## [WIP] [HF] I have a magic system in mind, but I think there are ways to munchkin it that I haven't spotted. * Author: u/Kecha_Wacha *Chaos Legion** * URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3dg9rs/wip_hf_i_have_a_magic_system_in_mind_but_i_think/ * Score: 10 * Created: 2015-07-16T01:07:55 ### Post: I really tried to keep this short. Everyone has the potential to use magic, but each person can only use one specific spell. You don't just find out what spell you can use just by deciding to become a mage either, you have to try thousands of different spells until you find one, the *only* one, that you can cast. I'm thinking of calling it an 'affinity.' There is a list of possible affinities, hundreds or maybe thousands of pages long. You don't get any hints, no gut feelings just by looking at the instructions for each spell, so you have to try them all one by one. Just as importantly, every single spell in the book is really... small-scale. Like someone with a spell for controlling fire would start out with an affinity to produce a matchstick's worth of flame by snapping their fingers. Those two factors together make it so that only a small percentage of the population ever actually learn magic. The ones who do have to practice for years to get better at it, take their affinity and invent bigger more powerful spells based on it. Eventually that mage with the fire spell can snap their fingers and a huge fireball comes flying out of their hand. Maybe they can produce a stream of lit gasoline, or a splash of lava, or transparent heat waves. Maybe they can't do any of those. But it takes time to find out; you don't know what limits your spell has until you experiment. There's a sort of mana/chakra/magicka type of power supply everyone has, but it's not stored inside the body. It floats invisibly around you as a sort of aura, invisible and pretty much impossible to tamper with. Example: Main protagonist's basic spell lets him shoot a glowing green thread, usually from his hand, that he can use to grab things and move them around. It's really strong; enough to easily support his weight. But if it touches the aura of anyone other than him, it dissolves. So he can't use it to grab someone, but he can use it to move *himself* around. He can do it by sending a thread out of his foot and then shortening the thread from his end, pulling himself along faster than anyone could sprint but nowhere near a flash-step. If he has to attack someone from a distance, he could attach a thread to the bottom end of a long weapon like a spear and touch them with the blade end. Later in the story I'm planning to have him learn to fly by sending a thread through the air and pulling himself along by shortening his end while simultaneously extending the far end so he doesn't run out of thread to ride on. But I still feel like I'm missing a big problem here. Any thoughts? I can provide more details as needed. EDIT: Thanks guys, this has all been really helpful. Problems I've thought of but really should've solved before coming here: How the hell is there a list of every possible affinity? Why do people even have magic? They didn't just evolve to be able to use some invisible power source floating around them to throw around fireballs, teleport and create matter from nothing. On the same subject, why are all these affinities perceptibly useful? I actually have an answer for this one; magic is the product of intelligent design. I can't say any more than that though. Additional problems I'll make sure to sort out: The way magic works is too arbitrary, as /u/Tirran put it, "completely word-of-author instead of like an actual physical system." Just about everything /u/Geminii27 said should totally be possible for the protagonist. Not sure if that's actually a *problem,* but it definitely has to be addressed. If everyone has the potential to learn a spell, a lot more people would probably take the time to find and master their affinity than what I have in mind. Maybe I could write it so only a certain percentage of people have an affinity, but they learn it instinctively. That also seems arbitrary enough to bug me, so it needs a good explanation... maybe it's only certain people with a certain bloodline like wizards in HPMOR? I dunno; I'll keep thinking until I get an idea. /u/Bsaito mentioned the problem of torque pulling the protagonist's foot out from under him while the rest of him falls behind, more or less. /u/Geminii27, just the munchkin I needed, supplied what seems like a good way around this. /u/Booljayj rightly pointed out that I'm describing affinities in a sort of unwieldy way; mages have affinities for just one *type* of spell and they start with a really weak little spell of that type. As opposed to having literally just one very exact thing you can use magic for in one very exact way. EDIT 2: [Here's the followup post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3eib8z/wip_hf_second_draft_of_magic_system_now_with/) ### Comments: > **u/Tirran** [+17] (28 minutes later) > > Well, you system can't really be munchkined, because it isn't really a system. Normally, munchkining is about exploiting asymmetric rules to produce effects that the designer didn't intend. Your system has no actual rules, so it can't be munchkined. > > Also, it seems weird that you're relying on the sheer number of different combinations and affinitied that exist to restrict the number of extant mages. How did they even figure out that there were those affinities if there isn't any consistency from person to person? Why is it that if they had the ability to catalog every single one of those affinities, they lack the infrastructure to have a full education system where every individual could be tested and taught? If they didn't have the ability to catalog it, where did the information come from? What exists that makes it so that every discovered power is useful (if anything is possible, anything from spontaneous matter generation a light-year away to the ability to switch the polarity of every molecule within 100 light years should be abilities, both of which are useless and would have no immediately noticeable effect. It seems like there has to be some kind of entity making sure that the powers selected for are useful, which seems incredibly unlikely elsewise)? How does your magical system interact with non-classical physics? It just seems like your system has so many unanswered questions that it seems to be completely word-of-author instead of like an actual physical system. >> **u/DCarrier** [+2] (18 hours later) >> >> There is some consistency. Say there's a million affinities. You'll only need on the order of a thousand mages to get a million pairs of mages, which means around one pair that has a shared affinity. So people will realize that two mages can have the same affinity fairly quickly. After that, they'll start recording all of the affinities so people can learn theirs faster. >>> **u/kaukamieli** [+1] (a day later) >>> >>> > After that, they'll start recording all of the affinities so people can learn theirs faster. >>> >>> Yeaaaa... they weren't always recorded? How were they found, if everyone has to find a certain exact spell to find theirs out? >>> >>> Thousands of people had to do original research to try to create spells to find the one for them? If a spell failed, they had no feedback, so they couldn't know if the spell was wrong or if it was just not the spell for them. >>> >>> We actually got no evidence that our world doesn't have a magic system like this. Nobody has just found their spell, and wouldn't really try to, because they think magic doesn't exist for a good reason. >> **u/eltegid** [+1] (9 hours later) >> >> > How did they even figure out that there were those affinities if there isn't any consistency from person to person? Why is it that if they had the ability to catalog every single one of those affinities >> This is the biggest point. Needs to be explained. >> >> Also some sort of global limitations of the whole system. For instance: all effects are generated from your magical aura. Effects that are generated away from it require that the aura expands or deforms to reach the location. > **u/GaBeRockKing** [+10] *Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857* (an hour later) > > Sort spells by utility, then have every person try the first hundred or so spells. Only a small proportion gets their affinity figured out, but that proportion is useful to society. >> **u/clawclawbite** [+2] (18 hours later) >> >> Yes, just about everyone will try to teleport and create gold. Most will create fire. Very few will try speed evaporation until the day an advanced user uses it for weather control. >> **u/kaukamieli** [+1] (a day later) >> >> And rip off the pages containing spells we don't want anyone to have. Exploding nearest kitten probably isn't anyone's favorite anyway. >>> **u/GaBeRockKing** [+1] *Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857* (a day later) >>> >>> There's probably some way to turn that into a renewable energy source... > **u/jgf1123** [+6] (55 minutes later) > > I don't really understand how you say a person can only use one specific spell and then go onto say that they can invent or cast spells related to it. > > Here's what I would do in such a world: compile a list of all known magic users and what spell(s) they knew. This sheds light on the relationship between different spells (fire spells go together, etc.). The goal is to speed up the search for people's affinity and their search for additional spells they can cast. The result would be a monastic order of scholar-mages who, over the centuries, help people realize their potential. >> **u/Sagebrysh** [+2] *Rank 7 Pragmatist* (an hour later) >> >> Could look for a connection between genetics and affinities, see if certain affinities are tied to genes or bloodlines, that sort of thing. >> **u/eltegid** [+1] (9 hours later) >> >> My own interpretation to make sense of it is that the fire affinity that will let you shoot lava is not the same affinity that will let you emit heat waves. So the base spells look very similar (flame at your fingertip after snapping fingers) but the detailed instructions are different (what you need to picture in your mind, for instance) > **u/DCarrier** [+3] (24 minutes later) > > I'd have to know how the spells work to know how to munchkin them. > > I don't get how the flight is supposed to work. Is he just creating the thread moving forward, moving it backward, and then making it vanish? It seems like it would have to be insanely powerful to do something like that. > > I'm also kind of confused as to how he's using it to move. You'd think if he supports his weight through a thread that small, it would just cut through stuff. He could probably do well as a miner. Or at least a logger. > > How long does it take to find your affinity? If you can go through the list of affinities in a year, and then it takes several years of practice to be useful, then finding the affinity isn't the hard part. > > The logical way to find your affinity would be to take a list of them ordered from most valuable to least valuable, and go through them one by one. Their values would change, so it might be more efficient to have books that group similar affinities together, and you go through the books in order of what's most valuable. > > I'm not sure how much that would happen. There's probably be a lot of people who don't understand statistics thinking they'd be better off picking them at random because there's no way they'll happen to have the first affinity in the list. And just because you don't get any hints doesn't mean you'll know you don't get any hints. People will come up with all sorts of superstitions for helping them find their affinity. And there's no way to be sure everyone even has an affinity. I would also imagine there's some unlisted affinities that nobody found yet. >> **u/kaukamieli** [+1] (a day later) >> >> >I'm also kind of confused as to how he's using it to move. >> >> Like spiderman? > **u/BSaito** [+3] (48 minutes later) > > If he's pulling his entire body weight by his foot, wouldn't the torque unbalance him and knock him on his ass? >> **u/Geminii27** [+2] (12 hours later) >> >> Not if the other end of the thread is wrapped around his entire body like a net, exits in a direct line from his center of gravity, and then dips down to the ground. > **u/timoni** [+3] (4 hours later) > > Not your question, but the one ability per person thing reminds me of Piers Anthony's Xanth. >> **u/stringless** [+1] *Rebel Alliance* (8 hours later) >> >> Luckily they don't have to do as much guesswork. >> **u/None** [+1] (14 hours later) >> >> I'd love to see someone munchkin the 'project a spot of colored light onto walls' talent. >>> **u/clawclawbite** [+2] (18 hours later) >>> >>> Flashlight to blinding light to hot light to laser to epic cutting beam of doom. >> **u/Roxolan** [+1] *Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager* (15 hours later) >> >> Or Lanfeust de Troy. >> >> Which, now that I think about it, is actually quite good at having its characters use their single power intelligently. > **u/stringless** [+3] *Rebel Alliance* (8 hours later) > > >You don't just find out what spell you can use just by deciding to become a mage either, you have to try thousands of different spells until you find one, the only one, that you can cast. > > How were these thousands of spells catalogued in the first place? >> **u/DCarrier** [+1] (18 hours later) >> >> I would imagine they're from mages that found those spells by chance. > **u/Geminii27** [+3] (12 hours later) > > > So he can't use it to grab someone > > But he can use a very long, very twisted thread to grab 50 broomsticks with soft pads on the other end, and grab/move a person with the pads. Or wrap tightly around several twenty-foot lengths of rope, tunnel them underground underneath a person criss-crossing in multiple directions and knotting around each other while underground, and then manipulating the ends of the rope lengths to weave a net which comes up out of the ground around the person and ties together at the top above their aura - he now has a person in a net that he can carry around (or smack into a building if that's the way he rolls). > > I'm assuming here that the auras cannot be blocked by any form of conventional matter, or else it would be a simple method to coat/wrap the thread in it. > > Other things the protagonist could do: Storm of 1000 Arrows. He wouldn't need bows - from what you say, the threads seem perfectly able to impart kinetic energy. An earlier version could be Storm of 1000 Pebbles. If the thread is thin enough, long enough, and controllable enough, he could generate and utterly control a whirlwind of sand - and sand, thrown hard enough, can scour, gouge, and cut like a bandsaw. It'd go straight through anything nonmagical with the possible exception of extremely dense ceramics. > > Heck, he could drop rocks of at *least* personweight on people/targets. He could wear armor and weaponry 100 pounds (or more!) heavier than his actual muscles could lift and/or walk in. > > Thought: How tightly can he bunch the thread up (or alternatively can he make the thread wide/flat/bowed)? Could be make a net that could hold small pebbles? A bag that could hold sand? A bowl that could hold water? Could he send the thread underground deep enough to avoid a person's aura, then levitate the chunk of ground they were standing on? >   > > Anyway, the only weaknesses in this system that I can see are narrative. The source of the magic isn't explained, and the types of magic which are handed out don't have any coherence, so there is no type of magic which *must* fall into the hands of a character. You can retcon anything which would be munchkinnable, such as an affinity for mind control or super-charisma or stackable metamagic or even simply life extension, and prevent any affinity from being maxxed to a munchkin level simply by saying "The character who got that affinity never got around to maxing it out," or "No characters with the personality or training to grind their levels to gamebreaker status appear in this story." > **u/Kuratius** [+2] (9 hours later) > > Some spells might be able to mimic effects of others if you habe precise control over them. A telekinetic could mimic Fire spells if he can act at the atomic or subatomic level. > > I think your protagonist could make a kind of living armor out of the thread. > > Anything clothes related would work, I think. > > If he can vary thickness, he can boil liquids by having a subatomic knot-like thing vibrate fast enough. > > He can probably build a big robot and control it via his thread. > > In general, he's a doctor octopus waiting to happen if he can do fine manipulation with the threads. > > Villain: You and what army? > > *points 8 guns at enemy* > > Hero: You were saying? > **u/None** [+2] (8 days later) > > You'll post here when you finish it, right? I want to read this, and I'm going to bookmark this page. >> **u/Kecha_Wacha** [+1] *Chaos Legion* (8 days later) >> >> I'm not yet ready to start writing the novel itself for multiple reasons, not least of which being that my mockup of the magic system is woefully incomplete. This post helped me work on it considerably, so I intend to post the next draft of the system once I think I've worked out all the flaws I can see. That should be at some point over the next couple of days. >> **u/Kecha_Wacha** [+1] *Chaos Legion* (8 days later) >> >> Scratch that, it'll be up in about thirty seconds. Thanks for prompting me to get back on this. > **u/much-bullshit** [+1] (49 minutes later) > > From your description, I'm assuming: a) the strength that spells can attain is enough for Badass Combat, or produces results that technology cannot, b) that population is large enough that, while everyone is unique, groups can still be organized around similar spells. > > You haven't written any description of political situation or government, so here's some thoughts on that: > > Even if there are thousands of spells listed, there are likely to be many spells which it is in the public interest to develop; violations of physics can produce some seriously impressive / powerful* results, doubly so if these can be used to manipulate, heal, or control people. Any government worth it's salt would test for spells that are useful to it, and (likely) restrict many of the rest to prevent crime. I would expect the (many) spells that they test for to be a part of the general curriculum, so they would test for these in school. > If the government has any sort of ethnic or class divide, it would preferentially test those loyal to the established regime. Those who develop magic would likely be rewarded at least somewhat well, as motivation for people to do this, recognition to their utility, and to ensure their loyalty. > > This is just one example of a society I'm sure would spring up due to these spells; others (black market? medical schools?) would also likely exist, but government wouldn't just leave people with these abilities alone. > > * (in the sense of, lots of work, quickly, through machines or otherwise) > **u/booljayj** [+1] (15 hours later) > > 1) You need a better description of affinity. What you seem to be saying is that everyone has the ability to cast a certain _type_ of spells, based around a single magical ability. So if you have the ability to cast "fire" spells, you start with producing small flames and eventually, with enough practice, can nuance that in various ways. Maybe you can create the heat without the actual flame, or take a non-flammable object and ignite it, or just make a bigger flame. I don't like the gasoline and lava examples, because they appear to break this system. They don't match the scope of the initial ability, to produce fire (they both involve creating other matter from nothing). > > 2) In a society like this, everything would be structured around people's affinity. At an early age, it would be paramount to find a child's affinity, so that they can be trained in its use as they grow. When entering the workforce, a person's affinity will determine their job options. People with fire affinity would work in forges or in power generation, people with thread affinity, like your protagonist, would work in construction. > > 3) With widespread magical abilities available to everyone, you're living in a scarcity-free world. As people learn new uses for their affinities, technological growth increases incredibly fast. When writing this story, you may want to indicate when people first learned of these affinities. You can then write a short history of how the world arrived in its current state. For instance, say this started in the Victorian era. You can show how your timeline differs from the real timeline, which gives some indication of how technology developed much more rapidly and the consequences of that. This isn't strictly necessary, but it would give your story better grounding. >> **u/booljayj** [+2] (15 hours later) >> >> Additionally, check out the Mistborn series. It's very similar to what you're thinking, with some differences. It's also a fantastic series of books, so that's another plus. > **u/kaukamieli** [+1] (a day later) > > >If he has to attack someone from a distance, he could attach a thread to the bottom end of a long weapon like a spear and touch them with the blade end. > > Or use a gun. ---