School of Magic

As I mentioned at the end of last year, I decided to look into whether designing the School of Magic game I’ve been wanting to make for decades would speed up the process of getting the mechanics into playtest. The only way to do that, really, is to try writing, and see whether progress is significantly faster, so I tried it out this morning.

The answer would appear to be yes.

The broader structure of how individual situations would fit together, and what the personae could achieve, was much easier to do in this setting. I guess twenty years of working on Ars Magica has made it rather easier for me to think about this sort of thing. (And yes, the broader structure in question does show the influence of Ars Magica. That’s not really something I could hope to avoid, even if I wanted to. It also has a very specific bit of influence from GURPS.)

I have a lot of background ideas, all of which can easily be made to work as story drivers given the system. Even exams fit in really easily as a major point of tension.

There is one important thing that I still need to test: how easy is it to design a specific situation? “Situation” is a specific term in the game system, referring to the units that serve the same purpose as “encounters” in other game systems. It has a different name because the personae are not typically encountering anything in a situation, so “encounter” is a bad name for it. A situation is quite elaborate, just like encounters in most other games, and has a number of elements that need to be designed. Players would normally take these from published material, in much the same way as they take Pathfinder monsters from the Bestiary, so the game needs to have a lot of them before playtest. This bit actually went quite smoothly in Kannagara, at least for some of the areas, so if this doesn’t go more smoothly in the School of Magic game (which will need a name, if I continue), there’s a good chance that I will go back to Kannagara. I’d really like to try this out this week, and my schedule suggests that I should be able to.

In practical terms, my thinking is this. If this week’s tests suggest that I will be able to finish a playtest scenario for the School of Magic by the end of March, I will do so. If they suggest that it is going to take longer than that, I will go back to Kannagara. I’d like to finish the playtest scenario earlier than that, if possible, but that’s the deadline I have in mind. I plan to continue working on Kannagara directly when the School of Magic is in playtest, and then fold the responses back in. However, if School of Magic continues to move more quickly, I will probably look at taking it to publication before I do the same for Kannagara.

My hope is that this change of tack will, in the long term, actually speed up the appearance of a playable form of Kannagara, as well as of the School of Magic game, but creative work is never that predictable. We’ll have to wait and see.


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