The Michael Bay Effect: Magic

We met sci-fi author Charles E. Gannon at Salt Lake Comic Con 2015 and he used the term "The Michael Bay Effect" during one of the writing action panels we attended. To paraphrase:

It is like a Michael Bay movie where you have explosion, explosion, explosion, and all of a sudden, explosions are the new norm. They aren't special anymore. You now have to do something bigger to wow an audience.

It is a fun statement, and true. If all you show people are explosions, they aren't special anymore. It is a theory of keeping the special events rare and unique, so they continue to have their power and impact over an audience when they do happen.

Mr. Gannon is a cool guy, and he actually got his start writing role-playing game supplements for the old GDW and MegaTraveller. We chatted endlessly about GDW, Traveller, his books, and sci-fi - and nowadays, he writes the most awesome hard sci-fi books you can get your hands on. We left the convention with autographed copies, so we are happy sci-fi readers for the next few months.

More on his books later, I want to get a chance to read them before we share a review. They look cool, and from what I read, they will be cool.

Now, the "Michael Bay Effect" in regards to magic?

Let's think about magic in fantasy role-playing gaming for a moment. With D&D 5 and Pathfinder, you typically get a "high fantasy" experience where magic is commonplace and everywhere. To be fair to D&D 5 and also Pathfinder, they have options for creating low-magic worlds, but to me, that does not feel to be the norm. If you look at the massive lists of magic spells, magical monsters, and magic items in this world and the page count which they cover - magic feels like a large and important part of both Pathfinder and D&D 5's assumed worlds.

You can't devote two-thirds of your page count to magic spells, items, and monsters and then turn around and say "people can run low magic games" - that does not compute, nor will it be what the average player expects. You also can't give magical classes infinite "blaster" spells to use to satisfy damage-per-second concerns of mages, as it is in D&D 5 (and to a lesser extent Pathfinder). If a wizard is walking around in D&D 5 like he is in a Gauntlet videogame blasting magic at everything in sight, you have lost me with the whole "low magic" feeling thing - even if you say "oh no, magic really is rare!" If it was truly rare, it wouldn't be used like that.

As a sidebar, D&D 4 really turns the magic up to 11 for all classes, and this rule is probably more appropriate for that setting as well. With that game, everything and everybody has magic and none of it feels special.

As a strange comparison, the old-school retro-clones actually have a lower-magic feel to me. Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord go back to the rarer magic feeling more than the D&D 3 and beyond games do, in my feeling. I feel you can run a low-magic game in those better than modern games because there isn't that much magic to begin with, the spells are simpler, and the balance between non-magic classes and magic-classes feels better.

Half You, and Half the Game

So the "Michael Bay Effect" does apply evenly to both world design and the game itself, so half of this problem is how you handle magic and the other half is how important magic is to the game. If the game supports dozens of magical classes, monsters are balanced against players equipped with an assortment of magic items, monsters themselves use or are created by magic, and the spell lists are long and cover every possible situation - the game is a high-magic game.

Contrast this with a lower-magic game such as Legend or Runequest, where the game assumes you are a normal person good with weapons and armor, and magic is so rare it is not the norm. In those games, you rely on steel and sword, and magic is something rare - even in a typical adventure you are lucky if a spell or two is cast. Here, magic is rare. It feels special. It is not being used every turn for even the most minor of problems, or a quickie one-shot attack spell. If magic is used, it is used for something big and noteworthy.

What the game expects is key here. If the game expects you to kit yourself out with level appropriate magic items or you can't keep up with the bestiary, like D&D 4, you have a situation where you get a Michel Bay effect with magic. It doesn't feel special. You need it to keep up. It is everywhere and everybody uses it. Magic isn't cool, it is a part of this videogame inspired balance thing to make play exciting and who cares what happens to the feeling and lore of the world?

That Escalation Thing

Now yes, games like Pathfinder and D&D 5 work well, and you can play them while ignoring the Michael Bay Effect and have fun. Magic is supposed to be common. We have fun upgrading our magic items like an MMO and accept the power curve. So what if every class can use magic and feel like they are contributing?

Well, there is typically a problem where the game's designers failed to account for the power of non-magical classes and solutions versus magical ones, and you get the whole thing in D&D where mages turn out to be end-game gods. Spells are king. They can solve every problem any other class could. They can wish away problems and do absolutely everything. Some games re-balance non-magic classes to compensate, but with the D&D lineage games, this has never really worked well.

But, with common magic, all of a sudden you need magics better than magic to create a sense of power and wonder among players. This isn't just ordinary magic, it is ancient creation magic, or metamagic, or somehow godly super magic! It is more magic than magic. You see the same thing in campaigns infested by common and interloping gods, all of a sudden, you need beings more powerful than the gods, like ancient gods, god-gods, or somehow nether-realm beings even more powerful than the supreme rulers of the universe.

You get escalation because what was supposed to be special is commonplace, and you need something to attract the audience's attention once again. And sooner or later...

"How can we top that?"

Is There an Answer?

It is up to you if you want one, of course. You may be happy with how things are, but you need to realize that the way a game is designed sets expectations for every player coming into it. The game's design may limit how far you limit magic because the game is designed around a particular set of assumptions and levels of magic present in a party. Players may come into the game with their favorite "build" based on high-magic assumptions, and saying "low magic" will disappoint them and unfairly limit something which they believe should be allowed since "everyone else plays that way."

I like games that start at a lower-magic base and let you scale up to high-magic, rather than a game that starts at high-magic and suggests you can play with low magic. With magic, it is hard to put the horse back in the barn and pull it back. The game has to be designed with a lower-magic base in mind, and balanced for a party of heroic normal non-magic classes. Then we add magic, and then we balance from there as powers ramp up and become more commonplace. The referee's guidelines then suggest how you balance for a higher-magic game, and the system supports everything equally well.

To be honest, the current and most popular games out there feel like high-magic designs with roots in the world of MMOs and character builds with an emphasis on magic and magic items as a part of the design process. For us and the groups we play with, we like magic (and those who use it) feeling powerful and special. As a referee, I don't want to have to justify more powerful magics just to get people to pay attention to the new threat. It gets tiring after a while, and in a high-magic world with commonplace casters, there is always someone else around to solve the extra-magical problem you face.

Personally...

I like low magic. I like magic feeling rare and special. I like players who use magic to have that sense of awe and wonder, and also that sense of secret and unlocked power.

I dislike the MMO arms race. I dislike magical powers feeling like blaster powers out of videogames. I dislike games that take away options by printing 1001 spells and magic items and setting player expectations that all of that stuff will be present and used in character builds. I dislike games that do not provide great and balanced options for non-magic characters.

As a referee, I like presenting normal challenges to players, and non-magical solutions work and are good options. I like not having to constantly escalate to get people's attention. I like normal enemies to be seen as threats, and not having to use magic to make something 'more threatening.' I like magic to be the 'wow' answer to a normal problem, not the expected answer.

I am in a mood right now where I am rolling back on magic in my games, and looking for games that provide better options to non-magic characters. This is not because I dislike magic, but because I love magic and I want magic to be special again. Honestly, the current big-name fantasy games are not doing it for me, and I am looking for alternatives.

It sometimes feels like a superhero game could do D&D and Pathfinder better, because that is where all of this is going anyways. Why mess around with the old-school d20 veneer of rules and systems when my archer could use the same rules a Hawkeye character is using, or my tank something more suited for Iron Man? There comes a point in fantasy gaming where you really what you are doing is playing a superhero game and the built-for-dungeons d20 system holds you back - with escalation in play. Without escalation, we are back to the good old realistic dungeon crawl, and d20 works well.

But yes, the Michael Bay Effect is real, and it is something you should think about when creating worlds, playing games, and most importantly, choosing the game you want to play. Game design matters, and how the designers expect magic to be used is something you should consider when playing in order to align your expectations with what the game delivers.