The implied metaphysics of Daggerheart

Roleplaying games have implied settings. Daggerheart's is deliberately kept as sparse as possible, as it offers a plethora of game settings (“campaign frames”) and advice on using them or creating new ones to structure play. The pros and cons of the approach are obvious: maximal flexibility, minimal fallback.

That said, “Daggerheart has established ancestries, communities, classes, abilities, and spells – so some worldbuilding aspects will exist similarly across every campaign” (page 11). I'm setting my sights on what these imply about Daggerheart's metaphysics. What's stated? What can be inferred?

By metaphysics I mean cosmological, structural, and supernatural elements of the game world(s).

 

 

What can we learn?

I'm looking only at the Daggerheart core rulebook here. The “World Overview” in Chapter 1 is particularly informative. I'll give page references in other cases.

The Core Realms

The Mortal Realm is a plane, in the many-dimensions sense, and is where “the majority of material beings and objects” as well as the Faint Divinities are. Allegedly but not definitively, the Mortal Realm was created by the Forgotten Gods during the Earliest Age.

The Hallows Above is another core realm. It formerly belonged to the Forgotten Gods, and is now home to the New Gods.

The Circles Below are also called the “lower realms”. Many of the Forgotten Gods are banished there, becoming Fallen Gods. Allegedly but not definitively (a) “places of corruption, destruction, and violence”, and (b) the home to some of the most dangerous creatures in the core realms.

The Realms Beyond: The book is laid out as if these are the fourth of the core realms. However, the text implies that the Mortal Realm, Hallows Above, and Circles Below are the core realms, and that the Realms Beyond are some of the “many realms” of the overall cosmos.

The Realms Beyond include “the Elemental Lands, the Astral Realm, the Valley of Death, and countless others”. The “Chaos Realm” (page 250), an “otherworldly space where the laws of reality are unstable” is “alien to the Mortal Realm” and likely a Realm Beyond. It features impossible architecture and glimpses of other worlds. 

Gods and such

→ The Earliest Age was a time when immortals from the Hallows Above intermingled with mortals. Of nonspecific duration and distance other than “millennia” ago (pages 11, 235).

→ The Forgotten Gods were the first known gods. No mention of what they were called when they were in control – certainly not “Forgotten Gods”. They fought the New Gods and lost, and “many of” them were imprisoned either in the Mortal Realm or the Circles Below. Presumably the others were killed, but the ones “who fought most passionately” were the ones banished to the Circles Below, so there's room for interpretation that some of the losers were rehabilitated as New Gods.

→ The Fallen Gods are simply those of the Forgotten Gods banished to the Circles Below. Unlike in e.g. Christian mythology, nothing is implied to have changed about them in the process. Fallen Gods are designated (but are not objectively stated to be) “evil practitioners of tainted magic”, and their banished Faint Divinity allies (and their descendants) “demons”; Infernis descend in turn from demons. Temples to the Fallen Gods still exist (page 102), and it is possible to have a “direct channel” to them (page 106). Fallen Gods might also be encountered as an adversary (page 235); interestingly only at the same level of threat as “really muscular zombie” (page 239).

→ The New Gods turned up after the Forgotten Gods as a distinct set of entities, but it's unclear whether or not the war began immediately. They seized and colonised the Hallows Above. They still exist and can intervene in the world in set ways.

→ The Faint Divinities are “lesser deities created by both the Forgotten and the New Gods to oversee the Mortal Realm.” They have narrower spheres of influence but “can greatly influence the lives of mortals.” The main text does not actually say so, but many of the campaign frames place the Faint Divinities as being physically present in the Mortal Realm.

The gods' reach includes (page 44) the ability to “appoint” seraphs who are “imbued with sacred purpose” but whose ethos are only “traditionally” in alignment with their god's domain or goals. Some seraphs (page 236) are tasked with enforcing their god's will. Deities who appoint seraphs are those who exist “within the realms” [plural], which implies that seraphs can serve a Forgotten or Fallen God, or possibly even a Faint Divinity.

Interestingly, Daggerheart definitively has gods but does not seem to have an afterlife. The gods have specific observable qualities, and can be communicated with. There is no mention in the text of a heaven, hell, reincarnation, paradise, judgment, or such.

Aside: Resurrecting a dead character is merely “often” (i.e., not always) difficult and costly (page 106). Page 182 contradicts this, calling death “more permanent in Daggerheart than in other games of the same genre” and the Risk It All roll being “final unless you provide another means of resurrection in your story”; it also contradicts the wording of the Resurrection spell by claiming it can only be used once.

There's a definite impression that the Hallows Above and Circles Below are just places where gods happen to live, and not afterlives. Getting there takes specialist knowledge and an enormous investment while, crucially, being alive. The gods are more like super powerful alien beings than anything that maps well onto the belief patterns we have on Earth, but this is generally true for most fantasy TTRPGs.

Not much is set in stone about Daggerheart's gods, their powers, their domain, or the extent of the human-like qualities (agendas and personality traits) which the text hints at.

We do know that the gods are mortal – confusingly, given that they are several times called ‘immortal’ and juxtaposed to mortals. It is possible (page 250) to “breach the gates” of the Hallows Above or “break the barrier” between it and the Mortal Realm, slay one or more gods, and usurp their powers. The mortality of the gods is emphasised several times by the campaign frames (e.g., page 255).

Planar travel

Communication: The Hallows Above are “closely connected with most other realms” (page 11), and according to the text it's because of that cosmological feature (i.e., not because of some godly power or designed property) that “the gods residing here can see and speak with the creatures of the Mortal Realm without leaving their domain”. Communication with the gods may be obfuscated, although it's unclear if this is an interplanar limitation or a feature of the gods themselves.

Travel: There are specific methods by which the New Gods “can leave the Hallows Above to occupy other realms, but in the current age they must always sacrifice something of personal importance to do so.” According to rumour (not definitively), this was a deliberate choice to help protect the Hallows if the Forgotten Gods return.

There's an implied symmetry for entering the Hallows Above, and the requisite sacrifices have caused “some of the great calamities that have befallen the Mortal Realm in recent millennia.”

Accessing and traversing the Realms Beyond from the Mortal Realm “requires specialised knowledge and hard-learned skills”, possessed by some beings in the core realms.

Security: Other planes typically have “safeguards against Fallen [Gods?] who wish to cross from the Circles Below. Within the Mortal Realm, the use of arcane magic in acts of great evil is said to open a temporary rift between the two planes, allowing Fallen [Gods?] to pass through.”

 

Details of the magic system

Magic is “very powerful and incredibly dangerous” (page 12). It permeates the environment, and there is specifically a “magic of the wilderness” (page 30).

Magic can manifest within people (page 12). Some magic is innate and heritable (page 46). This kind of magic can be cultivated and there's a skill component to using it.

Magical power can be acquired and developed through learning, tool use, and taking supplements (page 50). Having knowledge of magic leads to, or correlates with, being able to use it. Secrets can be inherently powerful.

...Other than that, magic is largely left as a mystery. Daggerheart doesn't make commitments about its origin, ground rules, systematisation, relationship to divine powers, etc.

There's not much to glean from the domain cards. Many game powers labelled ‘ability’ rather than ‘spell’ seem nevertheless supernatural. Magic can be used to break the rules in all the classic ways (slow time, transmit information from the future, negate gravity, break space, directly change reality, create and destroy matter, etc). This ‘canonical’ collection of spells is constrained in various ways that would be visible in-world, e.g., in magnitude and locality, which is obviously a TTRPG design consideration.

Notes from the bestiary

Fantastical creatures, undead, and things like “waygates” and “incarnations of fate” exist without any specific metaphysical underpinnings. “Outer Realms” monsters are likely from Realms Beyond. There are also nature spirits that are mentioned repeatedly (pages 183, 230, 283, 338, 339).

Sapients

Where did people come from? According to “stories” the gods created the world (page 12), but that has little epistemic weight. It seems unlikely that people evolved biologically, given that there are eighteen subgroups of people that (a) have enormously varying physical biology (e.g. dragon breath, flight, drastically varying lifespan and size, being made of metal or fungus), (b) are all capable of having children together, and (c) have such similar brains that there is no variance between subgroups in mental characteristics or personality traits.

Aside: There is one exception to the latter. Humans specifically (page 65) “incorporate [sic] both magical and mechanical tools, accessories, and items that assist their daily life and tasks”, and “often dress to clearly display social status, wealth, personal faith, or aesthetics”. These traits are necessarily rare amongst the other seventeen kinds of people, otherwise they would not have been ascribed to humans in particular. Daggerheart separates culture and community from ancestry, so these are inborn traits of humans, not ones developed amongst insular human-dominated societies.

Daggerheart is otherwise very careful about this sort of thing (“individuals from all lineages possess unique characteristics and cultures, as well as personhood”) and notes that all people's minds work indistinguishably, i.e., in a fundamentally human way. I think we should therefore regard these notes on human ancestry as an outright error.

Either way, the ability of e.g. infernis, fungrils, and clanks to mix ancestries seems to preclude a model of biology similar to that of our reality. Of course, Daggerheart has deeply pervasive magic, so although the book doesn't state it, all such cases could be magically induced. This might anyway be a case of “game design considerations” rather than actual metaphysics of the setting.

Campaign frames

Chapter 5 doesn't really talk about modifying the metaphysics for a campaign frame (outside of mentioning unique setting distinctions and special mechanics).

Looking at the details of the cosmos mentioned in the book's campaign frames, we quickly find that (of those that get into it) they are built firmly on the implied metaphysics above, with little deviation.

The Age of Umbra (as laid out on pages 281, 284, 287, 288) and Colossus of the Drylands (as described as “myths” on pages 308–310) for example are each fundamentally compatible with Daggerheart's underlying metaphysics, but develop those basics in different directions.

The Witherwild

This frame reinforces the mortality of the gods, featuring a successful deicide (Shun’Aush) and giving a physicality to their powers (the bodily dust of a dead god gives rise to a plague; the god Nikta's two eyes are individually responsible for ripening and ruination; maiming a god changes their powers).

The Witherwild frame develops the Faint Divinities: “Gods in this land [...] wander the land as incarnate beings, residing in both the natural world as well as within homes and small villages. [...] Many communities, and some larger families, even have their own small god or tutelary spirit who watches over them. […] there is a constant push and pull between the goals of people and their deific neighbors. The gods must curry worship from mortals, often by performing small miracles [...]” Note that this is the only mention in the book of gods having any interest in being worshipped!

The Witherwild frame names six Faint Divinities (Fulg, Hyacynis, Ikla, Oove, Qui’Gar, Rohkin) and says there are hundreds or thousands more. Gods are person-like, with allies, alignments, and special interests. Interestingly, a god's domain is described not as a source of power or set of powers but somewhere that effort is required (Qui’Gar presides over deaths near brambles and the current magical verdancy has “made her job harder”).

 

Motherboard

This is the only canon campaign frame that arguably departs from the base metaphysics. In Motherboard, magic is ancient technology. There's a lot of reskinning necessary, with somewhat vague guidance: “Consider how these would manifest in a world where magic comes from technology, then adapt the flavour of each feature accordingly.”

Faint Divinities are ghosts in the machine. Regarding divine power, players “should determine why their character relates to technology on a spiritual level, rather than simply employing it. They should also consider if and how they offer their devotion to the Motherboard or Faint Divinities.”

The text falls short of saying that gods (and the Hallows Above, etc) don't literally exist in the Motherboard frame. But that's the more plausible and parsimonious reading: the Motherboard is a “master program” left behind by ancient technomancers, whose indistinguishable-from-magic advanced technology gives rise to all supernatural phenomena.

In conclusion

Daggerheart has magic, and lots of it. But it has no deep underlying rules for a GM to fall back on in rulings (or viewed the other way, no constraints that the GM has to work within). 

In Daggerheart, gods exist but at times seem curiously divorced from serving a religious purpose. There are only a few mentions of them being worshipped (e.g. page 313), and this isn't strictly required even for the chosen champions who channel their powers. There's no mention of an afterlife, moral judgment, or belief in gods other than the ones that literally exist. There's also no mention of god-oppositional philosophies, even though the Faint Divinities affect people's lives.

(As I wrote in “Put Flourishes, Fairy Tales, and Folk Beliefs in Your Fantasy World”, these are the kind of details you are definitely going to want to expand upon in your campaign frames.)

The four core realms are “the basis for the worldbuilding elements inherent to many of Daggerheart's mechanics” (page 12). The obvious question to ask now is: do Daggerheart's implied metaphysics constrain campaign frames?

Arguably. The book's frames are all built on those basics or agnostic to them. The game provides very little guidance for tinkering with the metaphysics, even as it weighs in on other analogous matters for creating your own world (in Chapters 3–4 and especially 5). On the other hand, there's lots of customise-it, revise-it, collaborate-on-it, reskin-it, make-it-work-for-your-group sentiment throughout Daggerheart, which could be extended to imply permission.

Reviewn June 5: Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. It’s a 100 page work, written by Jenna K. Moran, who you may know from things like Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. This breaks the pattern for Reviewn June, as it's something I’ve read parts of before. But this is the first time I'm reading it through on its own (supposed?) terms: as a (supposed?) role-playing game.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (which can be abbreviated to WTF for reasons which aren’t accidental because nothing is ever an accident) bills itself in its subtitle as a story-telling game. Is it a story-telling game? Is it a game? Is it a series of sense-impressions? I’m unclear whether it’s a joke game, or at least, just a joke game. It’s a concept game, or it's the concept of a game, or at the very least it’s very interested in the concept of a game. It is, maybe, a partial exploration of games-space. It’s Buddhist philosophy and fake astrology, for some reason.

It might be in the twenty most entertaining things I’ve ever read, which is impressive for a set of rules and flavour text.

In case you're unfamiliar, let me quote the page 1 introduction in its entirety, just to set the tone.

Reality is an illusion.
Those who seek to understand it corrode their understanding of it. In naïveté, objects are solid, ideas are true or false, sensations are real, and communication conveys information. To the adept, these things are as fading dreams.
There is no object that is not also emptiness.
There is no arbiter of truth.
Sensations are the lies of Maya; they are the shifting of electrical patterns in the brain; they are signifiers without referent.
Communication is violence.
Reality is false.
It does not matter how many layers one peels back. It does not matter what revelations one has. This is because there is no truth.
We are things that we have dreamed, and there is no sense in it, and when the sleeper wakes we shall be washed away.

Really, this is a very hard work to review. I started writing this up from brief notes while I was partway through Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, but by the time I'd read to the end something rung false about my own words. They were somehow lacking in substance. I was writing phrases like “as in many story-games, the role of GM is optional”, things which just don’t seem to cleave reality at its joints when it comes to WTF.

So this is my second attempt. I've decided that to convey my helplessness as a reader, I'm going to forego sections and order and begin most of these paragraphs with "...So", the textual equivalent of the kind of shrug that's meant to indicate being overwhelmed.

...So there are places in the text where two different sentences reference the same footnote. It has rules for working out whether you are playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. And then rules about using those rules. It's all breathlessly earnest and obviously joking at the same time. I am deeply worried that I might be insufficiently enlightened to truly appreciate the idea of this game (as much as I do appreciate it).

...So the wisher/theurgist/fatalist character split is unlike anything I have read before or since, whether in story games or classic TTRPGs. Together, some of these characters must find the Jewel of All Desiring and make the universe they live in, and must make it well; or they fail and are forgotten in the great unravelling of what is. This, on top of the complexity and self-awareness and bizarre philosophy and astrology and player/character/god blurring and fourth-wall-breaking and layers of nuance, gives nothing so much as Homestuck vibes. But the one has has colossal toads fundamentally important to the quest-for-the-universe and the other frogs, so I guess the similarity is superficial.

I mentioned astrology. Page 6 introduces the first of several planet/star diagrams and tells you “Planets and stars help you play”, which is one of the text's many preposterous straight-faced half-truths. It adds that “You'll find more details on these planets — including two mystery planets seen only during eclipses — in the first supplement for WTF.” It sounds like a joke, but I did locate a three-page supplement the author released which introduces some new rules for the Weaver and a “competitive” WTF variant. They’re not presented in the form of planets, and I suspect the ‘supplement’ is basically patch notes (except maybe it was planned from the start). The supplement is called TLDR because of course it is.

The attributes/powers/skills/gifts system seems like it would be robust, and ties in very deeply with the lore that WTF is steeped in and emanates like a weird radiation. I’m not going to go into the mechanics even though I feel like I could write an essay on them. They seem good. Go read the thing.

...So I’ve skimmed this book before and everything about it still feels weird and surprising. On this full read-through I remembered with surprise that it has those hard mechanical underpinnings, and that feels weird. Discovering that it has an enormous pseudo-canonical world setting, not just implicit lore, feels odd and unexpected. (Each setting location includes both practical matters and ‘moral implications’.) The planets subsystem feels weird and I’m sure would surprise someone who didn’t go in forewarned. Don’t get me started on the ‘rules toys’ and ‘donuts’. When the book comes to an end, you blink, startled.

WTF

...So there’s the Weaver, or GM. At one point we are told that “If you are the Weaver, announce this to the group. Note that only one person is the Weaver. If you are the Weaver and someone else speaks up, it's up to you whether to denounce them now or let their heresy flourish.” This isn’t a joke. It can come into play. There are related rules. If a theurgist character becomes corrupted (it’s a whole thing), they can end up forcing the Weaver into the role of player, ‘immured in horrible durance within the world’, and the accursed theurgist takes on a correspondingly greater role in determining what is true. The dragons of the deeps, which are not bound by the rules of WTF, can “free” a weaver immured in the world. The rules note the possibility that you encounter the dragons of the deeps while you are not aware that you are playing WTF.

The rules are bizarre. I cannot begin to do either the base level or higher-order rules justice. Consider just one example. The author deftly calls the reader’s attention to an unlikely, yet possible, meta-rules interaction, neatly outlines the nature of the issue, and writes:

You might think that, having anticipated this problem, we’d have a solution.
Instead, we have a koan.

True to its word, the text presents its koan and continues with no solution offered.

...So there’s this incredible high-level meta stuff, juxtaposed with things like “The elemental basis of communication in WTF is sound and gesture---vibrations that you transmit through the air and gross physical motions that you use to adjust the pattern of light that you reflect.” This is part of a four-page section on talking/communication as a necessary component of “how to play WTF”.

Does the game book even give you enough to go on to play? I’ve read it and I couldn’t tell you, not without making a fool of myself by trying. Numerous places in the text discuss, either subtly or overtly, whether the game is playable or even designed to be played. One diagrammatical rules toy, if I read it right, has implications as to what ways the game might model fate entering into the equation as to whether WTF is being or will be played. A player’s “willful ego that does not want to play WTF” is a node that is lovingly described but never actually used.

What does Jenna Moran think about the actual process of playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist? Well, things like this:

The author has a strong sense of what you're supposed to be doing when you play WTF.

That said — you can't read her mind.

It’s protected by the fundamental isolation of personhood and the unbridgeable divide between soul and soul!

We are also offered hints like this:

The players' efforts to incarnate and instantiate a transcendent spirit of infinite universal love in the fabric of the game are the source of the meaning of the game. It is the contention of the author that players cannot help but catch fire with this burning spirit as soon as they attempt to play WTF, preventing any inappropriate uses of the mechanics below.

(I want to go out of my way to reassure you that all the quotes in this review are real.)

...So... Look, I don’t know. I kind of love it.

The game, as a story game, is divided into character creation and rules and then further organised by progression through a prologue and 5 books associated with realms or places. Each one has both practical threats and moral threats. The practical threats seem interesting but the moral threats feel more pressing.

Book 1 is set in the Civilized Lands, unless (except but also or even if) all the characters died in the prologue. In Raif, royalty have become vampires. “Setting forth to find the Jewel of All Desiring without their blessing would be unimaginably improper.” In Tin ’An, wishers are hunted by the Duke’s Axeman. “Also the characters do not know where to go next. That is why their mission must end in ignominy here.”

The game requires the players and/or their characters to at least consider a major problem of philosophy before they can move on to book 2.

Book 2 is travel through “the lands of the savage peoples” and then those of the fairies, whose lives are full of stories, and who, the book takes some pains to point out, do not exist.

Book 3 of the game is about the Dragons of the Deeps, unless of course it gets skipped, “although that means never knowing what happened in it or if the characters found the Jewel of All Desiring when you weren't looking.”

The Dragons of the Deeps present a moral threat “whether or not you skip” them.

Book 4 takes the characters under the world, to the realm of the ur-toads. Also, “If the characters have not yet visited the sun now might be a good time”. Did I mention that there are five cardinal directions and that blackguards live on the sun in palaces of ice?

Book 5 is the conclusion, wherein the characters (might) find the Jewel of All Desiring (depending on fate, maybe?). Just working out what it means that this has happened is what an enormous chunk of the book is about. I don’t have the answer. I will note that the game at this point more or less requires the players and/or their characters to solve that major problem of philosophy from the end of book 1.

By the way, somebody “is going to have to die to become the firmament of the world.” There are rules for this. WTF has an imposing spine of metaphysics beneath the dreamlike layers of cloud and poetry veiling it.

The example of play begins with the example character being “troubled by her destiny as an example player in a WTF game” before gathering some other players and discussing whether or not they are already playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. It proceeds into a fascinating exercise in creative writing which does not really clear things up all that much, but is written in compelling dialogue of the sort that seems unlikely to occur at a table not occupied by six Jenna Morans. By the time I finished WTF I was looking up all her past work to add to my neglected reading lists.

Minor text quibbles:

• The simple style and layout is actually quite nice. In any other work, I would be nitpicking things like the author’s use of three dashes instead of an em dash. But... I don’t know.
• This work is obviously unfinished from a presentational viewpoint. I don’t remember where or when I found it, but it’s just a word doc converted to PDF with some line diagrams. I don’t know what it could possibly look like, finished and cleaned up and published. If anything, WTF feels like it ought to be more cobbled-together than it. Handwritten in a fading ink, maybe. Or spiralling around like House of Leaves.
  

 

...So that’s it. 100 pages. Difficult to write about but a delight to read. I would be staggered if I read anything more steeped in interesting weirdness for Reviewn June.

I don't know if I'll ever try to play it. There were various little evocative details a person could lift and put in their own games, but that's not why I think you should read it. I don’t care if it counts as a game. It was a textual experience. If you're not in the market for those, leave it alone. What's my favourite bit? All of it.

Let me leave you with a word of warning from page 25 of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist:

Use caution when playing WTF while tired, drunk, or punchy, as it may increase the chance that the shadow lurking beyond the edge of the world shall immure you all in timeless misery.

Where to get it:

http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/a-small-gift-to-my-readers

 

On edge cases and magic

There's an innate design tension which RPG magic systems must contend with.

Magic must be more powerful than enacting the equivalent effect by mundane means, otherwise it's not fun and not fantastic. But if it's powerful and its uses are limitless (or at least non-rate-limited), then you become committed to an exceptionally high-magic setting.

If it takes ten seconds to give yourself a magical boon which lasts for ten minutes, the default player behaviour and the reasonable in-world behaviour will be to cast the spell every ten minutes... Unless they have a specific reason not to. That's almost always 'resource management'. In almost ever fantasy TTRPG, magic (whether spells, items, rituals, innate powers, etc) will be powerful and limited, i.e., a valuable resource; something to be conserved for when it will matter. Therefore, players will want to know the exact effect of some magic they might use, so that they can make an informed choice.

And this creates a design tension. How predictable to players is the magic their characters are harnessing?

The predictability predicament

Assuming you want magic to be able to do a huge range of things (it's magic), to get breadth of coverage, you either end up with these huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects and parameters (almost certainly player-facing), or you have a fuzzy system where the GM instantiates vague wordings at runtime (possibly via what amounts to negotiation with the player). These game design choices have different costs in terms of usability and satisfaction.

Most big, popular fantasy TTRPGs like D&D go with the huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects option. This arguably results in greater player agency, in the sense of being able to make good and meaningful decisions about resource allocation, but it constrains magic to the big official list (and if it's not exceptionally well-designed, you end up with weird codified corner cases and interactions). You also need to know the system really well to be effective as a player or a GM. Finally, there's a risk that presenting in exhaustive detail what is possible strongly implies that anything else isn't possible. You get cases like D&D 5e, where many destructive spells officially don't damage objects because a small subset of them specify that they do.

The fuzzy system option is attractive because it makes magic more 'mysterious' and wild, and thus fantastical. But it can be hard for a GM, especially one who isn't already operating in a "rulings not rules" tradition. But it can also be hard for players to come to terms with, unless either (a) it's the case in-world that a mage never knows exactly what they're going to get when they do some magic (which is flavourful, but risks a poor play experience), or (b) the GM and player together determine what happens when the magic is used. The latter might sound good (an opportunity for collaborative buy-in) or bad ('Mother May I' gameplay). Some GMs are surprised to find that many players hate 'collaborative storytelling exercises' spilling over into their roleplaying games. Either way, it doesn't actually resolve the tension: it's still in the player's best interests to stop and discuss the possible magical effect before they can make an informed choice whether to use their magic.

Variants of the fuzzy system where e.g. the GM has to follow certain rules to come up with a power-level-appropriate instantiation of a spell at run-time are close to being the worst of both worlds: mechanically fiddly but without giving a player enough information to make decisions with, and you just end up building that minutely-detailed canonical list slowly over time.

Resolving the tension

I consider this an open problem. As I've suggested before, I think the best practises are to

• Pick a path and stick with it, rather than mixing up how rigid and predictable the magic system is in different use-cases within the same game; and
• Have an extremely strong, well-thought out metaphysics which either underpins the mechanical design for the minutely-detailed lists option or informs what 'should be the case' for the fuzzy system option.

Food for thought

Here are some questions your magic system must be robust enough to answer, consistently:

If you turn flour to silver dust and mix it into acid, changing it to silver nitrate and creating heat, what happens to the silver nitrate if the spell wears off? What happens to the heat? If the compound is left over, can you reduce it to get silver? Does the resulting silver still count as being magical?

If you turn a pile of stones into loaves of bread and spend a week eating them, what happens to your tissue, the partially-digested bread, and the waste, if the magic ends? Do you die instantly? Does the energy you got from eating disappear?

If you turn a stone into a cat, and that cat eats and sweats and breathes makes waste, then the magic is dispelled, what happens to the bits of world (food and air and water) that got incorporated into the cat's body? Are they in the stone? Do they turn to stone? Can they be turned back? What happens to the cat's sweat and waste and loose hairs and skin particles out in the world? Do they turn to stone? What if the cat was a kitten, and it grew much bigger and older before the spell ended?

Or if the original subject was a mouse rather than a stone, what happens to the cells that changed in its body? Was there a 'mapping' from one mouse cell to multiple cat cells, so that injuries and shed cells and replaced cells carry back over? Do microbial diseases carry back over? Does cancer?

Are all your answers consistent so far?

What happens if you turn someone into a statue and snap their arm off? What about if you turn someone into steel and then temper or anneal the metal? Or take a mould of their body, turn them into ice, melt them, and then refreeze the water in the mould?

What about if you turn a piece of metal into a piece of wood and burn it inside a big tank of air? Does the carbon dioxide turn into a metal oxide? In general, if you heat something up while it's magically transformed and then turn it back, is it still hot? What if you turned something really small into something really big and then it just got slightly warm by soaking up a million times more sunlight than the tiny thing would have?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse and it eats a bucket of oats, what happens to the oats if it turns back? Does it matter whether they've been digested?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse inside a mouse-sized terrarium that a mouse couldn't possibly break but a horse easily could, does the spell work? Does the answer change if the terrarium is nearly horse-sized? What about if you try it on a mouse that's inside a crack in solid rock? Is this meaningfully different from trapping a mouse under a piece of heavy cloth and then expanding it to the size of a horse?

If you cast a spell on a subject, then another one that seems to have the inverse effect (flesh to rock then rock to flesh), do you get back the exact original? If so, why? If not, what happens if only the first spell ends or is dispelled? What if you cast the first spell, then make some orthogonal change to the subject, then cast the second?

What in-universe mechanism decides whether an object counts as meeting the targeting requirements of a spell? Does a spell that works on chairs work on a one-legged stool if the caster doesn't think a one-legged stool is a chair?

Do any of the answers to these questions change depending on whether it's a temporary effect, a dispelled permanent effect, a magically reversed effect, an intrinsic ability of a magical creature, the effect of an item, etc?

The 'Four Humors' Theory of TTRPG Players

The Angry GM recently published an article about the distinct ways in which players play RPGs, with the specific example of D&D.

He mentioned in particular the rise, or increase, of an attitude towards the game as an intrinsically theatrical activity, adding that to the old GNS classification:

Some players see D&D as a Game. They think it’s about overcoming obstacles, winning adventures, accomplishing goals, and advancing characters.

Some players see D&D as a Narrative. They think it’s about telling a story of fantasy adventure and they want to share the most interesting story possible.

Some players see D&D as a Simulation. They think it’s about entering a world as a character and dealing with it as it is. Whatever happens happens.

And now, some players see D&D as a Performance. They think it’s about putting on a show. They have a role to play and they’ve got to play it to the hilt. In the most interesting and engaging way possible.

It's a good article, worth checking out. While reading, it occurred to me that we could treat GNS Theory as just a way to describe some of the emergent properties of a simple pair of dichotomies, along the lines of another well-respected and evidence-based organisational schema, that of the humoral theory of human health.

Take all of this very seriously please.

A simple pair of dichotomies

Somebody is playing a tabletop role-playing game. They are engaging with an activity, making decisions, thinking about what they are doing. The act of play is, ultimately, a realisation of the act of thought. What is the player spending most of their brainpower thinking about?

There are two dichotomies here.

1. Is the player thinking mostly about their real world environment (the people they are playing with, the game rules, the miniatures, the side conversations)? Or are they thinking mostly about the fictive setting? Or something in between?
2. Is the player thinking mostly in an inward-looking away, about themself and what is theirs or squarely within their purview? Or are they thinking mostly in an outward-looking way, about things around them and outside of their control? Or something in between?

We can put this on a pair of axes, as in this professionally-drawn image.

And now a picture emerges, of what GNS+P is describing, but defined in terms of these innate characteristics of human thought: wet, dry, hot, and cold fictive, reality, inward-looking, and outward-looking.

 

These of course are what modern medicine ludology teaches us are the fundamental building blocks of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile different ways to engage with a role-playing game.

GNS+P Theory doesn't map precisely to the four resulting quadrants, of course. There's some interplay and outliers. We have debatable blobs, not square pigeonholes.

Let's break this exciting new bit of science down.

Yellow bile 'TTRPG as Game'

Temperament: choleric (ambitious, driven, aggressive)

What is a Gamist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be INWARD-LOOKING: upon their own (and usually necessarily, the group's) ability to win; to this end they channel attention into their own player skill, their own knowledge of the rules, and making decisions about their own character's capabilities.

Their thoughts typically tend towards REALITY: the nature of the game and how to win it, the rules and mechanics, win and lose conditions, and how to get other players to go along with their plans. But they do still focus some of their attention on parts of the fictive environment: the obstacles to winning that their character encounters, and the mechanical ways they can get advantages with their character (in particular, advancement). The yellow blob in the diagram therefore stretches away towards the left.

To put it another way, Gamists have an excess of yellow bile.

Black bile 'TTRPG as Narrative'

Temperament: melancholic (sad, delusional, deep in fantasy)

What is a Narrativist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be OUTWARD-LOOKING: towards the group having a satisfying play experience and how the game's play will become a story after the fact. At times, they may care more about their own enjoyment of the game-as-story, thus leaning towards the inwards-looking position.

Their thoughts tend towards REALITY: making decisions for the good of the players' play experience, the emergent story, and what will be 'interesting'. If they care about the game rules, it is in case those become an impediment to higher-order goals. (The Narrativist's thoughts may also drive towards a story with verisimilitude and/or immersion, creeping towards engagement with the fictive environment.)

To put it terms we can all understand, Narrativists may have an excess of black bile.

Phlegm 'TTRPG as Simulation'

Temperament: phlegmatic (calm, reserved, analytical)

What is a Simulationist player thinking about?

Their thoughts tend to be OUTWARD-LOOKING: at the world around their character, and at things they don't already know. They want to discover things about the fictive world and see how they mesh together, and inwards things like their knowledge of the rules and their character are mostly ancillary to that. But the act of engagement still requires making plausible decisions about the character, and the Simulationist does typically spend some attention on their character's place within the world (thus, the blue blob on the chart reaches upward).

The Simulationist's thoughts are almost strictly FICTIVE: They care most about the world they are playing in. The game's rules are meant to simulate a world, the GM is the arbiter of those rules, and the outcome of those rules is to be accepted and examined, never challenged or overruled for the sake of higher-order player/GM goals.

So of course, Simulationists have an excess of phlegm.

Blood 'TTRPG as Performance'

Temperament: sanguine (passionate, mirthful, self-indulgent)

The Angry GM suggested 'Performance' as a new and increasingly popular playstyle category, characterised by (amongst other things) creating

characters with clearly defined motivations, personalities, beliefs, goals, and fears right from the get-go. Their character’s character doesn’t emerge from gameplay and it doesn’t change as the game plays out.

What is a Performer player thinking about?

 

Their thoughts are ultimately INWARD-LOOKING: Most of all, they care about their own character, deciding its intrinsic properties, and then getting across those preselected properties.

Their thoughts are largely on the FICTIVE: How to affect the fictive world by determining a tiny part of it; looking for opportunities in the world to accomplish their secondary goal of expression. External things like 'the game rules' and 'the other players' don't impact this very much for trad RPGs.

Or as we normal, modern people would definitely say in normal, modern terms, "Performers have an excess of blood".

I put something weird on that chart, though.

 Entertainer island

I think there's a little outcrop of the Performative playstyle occupying the diametrically opposite position.

A player can start with a solid foundation of hot, wet inward, fictive humors. That is, they have a firmly imagined static character with predetermined characteristics and sometimes even an intention to pursue a 'character arc', whatever on earth that means when you're (a) playing a game that (b) involves, at its most fundamental level, making decisions about situations that you have no foreknowledge of.

But with those humors as a firm foundation, most of the player's attention is freed up to focus on the actual performative act, which is ultimately outward-looking in reality (given that it is a process of interaction with an audience). With this inversion of the expression of their bodily gameplay humors, the Performer is now thinking primarily about the theatrical entertainment of the other players / the GM / their Twitch audience / passersby in the real world. When taken to excess, to the game's detriment.

Balancing the humors

So it seems likely that people can have a predisposition towards certain humors, and we might or might not regard this as an imbalance of humors.

What are the implications? Let's sketch just a few, presupposing (naturally) that two thousand years of high-quality humoral medicine can be extended to the modern environment of the game table.

• A player who is desirous of a more neutral or 'balanced' playstyle may examine the degrees to which they are inward- or outward-looking, in the fictive world or reality, and deliberately change their behaviours accordingly.
• If the players and the GM at a table all have a similar humoral temperament, then we would expect their games to run well if they indulge in that temperament, although players of a different style would scarcely recognise the game they were playing!
• In rare circumstances where the group dynamics are just right, players of completely opposite humoral temperaments may 'cancel out' at the table due to the ways they use and express those temperaments, resulting in (against the odds) a harmonious, near-maximally-enjoyable game.
• Obviously, players may be able to select the right foods and drinks to modulate any excess of humors. By careful review of TTRPG play I have discerned some of the modern-day nostrums: pizza (hot + dry); coffee (hot + wet); soda (cold + wet); chips (cold + dry).

Science marches ever onwards.

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.

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.