@Auspice said in Magicians Game:
@Coin said in Magicians Game:
@Coin said in Magicians Game:
Just some advice: Give some real thought to how the learning of magic will be represented system-wise. Becuase if you let people just learn things at the same rate other games do, then the "school experience" will be lost rapidly.
Further thought on this because I actually did a lot of thinking on how to do a Magicians-style game using Mage: The Awakening--
I think one of the best things you can do is make "Learning Magic" one of the primary themes of the game, and build a lot of it around that. Let players come up with theories (both teachers and students), and have advancement be intrinsically weaved with learning/teaching magic. You can set up schedules, have players suggest courses, etc, etc.
So, while I do intend to make sure anyone applying to be a Professor/Lecturer sort does run scenes for classes, lectures, etc...
It is hard to run classes. I've done it on HP games in the past. I actually, around somewhere, have an entire Divination class schedule, suggested RP 'homework,' etc. I think at least one MU* borrowed it once upon a time. But the problem was? Few players ever got "into" it. It was fun for flavor, but I think it'd take some very devoted people to actually make it a big thing.
I'd love for it to be, I really would, but it would need a handful of dedicated players who are willing to run a couple classes/labs/etc a month.
I didn't really mean actual lecture/studying scenes, but more make sure that the learning is important, not just a thing that happens in the background. The best way to do this, I think, is by incentivizing scenes that have to do with exploring magic and what it can do, how it works, and, the most fun and most important: how it can go wrong.
Magic is, in pretty much every instance of fiction, akin to science. Yes, sometimes it features artistry--poetry, painting, ritual bloodletting to the tune of Michael Jackson's Beat It--but even these art bits are always a component in a cause-and-effect effort that can go right... or it can go wrong.
Much like science, any setting in which learning magic is a large part of it, should have as a main theme "what lessons do we learn when we fuck up"? And I feel this is especially important if you want to make a game based on The Magicians, seeing as how that's basically what the show (and presumably the books) uses as its main anchor for creating plot situations. It's always, "we need to do X but we don't know all the specifics or don't have the experience," leading to, "we do it anyway," which becomes, "we did it wrong and fucked up," culminating in, "holy shit this is horrible," leading back to "we need to do X but...", etc., etc.
When I talk about making learning magic central, I don't mean lectures and stuff, I mean actual learning about it through the characters and what happens when you do stuff with tools you don't know how to use.
