Does Magic Matter?

In fantasy games, particularly fantasy RPG's, the level and frequency of magic do a lot to define the world.  When you say how common magic is, you say a lot about the world.  One of the real issues isn't how common magic is, it's how common simple magical effects are, and the reality is that, while it matters a lot, so long as the effort to make magic makes sense compared to its frequency, it doesn't really matter at all.Imagine a game of the most popular FRPG in the world.  Everyone agrees that first or second level characters shouldn't get wands of fireballs. The magical effect makes that character vastly more powerful than they should be.  But, what about a +1 sword?  Where does hitting five percent more often and inflicting ten to twenty percent more base damage* when you do fall into that calculation? One of the problems with most games is that the players want low level magic weapons at relatively low levels, but the system doesn't support that working.  If only a high level wizard can create a magic sword, and doing so costs permanent experience points, and the power level of the sword you can create isn't enough to be worthwhile to the fighter you're travelling with,why would anyone bother making magic swords.

The solution has to be more interesting than that.  The problem with interesting solutions is that they don't scale well.  What if relatively low level magicians could make epic items, but it required epic materials?  If the Mighty Dragonslaying sword can be crafted by a relatively powerful hedge-mage, but it requires one of Tiamat's scales, you're either going to have to bargain with the mother of all dragons to build a weapon that kills her children, you're going to have to kill her and take her scales, or you're going to have to steal or find a scale that she lost naturally. While none of those are great options, the goal is to build an epic sword.  Someone might undertake the quest to bring back two scales if I give him a sword afterwards.

Let's say we want to make a weapon of vast power, that can kill any monster.  It needs to be made of something, it needs to be forged in something that burns, it needs to be hammered with something, and it needs to be cooled in something.  That's four necessities.  There are four elements, so I'm going to make it require four things that feel elemental.  The air component pops into my head first, and it solve the question of whether earth should be the weapon or the hammer/anvil.  The blade will have to be forged on Mjolnir.  Since only Thor can wield Mjolnir, it will probably be an anvil, but if you can talk him into doing the hammering at your instruction, it will work.  So you're going to have to bargain with the diety of thunder to make this.  The material you forge should be something earthy, so, let's say the stone heart of the king of the Mountain Giants**.  I need something to fire it in and something to cool it in.  For the fire I'm going to cheat.  The a fire started with the breath of a dragon will do it.  There are spells that simulate dragon breath, that might do it at high enough level, but otherwise you can bargain with a dragon, come up with a cool magical way to steal one's firey breath once, or find a village burning after a dragon attack and save some timber before it's all lost.  The water is the hard part for me.  I feel like a troll should be involved, so I'll say the blood of a troll, but I'd almost prefer the tears of something really interesting.  I just don't know what that thing would even be.

This system is cool.  It's full of character, it lets the characters make stuff that is useful to them, but the downside is that you can't actually write a system that works for how to build these sorts of items, and the balance can be disrupted if it is too easy to make something or too hard to make something.

It also doesn't help determine at what level +5 is appropriate as opposed to +4.  It also doesn't help determine how to balance a sword that makes one a better swordsman.  Part of the issue here is that how important those are is up to the guy running the game because it defines the world.  If it's easier to create powerful swords than it is to learn swordplay, most swordsmen won't be skilled, they'll be wealthy.  Being the best swordsman often falls to who got a better blade.  That's not necessarily interesting, but it means many swordsmen will be fops, men of leisure who were purchased careers (swords) when they didn't inherit land.  There will be master swordsmen, and those masters will likely be scary, because they'll have the capacity to beat someone with a powerful sword and take it, making them a powerful swordsman.

On the other hand, what if being a great swordsman meant you possessed finesse and deftness whereas powerful swords just made you hit harder and more often?  At that point, contests of swordplay probably aren't fights or sparring.  They're contests.  It doesn't matter if you can kill the lesser sell-swords.  It matters if you can stab the butterfly on the princess's cheek without marring her beautiful countenance.  I like ideas like this, but they're damned hard to model.

I'm asking these questions right now because I think they're interesting questions, and I'm working on something that falls into the weird story-based magical creation.  The trick is that what you're writing in a situation like this isn't a set of rules, it's a set of guidelines about what sort of adventures future GM's will give future players.  And that gets difficult.

*twenty percent more damage calculation determined by calculating average damage for a longsword as 4.5 rounding up to five, then presuming a damage bonus of between zero and 4, This would make base damage between five and nine.

**I like the idea that mythic important monsters have unnatural biology.  You can disagree, I also don't know what a Mountain Giant is, but most games have some sort of creature named something similar.