IP Idea: Magic Costs Dearly

I talk about an IP idea where magic costs the caster dearly to cast. What would a game using that mechanic be like to design and to play?

Video I reference:

[danielhart]

The Dark Sun campaign setting had something like that. Magic drained life from the world and the world was basically destroyed by the most power magic users who became the rulers of a world transformed into a wasteland. So defiler mages were hated by the people and would refuse to interact with them, if not outright attack them. The ruling defiler mages would see them as a threat and would most likely just try to have them killed. There were some preserver mages who would only sacrifice their own life force for their magic (making it much weaker than defiler magic) but the existence of preserver magic was mostly kept as a secret and far from common knowledge, so the people would just assume they were defilers and the ruling defilers who knew about it were their enemies. So there was the life force cost but also a social cost of using magic. Sadly I don't recall this aspect being implemented into the game play of the two video games in that setting.

[skalpathal]

The Dragon Age games, especially the first two, had an interesting concept for magic that touched on some of the things you mention here. Magic was extremely dangerous because it invited demonic corruption, so mages were feared and kept on a short leash. There was a whole religious military order entirely devoted to keeping mages in check and hunting down any that tried to be independent. Mages that didn't conform were killed or given what amounted to a magical lobotomy. But that only affected dialogue and cutscenes. They didn't do much of anything with it in terms of game mechanics, and that created a disconnect between what the story told you and what happened (or rather didn't) when you yourself used magic.

[Brawph]

The judicious use of the word "Interesting" made me think of the Mark Rosewater design lesson "Don't confuse Interesting with Fun" (from M:TG 20 Lessons from 20 Years) where he talked about how on Magic the Gathering they sometimes designed cool mechanics that were interesting from a design perspective, but didn't end up making a fun play experience. He cites that it's a difference of an intellectual experience versus an emotional one. It's possible a lot of these magic restrictions, while intellectually challenging... might be harder to make emotionally enjoyable! Which would maybe explain why we haven't seen this sort of thing come up as often as the "normal" magic systems?

[stevenkent]

Sounds eerily similar to the game I'm making currently... Mr. Cain I would appreciate you getting away from my computer, thank you.

[MiX]

There is something like this in fear an hunger where magic can drain your sanity and even limbs

[rpvarela]

About spells costing health, Fates of Ort does this. every single spell in that game costs health, so you can die from "over casting". In that world you pay in health and rest to recover. Greedy/evil sorcerers draw from the world itself to cast spells. They don't pay the cost, but instead a literal part of the world is destroyed. As you play the game, the landscape starts to crumble and disappear as a result. it is really cool

[pfm]

Noita does a lot of the things you talk about in the video.
In Noita you are a wizzard that can combine spells and modifiers into magic wands.
A major idea in Noita is that a lot of the spells harm the player, or have the potential to harm the player when combined with certain modifiers, or sometimes there are modifiers that negate that self harm.

It all boils down to the player (not the character) actually gaining real life knowledge of how to harness more and more powerful spells as they learn how to build wands and combine modifiers.
In late game the player comes across spell modifiers that allow to generate huge damage multipliers (I mean huge, as in billions of HP) at the cost of their own HP or at the cost of their Gold.

For example there is a spell modifier called "Blood Magic" that heavily reduces the time needed to recast a spell and dramatically reduces the spell's mana cost, but drains the player's HP. This allows players to trade off health for damage, but also allows for some ingenious uses, such as building a wand that will kill you, but then throw it at an enemy that will pick it up and proceed to self harm with it.

The game entices the player into these billion HP damage builds by introducing max health pickup orbs that when collected make the final Boss grow exponential in HP.
Thus as a player accumulates knowledge about the world, they get to feel more and more like a very powerful and knowledgeable wizzard. It's interesting that the best Noita wand makers are regarded in the game's community as "true wizzards" for how they have used the game knowledge they have acquired to use the spell and modifier magic components to achieve in game magic than even the developers hadn't anticipated or imagined.

Noita is worth studying for any designer looking to make a game about magic. Behind it's many times inscrutable mechanics lies a really unique and amazing game that could never have been made by a large studio.

[pretzelthedude]

Various points in this video had gaming memories pop up in my head. Like the power of ingredients for spells was somewhat done in the Atelier series, and needing 'reagents' for every spell was done at least in Ultima IV Quest of the Avatar. I think it's a cool concept to make magic a more critical thing to use in such ways. Also made me think of a game called "Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter" where your protagonist could turn into a dragon, but every time he did it filled a meter. if you maxed out the meter, BAM! Game over! BUT it also gave you 2 kinds of exp after every battle- regular exp that helped your characters level, and 'banked' exp so once you DID hit that game over, you started the new game with said banked exp and started off more powerful. So many interesting concepts to be had!!! 👍

[archmagusofevil]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!

I haven't tried implementing this yet, but I have been toying with this same idea ever since reading The Magister Trilogy by C.S. Friedman. In her books, magic has basically unlimited potential, but the caster fuels magic with their own life span. The stronger the spell, the more it burns off the longest they can possibly live, but even the most trivial spell will still shave a bit off your life. I found that pull something really intriguing that I wanted to explore more deeply, but that particular cost wouldn't make people playing a game care as much since "my character will die 10 years after the game ends instead of 60 years after the game ends" doesn't hit as hard as "I'm going to die in my 40s instead of my 90s".

[evlosolve]

I will figure it out so you can play that game Tim, challenge accepted! :)

[noskillgames]

This sounds a lot like what im trying to achieve in my game, using blood as a way to get stronger in exchange for health. Got the idea from your video about tying the world to gameplay mechanics, thanks for so many great design videos!

[lmttn]

Betrayal at Krondor used HP as its magic resource. If I remember right, you could even spend extra health to cast more powerful versions of your spells. It was additionally a game where pretty much all healing was done via resting, and resting was tied to the party having rations to spend resting, so you really had to pick your spots when it came to using magic.

[benl]

I really like the system in Call of Cthulhu RPG. Every character has a pool of magic points (basically mana) that slowly recovers over time. However, if you don't have enough MP to cast a spell, you can spend HP to make up the difference. More importantly, every single spell has a sanity cost (so more powerful spells might drive you temporarily insane just from casting them), and sanity isn't easy to recover.

[TonkarzOfSolSystem]

Fable 2 had a system where the character's appearance changed a lot based on various factors like good/evil alignment, character level (there were 3 types of level), and what you had them eat. A similar system could be used as player-important consequences for using certain types of magic.

[gamedev_zombie]

I once created a TTRPG setting where using magic was illegal and resulted in an execution right away, even without a proper trial. The thing was that to use magic a person had to have at least one magic tattoo on their body and one tattoo equaled one "learned" spell. A person with a tattoo could try to cast different spells than the ones supported by their tattoos, but it was more unlikely to succeed and the tattoos' shape and size was dependent on the nature of the spell (i.e. mind control spells had tattoos on the forehead). If a spell failed, something always happened - often something bad to the caster, but in theory destruction of the whole universe could be an effect of a botched spell - hence why magic was banned.

There was no closed list of spells to cast and some fun stuff happened, because the GM was free to decide on the effects of botched spells to match the intention of the spell. I.e. a character wanted to speed up time for a tower to collapse on an enemy and it failed, so the character grew very old very quickly, which completely changed the way the player roleplayed that character. Another character had a tattoo on his face and so every day had to cast an illusion spell on himself to hide it, which sometimes made him look deformed and monstrous when botched, which he once used to scare off some thugs. Really fun stuff, but also difficult to make systemic for a video game.

[TheGameStarter]

Hey, Tim. Made me laugh with "Let uncle Tim play your game", so thank you for that.

A lot of what you described seemed like it might indeed be very frustrating to play and a lot has been done either in games or other media, with varying degrees of success, so it would be hard to find the balance. I'll list my initial associations to some of your examples first and then I'll tell you which magic system I would adapt if I was making a game like this.

- Magic requires components from enemies killed in a special way - could be very frustrating (Horizon: The Forbidden West's whole crafting system works like that and it leads to a very opaque grind), but could be used smartly (The Witcher series' potions and oils give you an advantage over certain monsters and crafting them requires certain types of alcohol or animal/monster parts which are hard to find, but mastering this system is not a necessary requirement for progressing, just makes things easier for you and more "in-universe")
- Health or XP required to cast magic spells or craft things - The old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade games had a "special" attack which drained some health, but were very powerful, so they were usually used as a last resort... which I think could be retooled for an RPG easily. And speaking of RPGs, the games made by From Software usually use a singular type of currency (souls, echoes, what have you) for XP and money and they are required for crafting anything as well. While I think it's a bit punishing, people do tend to like this approach.
- Draining your soul and corrupting yourself - Todd McFarlane's Spawn has the idea of a limited "soul" supply used for magic and when the titular character ran out of it, he was to return back to hell. I don't know if any of the game adaptations ever used this, but it's cool. While the corruption bit was done pretty well in Fable - actions seen as "bad" and making certain choices caused the player character to grow horns, get certain reactions out of NPCs etc. I always felt that how it worked was a bit opaque, but another good inspiration.

Now, finally... Are you aware of David Eddings' "Belgariad" fantasy series? It's never been adapted into anything for multiple reasons (the late author being opposed to the idea and it not having aged very well - it contains a lot of racial, cultural and sexist stereotypes), but in there magic works somewhat like what you described - it's called "The Will and the Word" and those versed in using it, can basically focus their "will" and use a "word" to extract energy from nature to do whatever they desire. But there are some rules - attempting to destroy anything will result in the caster being destroyed instead, since the universe doesn't appreciate its creations being undone. The more complicated the desired effect, the more energy it requires to be gathered, which takes a toll on the caster - turning small stones into coins or pieces of candy is practically free and might cause a slight sense of fatigue after a while, but casting a thunderstorm above an army of enemies essentially puts the caster into a coma for days (it did happen in one of the books). In addition, using The Will and the Word causes "noise" that only other magic users can detect - so more serious spells might alert enemies nearby if they're adept in it.

How I think that could translate in terms of game design:
- You can have different classes, one or more can be users of the magic system (a classical trio of fighter, magic user and combat mage would do)
- Splitting spells into categories since we can't just allow the player to do anything they can think of, AI is not that advanced in writing code. So I'm thinking - influence spells (for dialogue and NPC manipulation), transformation spells (turning objects and NPCs into other objects and NPCs), attack spells (including the all time classic lighting bolt, fire ball and so on) and utility spells (for lockpicking, healing self and/or allies, becoming invisible for a time etc.).
- Assign each category a "noise" value and a "cost" value. The cost is a "stamina" bar and depending on where the player is on it after casting a spell, gradually more intense status effects are applied - first is getting slower, then is getting dizzy, then halving the player's health etc. Stamina is restored when eating or resting, but of course that couldn't be done everywhere. Having your stamina depleted would make you faint and how this is handled is another topic altogether (if in enemy territory, you could be jailed, if nearby a friendly town, you could awake in a healer's house etc.)
- Have the main enemy faction of the game be attuned to the magic system, so they can "hear" the "noise" you make with spells, so when you are in their territory, you think carefully how you approach the current objective as you may become overwhelmed or exhausted if you do too much.
- Finally, the more you use the spell system, the bigger your stamina bar grows, allowing you to cast bigger and better spells before passing out. So if you want to be a pure spellcaster, you can go that route, just have to solve a lot of problems with magic.

[axettrose]

A game called Soul Sacrifice tackled this idea from a lore and flavor perspective. It was a game similar to the Monster Hunter series but all players were Sorcerers. Magic was flavored such that it was only able to be used by killing creatures and absorbing their essence and using the components of their body. It also had something called Black Rites which lore wise would permanently destroy a part of the Sorcerer such as losing an eye to cast a large spell. In game this would cause your screen to be 40% blacked out for the rest of the mission. Super cool concept!

[bezceljudzelzceljsh]

Amazing cultivation simulator, TIM...
lots of your good ideas are already there in some form or another.
Magic being costly is part of that game, and being powerful takes a lot of time and effort, and game knowledge.

[beck-nightengale]

I've always been a fan of the idea of magic having a pretty high cost with the caster as well. It's why I really get the appeal of most types of "forbidden magic" because it usually entails some degree of either dark or gray morality but could actually be quite useful.

[Michael-xpgw]

The Ultima games, including Ultima Online had you using reagents/ingredients to cast spells. You had to gather them or buy them. And they were used up as you cast. And because you had limited storage on your person, you could only carry so much.

The Witcher games have a cost to health for certain potions, but they are not significant.