[UA] Risking it

[Tim Toner]

----- Original Message -----
From: Royal Minister of Stuff <yokeltania at yahoo.com>
To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2001 9:47 PM
Subject: Re: [UA] Risking it


> In a game, even something as notoriously arbitrary as
> an RPG run by your average
> the-players-are-stupid-because-they-can't-see-inside-my-brain
> GM, part of the appeal is the rules.  You KNOW what
> the natural law is going into it and you can make
> faster, flashier and more accute decisions based on
> your knowledge of those laws.  You can make a plot
> move along or add some adventure because you are
> certain that the same thing which happened last time
> will happen next time.  It's simple and it works, the
> two things all scientists want of natural law.

During the Great Magick Debates on rec.games.frp.misc, various people
espoused their theories on what magick is, was, and ought to be (in RPGs and
RL).  Most people wanted magic to be reproducible, but many pointed out that
magic is the core and essence of irreproducibility.  Whether magic worked or
not depended on the individual in question--some were born to the Art, and
some were not.  There were big arguments over whether the Art was genetic,
or if it could be learned.  In the end, I walked away from the debate
because there was too much clinical dissection for my tastes.  It robbed the
sense of wonder that, to me, is really the soul of magic.  As I left the
debate, I pointed out the problem I had with many skeptics who do not adhere
closely enough to Spinoza's Dictum -- just because I can't make it happen
again doesn't mean that it never happened.  In UA, I think that the first
time it happened, the Universe gave the proto-Adept a free hit, so to speak.
It tied into something the character was already fairly obsessed about, and
hinted at a greater truth.  Much later, after studying and sacrifice, the
character develops a degree of control over these forces that are difficult
to comprehend.  The control is not total.  The universe still exacts its tol
l on the Adept through the paradoxical actions that generate charges, and
even then, the magick does not flow exactly as it should.  Still, the very
fact that an adept can do something that 99% of the planet cannot is more
than enough reason to suck it up and keep trying.  Think of all the stupid
crap we do as a species to promote our individuality and supremacy over
others.  Magick is simply the pinnacle of the Stupid/Powerful pyramid.  The
most dangerous actions of magick should be the charge gathering, because it
represents our willingness to break from the herd.  And as we see in the
wild, it's the wildebeests that break from the herd that get picked off.


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