Transplanting this from the FotF thread...
And once again, the example of what "wild magic" means comes down to "it has a 20% chance of killing everyone nearby." Whenever I ask what "wild magic" means in terms of something that can actually be in a game, it always comes down to "it kills your dwarves if you use it". This isn't complex behavior, it's just a random game over if you're stupid enough to use the system.
Again, DF is fundamentally a game of managed risk. ...
Let me try and give a different sort of example. Let's assume for the moment that future!DF has a sliding "chaosity of magic" parameter; and that it can reasonably be condensed into a simple parameter of small integers. (Given the "fantasy level" parameter for the mythology generator shown in the GDC talk which works exactly like that, I think it's a decent starting point at least.)
Due to whatever combination of origin myths (which seem to frequently involve cosmic eggs, and commonly animal deities), let's say there is a spell that creates turkey eggs; as this is nominally for your breakfast omelette (Turkey Egg Stew: Expertly Diced Turkey Eggs x3), the simplest version creates 3. (The costs, difficulty in researching or learning, etc. would be set elsewhere in the generator.)
Chaos 0: Spell creates 3 turkey eggs (3-3, avg. 3)
Chaos 1: Spell creates 1d3+1 turkey eggs (2-4, avg. 3)
Chaos 2: Spell creates 1d5 turkey eggs (1-5, avg. 3)
Chaos 3: Spell creates 1d6-1 turkey eggs, with the dice
exploding on 6 (0 to infinite, or maxint at least; but still avg. 3)
Chaos 4: Spell creates 1d6-1 items, with the dice exploding on 6 (0 to infinite, or maxint at least; but still avg. 3); plus an additional d6 is rolled... 1: a random sort of egg; 2-5, turkey egg(s) as expected; 6: a random turkey product (varying the kind and the type at the two ends; a spell to create gold ingots might have a chance of random ingots, or random gold things)
Chaos 5: mostly as above, but the additional die is 1: random source or predecessor; 2: random egg; 3-4: turkey egg; 5: random turkey product; 6: random target or successor. You might end up with a live turkey, a ready to eat 3x Turkey Egg Stew (omelette, more or less), or something along those lines. The gold ingots spell might give gold ore, or gold figurines.
Chaos 6: adds another die, which on a 6 gives a random modifier or state to the result so far... eggs might be fertile or rotten or boiling, nominally-live turkeys might be giant or starving or husked. Gold ingots might arrive molten, or as masterwork studding on everything in the workshop.
All of the above are based on fairly straightforward algorithmic modifications of the initial "predictable" result (3 turkey eggs), plus trawling around in pre-existing relationships in the raws. No one would argue that even the Chaos 3 version *can* be a lot less predictable; but really you've got less than 0.5% chance of more than a dozen eggs, the *average* remains 3, and if some fort somewhere generates four dozen eggs from a single casting, that's amusing while also being one in a million.
Even stepping up to Chaos 5... getting several live turkeys when you asked for 3 eggs is certainly a bit surprising, but in the general scheme of fort (or adventurer) life is more likely to cause an amusing anecdote than the fall of civilization.
Only when you turn it all the way up to Chaos 6 does there become any real potential for disaster, and the odds are very low. Even most of the weird results are annoying and/or humorous; ending up with 11 rotting Turkey Egg Stew in your magic workshop, with attendant miasma until cleaned up, is unlikely to end any reasonably prepared fortress. There's a tiny chance of ending up with a few angry zombie turkeys, or were-turkeys; this could cause a moderate amount of damage to a good fort or end a teetering one, but the chances for this sort of ending are down there with "embarked someplace with undead eagles and rain that stuns the living". And remember that this is a *voluntary* parameter turned (in this example) up as far as it could go.
While the example is a bit contrived, hopefully it helps explain how a simple spell "creates about 3 turkey eggs" can become gradually more chaotic, via entirely procedural means that can readily be programmed within the existing structures.
This really doesn't address the fundamental problem I'm trying to point out.
The problem isn't the exact probability of death, it's that it's a really simple, boring cost-benefit analysis to make.
Once again, the thing people want is some magic system totally different from other RPGs and like what occurs in fantasy novels, where it seems mysterious. When asked how to make it, they say the exact same "wizard spends MP and gets an exactly measured, predictable output" concept as exists in those RPGs it's supposed to be different from. When told this, the inevitable next step to try to "fix" that problem is to append the exact same Wild Magic Table that just makes the numbers of the effect larger or smaller.
Let me use an example... I remember
Zero Punctuation's take on Assassin's Creed Unity, which said
Let's focus on the new mechanics, or rather, gimmicks.
A gimmick is a new mechanic that lets us achieve something we could already do with already-established mechanics, but easier... or harder, in the latter case instantly rendering itself as vestigial as an armless chimpanzee's bellend.
Syndicate has examples of both:
The new hookshot merely replaces all the traditional climbing gameplay with one button press, and when things go corset-up, you can instantly escape pursuers with a smoke bomb and hookshot out; AKA the Batman bye-bye. And while it was occasionally annoying to watch Ezio or Altair bounce his little tushy up and down internally debating whether a 2mm crack constitutes a handhold, this is taking out gameplay and not replacing it with anything - unless you count trying to figure out which square foot of rooftop to stand in to make the game recognize the opposite building as hookshot-able.
[...]
Also, there's drivable carriages in the sandbox [...] but it's slightly faster than parkour and slightly slower than hookshotting, making it a gimmick that is introduced and made obsolete within the same sodding game.
So, remember how bees were introduced, and they had these really complex mechanics, but everything you could achieve with bees could be achieved with much, much simpler means through things we already had? Or how ceramics were introduced, but they didn't do anything we couldn't already do with the much more prevalent and generally useful stone or wood?
The problem is that people are talking about magic as solely being a "make your wizard wave their hand and pay MP to do something we could already do, but with a percentage chance to have horrible things happen to you that wouldn't happen if you just did the things you could already do."
There is no reason to cast a spell for turkey eggs, we can already just bring turkeys on embark and be neck-deep in turkey eggs by two years in. Yes, that's just a silly, arbitrary example, but every other use people come up with tends to be the same: Attack magic that's just a "magic" version of a crossbow or dumping magma on something with "hilarious" drawbacks the existing methods of shooting enemies don't have.
Even if it were a "better" way of doing something we can already do, then you've just made some other, generally better-developed part of the game obsolete.
Or to put it far more bluntly, if you try to make magic into a way of doing something we could already do, you've already failed. You've reduced magic to a gimmick that is either an easy mode way of doing something we could do before with a system that had more depth, or it's not only a giant timewaster, but it's also suicidally stupid to use. You aren't making meaningful choices, you're making simple cost-benefit calculations.
I started creating the Class Warfare thread because I originally wanted to join the chorus asking for ceramics, (before, you know, they were in the game,) but then realized that they would serve no real purpose unless some problem existed that they could solve. I realized a lot of dwarven crafts generally already fell into that same trap of worthlessness. Hence, I started writing up a system of dwarves having growing demands for luxury goods and entertainment as a method of providing the problem that crafts could actually solve. Toady ultimately introduced ceramics without mechanics to make them useful, so they were useless. He is, however, eventually getting around to the concepts of designing a problem for the new mechanics to solve through making the Stress system more dependent upon having Taverns that entertain dwarves critical to preventing dwarven unhappiness with a boring life. He also made goblets finally useful, so hopefully, ceramics in general can eventually get in on that.
The basic hurdle the Wild Magic Table system that keeps coming up fails to clear is that you cannot make a magic system that isn't just "industrialized magic" with a system that fundamentally revolves around industrialized fulfillment of a few basic needs, and the rest being fluff. You need to make a whole new problem for what magic players can control players can use as the solution.
This is exactly why, so far, Toady has only introduced magic that players
cannot directly control. Because then, magic
is the problem that players have to solve, and it requires that players try to use the existing systems in more creative ways to solve these new problems. That is, it
enhances the value of existing mechanics, rather than
competing with or rendering obsolete those existing mechanics.
Even in these existing instances, however, the magic we have now is notably not terribly capable of that sort of "mystery" that you can't know and predict everything about how a vampire or necromancer will act. This is a largely a problem of a system that just isn't capable of generating seriously emergent behaviors.
Emergent behaviors (for which DF is famous) arise because individual systems are capable of interacting within a shared gamespace. Magma is only so useful and iconic in DF because it is something you can indirectly control through fortress layout, and it can interact with most other aspects of the game's mechanics (or occupants). Magma is its own system, but it also operates on the temperature system, the world-shaping system (digging), the mechanics system on both ends (triggering pressure plates or being moved by pumps or released with floodgates), creatures (dumping magma on creatures), combat (dumping magma on creatures), garbage disposal, resource creation (obsidian), industry (magma forges), and possibly some others I forgot. As is said in Bay12, magma is the solution to every problem, and that's specifically because its interactivity with every other system is precisely what makes it so capable of emergent gameplay.
Magic needs to be capable of creating that kind of emergent behavior, and that's not done when you make magic a system that simply tries to replace some already-existing system, where you either use the existing farming system or the magic system's "create food" spells. Inevitably, one will be better than the other, probably the existing farming, because it's doubtful you'd ever be able to have enough wizards to summon eggs for everyone, and even if you could, it seems even more doubtful it wouldn't be far more effective to just keep our current ludicrously scalable
tribbles egg-making machines.
This is, ultimately, why I wind up with this Xenosynthesis thread. It's meant to make "magic" a part of the environment that can interact with all the other systems in DF. It's meant to make magic a problem that takes understanding and manipulating magic its own solution. It gives magic to dwarves, but more in the way that magma is available to dwarves: It's a dangerous tiger to try to ride, but it isn't completely arbitrary and unfair. Magma doesn't just cause blindly random Wild Magma Table rolls that kill random dwarves, it's dangerous when you don't prepare for it, but tame and predictable if you have the foresight to manage the myriad issues related to its use.