Whiffless magick

Removing the "nothing happens" from the equation when it comes to magick.

I freakin' love Unknown Armies. But I have some issues with the system. Don't get me wrong, it's probably the most elegant traditional system out there, but I'm used to focused indie games, and some of the trad trappings get me. So here's my version. Do note that this is just how I intend to run it. There are several ideas here and they're not take it or leave it. If you like one part, just grab that and leave that shitty part where I'm an idiot.

Basically, my ground rule is: "Nothing happens" is the most boring thing in the world. When using the regular system, this isn't much of a problem. If the result of a failure is "Nothing happens", there's simply no roll. If there IS a roll, something bad is gonna happen if you fail it. The UA style of "only roll if you're on fire" fits this well.

But the magick system is worse. If you fail a Magick roll, the spell fizzles. And that's just boring. It's an artifact of gaming. In no book or movie I've ever seen have there been fizzling spells. A wizard simply does magic. Maybe he's too tired, or not good enough to do it, but he rarely tries and fails. And when he does, it's never "Nothing happens". Thats when the shit hits the fan.

I'm also rewriting the rules to do more customization. To me it's really weird that you get to make up your own skills, but your magick isn't unique. I want unique magick. This is partly inspired by the awesome Madness Talents in Don't Rest Your Head. Here's how this goes down:

Ritual Magick
Ritual magick is the simplest. It just works, period. I you do the ritual, it has the desired effect. No roll neccessary. Of course, the ritual might not really do what it says it does, or that chick isn't really a virgin. That's when things go wrong, and shit starts hitting fans. Improvise catastrophic consequences.

Of course, this makes rituals more powerful, and therefore more rare, more closely guarded and so on. If you find a ritual that works and that does something useful, it's a big thing and you're pretty powerful. If you play this way, don't throw rituals around like snacks. But you probably don't, already.

Adepts
Each and every adept is unique in his worldview. This is true in the original book, but for some reason, the magick is still organized in schools and spells. Not so in my version. An adept's Magick is not organized in spells, and there's no roll required to do it -- thus no fizzles. You have a general description of the sort of things your magick can do, and when it's time to work some mojo, you simply state what you're trying to achieve. The GM states the cost. I should probably make an example adept now to show you what I mean:

Hank is crazy. Not Jackass-style "I'll shock my testes for laughs" crazy, but real crazy. Adept crazy. Like any adept, his magick is based on a paradox. Hank is obsessed with streets. The paradox is that even though he can find his way better than anyone else in the world, he doesn't recognize actual street names, he can't use a map, and he routinely gets lost just going to get the newspaper. Here's how it works:

Hank can basically bend geography to his will. He can head off in the opposite direction of you and still cut you off at the corner. He can find a Chinese restaurant that's actually in China, right in LA central. Hell, he can even walk in through your kitchen door and come out though the closet door of his enemy. For Hank, this is nothing strange. It's hardly even magick. This is how the geography is. If you ask him "How did you do that?", he'll look puzzled. He doesn't get that your kitchen door didn't ACTUALLY lead to that closet.

But he still needs to get charges, of course. To generate minor charges, he walks around town for a while, obsessively writing down the names of the streets, cross-referencing, drawing maps that don't make any sort of sense to anyone else. What's worse, he doesn't call the streets by the same names as everyone else. If you ask him where's 52nd Avenue, he'll draw a blank, but tell him you're looking for Chewinggum Road and he'll tell you it's right through that there window. To get significant charges, he has to go to a town or city where he hasn't been before and map the place (and save the map). To get a major charge, he has to visit a place where nobody else has been for at least a century.

The Price he pays for this is that when he's not using his powers, he'll usually get lost if he's not with someone else. Since his view of reality is twisted, if he's not bending it to fit his image, it won't correlate. Of course, he'll blame this on not having updated his maps recently. And, of course, regular maps, GPS devices and such are of no use. They're wrong.

Okay, so you'll notice there are some changes. The powers are very vague, which is intentional. When Hank's player wants to activate a power, he'll tell the GM what he wants to do, and the GM tells him what it'll cost him. Simple as that. So not getting lost when going to a place is maybe one minor charge, while finding a door out of a prison cell might be five or six significant ones. Finding an actual Chinese restaurant is maybe two or three minor ones, while taking the subway from New York to Atlantis is probably a major. You'll see that it's quite expensive compared to how it is in the core rules. I'll tell you why in a bit. But first, a cool thing to do is letting big spendings affect reality even through metaphors. So for a big mojo spend, Hank might find the way to a woman's heart, or maybe find a depressed man a new way of life. Or maybe find a way to kill that sonofabitch. Of course, you don't HAVE to allow for this sort of thing, and if you do, it ought to be pretty expensive.

Does this mean that the Magick skill is useless? Nope. Instead, the skill determines how many charges you can get when you're charging in the appropriate way:

0s: 1 minor, no significant
10s: 1 minor, 1 significant
20s: 2 minor, 1 significant
30s: 2 minor, 2 significant
40s: 3 minor, 2 significant
50s: 4 minor, 3 significant
60s: 5 minor, 3 significant
70s: 6 minor, 4 significant
80s: 8 minor, 5 significant
90s: 10 minor, 7 significant

Also, the maximum number of minor charges you can hold is equal to your skill, while the maximum number of significant charges you can hold is your skill divided by five (rounded down).

Finally, you can Push it. When you Push it, you can attempt to work your magick without enough charges. To do this, you roll your Magick stat. Each minor charge you're missing gives you a -5 shift, and each significant a -10. But if you fail, there's no fizzle. Instead, something bad happens. This depends of what you were trying to do, how many charges you wanted to skip and how bad you failed. A simple failure when you were just missing a minor charge might give you a headache for half an hour. A double zero when you're playing with five significant charges is gonna be a lot worse. This is how failures work in the books and movies. An adept with a Magick skill of 34 can only have six significant charges. If he wants to do a big thing that costs seven, he's gonna have to Push it, and make a roll at a -10 shift. And playing with forces that are too powerful for you will probably get you squished.

Okay, so that's it for adepts. Simple, yeah? I just don't like ready-made concepts and I sure as hell hate whiffing. Magick doesn't fail. You just do it. Or maybe you're working beyond your capacity, and then you might open up the gates of hell. But when magick is involved, there's always SOMETHING that's gonna happen.

Oh, and another note or two on creating your own adept magic stuff: as you can see above, I used a Price instead of a Taboo. I think this is cooler, saving the Taboos for the Avatars. The difference is that a Price is something that you simply cannot do, instead of something that you shouldn't. Also, you can play around a lot with charging. It doesn't have to be parallel to the way you work your mojo. It's your madness, and if you want to have a character that charges by getting adrenaline rushes and works her mojo by controlling the shadows, I say go for it (unless the group thinks it's lame). Or you could put them diametrically opposed. That's golden, right there. An Angel of Death, a nurse who has the power of healing, but has to feed it though harming and killing. She charges up by pulling the plug on the old ones in pain and uses the mojo to heal the sick. Her price is that she'll ever be able to give life for real. She'll never be able to have a baby. Or how about this? A politician uses his magick to give him an aura of dignity and authority. He can convince people of almost anything, for example voting for him. To charge this, however, he has to humiliate and degrade himself. He visits S/M clubs, he pays hookers to dress him up and spank him, and so on. And now he's throwing one hell of an orgy, and plans to be caught and have his image plastered all over the media, dressed up in leather and tutu, being defiled by a hundred japanese schoolgirls. That'll get him a major charge. God knows what he'll do with that.

Oh, and I never mentioned those. Major charges work pretty much as one would expect. If you get one, you can do some powerful magick. If you're good, you won't have to roll, but if you're not so good (say, below 60), you might get in trouble. BIG trouble.

Avatars
Avatars don't really need to change much. I might change some channels (like any channel that can result in nothing happening), but most of it is fine. It's cool stuff that you can do and often involves no skill rolls at all, like I want it. However, I think I might make a push here as well, for individuality and customization. But how the hell can you customize an archetype? They're ... archetypes, after all. Well, the way I see it, there isn't a bunch of set archetypes that different famous people and myths separate into with no overlap. Rather, there's tons of them, with lots of overlap. Zorro is not a single archetype. He's the Swashbuckler, the Warrior, the Masked Avenger and the Dark Stranger. You might have an avatar for each one of those archetypes, and they're combatting each other because of the big overlap. In fact, each and every avatar is channeling a unique archetype. Two people who seem to be channeling the same one are really just channeling two different ones with a big overlap. And it's the ones who overlap that have to fight to get the ascension spot. The invisible clergy won't have overlaps. If there's a slight overlap between you and an already ascended archetype, that's ok. You'll simply change a bit so the overlap disappears. But if there's a large overlap, one of you has to go. You won't be able to ascend as the Mysterious Stranger if there's already a Secret Advisor up there. There's too much overlap.

This way, each and every one can create his or her own archetype, and adjust one of the finished ones to suit the needs. At least I prefer this uniqueness.

You might notice that Hank doesn't have a blast. I mean, seriously. Magick is not like in D&D. We don't need fireballs. At least I don't. But of course you can use magick to hurt people, if it's within your school, so to speak. Hank probably can't really do it, but the chick who can control the shadows could. Possibly there ought to be a rule for it, like how much it'll cost to do hand-to-hand damage and how much it'll cost to do firearms damage. And depending on what it is you're actually doing, it might require a roll of some kind. And if it doesn't, it'll be quite expensive, since it's an automatic hit. Simon | profile | May 28, 09 | 3:18 pm

I don't really see blast as a "fireball" but more like a guideline for how a magick user can directly harm his enemies. Sure you can see it as a DnD style static effect or you can inject your own elements to give it just as much depth and descriptive flair. Xombie | profile | May 31, 09 | 1:06 pm

First: nicely drawn concepts. Second: if your biggest gripe with adept and ritual magic is that nothing happens when you fail, you shold really look up the "random magical effects" in the rules, and start using them. Mattias | profile | Jun 02, 09 | 2:02 am

The only "problem" I see with this is the fact that it doesn't compute well with the concepts for adept schools in the rules. More specifically, that not all adept schools have the same amount of ease in gaining charges, and the amount of charges for their spells or respectively the power of their magick is analogue and also unequal, (when comparing different schools). While you circumvent this issue by generalizing the stats and make it a "GM makes the judgment call on a case-by-case basis"-thing, I see a problem with this modification if one guy has mega-powerful adept magick that bends reality and another guy can do nothing but telekinetically bend spoons with his magick. Sure, it's up to the GM to discern the differences and have adepts cash in charges appropriately, but it sounds like a bit of a balance issue which isn't as much inherent in the original system. And as Mattias said, random magical effects will go a long way if you want the magick rolls to yield... something, even when they fail. Another thing to consider is that adepts have to tie their Magick skill to their Obsession, which allows them to flip-flop it... which really narrows down the whiff factor. A character with 50% in the skill essentially has around 75% due to flip-flopping. Instead of whiffing, you could turn failed rolls into extending rolls. It doesn't work now, but it might work on the next roll. Two failures in a row may mean that the third try automatically succeeds, meaning that failed rolls merely mean delay (and only the match failures and fumbles yield extreme weirdness). Wratts | profile | Jun 02, 09 | 11:03 am

Awesomeness! I already do a lot of handwaving with my UA games (rituals just work) but I'm going to use a lot of your suggestions. I was thinking about something almost like your charging-scheme. Insect King | profile | Jun 30, 09 | 3:10 am

I partially agree with this article. But I like the idea of spending a charge to get an effect. It works with the internal logic of the game. So, in order to get a ritual to work, you must Spend the Charge. In order to get a spell to work you must Spend the Charge. But I prefer not to make my players roll for the effect after they Spend the Charge. Spend the Charge and it just works. Then we assign "fun" consequences for screwing with reality. Harbone | profile | Sep 07, 11 | 1:22 pm