thread: 2009-04-30 : Magical Magic
On 2009-05-05, David Berg wrote:
What's the standard for "magicalness"? I had a lot of play years ago bouncing between two impressions:
1) "Oh, neat, creep, weird, magical!"
2) "Okay, the GM just made that up."
with the only difference being color. And the main criteria for "magical" color being some combo of congruence and novelty. Cuz, y'know, nothing's very magical if it's completely out of nowhere, and nothing's very magical once you've seen it a bunch.
My best recent successes have been using magic as secret technology. There is in fact a "way magic works", and the GM knows this, and the players don't. Through play, the players witness magic in operation enough to figure out how it works, bit by bit. This way, I can re-use color, and the fading novelty is nicely countered by the broadened meaning, as players learn more and slot phenomena into a larger context.
Dunno if something learnable and repeatable counts as "magic-sense" or not... Emily, you've played Delve, I'd love to hear your take...
