Towards a Simple Magicka Game

I've written a fair bit about converting videogames to tabletop experiences. It's kinda my thing, even if lots of it doesn't amount to much. I consciously moved my play habits from videogames to tabletop not all that long ago, and just in the last week I've gone back to my Steam library, largely looking for some inspiration. 

So lo and behold when I remembered the first PC game I ever played: Magicka. 

Staff and sword and robe these wizards have, but Gandalf they are not 

A glorious, creative, buggy mess which I absolutely adored. It got me into PC games, which got me into CRPGs, which eventually brought me all the way here. Now, the time has come to close the circle.

Magicka is a loving parody of fantasy games, both of the video and tabletop variety. It references D&D and Diablo in its opening narration. Of course, I didn't understand the references then. My sense of humor was still on the level of laughing at the silly accents. Coming back to it all these years later, the fingerprints of tabletop games are all over it. 

And it occurs to me that it might make for a quite entertaining and over-the-top combat engine. Let's take a walk. 

The Basics

In Magicka, you are a wizard. That means you are a staff-and-sword wielding, cheese-and-sausage eating, destructive murderhobo psychopath. So we're already on good footing. Spellcasting is your bread and butter, and it could not be farther from a Vancian system if you tried.

Spells are cast by summoning elements and stringing them together. There are eight elements, plus three combination elements:

Core Elements
Water

Life

Shield

Frost

Lightning

Death (also called Arcane)

Rock

Fire

Combination Elements

Steam, Fire+Water

Ice, Water+Frost

Poison, Water+Death

Each element also has an opposite number. Opposites cancel each other, so you cannot cast a spell which contains both fire and frost, for example. Some elements have multiple opposites:

Water/Lightning

Life/Death

Frost/Fire

Rock/Lightning

Ice/Fire

Steam/Ice

Poison/Life

Finally, Shield is its own opposite, as you cannot cast a spell with more than one shield element.

You can cast a spell which holds up to 5 elements at a time. You can combine them as you wish, so long as you don't have opposites. That's really the only limitation you have. More elements means more power, and the more of each type, the stronger the characteristics of that element are in the spell. For example, you can stack together 5 Life elements for a powerful healing beam. If you're fighting zombies, which are harmed by Life, you can drop one of the life elements for Rock, so you can charge an explosive Life projectile. 

Puzzles and the Landscape

Beyond combat, spells have a wide variety of uses for puzzles and altering the landscape. Lightning charges ancient machines, frost freezes water and makes it passable, destructive effects can knock down walls and barriers, shields create new ones, and can also redirect magic beams. These possibilities should be greatly expanded in a tabletop setting. 

Good old problem solving

Many Kinds of Spells

There are a ton of different ways to cast spells, and a ton of different forms they can take. Just casting normally, there are gouts of flame or steam, boulders, fast-firing ice shards, beams of life or death, and crackling lightning. You can also cast them in an area centered around yourself, like a nova of frost, or a rippling earthquake. 

You can cast them on your own person. This usually means summoning a personal shield or healing yourself, but it also means getting water on yourself when on fire, getting fire on yourself when wet, or accidentally casting Death on yourself and taking damage. 

Finally, you can cast a spell on your weapon, which transforms its weak melee attack into a magical effect. This can be simple, with Death for more damage, but you can also use it to add status effects, like burning or wetness. You can also combine it with shield and other elements to create straight barriers away from you.

Shielding deserves a special mention, as you can cast them alone or with other elements, creating barriers or domes, or personal armor or wards which reduce damage from some sources, usually at the cost of reduced movement or particular weaknesses. 

Magicks

In addition to regular spells, you can cast Magicks, which must be learned from ancient texts. These have special effects, acting more like, and in some cases transparently being lifted from D&D. Haste to move around faster, Thunderbolt to deal a shit ton of damage to a wet enemy, Random Teleport to get out of the frying pan (and possibly into the fire) and, of course, Revive.

Notably, Revive is a very simple and easy Magick, which all wizards should know and be able to cast quickly. This is intentional. Death takes you out of play only temporarily, unless there's a TPK. 

This should be one of the primary avenues of character progression, which distinguishes characters at the start of a campaign from the end. You've always been able to throw storms of steaming lightning around, but more exotic effects require some adventuring, finding lost scrolls or proving yourself to teachers, to learn.

Gear

Besides Magicks, another mode of advancement should be equipment. The games have a variety of staves, weapons and other gear items which provide various bonuses and penalties, and which in some cases have powerful effects orthogonal to normal play, such as instantly killing a particular boss. 

In a tabletop version, it is conceivable that gear should be the main way characters are differentiated from one another. 

And the possibilities for magical duels!

The Fun of Magicka

The fun of the videogame largely comes from the tactile experience of pressing buttons to cast spells, string them together, and deploy them in the heat of the moment. Moving around while trying to cast, and catching your teammates in the crossfire, is a big part of the fun. The ease of resurrection also means that blowing up your teammates is a reason to laugh, not curse each other. 

That panicked, frantic effect doesn't translate over well to tabletop RPGs, in which you can actually mull over your turn. Enforcement with timers would be tyrannical if overused, and even then would not render the desired effect. 

In the translation from videogame to tabletop game, I would say that a shift in play experience would be in order. Cooperative teamwork (with some allowance for playful inter-party murder) is the name of the game. 

Moment to moment gameplay should also be addressed. The dominant tactic should not simply be to charge up maximally powerful spells every round and throw them everywhere. The desired direction of play should still have that frantic element. We want to create situations in which a chaotic mix of spells and melee, charging and holding, defending, attacking, healing and changing the landscape, are the norm. Death rays shot from across the map are boring, and should be the exception.

The Framework of the System

This is the basic idea for how the system (which is primarily a combat system) would work.

The basic restriction on spellcasting is the 5 element limit on any particular spell. We want there to be a reason to not constantly use spells with 5 elements, which are the most powerful. My proposal is to use a sort of Action Point system. In this system, summoning an element takes 1AP. You, as a PC, have 5AP in total. If you want to cast one big spell, it's your turn. However, you can also move a space, swing a weapon, or take a more abstract action, with GM ruling. 

You can also cast multiple different spells, or many of the same, if you so wish. A player's turn may well include casting a basic shield (1AP), moving a space to be in front of an enemy (1AP), enchanting their weapon with fire and lightning (2AP), and swinging with it (1AP). Alternately, a wizard may move two spaces to a dead friend's resting place, throw up a domed shield, and cast Revive (a 2AP Magick) to get them back on their feet in a somewhat safe location. 

The goal is to create a situation in which dynamic mixes of actions combine to create varied and entertaining play. Besides the combat engine, the presence of puzzles and NPC interaction fill out the play experience to give it more variety and texture. 

All this carries its own problems. With multiple players throwing potentially landscape-altering effects willy nilly, enemies doing the same, and a large number of tactical options to choose from in any moment, this can all get really overwhelming for GM and player alike. 

It can get really chaotic

Some cuts make sense. For one, I think that eliminating many of the usual dice rolling events used by D&D-alikes makes sense. By this is refer mainly to to-hit rolls, damage rolls and saving throws. If a player goes to swing their blade at a goblin, they just do so, and the appropriate damage is dealt. of course, Enemies do the same. This can greatly speed up play. 

The same goes for spellcasting. Moreover, I'm currently imagining a very simple damage system for combat, in which 1AP = 1 element = 1 point of the appropriate damage. When deciding their actions, players can simply call out 'Three fire and one lightning on the ogre!' which everyone one knows translates to three points of fire damage and one of lightning.

The same goes for status effects and landscape changes. A frost spell freezes a body of water and allows you to walk over it every day of the week. A fire spell will melt it and cause your wizard to drown with just as much certainty (wizards can't swim, dontcha know). A poison spray will sicken, frost slows, water wets, fire burns, life heals, death hurts, etc. 

This would be simple to the point of boredom, so it gets complicated by resistances and weaknesses, both of the players and the enemies, which would be best expressed in terms of Damage Reduction, rather than percentiles or AC, as well as status effects. Burning stops a troll's automatic life regeneration, being wet doubles lightning damage (or something like that) stone armor gives you some points of DR versus physical damage, and so on. Some parts of this mechanic, especially the idea of weaknesses as negative DR, are potentially weird, and need development, but I think the fundamentals work. 

The system should be simple enough to work for enemies as well without placing a burden on the GM. Give weaker enemies lower AP totals and restrict their possible actions. Some can just move and attack, in melee or at range, others have special moves which fit into the element system, like spitting jets of water, and some very dangerous enemies can cast spells, just like player characters. Boss creatures may well have more AP than PCs.

This simplified system actually makes the action economy very transparent. I don't know how initiative/order of action may work. I'm fond of player vs enemy sides in Swords and Wizardry, but I don't think it would fit the frantic tone. 5e style rolled initiative may work better, with groupings of some enemies for an easier time. 

This focuses on the combat system, which I expect to be the most complex part, as it so often is. But I don't intend to make something which only works for combat. The creation of fun puzzles involving spellcasting mechanics would likely be more difficult than setting up a combat, but very important, as well as social interaction. Outside of combat, I expect spellcasting restrictions to loosen, and be based more on player desire and GM ruling.

The Role of Randomness

It may also seem like the whole game is an overcomplicated chess match without random elements, a tactical exercise without opportunities for real surprise. This too concerns me, which is why I would like to shift random elements onto more special, but important events. For example, hits, damage and status effects don't require rolls, but lots of major effects do. For example, shields reflect beams, which can hit other entities. Which entity? Roll it. The Thunderbolt Magick hits one random creature with huge lightning damage. Using it is a solid gamble when you're outnumbered, but a bad idea when you outnumber the enemy.

I do want random elements to come in relatively often, but most especially when it's deciding if a player character will bite it. With easy resurrection on the table, humorous use of player death is too tempting not to use. I'll have to think more on this. 

Cooperative Play

In order to further enable cooperative play, I'd like to make some changes to the rules of the videogame. In particular, armor and self-shielding spells, as well as useful Magicks, could only be cast on oneself in the original. I think that in tabletop, with the ability to coordinate actions, it makes sense to allow players to cast more beneficial effects on each other. I can imagine a big boss battle where a huge wall of fire has separated the party from the enemy, whereupon the whole party coordinates to put powerful defenses on one teammate, Teleport him through the fire, with that player's actions still ready to go once on the other side. Moments like that are what the system should enable and encourage. 

Actually Running the Damn Thing

Supposing I actually manage to make this work, how does a GM run such a game? Largely like any other, I would say, except that you have to think a little outside the box to come up with non-combat challenges and motivations for adventure. Wizards are potent, but are comically inept in some domains. Tall places, bodies of water and awkward social situations work well. As motivators, you can't go wrong with arcane power, cheese and sausages. 

The most challenging thing for the GM might well be the spellcasting system. In the original game, there's a whole tree of priorities to determine how a spell comes out. Shield plus life or arcane plus other elements create mines, but not if the spell contains earth. Lightning can't mix with water, but if you put water and fire together first, you can make a cone of steaming lightning. If you've played the game, the rules for this may well be intuitive to you, but for a less familiar GM coming to this and wanting to run it, a formal explanation would look like a very confusing flowchart. 

Still, I'm not too worried about that. This is a silly hack to allow people who already liked and knew the game to run a tabletop experience in a setting they like with mechanics they like. 

Keep watching this space, as I (hopefully) develop this further! Oh, and if you like the idea enough to want to playtest it, do let me know!