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[Rowanas]

I disagree with everyone here on a point or two.

Yes, magic should be obscure and confusing, but I see no reason not to allow players some degree of control over it. Magic users should train themselves (or be trained by a better mage) in spheres of magic. Then when you want magic done, you hover over a mage, press v-m-(scroll down list of spheres the mage knows) and give it a target. The mage then proceeds to do magic, with the effect determined by what you targeted and what sphere you chose. Duration, magnitude and even the actual effect are decided by the game at that moment. You might target a goblin one day with fire and your mage will set fire to his clothes, but the next day you point at a goblin with fire magic and your mage turns the very earth itself to lava, cracking and scorching the ground, setting fire to trees and generally making a mess of the scenery.

Also, the greater the magnitude, the more tired/thirsty/tired your mage should become. In the previous example, the first spell should perhaps have the mage nip off for a quick drink, while the second would bring a well-fed, watered and fresh mage to the very brink of death, perhaps even wounding him severely.

The magic your mages could learn (to begin with) would be determined by which civ you come from, but underground ruins, caves and such could hold tablets detailing the secrets of new spheres, which would be studied by your little spellcasters and could then be learnt as normal.

Of course, I propose all of this only for other races. I think Dwarven magic, no matter how it's generated, should be artifacts, golems and enchantments all the way. Leave High Magic to the elves or humans.

[Nivim]

Rainseeker:   Here's more of a specific question; Is magic in [...] Dwarf Fortress ... what are you planning on doing with it? Are you planning on letting people fly with it ... or create trees, or grow things more quickly or maybe create gems in the side of a mountain; generate your own kind of stuff.
Toady:   It's hard to say, because you want magic to feel magical in a way, and if it starts to become this thing where you have 'these are my magic runemaster dwarves and they get a series of powers and I use the powers to make mining easier and I use the powers to make wood' or something, then it's kind of industrial and it doesn't feel like a fantasy world ... it feels more like a sci-fi thing in a way, like how it's become kind of a technological thing that's used that way rather than something that has hidden consequences and stuff like that, or something that seems somehow intangible. I know people have really really varied feelings about magic, it's one of those things where I've avoided the controversy because I haven't started it yet. I know people are going to want to do all kinds of things and they want their dwarves to be more magical in a sense ... some people don't want any magic with their dwarves at all, and other people don't want any magic period. We're just going to go with our original thing there for the stock universe and then whatever support ends up being possible we can start to put in for people that want to do something that's more standardised magical for the dwarves. Our own idea is pretty much to restrict dwarven magic to artifacts and to have the artifacts be magical in ways that you don't really know at first, and that you might have to discover over time as you mess with them. Now, there's a problem with that in the sense that your control is so indirect that it's a little difficult to get at things like that; it's not like you can be an adventurer and just mess around with stuff directly. The reason that the vision on that is a bit unformed is because we aren't there yet, we haven't really thought about the specifics.
Rainseeker:    I can just see it now, a dwarf is erecting his door artifact and the door actually transports people across the map which is really bad because it's in your front entrance.
Toady:    There's all kinds of things, right? You could have a cabinet [such that] when you put something into it and take it out it becomes an improved item, and you might notice that when the guy's doing that with his clothes but you wouldn't really notice because who has time to go 'v, enter' on all of the dude's clothes. So it should be something that's more along the lines of those advisor things we were talking about where the dwarf has something to say to you - like the guy I mentioned having conversations with his dwarves - the dwarf should be like 'hey I just took my shirt out of my cabinet and now it's gold-studded and that's pretty cool and I think I should tell you about that', and it should be a huge thing that the guy can tell you instead of something you'd have to piss around with, and in that way magic can kind of remain magical and it doesn't always have to be little things like that there could be larger effects that are related to it or, if some guy makes a fell mood object and then all of a sudden all the dead bodies in your fortress start to rise up and you have to try [to] dump the thing down to a chasm before you all get eaten alive ... that'd be pretty cool. So there's options
Rainseeker:    Very shocking ...
Toady:    Well it should be kind of shocking, it's supposed to be magic. I'm hoping that that's how it works, I'm hoping that magic would be introduced through artifacts like that and also through the demons and other adversaries that are unique and rare and you'd get this thing where weird things happen or the whole sun is blotted out and the plants start to die or whatever, things get colder, and that could happen and then you'd have to figure out why it's happened; it doesn't tell you. There's all kinds of things that it can do and then the issue becomes ... the other mode of the game is adventure mode and a lot of people probably look forward to being able to use a spell caster, and the thing I've just outlined doesn't really fit very well with the notion of levelled spells and treating it like that where you work at it for long enough and then you can do fireball. But at the same time it's not as if that's a wholly unwholesome way of thinking and it shouldn't be supportable and I don't think it's impossible to have everything work out either way with parameters because it's not ...
Rainseeker:    You could have it even more story based, as people get their powers more in a story-based ways.
Toady:    Yeah, thinking of things like the deals witches make and other ways where people source their magic or how they got it, and they get it from the fairies or blah blah blah, stuff like that. Then you just need to have a starting scenario set up ... is it possible to make your magic still feel magical even though you're the one that knows how to do it, that comes up and how well do you know how to do it? How well do you even understand the things that you're doing? I think there are a lot of interesting questions there that you can explore in this type of setup that have really only been explored properly before in a plot setup, where you might have had magic seem magical but it was going through a game on rails, or you have magic that doesn't seem particularly magical[;] it can be randomised, but it's still just like 'Book One', 'Book Two', 'Book Three' or whatever. I'm not sure what I'm going to be able to do, it'll be interesting to give it a shot. Magic is kind of officially post version 1 material but the artifact arc is pre version 1 material so those are going to have a little tug-of-war I think when we get to working on artifacts to see how much magic actually makes it into version 1.
Rainseeker:    Do you have any plans to make the dwarves have the ability to more easily discover minerals and gems and such?
Toady:    There was originally ... this could have even been up on the dev pages, I don't really remember ... there's this idea for people doing surveyors and stuff like that and then there's ...
Capntastic:    Geologists and geomancers ...
Toady:    Yeah that whole branch of suggestions that are either purely magic based or purely science based or anywhere in between and I'm still not sure what I want to do with that, because it seems like a cop out in a way or something [...] but what problem does [the request] point to? I guess the problem it points to is that people are just having trouble finding stuff, and if that's the problem then maybe more the issue is that the mineral layout ... if you've seen an unhidden screenshot you've seen that the mineral layout is kind of asstacular right? It's like these little ovals and these restricted veins that run all in one z-layer, and I think improving the mineral layout could go a long way to alleviating some percentage of the concerns there. I think the other concerns are people that want to know where features are in advance, features like big open areas and so on, so that they can design their fortress without hitting those places and that's another thing that I'm ambivalent about because I know that some people are really into having a place that looks exactly how they want and then there's the whole idea of the game being about adapting to your circumstances so again it's a completely ambivalent thing there where you'd really want to set that down almost to world generation parameters or something, so that people can have their cake and eat it too. The reason I haven't really moved that quickly on these kind of suggestions is I'd like to find a way to do it that is the best, that addresses all the concerns and can make everybody happy without really compromising what the game feels like. And I think it's possible, I just haven't really hit upon the best way yet.

[Kurouma]

The "What not to do" Magic Steps! (For Satire and not insult purposes)

Really? Slippery slope.

As for Tolkien magic... you should probably be aware that there is Conjuring fireballs in Tolkien magic. So your example falls flat as to where you put your examples

This is not what I meant per se; that was an example. Re this:

A side note - in Middle-Earth Gandalf was one of only five semi-divine immortal beings in the entire world, so you wouldn't expect the abilities or experience of a magic wielder at a frontier colony of dwarves to correspond.

in that not just anyone can blast away.

Look...  When magic is purely uncontrolled, barely useable, and unuseful it in it of itself stops being "Magic" and turns into banal chaos.

I completely agree. Which is why I think the suggestion was driving at a slightly different kind of randomness than you're afraid of:

Also the magic rules and frameworks would be procedurally generated, right? This means that the pitfalls of magic would be in different places in each game, giving you a suitable sense of paranoia and the unknown, even as a wizard. That kind of randomness I fully support. But I don't think the magic itself should be so random as some people have suggested in other threads where a wizard waves his wand and something happens. I have never ever seen or heard of a magic "system" like that, in books or myths or anywhere else.

I fully agree with this.

Not simply inherently chaotic and useless artefact effects, for example, but reliable ones. You just don't get to choose what they are initially.

Don't get me wrong, I want magic in the game. I just don't want to see it handled in a way that doesn't suit DF.
Magic can still have utility, even if it's not directly controllable by the player, only (? maybe not only) from legendary artefacts. I think this matters less for others races though. Something like what Rowanas suggests;

I think Dwarven magic, no matter how it's generated, should be artifacts, golems and enchantments all the way. Leave High Magic to the elves or humans.

SCRAP THAT THANK YOU NIVM

[Knigel]

^But you said it shouldn't be "directly controllable by the player", which wouldn't just mean dwarves sticking to enchanted objects, because in Adventure mode you control humans and elves too.

@Rowanas: I figure that any magic which could be spammable (and for instance wouldn't be balanced just by being passive or very situational) would need some sort of limit. My problem with an exhaustion based limit is that someone would feel like using magic just because they're about to rest or something already and feel they may as well use some magic "just because". That's why I think attribute-draining works better: you never want your attributes to go down if you can avoid it and it's something you'll always need to put some decent effort into recovering.

[thijser]

Well there are a few ways to set up magic.
1 mages: individueals who control magic.
2 force of nature: magic cannot be controlled it's a force that is ever pressent.
3 object based: well as already suggested artifacts hold the magic.
4 gods: the gods hold all the magic and will use it whenever they want.

Then there is how preditable it should be.
Some people like to have their game as preditable as passble and prefer to see a complex system which they are capable of understaning.
Other people like it to be random.
And there are those who prefer it to be predetermend but without a system.
And the last groep who likes to see it all as simple as passble.
I think a complex system fits df best. Trough a random system wouldn't be out of place aswell.

[Knigel]

^I have to support the idea of a system being procedurally (not the same as randomly) generated for each world at world-gen, and thus be varying mixes of the different types, except of course gods if Toady decides not to make them really exist like it is right now.

[Neonivek]

I completely agree. Which is why I think the suggestion was driving at a slightly different kind of randomness than you're afraid of

For sure, I was just refering to all the magic suggestions of randomness overall where there are quite a few people who strongly support magic just randomly killing you. So I was making my points in advance rather then dirrectly refering to what the topic creator wrote.

Which is why I wasn't sure I should have even written those three steps (actually I think my brain was scrambled at the time) since I was expecting people to take it as a trollish response to the topic creator. My points were individual thoughts rather then a coherant mass.

On another note

I should state that "Forces of nature" can be controlled. You can divert a river, stomp out a fire, tame animals. The difference between force of nature "Uncontrolled" and Force of nature "barely controlled" is that in one it simply exists outside of you and another you can only dirrect it.

I still say the magic system should borrow heavily from our already existing sphere system.

[Namfuak]

I don't understand why people don't think you shouldn't be able to use magic somewhat industrially (at least in fortress mode).  For example, let's say I have an Alchemist.  I ask him to turn lead into gold.  So, he grabs a bar of lead and tries to turn it into gold.  And, maybe after a year or two, finally succeeds.  He then does it again, and having done it once before, tries the same method and does it in months rather than years.  And, eventually, he is so good at turning lead into gold that it becomes a routine task for him.  I'm not saying he could then go turn people into gold.  That would be a completely different process (maybe if I taught him to turn coke into gold?). 

Then there could be some unpredictability.  Maybe he destroys the lead and catches the shop on fire.  Maybe he turns it into gold, but it can't be cut or melted down.  Who knows?  But, eventually he'll get the process down.

Actually, I think it would be cool if you could think of your own spells, but they had to be stuff dwarves can do (something related to earth, say).  So, in my previous example, I said maybe you could turn coke (carbon) into something.  Then, when you are attacked, your magdwarf turns the carbon in the attackers' bodies into gold, killing them instantly.

And then there could be artifacts with random magic that is only hinted at in the description, and enemy wizards you know nothing about (or good ones).  And clowns/FBs already pretty much are magical.

[cog disso]

Alchemy as "scientific magic" is a good direction to go in for dwarves, I'm thinking a bit like the "alchemy" in the Dragon Quest games, where taking one (common) object and combining it with one (rare) objects results in one (extremely rare, alchemy-only) object.

One bar of platinum plus one diamond, plus sufficient degree of Alchemy, yields one lump of Orichalcum, which can be used to transmute a base element into Unobtainium at will. Unobtainium does whatever Toady decides it does, rather like Slade, only controllable and defined by user desires.

Alchemy would be one school of magic, perhaps the most "dwarvenly". Glamour would be the most "elven", and Enchantment would be the most "human".

Alchemy would basically be the previously mentioned combination of existing objects into rare (magical) ones.

Glamour would be the temporary substitution of existing objects into other objects, such as turning a wooden spear into a steel broadsword for the duration of the spell.

Enchantment would be adding magical variables to existing objects to make them more efficacious, such as making the aforementioned wooden spear into a wooden spear that becomes more useful against a specific species of megabeast, but is still largely dependent upon the skill of the user.

In Fortress Mode, Alchemy would be the most common form of "magic" outside of possible artifact-based effects, as dwarves have mastery over it in comparison to other races. The other two schools would be wildly more useful in Adventure Mode, and would make playing an elf or a human over a dwarf an actual decision rather than a preference.

Observing some of the suggestions in this thread, I also amend my previous artifact-based suggestion to allow "control" of certain forces... rather like the Sorceror's Apprentice's magical hat. The wearer of the magical crown could activate existing statues into golems, for instance, at the risk of eventually going mad if using it for too long.

I still like the idea of ghosts and spirits that can't harm or be harmed by dwarves, and might even "haunt" abandoned parts of the fortress, like the empty barracks that are often built during construction of the main fortress. They would just flicker in and out of existence and would add even more depth to the already existing DF afterlife, and possibly even make it possible to resurrect dead dwarves if a successful attack on Hell happens. If you have a ghost issue, and you succeed in finding the ghost's soul in Hell, for instance, you could perform a small ritual to bring the dead dwarf back to life. It would be A LOT of work, but it would be an interesting personal quest to take up if you feel like it, especially as Fortresses start developing hero cults and legendary leaders, as they are already starting to do now.

[Rooster]

To clarify, Tolkien magic:

http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/lordoftherings/magic/principles.html

Why aren't you people using uncle google anymore?

[Neonivek]

The problem with using Magic for Industry is you don't want to replace or upstage industry.

I remember one system magic was extremely powerful and you could basically abuse it for things you could do normally. The problem was that Magic takes its toll on the magician so you didn't want to use magic except in life or death circumstances since a mage who uses magic a lot tends not to live very long.

In other worlds magic has sometimes been "expencive" to the point where a Wizard was only used for things you couldn't do normally. Since a spell that turns lead into gold probably cost more then the gold. Entire kingdoms usually had only one wizard.

[Nivim]

 All of these are examples of systems that might be generated, rather than the basic elements the generator would work with. Neonivek has the right idea by mentioning spheres. {Sphere ares things like Perseverance, Avarice, or Suicide, that current DF religons are based off of and gods are related to.} They are going to determine what kind of magic a civilization/culture would prefer to use, and determine a lot about magic in general. Spheres will be attached to creatures (in the raws), places, objects, and even events to help the game mechanics understand things more complex than any game ever has before.
 Take each of the examples you've used, identify their basic elements, identify how they interact, then figure out how that might work with the many spheres. Some obvious world generation settings are;

• The general level of magic in a world. 1 wizard in a million or 1 in 5?
• The scale of how predictable the magic is. Chaos magic versus vancian(DnD) magic.
• The proportions of who has the magic. Do mortals make it? Is it part of the land? Does it only come from powerful spirits?
• The scale of relative magic cost. Is it so easy everyone uses it over mundane means? Or is it so hard everyone uses it as a last resort?

Those are the kinds of things you're looking for!


 Also, like Toady's quote from the devtalk (you should all read because it's awesome), I have a few pointed quotes here that should further discussion, and keep a few things from being repeated again.

I don't want magic to be advanced technology.  I don't want magic to be at all reliable.  I want magic to be magic, from the root word MYSTERY, meaning "That which I don't understand".  Anything reliable is understandable, anything predicatable is understandable.  On the other hand, magic still needs to do stuff-- but it should be chaotic in the mathematic sense of slight changes in the setup leading to VASTLY different results.  The difference between summoning a tiny imp to do your bidding and summoning a spirit of fire who starts bahaving like a noble in your fort, walking down the halls like he lives there while starting fires and making demands for better furnature in its room.

Why do I want this?  Because dwarf fortress could be the first game I know of to be ABLE to do this.  What other game could you make a love potion in, and have that love potion have a non-scripted plot related effect?  What other game could you have magic that just makes people feel uncomfortably creeped out in a location?  What other magic can exact a cost of your ability to play music as a price for power?

In short, what other game can replicate FAIRY TALE magic, instead of D&D magic?

No other game has even tried.  Dwarf Fortress could do it.  Let technology be reliable.  Let magic be MAGIC.

That was beautiful. I'm going to sig the last line.

What's the point of making magic if you have no control whatsoever over the result? I can see a mage saying "well, I want this tomato to grow BIG!". So, alright, there's no "Bigsby's Improved Tomato Mass Increase" spell in some book, but surely the mage has some specific intention when "casting" his magic, at least? He's not going to go "wooot TOMATO let's see what happens if I do THIS!" and start waving his hand and invoking the circles of Life and throwing magic dust everywhere.

Sergius has a point.

There needs to be SOME baseline of normacy for Magic (excluding Chaotic spells, but those are specific kinds) or else they are one of two things or both
A) Useless: Magic has little chance of doing what you want or need
B) A Time Bomb: Magic will eventually backfire, making it effectively a time bomb.

It needs to be both useful and viable as a long term character build.

[...]but i see no reason why it can't eventually backfire. EVERYTHING IN DWARF FORTRESS IS DANGEROUS. Why should magic be any different. You set up a magma forge, but you could've done exactly the same thing with wood and less risk. Waterfalls are dangerous and lethal, when you could get the same effect by just giving everyone a larger room. nothing is necessary, and pretty much everything will eventually kill a dwarf or two, but that's what DF is all about. Discarding a decent magic system because it doesn't allow you to fireball a goblin at 50 paces every time with no risk is retarded. If you know and control how it works then it isn't fucking magic, is it?

[...]

This is what I'm thinking: Imagine technology as two gears with their teeth in eachother. You spin one gear, and the other gear will turn likewise in the predictable manner. Now imagine technology as throwing a super-bouncy ball being thrown at a target in a cluttered room. You have control over the ball, but the slightest error will cause it to not only miss, but to ricochet violently in all directions unpredictably.

What I'm saying is, is that magic should have elements of having control over it, but not so much that it's business as usual. It's varied, it's unique, it's difficult to understand, and only a master can truly get it to do what it wants all the time, and maybe not even then.

Perhaps the elements that magic can be randomized from game to game, or even area to area within the game-world, so as to increase the mystique and difficulty of use that would make it a valuable yet dangerous endeaver?

The thing that keeps coming up for me is that fireballing a goblin at fifty paces is basically just a crossbow but with pretty colours.

Magic that civilizations actually use would most likely not do anything normal, like killing stuff, because there's perfectly good technology for doing that already. It should do things that are otherwise impossible. (Create a magma pipe from whole cloth. That only goes two z-levels down, to the normal bottomless pit, with normal rock in the levels under the pit. No building up from there, though...)

It should not just create wood or food, for instance. Boring. Useful, maybe, and certainly in a story creating a huge pile of logs from nothing would be quite impressive, but in a game it ends up just being another tool. "Ah yes, I don't have enough wood on this map so let me just make the magic workshop and set 'create wood R'" This is not magic. This is the worst of spreadsheet RPG.

Magic does have to be a bit random, or it will just be normal things in different colours. For example, fey moods. They create otherwise unattainably powerful weapons and armour, but cannot be controlled.

Also of note, 'Dwarf magi' seems like a contradiction in terms. Elves are the dudes that have their civilization all magicked up. Dwarves are magical more implicitly...like casually using magma for smelting and forging.

Magic, to be magic, must do things that are otherwise impossible. By definition, it should bend physics, or break it outright, rather than just accelerating or easing perfectly mundane tasks. (Flight-it can get you up there, but so can building stairs.) Necromancy is a perfect example. Headless dwarves...now there's a benefit tied up into a drawback. Miasma? Is 'my hubby is wandering around headless' a thought to even compare to 'forced to watch a friend decay?'

Unfortunately for this line of reasoning, ALL magic ultimately must have a mundane goal. Protecting the fortress. Creating wealth. Exploration. That's about it. For example, necromancy is only better than robotics in the fact that it would probably be cheaper. In fact, there's only one real invention I can think of that acts even a little bit like ideal magic - ironically enough, the computer.

Before the transistor, machines could not, in practise, think. They needed human direction in all tasks. While complicated machines doing complicated things could be made, at the very least a human would have to turn them on, and usually off as well.

This is an ideal target for medieval magic - machines that can think, or at least tell the difference between similar objects. Fire that knows not to harm your dwarves, but is perhaps less finicky about pets. Doors that only let non-nobles pass. Also, divination (sensors) in general; reveal.exe plus balance, or maybe just 'it feels like iron is that way.'

One thing robotics definitely CAN'T do is make a functioning automaton with no physical equivalent to a brain, whereas necromancy does exactly that, in addition to somehow bypassing the muscles and digestive tract/power train as well.

Most immediately, I think magma forges should do something amazing. I mean, magma is pretty awesome, but magma forges are more awesome and I want them to somehow bake magma flavour into some kind of forged object. Toady would be much better at thinking up exactly how that I would, however.

P.S. Mainly I'm writing this cuz I like thinking about the issue.

  (I can't decide what quotes to pull out after the above; there are a lot of good ones in that thread. But also some logical failures...)


 Better?

[thijser]

Another way of creating magic yet limiting it would be by making rare magical crystals. That way you can have magic but it can't completly replace any other system because you would soon run out of crystals to power it. It could be used to lure more people to the hidden fun and certain magical creatures could carry them to use the magic themselfs.

[Nivim]

    5. The scale of how strongly magic is tied to objects. Does it vanish outside of special containers (crystals)? Is it impossible to bottle?
    6. The scale of how physical magic is. Is magic mined like a gem, or drunk like ale? Is it never seen, heard, or felt tactily?

[Virex]

Why should magic be something that the player wants anyway? It would be very fitting for DF if magic users would be a danger to your fortress. Sort of like moods and tantrums, magic users could spontaneously cause random, often dangerous, effects. Trying to rout out magic users would only worsen the problem as they would try anything they can to survive, with often hilarious result (burning one in magma makes other dwarves burn or turns the mayor into obsidian, drowing causes the magic user to reappear as a drowned death who hunts your dwarves, an unhappy magic user could cause the entire fort to tantrum as he sits by and watches the slaughter, *urist has enjoyed a good mind control today*)


Instead of asking "how can we use magic" we should ask ourself "how can we make magic as much FUN as possible."