Systems have rules. Systems are rules. Rules are systems.

OK, enough of the dullest of tautologies. I swear I’m getting somewhere. Eventually.

The Necessity of No

Earth’s reality has several concrete rules: Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Time flows in one direction. Mass warps spacetime. They may seem arbitrary, but without them, reality breaks down. Suddenly events can have multiple outcomes and all hell breaks loose: the individuals in the universe cannot exist within it, a fate far worse than being one’s own grandpa.

Once the laws of the physical universe are established, much as we may bristle against them, individual characters have rules laid on top of this scaffolding. The great-and-powerful Genie who helps Aladdin establishes three such guidelines: he will not bring the dead back to life, he will not change the course of true love, and he will not grant more than the three allotted wishes. These rules may be consequences of the physical reality (i.e. I cannot bench-press a thousand pounds) or a statement of personal creed (e.g. I choose not to eat beef), but nevertheless, within a story, they provide a similar end result. Without the rules, what transpires has no context, meaning, or significance.

Escaping the Algorithm

I was not introduced to the world of magic and improbability in any organized fashion. I suppose, like many, I had no words for these feats of fantasy. Martin spoke to Matthias through the threads of the tapestry because the story required it. Merlin could transform into a squirrel because that was how the boy destined to be king would best learn his lessons. I didn’t think much of it and didn’t question what these characters could do because I saw how it wove a path toward what needed to happen.

Enter D&D. All at once, these feats had names, parameters, descriptions, components. Mages were casting Polymorph Self, Fireball, Sleep. Across the table we now had titles and references and words began to shape our understanding as we bickered over interpretation. Even more opaque was an attempt to quantify this world. If you don’t have initiative, you cannot act. Roll 3d6 and hope you get above 14 to kill the lich. But the very facts and figures that facilitated the social activity reduced the mystery and majesty of magic into a couple matrices and some applications of randomly generated numbers. Sometimes a spell felt akin to a chain of if-then statements, and I felt tethered to a legalism from which I yearned to escape.

States that Matter

Mage: the Ascension, the World of Darkness splat that concerns itself with all things relating to magic and those capable of wielding it, takes an entirely different approach to the realm of the unknowable outcome. Without spell lists, slots, or points, the common theme of Mage is, “reality is what you make it”. A worker of feats did not need a framework in which to work or a spell description to which to adhere, and the possibilities were endless, if held together by a tenuous belief in the Consensus.

And yet, I resisted feeling as if I had finally come home. A mage was still limited by their dots, tabulated one through five, and manifesting abilities required grasping the divide between spheres, some of which eluded my intuition. Forces, fine, Life, okay, but what is Prime?

I realized I was looking to a game system to guide me in creating something that wasn’t a game. It was a world, a story, an adventure. But I still needed rules. A system without rules is chaos by another name.

Dissolving the Dissonance

Traditionally magic is treated with a roughly Aristotelian understanding of the natural world. Heat and cold are opposing qualities, and a mage with mastery over the elements may apply them like paint upon a canvas. The mage may disturb an object otherwise lingering in patient inertia at the flick of a finger, but he still works within a science increasingly becoming obsolete.

Other types of magic had even less of a pretense of adhering to physical laws. Suggestions, illusions, divinations, these were born from the simplest desires of humanity, the basest desire for the power to remake the world into something that grants the wishes of our imagination. But trying to explain these lapses in reality as rerouted neural impulses was something few dared attempt, much less felt necessary.

But what if magic were something that kept the inexplicable mystery, but could stand tall above a modern mathematical framework? The probability functions of quantum mechanics provide the necessary backdrop for magic’s infinite range, while reinforcing the mundane reality of our day to day lives. Anything is possible, but you might have to wait a while.

Upgrading the Infrastructure

Living in a world in which a Newtonian approximation is sufficient for the vast majority of common problems, modern physics embodies a very special sort of wizardry. We found in the twentieth century that electrons never sat in any one spot, and light, too, embodied puzzling behavior, being two things while at once being neither of them entirely. And, violating the peace of an impartial universe, some other things were said to behave differently according to whether they were being observed. What did it mean, to be ‘observed’?

As our science expanded, so too did the mathematics that attempted to explain it. All possible outcomes existed as timelines radiating from a single vertex we called the present, the past and future mere constructions of our psychology. We simply couldn’t see the possibilities that didn’t intersect with our own. But that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

The magic system I wanted to develop stood right in front of me, and it very well would occupy the rest of my days to distill it into chunks comprehensible to my tiny human mind.

Fudging the Rolls

Magic at its very core concerns the fantastical ability of a human to move something from imagination into reality. In a very real sense, the things we see before us are simply a subset of the larger corpus of all things ever dreamt by Man. Where one may wish quietly upon a star for love’s true companionship, another may equally create a blight intended to exact devastating revenge, in both cases giving shape to the shadows of their imagination.

But what if someone’s gift manifested quite a different capability? Instead of changing the shape of a single possibility, their ability could pull at a thread, however faint and remote, collapsing the ones that fell between? Instead of bending the rules of reality, they would reduce the infinite paths into a single dark line, rendering certainty from uncertainty. Instead of a gardener sowing seeds, he would find himself a culling blade, destined to lop the heads of some daisies in order to favor the ones that remained.

Maybe chance is simply an illusion in a game in which I refuse to accept any roll but the one I need.

It takes wisdom, courage, and a lot of luck to realize that may look nothing like a natural 20.