There’s no single answer to that, and while that’s rather the point, it’s also intensely frustrating. Magic says incredibly important things about your game and your setting, and if you don’t think those things through, you are going to end up with a thinly painted-on layer of magic that will quickly chip and fade. To put it another way, magic is not just an excuse to add spells to your game. The trap to avoid is not to base your magic on someone else’s interpretation of Vance. If you want to base your magic on Vance, then you’re picking some great source material. This should be familiar as the basis for magic in D&D, and whatever one thinks of its implementation in D&D and related games, it definitely instituted a number of rules-spellbooks, spells per level, and so on-to capture that idea. The greatest example of a magic system is “Vancian” magic, called such because it’s based off the books of the late, great Jack Vance, where wizards memorize spells, then forget them after casting. Coming up with the mechanical basis for a magic system is a lot of fun, and it is often the first thing we do with a new system, but this largely ends up perpetuating magic systems we already know from games where ideas and rules don’t mesh. This is backwards from the way a lot of games feel. The simple test for this is whether or not your magic system makes sense without the game. If you can find the spot where those two priorities overlap, then you’ve got the workings of a great magic system. Giving magic rules is not just good gaming, it’s good fiction. While it’s true that magic is a convenience of authors, those who use it willy-nilly produce tepid, mushy fantasy. The good news is that there’s a sweet spot that you can aim for. The consistency of rules makes behavior-without rhyme or reason, it’s just madness. Magic is, by its nature, a creation of fiction, and writers and creators are more interested in how it helps them tell stories than any kind of internal rules. So we try to find rules and logic that make the magical more familiar to us, and that’s something of a paradox. We don’t have the same foundation of experience to reference when we start throwing around thunder and lighting. Sufficiently misunderstood action is indistinguishable from magic.
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