be done many ways. Like how does harry patter's killing curse kill? Stop the heart/brain? Does it do something to the soul? Does it liquefy a target's insides?
And so you're not completely lost, what's necessary to know here is that everyone in my system builds powers from four categories, with the option to specialise in just one or pick one to be their primary and another to be their secondary. Those categories are:
Creation: making stuff from nothing, but also deleting stuff into nothing or transmuting things into other things
Perception: super senses like x-ray vision and bullet time
Control: both of minds and inanimate objects which can be moved with telekinesis
Teleportation:... teleporting stuff
Examples of some pop culture abilities:
Most benders from atla would just be control specialists with the exception of firebenders who would probably have creation as their primary and control their secondary as they most often create fire already going where they want, not much turning a fireball after it's thrown or anything like that
Terraria's spelunker potion would be a perception effect, though creation the potion itself would require that and creation too, also in my system the potion could lose it's effect if not consumed soon enough
Cyclops from x-men could be done a few ways, he could simply be a creation specialist just creating punch beams, he could also have creation and teleportation to combine them into making portals to the punch dimension. He could also just have modded irises to do either of these without being locked into creation or teleportation
Suppose you were given a button that when pressed would make your magic system real, if only some people can use it a number of people on earth become capable with about the same commonality as the people in your setting. So if 1 in 10 people in your world could use magic 1 in 10 on earth could too, if only elves can use magic those people are turning into elves
People capable of using magic will be aware of their new capabilities and able to use the most basic aspects immediately
Also does your answer change if you are assured you'll be one of the people with magic or not?
Edit: if everyone in your setting can use magic everyone on earth can now use it too, I thought that was obvious