What is your favorite TTRPG magic system?

I’ll never get to play all the games I want, in a meanginful way. But I could probably read them all, and right now I am interested in how “magic” is handled in various games. Not just mechanically, I also want to know the feeling of it.

So tell me you favorite magic system you’ve used or seen in a tabletop role-playing game, and a cool story about it. I don’t want to get into magic system in video games, but I wouldn’t mind hearing about systems you’re convinced would make a good tabletop system. :slight_smile:

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The Gramarye for Fudge actually feels like ritual magic to me, both at a mechanical level and at a in game level. It’s also possibly an all time favorite of mine to drop into a relatively rules light Fudge game as the system of college and realms allows for a lot of diversity and flexibility without needing endless spell lists.

I ran a truly delightful Urban Fantasy campaign I intend to come back to that heavily featured it. It was an alternate earth which diverged from ours in the early 1900s (taking place in London in the late 1970s) and the world being semi maleable as mass consensus reality.

The metaphysics for which were heavily shaped by Jennifer Diane Reitz’s Webcomics and old truly interesting multidimensional RPG campaign notes.

I’ve also got most of a RPG clone for Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books done in Fudge with an RPG system based around her book’s magic. Magic in that setting is kind of a powerful highly focused specialization within a wide catalog of psionic gifts that allows one to tap wells of energy. She goes into lots of details in books on how magic works in terms of tapping and untapping ley lines or nodes (where multiple ley lines cross) and I have always wanted to run a game around that.

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http://unicornjelly.com/gorbald10.htm

ARCDUCT is an interuniversal unoplasm fistula. When two universes of differing metacosmic potential begin to collide, hyperdimensional streamers of fundamental energies, called unoplasm are pulled out of one universe into the other. Like two stars of differing size colliding, the universes pull matter, energy, space, and time in long streams and rivers through hyperspace, as they collide, and ultimately destroy -or merge- with each other. This horrendous phenomena is called an Arcduct, and it is like a river of lava and a hurricane together, flowing through hyperspace, from one cosmos to another, as the two universes gradually collide. Sometimes two, or more, universes may actually go into a kind of ‘hyperspace orbit’ around each other, balanced from total collision, but bridged by an Arcduct. It is quite a feat to survive riding such a cosmic river…

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I know the Gramarye, I categorize it under that “adhoc Ars Magica” system. If you are familiar with that system, would you say they play similarly?

My favorite system I got to play was BESM 2e, with the sorcery sub-system. It was basically a fractal system where you had to spend mana points to cast things, but the spells you had were created the same way as abilities.

D&D splits magic so many ways, it is ripe for such a sub-system. Schools, domains, colleges, circles, even levels. Classes could have their own sub-systems, and still keep them thematically separate while having consistent ad-hoc spell casting.

Folks have opinions on Vancian casting, and here is mine: it always seemed like a feat, a special way to cast things. The background in D&D is that you basically cast a spell, but hold it on a trigger in yer head. Mechanically, that would be a great noob feat, as it allows them to pre-cast spells and set the fiddly bits, and then have a ready-to-cast list. They are cast for free, or at reduced cost; free invokes in Fate.

Im actually unfamiliar with it in practice, I know it only by reputation. Its kinda on my bucket list of things to acquire one day and try. That sounds reasonably likely to me but I don’t know for certain.

I’ve never had strong opinions either way on Vanican casting, but I kinda feel like between RPG/D&D remix culture and the plethera of editions, clones and entirely other systems to choose from I’m kinda never at a shortage for something to scratch the itch im looking for; which is a nice place to be in.

In practice, I kinda realized I allready run one 5e game that way as is. Not on purpose but, the group of people we got in that game are all relatively new to games still and they don’t have a good sense for interrupted spells and whatnot. We’re ignoring a lot of the more fine grain rules, with that game though. We’re just using the 5e books to look up spell descriptions and class advancement options, and kinda playing an idealized ad hoc good parts D&D thing. Largely because they wanted to know what D&D was like and we didn’t realize at the time it would turn into a whole campaign.

They got the gist of the big overarching bits of the mechanics. They know clerics pray for spells every day out of a whole pool and wizards gotta memmorize specific spells in the morning from a fixed but expandable list, and they know their limits on castings per day but that is about it for them; and im not inclined to bog them down with any more rules than that right now. Spells fire instantly and it doesn’t break anything for them.

And pretty much every game ive ever played it with my local gaming groups have always ignored material components if their common enough. (Maybe force the players to cough up a diamond or 1,000 GP once you start doing things like resurrection.)

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https://writing.exchange/@orionkidder/101685334666087121

I’ll look up how the mechanics work in Shadowrun. I’ve played with the fiction that magic basically cost the same caloric expense as movements, so mage hand-ing a gallon of milk would be nothing, whereas shooting a fireball would knock most folks out from the exertion. Over time mages develop mana-specific stamina increases, the most they practice, that kinda thing. Eventually you got people lifting buildings and flying around, eating swords and lobbing energy at each other, because training!

Also, that is basically how Narutoverse powers work.

https://mastodon.xyz/@klaatu/101685929791059461

PCs with a Mage attr > 1 can find or buy spells. These spells must first be transferred
to a PC’s personal spell book before use. To cast a spell, make a roll versus the DL of
the spell. If successful, your mana pool is reduced by the amount listed for the spell.

Never played it but really liked what I read of that game! Kinda tried to talk my gaming group into trying it a couple of times, but it never quite panned out.