RE: Re: Common Magic, Subcults

From: Light Castle <light_castle_at_...>
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:15:35 -0500


Wow. Lose the ability to pay attention to this group for a while and there's a thousand messages all of a sudden.

On 8 Feb 2005 at 11:50, Mike Holmes wrote:

>
> I really don't see why this is so hard. I mean, it's not like I've done some
> extensive study into this, but the answers all seem kinda obvious to me.

[wondergful description snipped]

Well, it does for some of the concentration issues, but it really doesn't help me with the whole common magic/concentration/misapplied worship stuff. I think part of the confusion is that the game uses "Concentration" to mean locking yourself into a single entity for those cosmic common magic religions, even though it is obviously not the same thing as concentrating on a single otherworld. So for something like Donadar, concentration DOES seem to mean devotion. So logically, why not just make it devotion across the board and remove some of the confusion? (At least, I think that is some people's position.)

I mean, I understand that Greg has said that the whole 3 worlds thing is important to the hero wars, and deciding what side you are on (or reconciling them) is part of all that.

Great. Sounds really interesting.

But while that makes the whole "concentrating" on an otherworld important and meaningful, the problem we get is that we have example after example of concentration being something other than that. The common magic religions you can concentrate on. The whole self-rock thing, where you can get all common magic active, even though common magic is elsewhere implied to be of the otherworlds in some way since you can use the right common magic actively by concentrating in an otherworld.

Personally, it won't be a big deal in my game, since only one character has made their magic an important point, and they are a high sorcerer from a weird unknown island and so has concentrated wizardry without any of this coming up.

But I've decided that in my game, magic costs the concentrated rate, and concentration is a question of aligning yourself with an otherworld, which to me seems the original intent. Thus you get things like the reduced cost on improvisations and such, but no cost bonus. This also removes some of the misapplied worship imbalance which bugged me a bit.

And common magic is magic made of the mixing of worlds. IT may mostly resemble a charm, spell, or feat, but it isn't "pure". So when you concentrate to an otherworld, you don't keep those magics labeled common magic, no matter what they were. You are now less of the mortal world, more pure and can't use magics mixed too much in the mortal world. If you concentrate on common magic, it's like self-rock. (Since as far as I can tell there isn't a specialized Talent religion anyway, I don't see why anyone would concentrate on innate magic without uzing self rock and getting everything else as well.)

I think the big problem in some ways is that the term concentration (Which I still don't think Gloranthans would use, because it just seems game mechanics-y to me) has been spread aroud to mean "a way of using things actively and paying half cost" instead of having anything to do with the otherworlds and religious choice.

Hopefully this will be cleared up somewhat in ILH2, where we have been promised some kind of explanation of concentration and what it really represents.

LC

(sorry to add to what appears to be an endless thread when I haven't had a chance to go back and re-read all that has been said before.)

me)

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