Post by mikkelus on Jan 31, 2020 20:59:50 GMT -6
Focus: What Focus is and How Focus Works
What does the mage believe? = Paradigm
How does the mage turn belief into action? = Practice
What does the mage use in that practice? = Instruments
Paradigm + Practice + Instruments = Focus
In game terms, what your character believes (paradigm) influences what said character does (practice); what the character does dictates the tools and skills employed in the doing (instruments); what the character uses facilitates the desired results (your character's magickal effect). Thus, magick is focused by beliefs, the practice which flows from those beliefs, and the tools employed by that practice in order to make things happen.
Focus follows function. A mage who loves to dance, and whose beliefs involve moving through life gracefully, will cast many of his Effects through dance and movements; a mechanically inclined technomancer builds inventions, employs workshops and specialized tools, and employs designs that have been honed by theory, trial, error, and success. A ceremonial magus employs the rituals he has learned, passed down through generations of research, practice, and protocol. A crazy-wisdom contrary, on the other hand, takes whatever expectations people might have had and turns those expectations profanely upside-down. When deciding which instruments seem most fitting to use with magickal Effects, use tools that best bridge the character’s background with the spells he casts.
Because magick (under any name) tends to have a certain logic behind it, an instrument should have some logical tie to the spell in question. A cyborg uses energy-weapons when firing off blasts of focused Forces /Prime Effects; a witch employs herbs, chants, and tools that symbolize the thing she’s trying to accomplish; a High Ritualist checks his books, memorizes ritual phrases, and conducts everything by exact specifications, while a chaos mage infuses poetically appropriate tools with his immediate intentions. In short, let the instrument fit the spell and the mage who casts it.
And that’s where roleplaying comes in…
Basic Mechanics of Magick
What does the character want to do? = Intended Outcome
How does the character go about making it happen? = Practice and Instruments
Why does the character think it will work? = Belief (Paradigm and Past Experience)
Those Traditions which emphasize training for their members employ rotes as part of training. What is a rote? Simply, mechanical or habitual repetition of something to be learned. Which is to say that the student is given a task to perform, may be given varying degrees of guidance concerning methods that have proven effective in accomplishing that task, and perhaps even be coached through all the steps required until the task is successfully performed the first time under supervision. And then, the student practices, over and over (some might say ad nauseum), until performing all the steps to accomplish that task becomes automatic, almost second nature. With time and better/fuller understanding/insight, the former student may find different ways to accomplish the task, generalize the method to other similar endeavors, find ways to streamline the process by combining steps, or even find that they no longer need certain tools: a beginning student might need a tuning fork and a visual display to tune their stringed instrument, but an accomplished musician can perfectly tune the strings on their instrument, or even similar instruments, by ear.
Sensory magicks tend to be learned by rote. Accuracy-enhancing or damage enhancing combat magicks may be learned by rote. Trauma-treatment magicks, too, whether practiced under austere battlefield conditions or in the best equipped emergency rooms, tend to be learned by rote. Most routine tasks, magickal or mundane, may be learned by rote. The source books provides a guideline of what can be done by rote at the appropriate skill level, without getting into the specifics of how the character goes about doing it: "Stop Bleeding - Life 3 healing rote" is a mechanic that describes a relative skill level required for the desired outcome, not how the character goes about it, and "Forces 3 lightning bolt" more accurately describes an intended outcome to be produced, not the means used, specific to the character, to produce it; different traditions, and different factions within each tradition, may do similar things... differently.
The means itself varies according to the specifics of the character. Going beyond mere 'flavor of the game', HOW is as important as WHAT in determining the difficulty involved.
While it's perfectly valid and acceptable for a character (or player of said character) to explain "By my Will it is done - I say, it happens - it's Magick!", expect said character to often find themselves at odds with the consensus of belief prevalent in the so-called 'real world' of western civilization. Expect said character to experience many repercussions on many levels as a result of this approach. In short, if that's the only sort of explanation offered, we're talking about a character doing something that's clearly vulgar magick -- done in the real world, with or without witnesses, the character can expect Reality to push back in the form of Paradox, even if they do manage to make it happen, and to create ripples (or waves) that will be noticed.
Rather than fighting against Reality, it is easier for a character to use cause and effect to their advantage. Coincidental magick makes use of practices and instruments commonly accepted by the target group: that is, according to the local belief system, it's generally accepted as that certain things, done in certain ways, tend to produce known and expected results. Yes, magickal senses reveal that the character who observes happenings in a distant location by using an app to remotely activate a cell-phone camera, the character who uses music to sway emotion or media to influence opinion, the character who painstakingly 'doctors' a weapon to change the amount and type of damage it causes, the character who uses their knowledge of biochemistry to create new drugs that alter perceptions or enhance performance, and the character who uses massage and acupuncture to treat a variety of ailments do, in fact, make subtle use of magick to produce the intended results. However, only the ability to sense magickal influence is likely to reveal the true nature of the cause behind the effect; sleepers see it as nothing more than cause and effect.