In reply to OggyBenDoggy (msg # 821):

Ah yes ...
Ninjas Attack ;)
=

hm.  interesting theory.  So the key, then, is to make sure that everyone's expectations are the same.

Fantasy also has the advantage that you can play it just with core.  That's why, I think Deadlands is the next most popular, people know the setting well.

ah well.  I certainly like fantasy, but wouldn't mind a few other things.

Pretty much.  Or, to put it in terms of food, Fantasy is like peanut butter and jelly while sci-fi is more like meat loaf.


Mmmm, meatloaf...  :)

Or pizza.  lots of different toppings.

so the key is to make sure everyone likes the same toppings, or at least has a few slices they like.

Awesome conversation, and it's giving me a lot of food for thought with my own games (mostly pizza). I know I don't post very often, but mostly wanted to ask a question I haven't otherwise found the answer to lately.

I don't have a Savage Worlds game to run, but I have interest in one of the Savage Tales. Where would I go about asking if anyone would like to run it? Mainly because I've only gotten involved in one SW game, and it died shortly out of character creation. I wanna really get to play the game, get a feel for it and all.

I had about three huge paragraphs of comment to your points about sci-fi vs fantasy tropes killing games, but they felt at least a little redundant and possibly going well off topic. Gonna have to restructure my thoughts on them. Basically, I was going to make some point about the fantasy-style mission+loot based story structure works well in most sci-fi as well, and it's puzzles and riddles that are the real killers, which can come up in fantasy as often as they do in Star Trek-style sci-fi. They need to be executed well and in the players' favor, because solving a puzzle the GM designed to be tricky is a lot harder than killing a room full of goblins and taking their stuff.

If you're looking for someone to run it, I'd use the "Game Ideas?" thread to check for interested players and a GM. It's here: link to a message in this game

Thanks, I was looking at that, but reading the first post got the idea into my head that it was for checking interest from players, rather than GMs. Not comfortable running SW on my own yet, too many things that are just weird to me.

Actually, there's a point I can use to get involved in the awesome conversation: Do you think a game's survival chances have to do with the game mechanics as applied to the chosen setting? You were talking about fantasy vs sci-fi having different tropes and thus different expectations of players, and thus different odds of survival. What about, for instance, Savage Worlds Fantasy vs Savage Worlds Sci-fi? The mechanics apply themselves to those tropes in different ways, affect expectations, and thus might affect how long a game runs before it dies.

For instance, a lot of people I talk to prefer less fantasy in their SW because of the Arcane Background system. They prefer dealing with guns and cover over spells and powers, which tells me those players lend themselves better to low sci-fi and historical fantasy rather than space opera and high fantasy, but only when talking about SW itself. Those same players prefer high level Pathfinder play for their fantasy and, in most cases, Star Wars D6 for any and all sci-fi.

Anyone else have similar observations, or see the opposite? I'm planning on jumping into the deep end of the Savage Worlds pool and so wanna know as much as I can about the expectations and ideas involved. Finger on the pulse of the people and all that.

My experience is pretty much the opposite, but that's probably because I gravitate towards high-fantasy or magic-friendly settings. I actually like alternatives to the Arcane Backgrounds approach like in the Solmon Kane setting (my favorite SW setting by far), but I run games with the AB rules and have no issues with them. Even as crazy as they can get, they're still less overpowered than some systems :-)

I owe people my list of games for later amusement.

as a side note, my old group seemed to like games with guns and magic.  A GURPS:"magic returns game", Shadowrun, Deadlands.

Mechanics could be it.  SW is good about not having, in core at least, spells you can keep up all day.  Having long duration spells is very useful to some concepts, like the fighter/mage.

I've often wondered what the appeal was to Deadlands and Solomon Kane.  I'm familiar with the source material of Solomon Kane, at least on a basic level since I love Conan, so I kinda get that, but the other one totally escapes me.  Anyone willing to elaborate a little on what draws them to those two settings?

for me:
Deadlands - I got into DL under the 1st ed of the classic rules.  The idea of a western with weird magic, horror, and monster hunting was, to me at least, pretty new and cool.  In some ways like Shadowrun was back in the day, it was the first big high tech + magic setting.
DL is nice because there is some tech and guns, better guns that muzzle loaders, but not, generally, assault rifles, grenade launchers, etc.  It's in a sweet spot where guns are getting dominant, but melee is still important.  For me at least, that lasts up to WWI, maybe WWII, before satellites and computers and all that.

SK - don't know.  never played.  Read the stories.

Solomon Kane has four elements that I like:

--Historical fiction
--Swashbuckling action
--Mild horror/grim adventuring
--"Realistic" fantasy elements

The last category describes settings where magic is not all-powerful and pervasive. In Solomon Kane's world, magic is used with trepidation and often with consequences. It is not universally embraced--Kane himself was skeptical about its source.

The adventure path is also epic in scope, which I love.

On a mildly related tangent, I'd like to open up a discussion from a friend of mine to this wider forum. To be very clear, it started with his disgust at the Marvel Cinematic Universe's portrayal of magic as advanced technology, specifically in the two Thor films. The argument goes something like this:

Magic should be impossible to quantify and explain in scientific terms, impossible to study to the point where it can be understood precisely. It should be "magical". Being that the Asgardians can explain and even create such objects as the Tesseract and Mjolnir, and they refer to these things as "science" and "technology" explicity, gods and magic as a whole have been removed from the Marvel universe and replaced with just aliens and science.

My reply cites Clarke's third law, that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. The reverse is also possibly, that a sufficiently advanced magic can be indistinguishable from science. So maybe what is "science" to the Asgardians is still magic to everyone else, and that's okay. What is simply another race of beings could, to others, appear as gods.

Now, I do agree that really, magic should be impossible to explain, study, and control in scientific conditions, which brings me to my point. In high fantasy settings like the standard D&D setting (or in the case of this forum, Savage Worlds Fantasy), wizards are character types who have studied magic so extensively they can reliably shape and control it to specific effects. They understand what they're doing, how they're doing it, and can explain it scientifically to anyone who will sit still and listen for a few years. We as players don't know what they'd be saying, but that's because magic doesn't work in our universe and thus we have no frame of reference for what they'd be talking about.

So...does that mean there really is no such thing as "magic" in high fantasy? It's all based on what that universe considers scientific principles and natural forces. Enchanted weapons and artifacts are merely complicated pieces of technology, like a cell phone or motor, using an energy we as players don't understand, but they as characters have fully researched and documented to the point of it being commonplace.

The subject came to mind when cooneydad explained "'Realistic' fantasy elements" in Solomon Kane including magic being dubiously understood and inherently dangerous. THAT sounds like a setting with "magic" to me, as opposed to a setting with "super science performed in Gandalf-inspired labcoats".

I think that was the idea. I personally find the idea of magic as magic's sake to be distasteful. I have several reasons--intellectual, religious and aesthetic in that order--but I like the change Marvel made.

Magic as something "other" that is beyond seems to put magic in the same place that a transcendent deity in a RL religion would take. I'm not cool with that.

I have always hated the idea that magic is somehow "unexplainable." It's really stupid to me. That which can be sensed is, by definition, quantifiable. That which is quantifiable can be studied as long as it's not random (which you could make an argument is impossible in a closed system). Magic is a non-random and predictable phenomena or else you'd never have anything like Mages etc. So, magic can be quantified and explained. Science is simply a system which seeks to study, quantify, and explain natural phenomena. Magic cannot be 'supernatural' in any sense as long as it is sensible (because then it clearly occurs in the natural order) and if it wasn't sensible nobody in a universe with magic would be talking about it at all.
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:46, Fri 07 Mar 2014.

So my friend's assertion that Marvel ruined magic with the Thor films is as silly as I thought, right? And my own statement that high fantasy doesn't have "magic" but rather a perfectly normal energy source that happens to be able to manipulate reality on controllable levels also makes sense, and we can just refer to that energy by the name "magic" for the sake of conversational convenience.

Rawkin'. Just one more excuse to make a wizard with ether goggles and a labcoat with a wand shaped like a raygun. :D

Thanks Oggy and coonydad.  That helps a bit.  :)

For me, I don't like mixing 'magic' and sci-fi in a setting.  Modern day magic is something different, but when you've got laser guns and fireball scrolls things tend to get a little odd.

I like magic as something which holds the power of myth.  Not the flashy kind where spells are slung willy-nilly until the medieval battlefield begins to resemble the worst of WWII, but the more subtle kind like you see in movies such as Excalibur.  The potential for explaining it should always be there, but using it should be dangerous and/or costly.

That's also why I prefer low magic settings which draw upon Celtic and Norse style mythology to high fantasy where the rich cities use everburning torches as street lamps and adventurers can go to the latest discount Magic-Mart for their equipment.  That gripe is also at the heart of my issues with d20, but that's a different topic.

So, have any of you used the alternative magic rules from the Horror Companion?  Ritual magic, wards and binds, and linking magic with sanity?  I'm thinking about using these in a Dark Fantasy style setting with my IRL group.

Nintaku; or give him a helmet and a 'wand' rifle.  ;)  I do agree with your point.  In a high magic setting magic works like just another power source.  As long as that is how it is treated then its' managable; and the Thor movies did it right.  The biggest thing, in my opinion, for high magic settings is the separation between 'arcane' and 'divine' magic creating an impression that the 'gods' of the setting are simply power generators that can be tapped by anyone who says and does the right things.  If somebody wants magic to be just another power source then I believe that 'gods' should be taken out of the equation.  Make magic a force of nature separate from the divine.  thus what makes a caster 'good' or 'evil' isn't where he gets his power from but how he uses it.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:07, Fri 07 Mar 2014.

Staff of Fireball, with a finger-linked manual cast lever. :P

Yeah, as much as I don't really like to play in those low-magic settings, where magic itself is mysterious and dangerous, I do prefer them and think the idea of the Magi-Mart is embarrassing in the extreme. Takes the magic out of magic, y'know? Which is hilarious, because right as I typed that, Final Fantasy music popped up on my mp3 player. It's okay, FF. I only judge you a little.

My preferences do run toward the nigh-superheroic in terms of playing games. But that isn't the type of fantasy I want to see. I like the idea of heroes facing threats they can't comprehend and overcoming them without resorting to using them, or risking everything in the hopes using these incomprehensible forces works out. Granted, I also don't like Call of Cthulhu simply because of just how dangerous using magic actually turns out to be, and how it's the only solution. Total downer.

I'm generally okay mixing magic and technology. One of my favorite settings is Star Wars, and that's so far into fantasy it's hard to find the science. Laser guns, telekinesis, ghosts and planet-killing starships. It really is space fantasy rather than sci-fi. Though the magic aspect has been getting pushed pretty hard, to the point where it overwhelms everything else now. As not-fun as that can be, that's true of every setting with a fantastic element, isn't it?

Well, I think a general term all of us can agree, is that "magic" (or the supernatural) refers to things which happen / can be caused to happen, which don't have a scientific explanation as we understand physics, chemistry, biology, science to work.

a couple of thousand years ago magic explained lots of things, as our ancestors didn't understand science.  Why did that lightning bolt hit my house?  Wrath of the gods.  Why do the seasons change?  The daughter of spring is visiting her husband in the underworld, and her mother is sad.

from that, you can break it up into, well, magical science, where magic has rules it follows, some consistency.
This might be magic as nanotech, or as Psi powers.  It might be magic as done in Jack Chalker's Well World series, where people and very advanced machines can rewrite the equations of reality.
Usually these include a limit on what can be done (which a lot of games have for balance)  GURPS magic typifies this.  I would think that even a well educated non-mage could understand the principles of magic

And more magical magic.
This is where even the practitioners don't fully understand it.  It might not have internal consistency.  Thinks work sometimes, and sometimes not.
Deadlands classic, more so than Savage DL has this, particularly with Hucksters.  A huckster doesn't understand what he's doing, really, he's not doing it.  He's browbeating a spirit into doing it.
DnD has this.  You cast a spell, it works.  You try again, it doesn't (because you only prepared it once).  Smacks of the definition of insanity, trying the same thing twice and expecting different results; in this case the different results are going to happen
Some extreme post apoc settings might includes this.  Stone age tribesman mashing buttons on a keyboard, knowing that sometimes it will open a door.  Stopping at any red light, because once legend has it someone didn't stop, and a demon (traffic cop) took away the mighty hero never to be seen again.  (locked in jail for jaywalking, starved to death)  But the other guy stopped to drink water.  So now, at every red light, you stop and drink water until it turns green.

Well, even in D&D there's an explanation for why you can only cast the spell once: a wizard "memorizes" a spell, and it essentially becomes a nexus of potential energy in their mind. When they cast the spell, the energy is used up and they "forget" the spell. To do it again, that spell energy needs to be replaced. I really wish I could remember where I read that explanation, as I have no idea what edition or book I was reading, but it was pretty cool.

So it's not that the rules change, it's that a battery gets depleted and has to be recharged before it can be used again. The battery just happens to be the magic user, and the energy is the magic of that specific effect.

What's worse is that in D&D, Sorcerers are supposed to be natural channels for magic energy into effects they have to train themselves to use, or else the energy is raw and could have any number of effects. Except that isn't modeled anywhere in the system, only in the fluff text. A sorcerer can't decide to just WHOOSH, MAGIC at someone and see what happens. They can only cast the spells they already know, which enforces the idea that D&D magic /can/ only be applied in these rigid, specific, and well-documented ways, unless years of study and research are put into inventing new spell effects.

That really isn't magic in the sense of a mysterious force, but simply an application of rigorous study performed on a natural element or force that we don't happen to have in our universe.

Also, by those definitions, isn't Star Trek really just a fantasy story set in space? They have warp propulsion and deflector shields, both of which can do literally anything, given the right technobabble. Wanna destroy humanity? Use the deflector array to fire an inverse tachyon beam into the same point in space in at least three different times. Wanna reverse that? Put your shields up, then channel the warp core's warp field through the shield array to create a static warp shell, then fly that into the same point in space in those three times. The real difference between Star Trek and D&D is that we can generally get an idea of what magic words we're using in Trek, whereas we have no idea what the D&D wizards are saying.

And don't get me started on Doctor Who. There's a wizard with a magic wand if ever I saw one.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:21, Fri 07 Mar 2014.

Well, you have hard SF, and soft SF

and you have high magic and low magic fantasy.

Hm. Been reading XKCD on Random for several hours. That may be causing me to lose my mind, which may be explain my train of thought. I'd just like to conclude with: I really want to find some high fantasy that isn't preposterous, and some soft sci-fi that isn't high fantasy. And that sentence both seems to make perfect sense and none at all simultaneously, what with my not finding Star Trek or Star Wars all that preposterous, but I do find D&D incredibly silly.

Might be time to close the webcomic until I return to relative normalcy.

I'm a big Shadowrun fan, so the idea of magic and technology coexisting is fine with me.

However, magic doesn't need to be uncontrollable to be unscientific.  One of the Shadowrun books put it this way: while the effects of magic can and often does follow a set of principles, the big problem is that the causes are subjective.  Because magic comes from a living mind, you can't actually measure some parts of it objectively, and science is all about objective measures.

That's a good point grandmaster_cain. However, I feel like a sufficiently advanced field of Neuroscience would defeat that argument completely. With that in place you could easily get objective measurements of so called subjective phenomena related to the mind and consciousness.

In "my" setting magic is the ability to convert plainer energy into things or effects.
The human brain can be used or a mechanical device. The difference being that mechanical devices (Science!) do only a specific effect the same way every time. Where as a human mind can either emulate this or, if properly sensitive, alter it somewhat. Those that are not sensitive need rituals to ensure that the same focus is used in the shaping of the energy. However, they still need the potential to focus to even have a chance.
Those that are sensitive can "create" this focus and "tune" it for effect just from "feel". The limitation is, this flow of energy through the focused mind can be damaging. Yes, if you want to "burn out" your brain you can overload but, your body tends to rebel when this is attempted.
This message was last edited by the player at 14:01, Sat 08 Mar 2014.