SR4 FAQ, Part Five
Now to get back on track with SR4 FAQ updates. Here are a few answers regarding magic:
Q. Will Magic skills be broken up like firearms in SR3?
A. Magic is roughly divided into two categories for the core book, Sorcery and Conjuring. Rather than being skills of their own, however, those are general categories. The Sorcery skills are Spellcasting, Ritual Spellcasting, and Counterspelling. The Conjuring skills are Summoning, Banishing, and Binding. Those are the skills that do most of the heavy lifting for magic in SR4.
Q. Will there still be Metamagic?
A. Yes, though it’s not exactly the same. Rather than relying on a host of new additional skills, we’ve redesigned metamagic techniques to grant new abilities to skills the magician should already have access to. Metamagic does not make a huge appearance in the core book, however. There just isn’t enough room to include it all.
Q. Do we still have Mages and Shamans?
A. Yes. In addition, however, a flexible tradition design system has been included, allowing players to model existing traditions easily, or even to create their own along with their GM. Both Hermetic and Shamanic traditions have been created for the main book and are included as the default choices.
Q. What are you trying to do with Magic?
A. In setting out to design this, we had a few things in mind that we wanted to do as improvements over the old system. First, we wanted to make sure we were laying the groundwork for something we could expand upon later. One of the big problems with the Magic system up until now is that it simply didn’t accomodate additions. It was built to be what it was, and if anything got added, it had to be an entirely new method of doing things. Nothing was ever built upon the existing mechanics, in large part because the original existing mechanics weren’t built to accomodate other uses. The result was a system that accumulated rules detritus like a ship gathers barnacles. That’s not good design.
A second problem was that, despite three editions of the game, Magic was largely still a legacy system (to borrow a bit of computer terminology). Instead of using things that worked and discarding things that didn’t, we largely had just kept it all and tried using tweaks and bailing wire to hold it all together. With SR4, we had the luxury of taking it apart, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and reassembling it into a working whole, with new parts to replace the missing ones or damaged ones. We also didn’t want the mechanics of the core game to work in a substantially different manner than Magic did, so we tried to find new ways to handle rules issues that before had given rise to special cases, created just for Magic. This is true of design all throughout the game, though, not just for the Magic system.
The third goal we had for design with this part of the game was to eliminate unnecessary complexity. We didn’t want to do away with the aspects of magic that gave the game its feel, like traditions, spirit summoning, drain, and so forth, but we did want to make sure we didn’t have a dozen different systems trying to accomplish what one could do. I think we went a long way toward accomplishing that.
