Magic in Games: The Absence of Mystery and Danger

Why isn't magic mysterious and dangerous in most games? The idea of magic, and the lore of magic, tend to be that it is mysterious and dangerous, yet I have difficulty thinking of games that manifest this idea in their rules. Most of the time, magic is just one power among money, one that is more scientistic than otherworldly.

From the first edition of D&D, the venerable tabletop roleplaying game has suffered from ludonarrative dissonance: the book tells you that magic is strange and weird, but the mechanics around them are a fairly simple metaphysics. In the old days, it was Vancian: learn a spell, cast it to produce an effect, burn it from memory, wash, rinse, repeat. 

There was one exception in my heyday of AD&D Second Edition, and that was from The Tome of Magic. I loved that book, with its expanded list of spells, new cleric spheres, and rules for elemental magic. Most notable, though, was the introduction of wild magic. When a practitioner of wild magic cast a spell, there were all manner of outcomes: one could succeed phenomenally, fail abysmally, or do something completely unrelated to the original goal. Perhaps it is noteworthy that in the campaigns I played, the only wild magic users were ever NPCs. It seems that players were less interested in risking their characters' hides than a DM was willing to tinker with novel systems! Notice also that this was not "magic" but "wild magic", establishing that the unpredictable kind of magic was categorically distinct from the staid kind.

Then, the flood of second edition sourcebooks started making every class gain more and more "spell-like" powers, until with 3rd edition, basically every character was defined by powers. The danger of being a wizard was due to the lack of armor and low hit points rather than due to the properties of their craft, and the distinctiveness of a wizard was their status as glass cannon rather than mysteriousness.

As I understand the trend of D&D, it has continued to move in this direction. Not only do characters have multiple powers, now it seems that almost any class can get access to magic. The stories I hear and the fan art I see looks more like anime than anything that inspired Gygax and Arneson. I'm not making a value judgement here, but is any of this really magical? Memorize this spell and cast it for an effect, or, draw upon your connection to nature or mana or something and conjure up a fireball with your charisma. It is more scientistic than mysterious, more earthbending than arcane.

In video games, it seems even simpler. By and large, "magic" is resource management: save up your mana so you can do your big blast effect against the mini-boss. I think Bard's Tale III was the first game I played with Spell Points, and I can remember delving into dungeons, then running around outside to regenerate Spell Points before I could go back in. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with this except perhaps the theme. It lacks mystery: magic is simply a predictable force that works in a predictable way.

I have played more video games than I can remember, but of those I could bring to mind, very few give magic any sense of danger. In Nethack, when you find a scroll, you don't know which spell it is, nor whether it is cursed; but you know that it's one from a list of possible spells, and you know that it is cursed, blessed, or neither. In Darkest Dungeon, the occultist may actually do more harm than good when casting his healing spells, but it will be one or the other. The Divine Divinity series contains some interesting effects between the environment and magic such as being able to set fire to a pool of oil, and if you do it wrong, it hurts your own characters rather than the enemies; the casting has some danger, then, but only if you're not careful nor tactical. 

To be fair, the influences of early fantasy games (video and otherwise) included not just Sword & Sorcery but also movies like 1963's The Raven. In Conan's stories, if you meet someone who can sling fireballs at will, that person is evil, corrupt, possessed by otherworldly powers. The Raven is a bit oddball, but here, we see a conflict between good and evil spellcasters, the best of whom can create fantastic effects with just a waggle of the fingers. Why do almost all games take the latter approach instead of the former?

Hold on to that for a moment, and let's return to Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, a game that has been on my mind a lot recently. (See this post about playing with my family, for example.) DCC uses a system called "Mercurial Magic": when a wizard learns a spell, the player rolls on a table, and there's a high chance that this spell will have some additional manifestation or property that is, more or less, unique to that spellcaster. For example, when we played last weekend, my son's wizard cast flaming hands, and it summoned the attention of an ominous, otherworldly spirit onto the party. Neat! DCC uses a roll-to-cast system, such as advocated by pundits like Professor Dungeonmaster and Hankerin Ferinale. DCC goes further than just success or failure on spellcasting, which only brings magic up to the level of uncertainty that goes into punching and kicking. Rather, in DCC, each spell has its own table of outcomes, and the better the roll, the more wondrous the outcomes. It's like taking "1d4+1 damage from magic missile" and turning it up to eleven, where the damage, the number of targets, the range, and more are all potentially modified by casting. DCC is the first game I have played where I felt like magic is mysterious and dangerous. It's not even that magic is grimdark, as it tends to be in Conan stories for example, but it feels magical.

Why don't we see this in other games? One of the simpler answers for videogames is hinted at in my notes from Burgun's and Ma's discussion of strategy game design: it's hard to program! It's one thing for a tabletop RPG to say, "An ominous, otherworldly presence looks over the party," which the Judge/DM can pick up and run with. It's quite another to program that. Writing the code, creating the assets, and QA testing N spells is hard enough, but if you have M effects for each, that's quadratic growth. Yet, we don't see in video games even the easier things. We have "1d4+1 damage from magic missile," but without variable targets or range, and without passing parameters to shaders for moderate variation.

The other answer that may be the better one. In practically all videogames, and every one I have mentioned here, you can lose. I personally enjoy the random chance that comes up in games like X-Com as well as classic roguelikes such as Nethack. Would I enjoy it as much if I was at the last level of either and my spellcaster suddenly blew up the dungeon? Maybe not. I think, though, that this proves my hypothesis that the problem of integrating magical magic is a game design problem that goes all the way down. The conventional approach is to add magic the way you might add traps for a thief or instruments for a bard. The fact that people make traps is interesting, and the addition of music to a world gives it culture. These are both mundane, though, whereas magic is about changing the nature of reality.

In his essay "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien reserves the word "magic" for that practiced by Magicians who value "greed and self-centered power." It stands in stark contrast to the enchantments of the fairies, which are not just transcendent, but which have the properties to which only the very best of human arts approaches. That is, the best of human effort comes close to the fairies' enchantments, while magic is performed through the worst of vices. Perhaps there is an opportunity then that we game designers might strive for enchanted subcreation by exploring the perils of magic.