How I think about story games

What follows isn't an attempt at a codification or taxonomy or definition. In fact, it deviates from some of the language people use to describe TTRPGs and story(-telling) games.

It's a way of looking at the design space that I've personally found useful, and a sketch of some of the ways people end up arguing at cross-purposes about story.

 

Story  ∈  TTRPG

First, the process of playing a tabletop role-playing game does inevitably create stories: whether you think that's the point of playing or not; whether you think the GM should try to steer it or plan it or not; whether you think there's story from start to finish or only after the fact.

Back in 1987, Gary Gygax advised that

When the principal characters in a story (the campaign) are free-willed and have a multitude of choices regarding how to proceed, it is counterproductive – and, in fact, impossible – to preordain just how the events in the campaign will unfold.

In 2009, the Alexandrian made the firm case most of us are familiar with: don't prep plots.

A plot is the sequence of events in a story.

And the problem with trying to prep a plot for an RPG is that you’re attempting to pre-determine events that have not yet happened. Your gaming session is not a story — it is a happening. It is something about which stories can be told, but in the genesis of the moment it is not a tale being told. It is a fact that is transpiring.

In 2021, the Angry GM noted that

the story—the narrative—is an emergent thing. Your game’s going to have a narrative when it’s done. Like it or not. And people are going to interpret it based on how they think stories work. Players won’t experience the game as it was. They’ll experience it based on their warped perception of it. [...]

Once your game’s done, it’s going to have had a plot. It’s going to have followed a single sequence of events. There’s going to have been a climax. People—even you—will remember that s$&%. You can either use what power you have to steer the game toward the best narrative possible. One that does the things that thirty millenniums of storytelling have taught us make for good stories. Or you can hope and pray that the emergent narrative is accidentally a good one. It’s your call.

And just recently in 2024, Tom van Winkle wrote a superb article about the nuances of all this. If you only have time to read one blog post today, go read that one instead of this.

The assumption seems to be that to create a story, you need a plot in advance. It's important for the entire entry here to understand that that is not true. [...]

What all the "anti-story" gamers have in common today is that they allowed other people to define the term "story" for them as "pre-designed plot," even though that's not what story means.

He analyses "anti-story" gamers, who

have, apparently unwittingly, accepted the false idea that RPGs would need plots designed in advance to have stories in a story-telling game. Their objections are therefore confusing for many people who are aware that they experience stories arising spontaneously in RPGs.

The underlying claim is: playing a tabletop role-playing game is intrinsically a process of telling a story. And yes, in a technical sense, this is absolutely true. In a TTRPG session, real-world people are making deliberate decisions that lead to the details of a fictional universe and events within it being filled in. Therefore, definitionally speaking, the players and GM have collaborated to tell a story.

Tom van Winkle in particular discusses the literature, and what scholars of story and narrative have agreed on, and how that applies.

The problem, though, is that in everyday, natural English for the layperson, the phrase "tell a story" comes with all sorts of baggage that doesn't necessarily apply to TTRPGs.

The phrase is laden with subtle implications in common English:

1. Telling a story means the storytellers are doing so with the primary goal of producing a 'good story', or at least are telling a story intentionally
2. Telling a story means the storytellers have equal parts, or at least similar amounts of creative control
3. Telling a story means the process is done selectively, without random elements
4. Telling a story means that core elements of the narrative are planned (at least a little in advance), not suddenly discovered
5. Telling a story means that people are making choices in order to further the narrative in a satisfying way, which might not be the 'optimal' or even plausible choices for a particular character
6. Telling a story is unregulated by formal mechanics, or at least largely so

None of these are true of TTRPGs in general. They're not even all true simultaneously for most story-telling games!

So telling a novice who's interested in entering the hobby that a TTRPG is necessarily 'about telling a story' is frankly just misleading that person, unless you stop and break down why 'telling a story' doesn't mean most of what they think it means. (And it may lead to further misunderstandings, like when they hear the term 'player agency' and think it means creative agency over the fictive world, and so on...)

...We still have this phrase, 'story game'.

Two axes

When I think about 'story games' and TTRPGs, I envisage two parallel tracks running left to right.

On the first axis, we have 'rules' to the left and 'freeform' to the right. This axis mostly has to do with the GM, if the game has one.

• A game can be towards the left, 'rules', with lots of rules and processes for decision-making. A game here encourages system mastery for both the GM and the players. It doesn't necessarily imply more control or omniscience for the GM: the game could be heavily reliant on random tables, for instance, or there could be lots of codified rules for how the players get to mess around with the game world directly rather than through their characters.
• A game can be towards the right, 'freeform', taking an open-ended and freeform approach to actual gameplay. In this case the GM is making up a lot as they go along, relying more on the characteristics of the world that have so far been determined than on rules and frameworks provided by the game.
• A game can be somewhere in the middle, with moderate rule support.

On the second axis, we have 'decisions' to the left and 'insertions' to the right. This axis has more to do with the players than the GM.

• A game can be towards the left, 'decisions', where players control their character's mind – the decisions they make – and nothing else. The GM determines what is in the world, controls events and NPCs, and adjudicates PC decision outcomes. (But even the most leftward TTRPGs usually have a carve-out here for character generation, where players get to pick things about their character which the character realistically couldn't have chosen within the world.)
• A game can be towards the right, 'insertions', where players have power over aspects of the game that isn't through their characters. In some situations characters can create, choose, affect, invent, or veto, but in games like this the players have an ability to create, choose, affect, invent, or veto.
• A game can be somewhere in the middle, mixing approaches.
  

The reason I picture the tracks as parallel is that many games, if you map them onto the axes, make a line that's close to vertical. That is,

• Most, though not all, 'traddish TTRPGs' (games with few to no overt player-available story-telling elements) are also mechanically rigorous. They are towards the left on both axes. In general, the GM has lots of power and mechanical support, and the players will know that most things they choose to do will be covered by rules. Whether those rules are good or bad, players may be uneasy with situations where the GM has to go with their gut over having an 'official' answer. It will be unusual (troubling, even) for a GM to invite a player to fill in gaps in the world or determine action outcomes.
• Most, though not all, 'collaborative story-telling games' (in which players are permitted to insert content directly into the world rather than being restricted to attempts to alter the world with their characters) have relatively few rules and processes. They are towards the right on both axes. In general, there isn't anywhere near as much of an authority disparity between the GM and the players, or there might not be a GM at all. The game rules tend to be 'softer' or 'fuzzier', the players are given more overt license to override or ignore them, and the mechanical framework is usually designed more towards 'crafting a satisfying narrative' than towards 'playing a skill-requiring game' or 'simulating a fictional world'.

I'm personally most interested in the leftward side of both scales. I've designed at least one little game that wanders around the middle of the axes, and have a few others sitting on the project pile, but as a designer and player I mostly lean left, towards 'traddish TTRPGs'.

But I'm also interested, from a design point of view, in the rare oddballs. The really open-ended, rules-light TTRPGs with high GM authority, perhaps like this idea. And the highly constrained, rules-heavy, almost formulaic, versions of story-telling games, with no referee.

 

Ways of playing

We can map the way people actually play games onto these two tracks, too. As opposed to how games were designed to be played.

The big example here is (as it often is) D&D 5e. The system is to the centre-left on the rules/freeform track: it's crunchy and extensive compared to a lot of indie games, but not as much as previous editions of the same game, or GURPS, or whatever). And it's quite far left on the decisions/insertions track: the official rules only contain (outside character generation) a few optional and tacked-on suggestions about direct player control over the world.

Interestingly, this isn't always borne out in play. It's possibly due to the rise of people entering the hobby via watching televised 'actual play' by actors, or possibly a trend that's always been there but is just more visible now. A lot of people these days play D&D as if it was further right on the decisions/insertions scale. Players in a lot of games end up with a certain amount of creative control over the world.

To put it in fuzzier terms, they inject elements of a collaborative story-telling exercise into a relatively traddish TTRPG when they play. And that's fine. I suspect they might be better served by playing an actual story-telling game with design elements supporting that, but ultimately, let people have their own fun.

To sum up

This is just how I think about things. It's not a formal system or a position on how things ought to be done.

I think it's fair to say that all TTRPG involves the creation of story – and again, go read van Winkle's article for a really well-considered take – and that some people have the creation of that story as a more primary concern than others. I think that the phrase 'telling a story' has misleading implications when it comes to TTRPGs, which is why I personally avoid saying that TTRPGs deeply involve it, even if (getting into the weeds) it's true. And I find it interesting that when it comes to story, we can try to pin games onto two axes which quite often correlate with one another.

Players not engaging

It's game time and the players are just sitting there spinning their wheels. They plan and what-if and weigh their odds and bicker in and out of character. Yeah, it's one of those sessions.

 What's happened?

1. The players might have insufficient information to make a decision. They may have forgotten some information. Perhaps one of your hints was inscrutable. The players might not see how some information they have aligns with one of their objectives.
   
2. The player characters might have unclear goals or clashing goals, or there might be disagreement in the group about which goal to pursue (due to differences in PC preference or differences in reasoning). They might be unclear about which goals should be prioritised above which others.
3. The players might have a real-life moral dilemma about acting to achieve in-character goals that don't align well with their own ideals, and are tip-toeing around having to confront that. This is a huge issue and is best served by halting the session to have the conversation.
4. You might have forgotten to give the player characters time pressure and stakes. There's a particular kind of malaise that can occur when you're using a subjective (or just subjective-feeling) experience/advancement system ('milestone' or 'narrative' or 'chapter' advancement) and you don't have a setting with big obvious time limits or opportunity costs or wandering damage. A feeling that the positive and negative consequences of action and inaction are all vague and distant can transition into a feeling that action and inaction don't really matter.
5. The players might be dreading that the wrong choice will endanger their PCs. This is a different way there can be a lack of motivation towards action over inaction. In this case, you've done such a good job as a GM getting the players invested in their characters and feeling the world has big dangerous stakes that they've become paralysed with indecision. Good work, bad outcome. I'm quite sad that I've never achieved this one. Probably the best way to coax things towards action is to remind them of how the world is ticking on in the background without them.
6. The players might be under the misapprehension that the GM should be deciding things for them. Apparently this can happen with novice players and/or due to 'learned helplessness' in the wake of unpleasantly railroady GM-ing. This is another huge issue where your best bet is to call a halt and discuss the problem in an understanding but matter-of-fact way.
7. The players might be too overloaded with information to make a good decision.

That last one's a joke. It might be possible to give the players 'too much' information but I've never seen it done (or even heard it complained about).

There are orthogonal mistakes, of course: giving the players too much false information from bad sources, giving the players too little likely-immediately-meaningful information, obfuscating information excessively, giving the players information in ways that makes it seem irrelevant, giving the players information that makes them regret their goals and objectives, giving the players information too fast for them to digest or note down, giving the players information after establishing a GM style in which nothing they learn ever really matters, etc.

Manage information to avoid a 'players not engaging' session

I have two tips here.

First

Establish PC goals early. Always summarise PC goals at the start of a session along with information you know they have which is likely to be relevant to those goals (and other key information). Constantly restate PC goals and key information during play, if even a glimmer of an opportunity presents itself. It's hard to overdo this. Remind PCs of their character motivations if those are substantially different from their immediate and long-term goals.

When the player (character)s acquire new information, try to frame it in terms of PC goals and other key information they already have, so that it slots neatly into their mental framework.

Second

When you're handing out any kind of information "X" via narration, you might have a tendency to hedge or use filler words. You absolutely must learn to overcome this. Cut out any qualifying language like this:

• "I guess it makes sense that X"
• "it's sort of X"
• "I suppose X would"
• "it's kind of... you know, X"
  
• "you think that maybe X"
• "[sigh and grimace] well... X"
• "Y! ...No, well actually, X"
  

Phrasing things this way undermines a player's trust in the quality, validity, and importance of the information content! It conveys, consciously or unconsciously, that the GM is uncertain about what's true in the world. It also conveys that the information wasn't important enough to pre-determine. And it conveys that the information wasn't connected enough to other things in the world for there to be an obvious answer.

Brains can only pay attention to so much, and are constantly filtering information into buckets based on its perceived usefulness. Hedging/filling will get information filtered disproportionately into the mental bucket with 'discard immediately' written on it.

The solution is just a matter of practice. Learn to pause and work out exactly what you want to say, then give a precise, confident, unambiguous answer. Even after a long pause you'll be much more likely to get information to stick in the players' heads.

d6 degrees of success with anything

Is the badger's burrow wide enough to squeeze down? Is the giant scorpion's flesh edible? Are the bars set in a stone weak enough to chip away? Will the dead tree's branch stand up to the dwarf's weight? Does the abandoned generator have any gas left in it?

You're a GM and need to determine some aspect of your world. Roll a d6. 1 is the worst plausible outcome for the characters, 6 is the best, and everything else is shades in between.

Why do this?

• It's quicker than any other rules-based approach
  
• It's helpful if you have trouble just snap deciding the answers to questions
• It's useful when something would affect the PCs, so you would be either 'handing them a win' or 'screwing them over' by fiat
• The dice can surprise you and challenge you
• When not everything has the most likely default answer, it can make a world feel more real
• There might be a rule for this situation (or one that can be adapted), but you don't remember where it is

The "crawling down the badger burrow" example:
1 - Looks barely wide enough to get down, but narrows partway through, so characters can get stuck upside down in the middle of a twisty dirt tube
2 - Isn't wide enough to squeeze through
3 - Is wide enough to squeeze down but requires a little digging around the bends
4,5 - Is wide enough for the smaller characters, but not the largest
6 - Is just large enough for everyone to get through

The "eating the giant scorpion meat" example:
1 - Is poisonous; incautious consumers suffer a minor ongoing poison effect
2 - Is mildly toxic; characters start throwing it up shortly after getting it down
3 - Is edible but tastes really bad
4,5 - Is fine to eat
6 - Is not merely edible, but delicious and keeps well

Etcetera.

The key understanding is that you don't even have to assign numbers and degrees of success before rolling. Just mentally frame - or speak out loud - your question. Then you roll, say, a 2. All you have to do is think, what's the second-worst answer to the question?

Advanced versions:

• Rarely, you'll have a question where the range of plausible outcomes are neutral with regard to the player characters. Just orient yourself on whatever axis you can find, and roll.
• Sometimes there will clearly be more possible axes than 'good' or 'bad'. Something could pose a high or low threat but offer a high or low reward, for example. Just use several dice, associating one colour with one axis.
• With a basic intuitive understanding of dice probabilities, you can determine the answers to questions about populations, off the cuff. Say you've randomly generated a group of 21 soldiers on the road. How many are in poor morale? Could really be any number of them: 1d20. How many are currently battle-ready? Probably most but not all of them: 1d8+10. How many are carrying bows? Let's guess it's likely to be about half: 2d10.
  

The hit point problem

...Or, what do HP actually represent (in traditional RPGs and their descendants)?

Dr Bret Devereaux's recent article on armour and RPGs, in talking about how armour actually works, reminded me about this argument. It's an argument that's older than the internet, an argument that's fundamentally pointless, an argument that's been rehashed thousands if not millions of times... so I thought I might as well get into it briefly.

Let's start here:

Hit points are a combination of actual physical constitution, skill at the avoidance of taking real physical damage, luck and/or magical or divine factors. [...] a near-miss, a slight wound, and a bit of luck used up, [...] more often than not a grazing blow, a mere light wound which would have been fatal (or nearly so) to a lesser mortal. If sufficient numbers of such wounds accrue to the character, however, stamina, skill, and luck will eventually run out, and an attack will strike home

- Gary Gygax, Dragon #24


It seems widely accepted, as well as being straight from the horse's mouth, that hit points are a mixture of a creature's capacity for and resilience against suffering injury ('meat points') and its chances, for various reasons, of avoiding serious injury in situations in which it might suffer serious injury ('grace points').

There's an implication that grace points are mostly 'used up' before meat points. And the obvious interpretation is that there's some (unspecified) ratio of grace to meat.

Unfortunately it's still impossible to arrive at a really self-consistent understanding of hit points in D&D-likes, whether you think HP is 0.1% meat and 99.9% grace, 99.9% meat and 0.1% grace, or anything in between.

HP must be almost entirely meat points, for the following reasons.

• 1 damage to a 100-HP creature has to entail actual physical harm because it can come with 'riders' like injecting poison from a poison-tipped dart. If the dart didn't pierce the flesh 'on hit', it wouldn't have been able to convey the poison. At the other end of the spectrum, 100 damage is enough to kill the creature (or nearly so, depending on edition), so that too must be actual physical harm.
• In trad games, higher Constitution improves HP (i.e., meat points). In comparison, Dexterity, Wisdom, and Intelligence (i.e., grace points) don't improve hit points at all, and neither do weapon/armour use skills and features (when they exist). If grace points made up a non-negligible proportion of hit points, having these attributes would affect HP total.
• Numerous game effects, spells, items, and so on have descriptors that equate even potentially quite small amounts of HP recovery with descriptions of physical wounds closing. I would guess an outright majority of supernatural healing effects involve physical injury in their description, with most of the others being ambivalent or lacking description, and very few indeed talking about restoring anything that seems like grace points.
• Plenty of damage in classic RPGs comes from sources that can't easily be mitigated (or can come from them in principle, for no special rules for when that happens). You character is stabbed while unconscious. Your character falls onto a field of spikes. Your character swims across an acid lake. Your character takes intermittent damage from rotting disease. The moisture is leached from your character's body by a horrid spell. In cases like these, half of the justification for 'grace points' can't be in play: the character isn't 'using skill to avoid harm', the damage isn't 'near-misses', and the character isn't just 'getting tired' or 'pushing their luck'. There are whole character archetypes unlikely to be protected by 'divine forces' or 'magical factors'.

Of course, it's also true that

HP has to be almost entirely grace points, for the following reasons.

• When a 100-HP creature takes 99 damage, this doesn't seem to involve any actual physical harm: in classic games being down to 1 HP has no immediate in-game consequence on the creature (notable exception: D&D 4e's bloodied condition, and even then the effect isn't "a massive reduction in all of the wounded creature's physical capabilities" like you would expect). Per rules, the creature doesn't fall over or involuntarily scream or pass out from pain or anything. (And sure, the game rules are an abstraction, but the same RPGs will have other subsystems that are vastly more fine-grained than the idea that if you put a sword through someone, it has major traumatic effects.) There is never any indication that the GM is expected to improvise these consequences, either.
• Martial characters get more hit points; they're the ones who are best able to avoid harm, because that is what all of their training is for. That harm avoidance is HP.
  
• Characters gain hit points with level, at a rate that is vastly higher than remotely plausible variance in a person's actual ability to survive wounds. You could maybe convince me that some exceptional person could have twice as many 'meat points' as average. Three, four, five times? No way.
• The same plausibility argument applies in general. A twelve-foot giant should weigh about 1500 lbs or 700 kg. If something like that swings an axe at you and it connects, the best you can hope for is that whatever gets lopped off is non-vital. Plenty of D&D-like games would model this attack hitting as something that can be slept off (depending on a damage roll, possibly). High-level characters might take dozens of such hits, depending on the game.

So we've immediately run into contradiction: some things in the game tell us that HP is almost all meat, and other things tell us that HP is almost all grace.

Side note

There's another reason we're unlikely to square the circle and find a self-consistent explanation in (most) HP-based games: Extreme injury.

Suppose 100 damage is just enough to kill some creature: It has 100 HP, or 90, or 90 and then flubs some rolls, or whatever. For this creature, 100 damage kills, so 99 damage is as close to a mortal wound as you can get. This amount of harm heals naturally, and perfectly, very fast, in almost every trad game I've ever seen. In modern editions, this near-mortal wound just goes away overnight! In contrast, I've personally had garden scratches that took a week to heal. Even in OD&D, the upper limit on healing is one month. That would be an optimistic timeframe for being discharged in a modern hospital after "a wound that very nearly killed you". That kind of wound would usually be the beginning of years of physical therapy, if not permanent disability.

COUNTERARGUMENT 1: We can concoct explanations for this, involving abstraction, and how much more survivable wounds are with modern medicine (or with fantasy magic), and how unfun it is to play out deadly infections or characters with degraded abilities, and how we don't want to require a player to play a character who's only definitely going to die rather than dead... sure. I've never heard one that's really comprehensive within the fiction, which is what I'm mostly concerned with.

COUNTERARGUMENT 2: Some games layer lingering injury frameworks, scar systems, etc, onto HP systems. This is fine, and sometimes works pretty well! I will note that in my experience they usually still don't go far enough to make for good simulation, and in particular these additional systems almost always still use a weird sped-up timeframe. I think they're also pretty rare on the whole, for traditional D&D-likes. I like em, though.

COUNTERARGUMENT 3: Some fantasy game worlds might be assumed to have low-level magical healing on tap everywhere, so a very slow trickle of hit points amounts to recovering your HP overnight (or 2d6/night or with one full day of bed rest or whatever). Sure, this works in principle. But I don't think many games come right out and say in their setting information that this is what's going on; it's hard to import into most worlds; it also precludes some genre features, like the existence of lingering injuries and old scars in the broad populace.

Finally, let's flip it around and consider actual practises at the table, where this matters. It's always been the case that certain rules get ignored or changed by swathes of gamers.

At the table, what GM ever describes a sword swing inflicting 10 damage as 'you nearly get hit' or 'they get a little tired jumping out of the way of the sword's arc' or 'fortunately for the ogre, your blade bounces off his belt buckle'? My impression is that this essentially never happens, in part because it makes a hit sound just like a miss, which is both confusing and a letdown.

What I do see, sometimes, is GMs being cautious and sometimes even vague about what is going on within the world – not really a sign that everything is as it should be in the game. They describe damage to enemies as flesh wounds (up until the moment it kills), and damage to characters as minor abrasions and bruises. They're careful not to imply any level of injury that would have actual game world impact (like impeding a creature's movement or making it leave a trail of blood) or later raise questions like 'you said I shattered his arm with that critical hit, how is he climbing the rope now?' or 'you said I was skewered by three arrows, how come I got better completely overnight?'

And likewise, I sometimes see GMs avoid describing the effects of magical healing as 'knitting together wounds', 'restoring all your blood', etc – and sometimes just not describe it at all – because that implies the character had been seriously wounded, and it somehow never feels like a character is badly wounded at the table, no matter how low their HP goes.

And in other cases, I see tables of players and GMs venture into absurdism, where HP loss is always a grisly wound described with relish; such wounds come and go entirely without any knock-on effects within the world, disappearing overnight.

Reconciliation

Is there a way around this without having to hack some extremely core game rules?

Solution 1: Embrace indeterminacy. Hit points don't really mean anything, and wounds are never described until the moment they are gone. If 50 lost hit points are immediately restored by a powerful healing spell then it may well have been a devastating wound (especially if the sufferer was 'dying' as per e.g. 5e rules), and the GM may feel free to describe it that way. But when a character suffers through an afternoon's adventure with 50 missing hit points and they get restored overnight, those ones were in retrospect obviously just a little fatigue (not enough to cause exhaustion), scratches and bruises (not enough to impede movement), and 'expended' luck or divine grace (whatever that means).

Solution 2: Play it straight. This fantasy world is different from our own because of its fantasy elements, and those fantasy elements officially include people's bodies operating utterly differently to how they do in our world. You can go from 'fifty-fifty chance of death' to 'top physical condition' overnight with no magical intervention because that's how it is in this universe. People of this world have no lingering injuries unless they were inflicted by one of the few extremely specific spells or powers that do that.

Solution 3: Beer and pretzels game. Just don't think about it.

Solution 4: It's meta. The game, in being played, produces a story of action in a heroic genre; all the bits of that story which don't make sense are because of (say) unreliable storytellers or other narrative tricks. At the moment it is happening at the table, nothing means anything; after the game, the resulting story is allowed to be inconsistent and impossible, because it's just a story. Yes, this undermines the very concept of roleplaying, so what?

Solution 5: It's stochastic. The lower a character's hit points – whether from injury or being fragile or low level – the more likely they are to die from the next attack. That's the only thing that 'HP' means. All attacks do little to no physical harm until the one that does: health and injury are a random walk on a line. More damaging attacks are both more likely to kill, and more likely to cause successive attacks to kill. And maimings, debilitating wounds, and true life-or-death situations cannot occur (presumably for one of the other four reasons above).

I don't think any of these solutions are very good. #1 is perhaps the most palatable, especially if it starts out hiding behind #3 as so seems more adequate once revealed.

Final thoughts

There's no good way to conclude because when it comes to 'what hit points mean' there's no conclusion to reach, no advice to give – hence the thousands or possibly millions of times something like this has been written or said before. These days I'm personally drawn to the idea of systems designed with something less abstract than hit points, as a way of making play experience more immersive, but, well, I think most players, most of the time, still like HP.

Brigands and bandits and corsairs, oh my

Differentiate your criminal malefactors!

You may not know it, but terms like 'bandits', 'outlaws', 'pillagers', 'highwaymen', and so on all mean different things. If your party is going up against violent robbers and criminals in your game, make sure you know the difference, because a freebooter isn't a pirate if they're from your kingdom, and a footpad shouldn't necessarily be treated as if they were an outlaw.

All kinds of criminal malefactors are more likely to be found where there is weak state administration, rough terrain, and recent or nearby war.

BRIGANDS

Brigands are highway robbers - people who steal from travellers on roads, usually by force and/or intimidation. They usually operate as a gang and are commonly deserted soldiers.

Footpads are brigands on foot.

Highwayman are brigands who are usually mounted and - being able to roam widely to find targets and escape consequences - less likely to be part of a gang. Carjackers are modern highwaymen who steal cars.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: kill or drive off brigands in self-defence; round up and capture or kill brigands if approved by the authorities or in weakly governed/lawless areas; otherwise drag them to justice

PIRATES

Pirates are brigands of the seas - people with ships who steal from other people with ships, almost always by force and/or intimidation. Using a ship they can make off with substantially more cargo than a land brigand.

River pirates use, and target, boats rather than ships.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: kill or drive off pirates in self-defence; hunt down and capture or kill pirates if approved by the authorities or on the open seas (depending on setting); otherwise drag them to justice

FREEBOOTERS

Freebooters or 'privateers' are people who pillage, plunder, raid, or capture the ships of other states, using their own ship - often a warship. Freebooters mostly attack merchant ships.

They are not technically pirates - they have been given license to act by their own state, either by blanket order, or by issuing something like a personal 'letter of marque' - an official commission authorising their actions. But another state's freebooters may be considered pirates and/or outlaws.

Corsairs are historically French freebooters.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: kill or drive off freebooters in self-defence, and take their stuff; capturing them and dragging them to justice may be preferred in some settings

OUTLAWS

Outlaws are, literally, people who are officially outside the law. Outlawry is conferred as a criminal sentence or decree. An outlaw does not enjoy any of the legal protections of the law, including against killing. This opens outlaws up to mob justice, extrajudicial killing with impunity, and so on.

An outlaw might turn to brigandry, piracy, or marauding (if they weren't already).

In some contexts it might be not merely lawful but praiseworthy to kill an outlaw.

Outlawry is a form of unpersoning; in some contexts to give an outlaw any kind of support is illegal, akin to 'aiding and abetting'.

A desperado is a particularly bold or dangerous outlaw.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: unlike with brigands or pirates, dealing with outlaws does not require - and usually cannot involve - any legal mechanisms. The unambiguously worst legal status has already been inflicted on them. The authorities are fine with a group of PCs doing anything to outlaws except tying them up and dumping them on the courthouse steps for 'justice'. There is no more justice to be done. This is something that can be hard for us modern people to understand: The law has no more official business with them.

BANDITS

The word 'bandit' is a little ambiguous, usually referring to a brigand but sometimes to an outlaw or a marauder.

MARAUDERS

A marauder is someone, usually an ex-soldier, who roves the countryside looting, plundering, pillaging, and sacking (related words which mean to unlawfully seize and/or destroy property). This is usually accomplished with or accompanied by violence, sometimes extreme forms like torture or terrorism. Marauders usually work in groups to accomplish this.

A marauder might also be called a plunderer or pillager.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: kill or drive off marauders in self-defence; round up and capture or kill marauders if approved by the authorities or in weakly governed/lawless areas; otherwise drag them to justice

RAIDERS

Raiders are those from a culture/society/state in which raiding other cultures/societies/states is permissible, who do so. 'Raiding' here means travelling to a population centre to loot/plunder/pillage/sack as a marauder does. Raiding sometimes also has connotations of enslaving people.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: raiders from other states usually don't enjoy legal protections; typically the expected thing is to kill them (reactively or proactively) in defence of the state and its people

THE MORE YOU KNOW

What does a lawful good paladin do with a brigand or pirate? Capture them to be tried. What does a lawful good paladin do with a raider? Dispense swift death. What does a lawful good paladin do with an outlaw? Well, now they have to decide what's 'good'.

Internally consistent magical paradigms: A paean to good design

I talk a lot about verisimilitude in fantasy settings, both here and in real life (whenever a friend doesn't manage to escape). One thing I often think about is the metaphysical nature of magic, and the competing desires in fantasy TTRPGs to have player-graspable/predictable magic, mysterious/fantastic magic, and sensible/plausible world design.

I think it's both possible and desirable to have an internally consistent magical metaphysics ('thaumaphysics'?). By which I mean: a framework of magic that is based on inviolable rules (not necessarily complex ones) that are theoretically discoverable by people within the setting. At this point, some readers will clamour that I intend to "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— / Unweave a rainbow", but my definition makes for a broader umbrella than you might think:

• The kind of spellcasting where you learn secret words and gestures which affect reality can be internally consistent.
• Magic where psychic phenomena are measurable in the universe, and spells are entities which occupy some analogue of physical space in your head, can be done with internal consistentency.
• If every magical effect is always completely random, in the sense of 'drawn from an enormous table or procedurally generated', that's internally consistent as long as the methods of invoking magic are.
• Magic that is fueled by spell points / mana / energy which the body recovers naturally over time can be internally consistent.
• Some creatures being innately magical by their nature, and defined methods existing to borrow those beasts' power, is internally consistent.
  
• If near-omnipotent gods are locked in conflict over the world, with factions and/or individual minor power variations, and all magic is that which they pass down, then with sufficiently delineated gods the magical framework is internally consistent.
• High fantasy magic aligned along ideas like "magic always requires a sacrifice" or "magic comes with a commensurate cost which can only be delayed or passed on to others" can easily be internally consistent, being based on a few simple rules.
• Frameworks where multiple types of magic and spellcasting co-exist (D&D-style) can be internally consistent.

What magic isn't internally consistent?

In most fairytales, magic is presented as something of a fait accompli. Sometimes there are rules based on the implied rules of storytelling, but not usually.

• The tree can be cut down with a single chop by a princess's hair pressed into the edge of an axe made of wax, and this idea goes unexamined. It says nothing about whether the same axe can break through a stone wall, or whether a prince's hair would work, or if a regular axe with the hair glued on would still have done the job in one chop.
• The wicked sorcerer tricks the king into agreeing to give up his firstborn child, but it's not clear whether the king follows through on this because of an ensorcelment, or because of the king's honest nature, or the king's fear of the sorcerer's unspecified magic.

Some TTRPG systems and settings aren't sufficiently well-described to have internally consistent magic. What Justin Alexander called 'dissociated mechanics' are sometimes an indicator that magic isn't internally consistent: characters, monsters, or environmental features might be able to do things or have in-game effects that "exist outside of the character’s world and they are only rough approximations of that world." They are insufficiently described in the rules for a player or GM to work out cohesive underlying principles (and use that knowledge to infer capabilities, make predictions, judge interactions and edge cases, etc).

Now, just because the metaphysics is insufficiently developed for the magic to be recognisably consistent doesn't mean the magic is inconsistent. But it does mean that the onus of filling in the gaps is on the GM, and usually the GM won't even think to try to do that ahead of time (which would require, at a minimum, reading and internalising all the official rulebooks and adventure scenarios of the TTRPG, and then coming up with something that is consistent - i.e., doing the rest of the game designer's job for them).

No, it will tend to only come up when some interaction in the game needs a ruling, and the GM has no (or too few) established 'first principles' of magic to fall back on. With every such ruling about the way the world is, the implied underlying rules of magic get squirrelier and squigglier, until it's nearly impossible to come up with an internally consistent framework. At some point, the GM makes a ruling which contradicts an earlier one or something else in the books, and all of a sudden magic is inconsistent.

(Those who went before warn those who go ahead; it's happened to me.)

Why care?

An absolutely fundamental aspect of a roleplaying game is that a player can get a measure of what is going on around them and make choices based on that. If you could boil down roleplaying to three words, "make reasonable choices" would be a decent first draft. That requires a character's surroundings to be (mostly) intelligible. As they travel, interact with things, look at stuff, learn and explore, 'a character's surroundings' expands to 'the observed world', and not just objects within it, but processes too. Simple logic has to work in the metaphysics, too, or it's impossible to do basic roleplaying.

If absolutely anything in the world can change at any time for any reason or no reason — if it's a world where things can stop being true, or retroactively not have been the case — then it's a world you can't roleplay in, let alone get invested in. You certainly can't identify character goals and plan to achieve them. In a world like that, when the GM asks "what do you do next?", the appropriate answer is "who cares?" and to start packing up your things.

If a game rule says that a spell of type X does Y, and another rule says that whenever a spell does Y it's [verb]able by any magical effect of type Z, then that tells the wizard's player something about how magic works. If there's a monster which accomplishes Y as an effect of its X spell, then the wizard's Z magic better bloody be able to [verb] it, and if not (because the game was poorly designed), the onus is on the GM to find a theoretical underpinning for that. They don't necessarily have to tell the player why not, but they do need to assure the player that there's a reason, and a theoretically discoverable one in-world.

If the GM has three options and they are 'sacrifice magical consistency to create this exception' or 'change an established rule of magic to support this monster design' or 'change this monster so it follows established rules of magic', they should understand those options to be terrible, mediocre, or necessary, respectively.

This is all such pain in the neck for the GM that a well-designed game goes out of its way to avoid it, by making its magic internally consistent and spelling out at least the more major of the rules on which it rests.

One particular example: Magical realism

Take the magic of artsy literature, 'magic realism'. Here's the kind of magic you would expect from that metaphysical framework:

The plants in your grandfather's garden all grow three metres tall and are well-stocked with flowers and berries. You have a photographs with you as a kid, overshadowed by them fivefold. You move for college, then for work, and when you come back to visit fifteen years later the plants are all in the same places you remember, as vivid as ever, but they only reach to your knee.

A knight in shining armour loses her child; her sword and armour break into splinters, leaving her able to be harmed by the worst of the world and unable to lead the charge against it. After a long period of character growth and psychological healing, an ogre appears on the horizon and, looking about for her sword and armour for the first time in a long time, finds them to be intact once more.

A stressed businessman goes home tired every night and must then spend hours shoveling food into the dragon's head that grows out of his bedroom wall, tongue lolling over his bed. He is completely exhausted by this and then has to sleep on the floor because his bed is taken up by the horrid mass. One day he sees an advertisement to work at a charity. He applies, gets it, and quits his former job, then goes home and finds the dragon's head has turned into the softest blanket in the world. He gets the best night's sleep he's ever had.

Despite its seemingly vague nature, magical realism can be made an internally consistent framework, by creating rules like:

• The world is divided into important characters and background characters by some criterion
• When an important character experiences a powerful or persistent emotion, their surroundings change to elicit that emotion in a hypothetical viewer
• The challenges an important character faces in their daily life give rise to the introduction of new fantastic objects into their surroundings representing those challenges
• When an important character develops as a person or solves a major problem, they undergo a corresponding symbolic transformation in their material possessions, environment, or body
• Any politically, economically, militarily, socially, (etc) powerful person, if they are a background character, has an appearance or key trait that is fantastic or phantasmagorical, and allegorical to the nature of their power

Not all internally consistent magical paradigms are equal (when it comes to TTRPGs)

Magic realism can be made internally consistent. But it still doesn't work in a TTRPG because of the interactive nature of the medium.

Readers can enjoy magic realism because they can, in the worst case, write to the author to say "when Jorris had his nightmare he should have woken up to find all the curtains in his room had turned into red-hot serpents, why didn't you turn them into red-hot serpents you hack". Most won't bother.

Players in a TTRPG tradition can't enjoy magic realism because not only are they able to say things like that to the game master, but they should. By  which I mean it's in their best interests to engage directly with, and explore, the magic system — as we've covered, magic is a useful technology and players would be idiots not to try to make use of it. It's not an 'exploit', it's the human condition.

A TTRPG world based on magical realism would be one of constant argument, or one where magic is proudly (unpleasantly) inconsistent, or one where the players have the (unpleasant) false belief that magic isn't internally consistent.

Other magical paradigms have other problems for TTRPG usage.

• Classic high fantasy magic in the vein of Lord of the Rings is typically too subtle for PC spellcasting. Also, the source media usually tries to hide its more detailed rules, if not its broad-stroke ones, in a way that's incompatible with a player wanting to know how many orcs their Concussive Wave is likely to knock down and how often they can cast it.
• If magic is (very nearly) random, drawn from huge tables or procedures, a spellcaster can't reliably do much other than cause a distraction, and (given the nature of many magical effects) can't do that safely.
• If magic is all in the hands of powerful entities, and people can use it to the extent that they can convince an entity to grant it, then you have too much 'roleplaying' and not enough 'game'. At the very least, you need additional game structures preventing degenerate conditions where the players talk to too many entities or win them over too completely. Along the way you need to solve the old dichotomy of player skill (at persuasion, in this case) versus character skill.
• If magic comes entirely from objects and materials, then the game must be very precisely designed to preclude too strong of a positive feedback loop whereby getting your hands on too much treasure lets you acquire too much magic which lets you seize more treasure which lets you acquire more magic which [...]

Considerations like these act as design constraints on fantasy TTRPG elements.

Design tensions in fantasy TTRPGs

I quoted Keats' Lamia above to set up a juxtaposition.

Yes, I think it's best that magic be discoverable, explicable, rules-based, and consistent.

No, I don't think that magic should be all discovered by NPCs in the setting, that it should be explained to the players, that its rules should be in a player-facing rulebook, or that its applications must all be obvious outcomes of a single consistent pattern.

Magic should be internally consistent (a) as a matter of elegance, (b) so the GM doesn't have to do a ton of extra work to avoid making bad rulings, (c) so that the world has verisimilitude, (d) as evidence that the designers knew what they were doing, and (e) so players can adequately roleplay in a world where they will interact with magic.

But the players shouldn't be sat down with a complete overview of the exact details of magical metaphysics and all the implications, any more than a fantasy book should open with a dry five-page essay on underlying rules and cosmology.

Graspable, yet mysterious. Sensible, yet compelling. Consistent, yet fantastic.

Reviving the village witch (Or: Worlds Where The State Can't Hoard All The Magic)

Here's another extra-long post, following on from the recent one (https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2023/07/how-is-there-village-witch-or-states.html) which laid out in eyeball-blistering detail the following argument.

• When something is available, usable, useful, and repeatable, that's a technology, and people will use it to make their lives better.
• Pre-industrial states try to control the levers of power (organised violence, useful military technologies, useful people, wealth, etc). None are perfect at this but the ones that are bad at it will have a competitive disadvantage compared to the ones that are good at it (and inter-state competition is the default state of the world).
• Historical states use positive incentives, coercion, and cultural programming - or Benefits, Blackmail, and Brainwashing (BBBs) - to control the human component of the levers of power.
• In classic fantasy, magic-users have somewhat predictable/consistent magic, and notable benefits to using it in at least some circumstances; therefore magic is a useful technology. Usually it's a very useful technology with major military, economic, and administrative applications.
• We generally prefer TTRPG fantasy settings with the following elements: verisimilitude; magic is a modestly scarce resource; the state doesn't control all (or even most) magic; magic-users themselves don't (necessarily) run everything.
• The premises seem to preclude the preferred setting details.
• States poured enormous amounts of investment into useful military technologies like 'mounted knights' or 'foreign mercenaries', which you needed a bunch of to help win a battle. If one magic-user can turn the tide of a battle via a localised rain shower, a conjured barrier, better military signals, subverting the enemy command, flying over a castle's walls, or whatever, then the state's best strategy is to switch from training men-at-arms to training mages even if the cost of that is very high. Analogous arguments apply for economic use of magic, medical use of magic, infrastructure-developing use of magic, etc.
• If magic-users are powerful enough to avoid being compelled by the state's various methods, then almost by definition, magic-users are powerful enough to become the state, and that being the norm is not necessarily what we want in a fantasy milieu.
• If they're not powerful enough to avoid the state, then we have these weird worlds where each village witch, reclusive warlock, or adventuring wizard represents a failure of the state to carry through with what should be one of its main objectives. The same applies to magic-users specialising in kinds of magic that aren't useful for the state, magic-using outlaws (implicitly threatening the state), magical training not regulated by the state, etc. Again, not what we usually want in a fantasy milieu.

I wanted to add a couple of things after writing the original post, based on the idea that we're mainly talking about TTRPG settings.

THING ONE

If you think this isn't a problem because you model people in the past as doing certain things differently, or you fundamentally disagree with my characterisation of pre-industrial states, remember that TTRPGs are played by modern people. If the NPC rulers for some reason aren't amassing magical power and control over magic-users, the players are likely to notice there's an unexploited power vacuum and start trying it, at least in games where their characters can reach that level of power/influence. What are you going to tell them? 'No, actually, your character doesn't have the idea to do that thing which will significantly further their interests'?

THING TWO

Something I didn't specifically call out is that it just feels 'off' for magic to be exploitable in the way that mundane technologies are, for most fantasy settings. It feels like the argument that Superman can do maximal good by spending all his time forcing heads of state to pass better laws for the good of humanity, or by generating clean electricity for the world. It's inappropriate to the tenor of the main source texts.

But once something is useful and repeatable, it seems inevitable that people will start treating it as a technology, even if it is originally spooky and mysterious. They'll start looking at their records and doing calculations like: "I usually make ten florins on the days that I prepare all plant growth and weather spells, and I usually only make five or six florins on the days that I also prepare levitation and transport spells. Preparing fireball spells has never paid off for me. I should look into specialising further in spells for improving crops." That kind of thinking is just how people work; it's not a modern thing.

This is all the more obvious in a setting running on TTRPG-friendly rules, where magic comes pre-systematised (so it can easily be resolved at the table) and is seldom really dangerous for its wielder (so players can be wizards). The problem of retaining a sense of the mysterious/fantastic in magic for TTRPG play is a separate one and demands a series of posts of its own.

ENOUGH OF ALL THAT

On to the possible solutions! I thought of a dozen of them, although some are variations of one idea. Thank you to the various commenters and conversationalists who helped sculpt my thinking on them.

1. THE MOST OBVIOUS SOLUTION: THERE'S A SWEET SPOT

Take the question 'How powerful and useful is magic?' and the question 'How likely is it that a successful state spends resources trying to maximise control of magic?'. The former implies a continuum of possibilities which fairly directly answer the latter.

At one end of the continuum, we have the answer 'Magic is not powerful or useful at all'. The answer to the second question is 'no successful states wastes resources maximising control of magic'. States will only care about magic to the degree that pre-industrial states are largely indistinguishable from their individual rulers, and some of those rulers may be curious about this little meaningless part of the world.

At the other end of the continuum, we have the answer 'Magic is more powerful and useful than any other technology / instrument of control'. Now the answer to the second question is 'all successful states put everything they have into maximising their control of magic, vying for control over the literal only way for them to maintain themselves'. This is the extreme case where, say, a wizard can snap her fingers and remove people from existence halfway across the world.

In the vast middle of the continuum, it seems axiomatic that the more powerful and useful magic is, the more important it is to the state.

The solution, then, is to say that there's a 'sweet spot' in the continuum, a point at which magic is powerful and useful enough to be worthwhile learning for some people, but not powerful and useful enough for the state to invest much in it. That is, it looks like this:



And not like this:



Note that as the continuum progresses to the right, we expect the state to become increasingly desperate for magic, and then at some point far enough along, instead of 'the state' there is 'the magocracy' (and then possibly just 'anarchic groups of loosely affiliated all-powerful wizards' all the way at the right end). But in the first diagram, there's a point where magic is powerful enough to serve some use in individual people's lives, but it's challenging enough for the state to get hold of that the payoff isn't always worth the effort.

I think most of the people who were unconvinced by my original post will have already had something like this solution in their heads: they may conceive of that 'sweet spot' as being very large indeed. If that's the case, the implication is only that some states will seek to control some magical power instead of other kinds of power, which matches what we usually want in a fantasy setting.

Verdict:

Your mileage may vary. To me personally it still indicates a magic which is far weaker / costlier / less useful / less exploitable than we usually see in TTRPG magic systems.

2. VARIOUS BAD SOLUTIONS (ABANDON SOME OF THE ARGUMENT'S AXIOMS)

It's possible to dissolve the problem by getting really weird with your fantasy. Any of the following will do the trick:

• "People are different to people in our world: the nice, altruistic ones outnumber the ruthless ones so overwhelmingly that the latter never amass power (and we're willing to apply this to player characters too)."
• "People are different to people in our world: they are completely irrational and are unable to notice and adopt useful technologies (and we're willing to apply this to player characters too)."
• "People can't do magic (even player characters)."
• "All the effects of magic are completely unpredictable. Maybe sometimes people do magic just to see what will happen but it's an absolute roll of the dice every time, and not even in an exploitable way where the state can radicalise magic-users and have them creep into the enemy camp and create a bunch of random spell effects as a kamikaze attack."
• "Magic can only accomplish the same things as mundane feats, and it's always the same cost (or costlier) on every axis as doing things the mundane way."
• "States are just different to the states we're familiar with from pre-modern history. There's no monopoly on violence, or they aren't mostly just individually powerful wealthy people, or they don't maximise making things nicer for themselves. And if a state like that arises, it doesn't outcompete other states even though it should."
• "The world has no scarcity of magic, actually. Everyone can be a magic-user if they want to."
• "The world doesn't have to make sense, and for things like this it doesn't."

Verdict:

Yes, these solve the problem, but not really for the kinds of fantasy worlds that we're most interested in (except as intellectual exercises! I'd actually love to see some of those written up - I just wouldn't want to run a game in them). e.g., if you replace people with 'people' who don't work like the way we know people work, then your world is going to feel like science fiction with fantasy trappings.

I do want to call out that last one in the list, "The world doesn't have to make sense", as an odd duck. It's certainly possible to just not have a self-consistent, understandable, plausible world, and for a Friday night chips-and-beers tabletop game, it might be completely fine. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, here. Personally, I find it unworkable, for settings that players are going to spend a lot of time in (especially if you are lucky enough to have clever, curious, really engaged players). So as solutions goes, it amounts to "I don't think this will be a problem for me and my players". And that's fine if it's true.

3. RUINOUS COSTS: DANGER, POLLUTION, DISFIGUREMENT

Now this is an interesting attempt at a solution! For certain game systems, especially OSR ones like GLOG but also some others like (some classes in) WFRP, magic is a troubling, dangerous, unstable power. The implication is that magic can be so dangerous or disfiguring to the caster, or ruinous or polluting to the surrounding area, that it's not worth the state getting involved with it. Usually it's a risk (chance of catastrophe) rather than a cost (the following nasty things consequently happen), although the latter is possible.

I think this is a variation of the 'sweet spot' solution that is actually a really difficult needle to thread. It's just saying that magic has both upsides and downsides. If it didn't have any upsides, then we're at the 'nobody uses magic / unsuitable for TTRPG' end of the spectrum again. If magic has meagre upsides and massive downsides, then it will only be used in times of desperation or not at all, unless the magic-user is deranged. By the time we're talking about magic having useful upsides (coupled with those downsides), then we're in the realm of the state wanting the upsides and finding workarounds for the downsides.

And I think the default position is that the state will find workarounds. For a start, it's possible (albeit more difficult) to exert control over people at a distance. The state can get control of (and direct the labour of) magic-users at arm's length, via proxies and patsies and hierarchies, so that those who bear the brunt of the downsides are the magic-user and the people near them who the state doesn't care about. To put it another way, if every magician is dangerous in the same way a suicide bomber is dangerous, that doesn't actually change the state's military interest in sending bombs against its enemies. It just changes the methodology.

In practice I think that in a well-thought-out world the 'ruinous danger' angle might have the opposite effect from the one we want, actually increasing the ratio of magic in the hands of the state compared to 'private magic-users'. There are two reasons:

1. The state can use BBBs to get control over magic-users and then require them only use their magic when directed. Assuming this kind of leash makes a mage less likely to cast a spell and therefore less dangerous to themselves, then it's trivially true that magic-users outside of state control will destroy themselves at a higher rate than magic-users under state control. We could even speculate that if this is publicly visible, magic-users might desire to come under the control of the state under the false impression that 'official mages' always suffer fewer catastrophes.
2. If it's at all possible to combat, ameliorate, or prevent the 'ruinous danger' in whatever form it takes, then it is the people in power who can amass the resources to do so. Imagine the case of the private country mage accidentally summoning up a horde of fire imps. His chance of survival is going to be lower than that of the mage in the king's service who does her magic in a flooded, lead-lined, well-mortared stone room with armed guards and a priest on standby (having read the book of 'best practices' that the state has slowly developed through trial and error).

Verdict:

It's hard to make this workable on its own; I think it works best in tandem with other solutions. It's a flavourful extra reason for states to usually look at magic and say "yeah, let's just stick to having the one court magician for emergencies".

4. RUINOUS COSTS, VARIANT (i): CRITICAL MASS

One notable variant of 'magic is too dangerous' is that having too many magic-users in close proximity is automatically dangerous in some way (e.g., rifts in reality). This leads to a natural distribution of wizards over small towns and lonely towers, and we can imagine it sparking local modulating action (persecution, execution, exile, etc) if there get to be too many in one area.

Verdict:

I like this variant of 'ruinous costs' a lot.

• It makes it somewhat harder for states to acquire magical power.
• It makes it a lot harder for the state to consolidate magical power geographically, which is pretty key in settings without mass transit, portals, or such.
• It makes it impossible for the state to replace armies with massed magic-users, which was one of the big concerns

But I think it's still best used in conjunction with other solutions, otherwise it doesn't stop the state being the main employer of wizards.

5. RUINOUS COSTS, VARIANT (ii): METAPHYSICAL CHAIN REACTIONS

The main problem with 'magic is ruinously dangerous' is that the people in charge can find ways to avoid the brunt of the danger. This solution asks: what if that's not true?

Magic is disfiguring, polluting, potentially catastrophic, commits you to the bad afterlife, or whatever, and the negative consequences can and do reach up the chain of command!

Let's say a magic-user (and by this metaphysical transitive property, their liege lord) has a 1/1000 chance of imploding per spell cast. That's fine for individual mages using spells rarely, and works well with magic-users being superstitious, ignorant, risk-takers, etc. But if the king is in the habit of sending out brigades of 100 mages to lay siege to castles, and they each cast a couple of spells in the process, then it's not very many castles captured before the king's odds of survival aren't looking so good. The outcome doesn't have to be self-implosion, but sufficiently nasty consequences make for a big disincentive for rulers to take advantage of magic.

It does raise questions for the GM or game designer about what it means for something to be done at someone's command, i.e., what's sufficient for ruinous consequences to get passed up the chain.

• What if the queen gives the order to her seneschal who gives the order to his commander who gives the order to her mage soldiers?
• What if the king pays a proxy 100 florins to "do what's best for the kingdom" and that proxy pays 10 florins each to nine suspected mages to "do what's best for the kingdom" and never follows up?
• What if the emperor is known to often give enormous rewards to wizards who do things that the state likes, such as assassinate imperial enemies and perform medical miracles and make ships safe at sea, but the emperor never promises anything and sometimes delays the reward or never gives it and always refuses to reward a wizard who approaches expectantly?
• What if there's a 'master of mages' position in the royal court with a high turnover rate, and the position operates completely autonomously?

Verdict:

This solution works (once you've delineated the mechanical consequences), but I personally find it unsatisfying/contrived without a really good in-setting metaphysical reason for why the spooky action at a distance happens.

One outcome that I do like is that this variant of 'ruinous costs' doesn't strictly remove the incentive to have a magic-using servant or two, and they don't have to be kept at arm's reach. It makes some sense for, say, a risk-taking monarch to have one seldom-consulted court magician, and that's a useful conceit.

6. MAGIC STAYS AWAY FROM THE STATE

This is like the last solution, except that instead of negative consequences, magic just stops working properly when used to benefit powerful people.

One way to implement this would be to say that spells which are used on behalf/command of someone who has amassed power (in terms of wealth, soldiers, legal protections, other kinds of magic, etc) become weak in proportion to the amount of power amassed. In practice, adjusting magical effects on a continuum sounds like a headache.

Another way would be to say that when a magic-user becomes powerful enough, or serves (or agrees to serve) a powerful enough person, all the magic leaves their body forever (and maybe goes and turns some random commoner or newborn into a mage). This is very direct and to the point, but has enormous setting implications, and isn't well-suited to TTRPG play. It could also create a new kind of caste hierarchy amongst people not quite powerful enough to trigger the 'magic escapes' outcome, but wealthy enough to pay for magic. And you need that clause that prevents magic-users themselves becoming too powerful, otherwise you risk a constant cycle of magic-users overthrowing the state, becoming the state, and losing their power.

In both cases the GM or game designer would also have to make a lot of decisions about what different kinds of power are 'worth', how much an individual really 'has', to what degree direct and indirect control of things matters, etc.

I'd still want a good in-universe reason for this being the way the metaphysics works.

Verdict:

This has all of the problems of 'magic is ruinously dangerous to state control' with few of the upsides. So, pass. Except...

7. MAGIC STAYS AWAY FROM THE STATE, VARIANT (i): LESS METAPHYSICS

In this variant, the affordances of the magic system - the crunchy bits that people interact with, like spells and magic items - are themselves unusually oriented towards escaping state control.

That is, there is an inherent, self-perpetuating disparity, based on the nature of magic itself, between powerful people's ability to acquire more magic and magic-users' ability to escape being acquired.

I can imagine a magic system that's chock-full of readily available effects along the lines of 'hide from authority', 'become rational', 'teleport to home', 'escape notice', 'remove brainwashing', 'change focus of target's attention', etc. It would need to have no effects like 'find mage', 'subjugate person', 'detect magic', 'persuade other', etc (or makes those effects unusually high-tier), because those could be used to enhance BBBs. With this kind of magic system, the state would still want control over magic, but would be limited in its ability to use coercion and indoctrination to do it, leaving it with just positive incentives.

A stronger way to implement this would be to say that when a person learns to use magic, part of the process is becoming psychologically or emotionally affected by it, in a way that they are made extremely averse to authority and powerful people, always resist coercion, are paranoid of positive incentives, etc. This is more impactful, but is tricky, because it has major roleplaying implications and you'd have to be careful to make it sufficiently difficult that the state can't find clever workarounds (getting control of magic through proxies, regulation, reverse psychology, market forces, other kinds of magic that override the mental effect, etc).

Verdict:

This does put additional constraints on worldbuilding and/or roleplaying, precluding certain kinds of fantasy setting. Apart from that, seems workable.

7. MAGIC STAYS AWAY FROM THE STATE, VARIANT (ii): MORE METAPHYSICS

Suppose magic is sophisticated and autonomous enough to supervise its own use according to some coherent ideology/aesthetic. Or equivalently, magic is directly overseen by super-powerful force(s) with a particular ideology/aesthetic.

And suppose that this ideology/aesthetic amounts to, basically, "shape the world into the kind of classic fantasy world that we like".

Let's set aside the meta-fictional interpretation of this metaphysics where the force accomplishing this is the GM. The obvious textual interpretation is that this fantasy world has interventionist gods or godlike entities, and those omnipotent meddlers hate it when states achieve huge consolidated control of spellcasters, magical armies, magical production lines, and so on. The tastes of these entities run to hedge wizards and travelling thaumaturges, village witches and hermit warlocks, heirloom magic and dabbling thaumaturgy. So that's what there is in the world.

Different mechanisms would accomplish this. If you want it to be something that feels really 'present' in the world, then the gods prevent magic working when used by or for the powerful, and maybe enact some huge flashy punishment for those who try. If you want it to be something subtle in the background, then the gods make innumerable tiny interventions to invisibly change the course of history, and you have to puzzle out in-setting why it is that states haven't dominated the magic business.

Or it can be done mostly through mortal instruments - powerful clerics who understand and agree with the ideology/aesthetic of their deities, and mostly use their magic to implement it; hordes of druids who stand in opposition to the very idea of states and seek to destroy them.

Verdict:

It's sort of tautologically true that you can get exactly what you want out of a setting by invoking all-powerful superbeings who also want that... Unless what you want in your setting is 'no all-powerful superbeings'. I am probably further in that direction than most GMs, my personal taste being towards massively inconsistent and varied religious practices, 'silent' gods, and little to no magical evidence of the divine.

Still, of all the solutions I've looked at, I have to admit this one is amongst the best, since it's very easy to explain ("there are interventionist gods and they have tastes"), very easy to implement (just do whatever you were going to do anyway), and exactly gets you whichever fantasy setting you want (aside from that one superbeings requirement).

8. THE CAMERA LENS IS NARROWLY FOCUSED

This one expands on someone's comment on the first article. Suppose that the argument so far holds: states which amass control over magic do tend to outcompete states which don't, and this is obvious within the world, so most states in most places and times are trying to control as much magic as they can.

Even if this is the case, by massaging the details we can come up with a workable section of the setting to play our game in.

For example. There's a reason the classic witch or wizard is so old: it's because magic-users almost all serve 'the usual' twenty to thirty years in the army or bureaucracy or similar apparatus (compelled by the state's BBBs) and then the survivors are rewarded for their service with a plot of land out in the country where they can't cause trouble. This is analogous to the Roman Legion approach, where together some positive incentives, strong cultural expectations, and a mild element of coercion result in the amassing of a useful resource (fit young men) where the state wants (the army).

So now assume that the actual tabletop gameplay all takes place in the hinterlands and dangerous wildernesses, away from the locuses of power where mass use of magic is going on at the state's behest. That means any mages the adventuring party encounters are mostly the retired ones - old, moderately powerful, fairly wealthy, in possession of a plot of land to build their farmhouse/tower/lair/bakery/inn/manor, and finally able to specialise in whatever strange and fantastical kind of magic they're interested in which the state doesn't care for.

Verdict:

In some ways this is a variant of the 'sweet spot' solution. It definitely seems workable for many games and many settings, and it also seems like it would work well in tandem with some of the other solutions. There are still a few questions to resolve, like 'what about PC spellcasters?' and 'what about when they visit the big city?' and 'what about when the state is losing a war and goes to muster its veterans and stragglers?', but on the whole I really like this one. Thank you anonymous commenter.

9. MAGIC IS ACQUIRED SUDDENLY AND SPECIFICALLY

Say magic comes about like this: people are born with, or develop, a knack for a certain type of wizardry that can't be transferred to a different type which would be more useful to the state. You can't learn, say, volcano magic by studying or going to volcanoes (things that the state could control and optimise around); it just happens to a random person.

The outcome is that there's less pressure from the people in power to create specific kinds of magic-user (although no less pressure to control the ones who do exist). So there's magic-users in all the nooks and crannies of the world - just ones whose powers aren't too useful to the state. A thousand confection-mages can plausibly be spread out over the kingdom, in small market towns or on the road or inexplicably delving a dungeon, with only a few working for the state (serving manorial estates, creating wealth in big cities, etc).

Unfortunately I don't think this works very well, for two reasons.

• Most kinds of magic are still desired by the state, because the state is just the people in charge, who want most of the things magic can offer. It's just that some are at the 'we want this' level and others are at the 'we really want this' level. Even little party trick stuff is still going to be desirable for individual rulers, just not a high priority. TTRPG settings tend to have lots of the high-priority kind which can produce wealth or military advantages or longevity or whatever.
  
• Players are usually going to want their PCs to be the kind of magic-user with sweeping combat and utility powers, i.e., the kinds the state really wants to get control of.
  

Verdict:

This is at best a partial solution. It constrains the kind of magic in the setting quite a lot, too: If there's this spontaneously acquired magic but also other kinds of magic that are, say, acquired by study in a particular sphere, the state would just be able to invest in the latter.

10. MENTAL GYMNASTICS

Suppose to learn (or otherwise acquire) magic, you need some set of mental characteristics. Let's say, wisdom, compassion, a distaste for institutions, a preference for local over regional interests, an elevation of the abstract above the mundane, and maybe - let's just come right out and say it - a lack of interest in statecraft. Then, as long as magic itself is really powerful, states will fail to get control over magic-users most of the time.

Verdict:

This is really just an instance of solution 7(i) dressed up nicely. It has the same issues - roleplaying implications and potential workarounds - and also requires individual (or small collectives of) magic-users to largely be more powerful than states (otherwise the state can still compel its use through coercion).

Overall, it demands too much of characters for me to use it. You could perhaps apply it to certain kinds of magic (wise clerics, non-worldly hermits) as part of a patchwork solution.

11. RESCUED BY INSTITUTIONS

Fantasy milieus commonly have at least a pretense that society is organised in a classic high medieval power structure, i.e.,

Peasants < A local lord (knight or baron) < His liege, an aristocrat < Possibly a higher ranking aristocrat < The monarch

Separate from this is the "First Estate", ordained clergymen, who had a hierarchy of their own. And in urban settlements with a charter (most cities, some towns), the power structure tends to cut out the aristocrats.

So maybe we can have institutions other than states which shelter magic practitioners and allow them to flourish outside the state's purview? It seems like there's three good candidates for that:

1. Guilds
2. The First Estate (church or comparable religious institution)
3. A Fourth Estate (something unique to magic-users)

RESCUED BY INSTITUTIONS, ATTEMPT 1: GUILDS

I think there's a misconception that guilds were somewhere between modern labour unions and MMORPG 'guilds' for collaborating on activities. Not really. At least in Western Europe between the Crusades and industrialisation (a pretty common touchstone for fantasy worlds), guilds tended to have some quite specific characteristics:

• They tried to keep prices high, to their own benefit, via various means (principally squashing competition from outside the guild via political action).
• They tried to keep quality high, or at least high enough not to ruin the guild members' reputation; to do so they met regularly, policed themselves, stamped marks on their work, and often regulated teaching.
• They were almost always small, selective bodies. By deliberately keeping their membership low with a "dead men's shoes" type system, each individual member could get more trade, charge more, have more prestige, and so on. Plenty of historical people diligently apprenticed in a trade and never got to practice it as a guild-accredited artisan - usually because guild members' children were preferentially elevated into the guild!
• Guilds usually were officially associated with specific religious, moral, or charitable causes - this was a deeply pious time, and often the guild would have a specific religious purpose, a patron saint, would collectively give to the church, sponsor the building of new churches, etc.
• Guilds sometimes had an additional civic purpose - they might sponsor the construction of civil infrastructure like bridges, organise festivals, etc. They might be formal divisions of the town militia, and the guild would bear the responsibility of arming and organising their members.
• Guilds often acted as an informal social safety net for widows and children of deceased guild members.

Successful guilds also tended to amass wealth and be politically important. Whereas outside cities, society was often arranged in the hierarchy of vassalage mentioned above, inside towns, the power structure might look more like:

Townsfolk < Wealthy and successful burghers < Aldermen/mayor < The monarch

In many cases, guilds would weigh heavily in the two middle tiers.

All of this could apply to magical arts. If magic did develop through a system of powerful guilds, would that be enough to keep it safe from grasping states?

• Guilds flourish under a system where cities can have municipal charters, so their townsfolk are 'free'... but 'free' mostly means 'free from the tyranny of aristocrats', not 'free from the tyranny of the monarch', which is to say, city charters don't prevent the state from meddling.
• Having a close-knit collective of magic-users definitely helps prevent the "if magic-users are too powerful to be controlled by the state, magic-users will overthrow and become the state" problem. It means that individual mages can be quite weak compared to the state's knights/assassins/armies/etc, which is desirable for most settings. It only works as long as the guild has strong bonds and weak ambitions, though; you need to find the sweet spot where magic guilds stop their members defecting to the state, but also don't grow to become de facto state powers.
• Mage guilds need to have an extremely high rate of membership and a tight grasp on teaching magic, otherwise the state can still bypass it by spending resources to create and/or hire its own magic-users and slowly consolidate power.

Verdict:

I think this is borderline workable, as long as you don't mind the constraints it places on the setting. It still allows for a small number of court magicians and war wizards, and princes complaining about the ruinous rates the Guild charges, which are nice situations to have in the pocket. Unfortunately there's a weird implication that most of those small-town witches / dungeon-delving sorcerers / wandering illusionists / reclusive sages / etc still have deep guild affiliations (otherwise the state would be finagling them into its service).

RESCUED BY INSTITUTIONS, ATTEMPT 2: THE FIRST ESTATE

In this version we're saying that something directly comparable to the Medieval West European Christian Church is in charge of magic. It's a big, important, hierarchical, highly respected institution with major (but not complete) autonomy and a lot of accrued wealth.

A large part of the reason the Church survives (and mostly thrives) outside the secular system of fiefdoms and vassalage is that everybody of the era is highly religious, so acting against the Church gets "you are violating God's will" added to the normal list of reasons it's a bad idea to act against powerful institutions.

There's two issues with this solution.

First, why is the First Estate in charge of magic? It's extremely restrictive to world-building to have all magic be divine magic, or be non-divine magic that is nevertheless sheltered by or structured around the Church.

Second, we have historical counterexamples to the Church's ability to protect its own interests. The infamous one is Henry VIII of England, married to Catherine and wanting to marry Anne instead. He destroys the institutions of the First Estate, gets excommunicated, divorces Catherine, marries Anne, starts looting the wreckage of the Catholic Church in much of England, and replaces the local religion with his own new version. This was all done in pursuit of a personal goal, and frankly a minor one compared to some of the benefits that magic can usually offer.

Verdict:

This solution's plausibility really depends on setting details. If it's the kind of fantasy milieu where interventionist gods literally exist, then no earthly ruler is going to succeed in replacing the First Estate a la King Henry. But in that case you're probably better off just going with Solution 7 (ii).

RESCUED BY INSTITUTIONS, ATTEMPT 3: A FOURTH ESTATE

Not 'Fourth Estate' like the modern media. Magicians.

The three 'Estates' were, in their historical context, viewed (by the people who put stock in the framework) as deeply different things. It's possible that if magic actually existed, it would be thought of as so fundamentally different that magic-users would end up structured as another Estate, separate from those who ruled, those who toiled, and those who prayed. This might be especially true if magic is of a weird and otherworldly kind which changes the person who wields it.

But I think this probably oversells how weird magic is if you grew up in a world where it existed. Imagine saying 'if metallurgy actually existed, it would be thought of as so fundamentally different that blacksmiths would end up structured as another Estate'. Or 'if literacy actually existed, it would be thought of as so fundamentally different that scribes would end up structured as another Estate'.

Verdict:

Maybe a long, ancient, ingrained tradition of "mages are just a different class of folk, and we let them govern their own" is doable. But it's not like rulers didn't try to meddle in the affairs of the Church, a different class of folk who were meant to govern their own.

And, as I've said before, all you need is for one state to find a path to controlling a bunch of magic (in this case by busting down the traditional setting-aside of the Fourth Estate). Then it starts to outcompete its neighbours, its successors learn from its success, and soon there's a new normal.

12. SOME STATES, SOME OF THE TIME

One of the rejoinders I heard to the original argument was that it makes its own case too strongly. In particular, we do have what amount to counterexamples from our own history - cases where states had the ability to seize additional power and failed to do so.

For example, someone mentioned Genoese engineers in the late medieval/early modern period who built cannons for anyone with the cash. From Wikipedia, we get examples like "Orban [...] was an iron founder and engineer [...] in the Kingdom of Hungary [...] who cast large-calibre artillery for the Ottoman siege of [Byzantine] Constantinople in 1453. [...] He had offered his services to the Byzantines in 1452, a year before the Ottomans attacked the city, but the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI could not afford Orban's high salary nor did the Byzantines possess the materials necessary for constructing such a large siege cannon. Orban then left Constantinople and approached the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, who was preparing to besiege the city. [...] Orban was given abundant funds and materials by the sultan."

The implication is that in some cases a skilled magic-user might just exist outside the state system, and offer their services to anyone rich enough... and some states say "yeah, that's fine. We'll call you back if we get money."

Of course, it's not a perfect analogy. For a start, magical power tends to be both more wide-ranging and more tightly linked to the individual than engineering power. We also usually want settings where spellcasters of various capabilities and specialisations might be wandering around in every little corner of the world; I get the impression that this was not historically the case for cannon-founders.

(Also part of the Wikipedia entry points out that the Byzantines didn't actually have the materials to make a large siege cannon, which in the analogy is like a state with no access to parchment failing to put effort into getting a maker of magical scrolls under its control. Still, a sufficiently ruthless state might have imprisoned or killed Orban just in case he took an offer to their enemies, as he ended up doing.)

To generalise, though - yes, I think it's fair to say that there are forces and incentives opposing the ones which should drive states to invest heavily in magic power. Systems are complicated, people are motivated by things other than perfect rationality, information is obscure (especially before the Information Age), circumstances can change, outside factors can intervene, and winning strategies are seldom obvious before the competition takes place.

And maybe all this can lead to a 'fantasy mess' milieu where different states have different levels of, and methods of, investment in getting the useful technology of magic under their control - and even when they try, sometimes fail due to all sorts of messy reasons.

Verdict:

This is again quite similar to the 'sweet spot' solution, implying that yes, some states, some of the time, should be investing heavily in magic, but for many states much of the time, there are good reasons for them not to. Things often are messy and inefficient. I think it's a fair view, enough so that it actually makes me feel that the problem is less of a sticking point for verisimilitude.

So... sure. From time to time, states can emerge which hate magic, or overvalue military power, or rely on a different kind of power base they've built up, or accidentally drive all their citizen mages into hiding, or whatever. If you have a sufficiently cynical view of people's basic competence, this could even be the norm. Expect that if there's a well-run, thoughtful, wealthy state, it will be grabbing up a disproportionate numbers of magic-users - but nothing like all of them.

FINAL VERDICT

So, what are the winners?

The obvious 'out' is [#7 variant (ii), 'superpowers keep things the way they like it']. As long as you have all-powerful interventionist gods in your setting, you can directly import this rationale and pretty much never worry about verisimilitude again.

I think my own preference, at the end of all this, is to combine [#1, 'sweet spot'] with [#12, 'some states, some of the time'] and [#8, 'narrowly focused camera lens']. In conjunction, you get a glorious mess where yes there are lots of sorcerous mercenaries and manor mages and court magicians and so on, in some states more than others, but whichever state(s) the game is taking place in are the ones that happen to be lower on the magic-investment end of things, so that there are plenty of magic-users choosing their own paths as individuals. On reflection, I think that works okay.

And my personal favourite, which I'd throw into the mix just for flavour? The partial solution where mages tear apart reality if you stack them too tightly in one place: [#4 variant (i), 'critical mass'].

ANY OTHER SOLUTIONS?

I'm excited to hear whether other people thought up other ways to address this world-building problem, or picked a hole in one of these solutions. Comment if you did!