New magic system, responsive discussion thread

[Teeke]

Being as the lore section is locked, very wisely, I would like to go ahead and open a thread here in RP discussion to give feedback on the system.

First I'd like to thank the entire staff and lore team that has obviously worked very hard on this new system. The level of transparency and comprehensibility is very nice and makes it easy to understand what we are working with. The outlined schools and levels are very nice to see, and easy enough to understand. An easy reference like this is very helpful and serves the intended purpose well.

I hope it's alright with the staff and lore team if this thread is able to run as a responsive thread to the entire magic system: open questions, critiques, questions, and criticisms may be posted here.


Quick Reference Info
Read this first

Schools of Magic
Animancy - Soul Magic
Cogimency - Thought Magic
Eviscism - Evocation Magic (Magic Missile)
Formistry - Living Things Magic

Levels of Magic
Burn-Out - Someone incapable of using magic
Wash-Out - Someone incapable of learning new skills or teaching others.
Sparked - Someone with newly awakened magical abilities - this person must find a teacher in order to progress - this person has no direct control over magic.
Apprentice - Someone who has found a teacher and has been taught at least one spell.
Journeyman - Someone still relatively new to magic, but more practiced than an apprentice.
Adept - Someone who has trained enough to become competent at magic, is able to learn new skill independently, is able to take students.
Master - Someone who is incredibly skilled in their school, is able to answer any question about the discipline.
Magus - The top dog in a given school of magic.

Spoiler: What is DC?

this is probably just because I'm a Scrub, but what does DC mean?

It's a term coming from Tabletop Roleplay games such as Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons. It means "Difficulty Class" and it just means that you need to roll that number or higher to succeed the difficulty level.

Spoiler: Will the Sisterhood of Shalherana/revivals be affected by this?

How will the changes to mysticism affect the Sisterhood of Shalherana and revivals?a

Effectively not at all.

Spoiler: 8 hour down time required to regenerate mp

@Somnastra
8 hours down time for any character from a single player in order to recoup mp? (can i call it mp?)
What happens if someone is offline for only say, 6 hours?

If a character is logged off, and the player logs in with a different character. . . does this still qualify as the aforementioned character resting?

I shall explain:

We needed a way for the spell points to be reset with an easily-recognizable milestone, but we didn't want to open ourselves up to potentially doubling some mages' spell pools by making the cut-off server reset (some people are still RPing when that happens). And so it was decided that it would reset when the player slept, as opposed to something server-based. We still needed something quantifiable, so the "recommended daily amount of sleep" (who does that, though?) of eight hours was chosen.

I personally am comfortable with this because the people who will be using the magic system are intended to be the folks who will happily and faithfully abide by such rules.

((Important questions and information may be repeated in this op))
((pointless/useless posts will be flagged for removal))

 

[Immerael]

What made you decide to drop Thatmurgy and break Mysticsm into two separate schools? I for one and am in favor of breaking the Mysticsm apart as it had too many things going on imo just curious what your reasoning was.

Thatmurgy from what I've read seems to be one of the easiest schools to prevent meta and power gaming. As all their enchantments must be drawn out before hand in RP with specific activation sequences. Also as much as I personally was not attracted to it as a school To pursue for any of my characters I did think it was pretty cool.

 

[Somnastra]

What made you decide to drop Thatmurgy and break Mysticsm into two separate schools? I for one and am in favor of breaking the Mysticsm apart as it had too many things going on imo just curious what your reasoning was.

Thatmurgy from what I've read seems to be one of the easiest schools to prevent meta and power gaming. As all their enchantments must be drawn out before hand in RP with specific activation sequences. Also as much as I personally was not attracted to it as a school To pursue for any of my characters I did think it was pretty cool.

I'm only going to answer part of this, as what's going on with Thaumaturgy is... complicated, and I can't actually answer that question as it's worded.

But Mysticism was broken in twain due to backmatter considerations that have existed since (I believe) before even the previous schools were a thing.

 

[Sankera]

The one and only response worthy of all the stuff I've read

 

[Baron]

Pure speculation:

Mysticism covers a large variety of fields (Undeath, Life, & the Divine), and would be better represented by splitting into separate disciplines.

Thaumaturgy is very, very complex, and though it's pretty ironclad to meta and powergaming, there's only one person who can effectively teach it, and he's the one who wrote it. It's also far and away the most powerful of the other schools, and capable of doing what all of them can do at a higher investment of work, being that thaumaturgy is meta-magic. It's like how mathematics can be used to fully describe the world if you have the right equations. Sure, you can write the math for the respiratory process, but it's a lot easier to go with biology/chemistry and describe it there.

 

[dUMMY]

What will happen to characters who already know magic, such as Naelwyn?

 

[Teeke]

Would the presence of magic be known IC? Would people know of the different branches, or would someone need to be told specifically that magic does exist and what the branches are?

 

[Immerael]

Would the presence of magic be known IC? Would people know of the different branches, or would someone need to be told specifically that magic does exist and what the branches are?

In the same vein as this question, when magic becomes available via teachers will there be some sort of event that makes the presence of the new Magi known or will it all be via IC word of mouth as they slowly spread out? Either way has pros and cons I'm just curious if you can tell us which way it's going to go.

 

[Tybalt]

I appreciate the hard work of the staff team. And I am sure it took a long time to make this. I just hope my speculations about this new system is wrong.

But characters such as Tzemik, who had their school of magic split. How will that character be affected?

 

[Somnastra]

What will happen to characters who already know magic, such as Naelwyn?

He's involved in the revamp, and I'm working with him on what Nael has/knows.

Would the presence of magic be known IC? Would people know of the different branches, or would someone need to be told specifically that magic does exist and what the branches are?

Everything's designed such that existing IC knowledge can be retained. But while the idea of magic can certainly be common knowledge, any information about it should be found out IC.

In the same vein as this question, when magic becomes available via teachers will there be some sort of event that makes the presence of the new Magi known or will it all be via IC word of mouth as they slowly spread out? Either way has pros and cons I'm just curious if you can tell us which way it's going to go.

Honestly, not sure yet.

 

[Teeke]

Would the presence of magic be known IC? Would people know of the different branches, or would someone need to be told specifically that magic does exist and what the branches are?

Everything's designed such that existing IC knowledge can be retained. But while the idea of magic can certainly be common knowledge, any information about it should be found out IC.

Meaning the existence of magic can be a given - if someone specifically knows that someone else is capable of magic (from the old schools) they would still know this person is capable of magic?
However how to control it, what the different branches are (even the fact that there are even different branches), who knows magic, spells, these sorts of things would require ic investigation/research/talky time/etc?

 

[NIAH]

He's involved in the revamp, and I'm working with him on what Nael has/knows.


Everything's designed such that existing IC knowledge can be retained. But while the idea of magic can certainly be common knowledge, any information about it should be found out IC.


Honestly, not sure yet.

I would vote for word of mouth instead of a big reveal IC event.

 

[Teeke]

In the same vein as this question, when magic becomes available via teachers will there be some sort of event that makes the presence of the new Magi known or will it all be via IC word of mouth as they slowly spread out? Either way has pros and cons I'm just curious if you can tell us which way it's going to go.

I would vote for word of mouth instead of a big reveal IC event.

I think it would really depend on each character/magus and how he/she wants to handle it. . . ?

 

[Somnastra]

Meaning the existence of magic can be a given - if someone specifically knows that someone else is capable of magic (from the old schools) they would still know this person is capable of magic?
However how to control it, what the different branches are (even the fact that there are even different branches), who knows magic, spells, these sorts of things would require ic investigation/research/talky time/etc?

"How to control it" is not just a knowledge thing, but as for the rest, yeah, more or less.

 

[Tybalt]

Will there ever be anything on Anti- Magic?

 

[Immerael]

I would vote for word of mouth instead of a big reveal IC event.

I vote event because events are nice Though it would be terrible in practice as I imagine the Magi would soon be swamped by folks wanting to learn and it would likely resemble one of those horror stories on the news about Black Friday. "Today the Four new Magi appeared offering to teach new students. Three halfings and the last Greyling were crushed to death in the ensuing rush to reach them. A dwarf escaped with minor injuries."

 

[Friosis]

I am loving the way this system looks. Very well made and i'd like to thank the staff for working so hard on this.

 

[Immerael]

Oh serious question. I read in the new ranking system that in most ranks there is a rolling system (Which I love by the way) but I am curious about the crit fail criteria in some of them as you suffer overuse and its negative effects. I'm curious will overuse when caused by this roll will it end the mage's potential magical career or will it simply shut them down with negative RP effects whose severity and length of time will be decided on the situation?

Consider the following Apprentice rank mages. What would happen to him?

Situation A: Full rested mage student attempts spell but rolls a 1.

Situation B: Mage very close to using all his spell points for a day rolls a 1.

If you plan on releasing more details about overuse soon that will answer this I apologize and you just can pass over this one. My biggest concern is that a mage's career and likely IRL months of RP progression could end based on a bad roll permanently even if they obey the IC and OOC rules and do everything else right.

 

[Archbishop]

A dwarf escaped with minor injuries."

You're damn right we escape.

 

[Somnastra]

I appreciate the hard work of the staff team. And I am sure it took a long time to make this. I just hope my speculations about this new system is wrong.

But characters such as Tzemik, who had their school of magic split. How will that character be affected?

It's not just staff. And they are.

Details on Tzemik are still being worked out with her player. And should be found out IC.

I am loving the way this system looks. Very well made and i'd like to thank the staff for working so hard on this.

S'not just staff.

Oh serious question. I read in the new ranking system that in most ranks there is a rolling system (Which I love by the way) but I am curious about the crit fail criteria in some of them as you suffer overuse and its negative effects. I'm curious will overuse when caused by this roll will it end the mage's potential magical career or will it simply shut them down with negative RP effects whose severity and length of time will be decided on the situation?

Consider the following Apprentice rank mages. What would happen to him?

Situation A: Full rested mage student attempts spell but rolls a 1.

Situation B: Mage very close to using all his spell points for a day rolls a 1.

If you plan on releasing more details about overuse soon that will answer this I apologize and you just can pass over this one. My biggest concern is that a mage's career and likely IRL months of RP progression could end based on a bad roll permanently even if they obey the IC and OOC rules and do everything else right.

Actually, while overuse is a serious thing, and will definitely hamper spell-use for a time, not all instances of overuse will end a career. For example, anyone involved in a sparking will experience a form of overuse. Because it's flippin' hard and harrowing.