Rule Magic

Magic's a tricky thing. As much as I enjoy the concept, it is in essence a do anything device. In the hands of the protagonist, unbridled magic makes him invincible and thus boring. With the villain, such power almost requires a deus ex machina to confront. Some sort of limiter is required to make such stories interesting. There needs to be a price.

Games generally end up going with the fixed cost and spell list option. This is by far the simplest but is also the least flexible. There are exact limits to damage, range, number of target, and often lack of secondary effects (e.g. the fireball somehow hurts all targets without lighting the room on fire). This is understandable, of course. It's truly impossible to program all the nuances of, say, a pyrokineticist and still be playable. However, this often leads to segregation of how gameplay and storyline spells work. In cutscenes, the very spells which targeted only enemies are blowing through castle walls. It's all very dramatic, but leaves something to be desired when your characters find themselves blocked by a three-foot picket fence.

Consistency is key to good storytelling. Strangely, inconsistency can be a consistency of it's own. I recently watched all of Darker than Black on Funimation.com (and if you didn't realize they're putting most of their anime for free online, you should go check it out). Each Coordinator in this series is given both a power and a price which must be fulfilled after its usage. The prices very wildly, and are not guaranteed to even be proportional to the power. You could be required to smoke a cigarette or break your own fingers. The cost is always there, with one exception. The protagonist, Hei, is able to use his electricity without cost. Now, exceptions to magical rules can be effective narrative devices. The philosopher's stone of Fullmetal Alchemist is a great example of that. Here, however, it's simply frustrating. No one seems to notice or comment upon the fact that Hei gets a pass. The "why" of this is finally explained near the end of the series, and I won't spoil it here. How this came about is still mostly a mystery. The second season is currently airing in Japan, so I'm hoping they go into more detail. For now, it remains the one nagging flaw in an otherwise entertaining series.

On the subject of Fullmetal, I particularly enjoy the magic system of equivalent exchange. The energy needed to transmute seems to be in infinite supply, but the chemical makeup of the ingredients must match the finished product. Basically, alchemy is magical science. Most of the rules are already baked into the universe we know. Anything that leads to chemical tricks like extracting oxygen from the air itself then lighting it is okay in my book.

I've actually been working on my own fictional magical system for some time now as well. In a way, it's similar to equivalent exchange in that the magic is a form of energy malleable by humans. However, I'm not currently applying it to transmutation. Physical ingredients make things easier but are not essential. The true limit of this power is the danger of burnout. Channeling magic from the Source uses the casters body as a conduit. Try to take on too much at once, and you risk losing control of it. The actual effect varies on what the caster was attempting, but it is rarely good for him. I've got a lot more details in my head about this, but none of those are truly set in stone yet.