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Why low/funky mana areas aren't (always) unfair
Ed Note: This post is based on previously posted material (by yours truely) which I have edited and expanded upon. If you get deja vu, that's why.
A cruel, bored or irritated GM can abuse their editorial powers to heap misery upon suffering on their players, up to and including terminating the game via horrible in-game events: Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. This kind of adversarial play style is pretty unpopular these days, but sometimes I wonder if we've over-corrected for sins past. Making things more difficult for your players is not the same as using the magnifying glass of your GMly powers on their ant-like paper men.
This concern comes up quickest in GURPS when Low Mana zones, or other weird magic areas, are discussed - "-5 to all your spells" is a pretty purified "Here, lets make all the wizards lives difficult today" mechanic, and it only gets worse if you have something like Twisted Mana, where even succeeding can be worrying.
But mana zones aren't inherently adversarial GMing, any more than having deep water, dangerous acid, lava, or fire lying around the dungeon is inherently adversarial. Acid lying openly in a pool, sending up acrid fumes and seething ominously is a rather different thing than water that magically turns into acid after you drink it (no resistance roll) - one is a hazard, the other is mean.
Hazards are just as valid in an RPG as they are on a golf course - standard golf-course hazards are maximal "fairness" (pun not intended) as you have full information about each one before having to deal with it. Dungeons contain a lot of hazards like this, although they sometimes border on "set dressing" because nobody's foolish enough to take a bath in the lava without a lot of heat/fire DR.
"Mini-putt" is "less fair" in that the hazards become nonstandard, dynamic, and/or complex, making them harder to get all the information about them, and can include hidden components (a large box with many entrances, and many exits, but only one exit leads to the end - no obvious information which entrance leads to the end). Dungeon hazards are frequently like this. They may be relatively simple but hidden (secret doors, trap triggers). They may be sitting right out in the open and obviously A Thing but you have no idea what kind of Thing (puzzle doors, where you're not even sure it's a door or what's on the other side). They're frequently very obvious and simple (making whatever you're doing more difficult - "the floor is covered in glass marbles in this room, all combat is at -2 and moving more than a yard requires DX checks").
"Least Fair" is your Tomb Of Horrors level of "every hazard is hidden, complex, violates the apparent rules of the game, has an instant fail condition, and ideally all of the above". It's even worse if the hazards are relentless and everywhere, but all it takes is one "you should have known better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon" random death-trap to ruin a game. The drinking-water-to-acid "trap" is firmly in this category, as were most of the Tomb of Horrors traps. It's just rude when your GM decides to "save your time" by not letting you Search and not having Resistance checks or evasion checks or disarm checks.
Bad mana conditions, like a sand trap or water hazard, can be completely fair when used the same way - everyone knows about it, everyone has the equipment to deal with it, and it doesn't dominate the fairway (er, dungeon). It's added to increase the challenge by making you avoid it, or if you can't/don't avoid it, by making you wade through it. Mages have the ability to detect changes in mana levels, passively and without the use of fatigue or spells, meaning bad mana isn't even well hidden. In a larger dungeon, having a zone of weird mana over part of it (a few rooms, say) is as fair as having a room full of marbles. In a smaller dungeon you could have the whole dungeon weird, since it's relatively easy to retreat to sane mana.
Bad mana can also be used like the mini-putt hazards - anything from annoying windmills that are totally obvious, totally blocking your way, but also obviously can be dealt with, to the mysterious black box type that are obviously something and can be figured out with experimentation and observation without it eating your ball. If the Dungeon Of The Four Elements has four quadrants, each of which is Low Mana for an elemental college and a paired themed college, but high mana for the opposing elemental college and a paired theme college, that's a bit of a puzzle but it's not picking on your wizard.
Bad Mana can also be used abusively, much like the water that turns into acid after you drank it. If everything, everywhere, all the time is Low/Twisted Mana, and your players didn't sign on for that, it's mean. If the mana change is impossibly well disguised and there's no way to find out via rumour or research that this is a thing, it's still mean (finding out you have a -5 to cast after you've rolled your dice and watch a reasonable dice roll turn into a critical failure is infuriating). Mana changes that impact PCs only, but not NPCs using exactly the same spell, For No Reason, is mean.
These "worst" situations can be made into mini-putt hazards by putting a little more effort into describing them, and turning all the "No!" into "Yes but" or "No but". A campaign explicitly set in Caithness in Banestorm, where it is low mana, and your players are repeatedly warned and the wizard is explicitly walked through what this implies can be lots of fun - I ran this game once. An impossibly well disguised mana change that you can instead find out about via talking to locals or via research or finding notes in a monsters effects is one that changes how you find it, not if you can find it. Mana changes that the NPCs are evading due to a McGuffin that can be swiped, pickpocketed, or killed effectively restricts the size of the low mana area to "until you get the juju stick" rather than "to those four rooms".
We knew it was bad when we went there - it was the Dungeon Of Many Deathy Cursed Things That Are Dead And Cursed, Did We Mention The Curses And The Death? It wasn't secret, and we had choices. We had alternates to healing spells (potions), the dungeon was small so we could always retreat outside to heal (but sacrificing the initiative if we did so), and generally it was a hazard we chose to deal with. We could have always just written the place off and gone somewhere else, although I sympathize with player groups who don't understand the word "retreat"; we were pretty fuzzy on the concept ourselves.
I wasn't playing a caster, but I was playing a character dependent on lots of healer babysitting (SM +1 berserker, an easy target :P). I soaked up SO much healing despite the penalties, until my barbarian's leg got broken in the final fight and the party was left with the problem of how to move 600 lbs of nearly-dead berserker plus over 200 lbs of his equipment. Not counting treasure, which they were sort of hoping he'd do the heavy lifting on.
I had a lot of fun - because I knew we were going into the Dungeon Of Many Deathy Cursed Things. It's like going into a dungeon in an active volcano - the GM isn't picking on you because you get set on fire a few times, and if you forget to pack burn ointment, well, that's your problem, not the GMs.
A cruel, bored or irritated GM can abuse their editorial powers to heap misery upon suffering on their players, up to and including terminating the game via horrible in-game events: Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. This kind of adversarial play style is pretty unpopular these days, but sometimes I wonder if we've over-corrected for sins past. Making things more difficult for your players is not the same as using the magnifying glass of your GMly powers on their ant-like paper men.
This concern comes up quickest in GURPS when Low Mana zones, or other weird magic areas, are discussed - "-5 to all your spells" is a pretty purified "Here, lets make all the wizards lives difficult today" mechanic, and it only gets worse if you have something like Twisted Mana, where even succeeding can be worrying.
But mana zones aren't inherently adversarial GMing, any more than having deep water, dangerous acid, lava, or fire lying around the dungeon is inherently adversarial. Acid lying openly in a pool, sending up acrid fumes and seething ominously is a rather different thing than water that magically turns into acid after you drink it (no resistance roll) - one is a hazard, the other is mean.
Hazards are just as valid in an RPG as they are on a golf course - standard golf-course hazards are maximal "fairness" (pun not intended) as you have full information about each one before having to deal with it. Dungeons contain a lot of hazards like this, although they sometimes border on "set dressing" because nobody's foolish enough to take a bath in the lava without a lot of heat/fire DR.
"Mini-putt" is "less fair" in that the hazards become nonstandard, dynamic, and/or complex, making them harder to get all the information about them, and can include hidden components (a large box with many entrances, and many exits, but only one exit leads to the end - no obvious information which entrance leads to the end). Dungeon hazards are frequently like this. They may be relatively simple but hidden (secret doors, trap triggers). They may be sitting right out in the open and obviously A Thing but you have no idea what kind of Thing (puzzle doors, where you're not even sure it's a door or what's on the other side). They're frequently very obvious and simple (making whatever you're doing more difficult - "the floor is covered in glass marbles in this room, all combat is at -2 and moving more than a yard requires DX checks").
"Least Fair" is your Tomb Of Horrors level of "every hazard is hidden, complex, violates the apparent rules of the game, has an instant fail condition, and ideally all of the above". It's even worse if the hazards are relentless and everywhere, but all it takes is one "you should have known better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon" random death-trap to ruin a game. The drinking-water-to-acid "trap" is firmly in this category, as were most of the Tomb of Horrors traps. It's just rude when your GM decides to "save your time" by not letting you Search and not having Resistance checks or evasion checks or disarm checks.
Bad mana conditions, like a sand trap or water hazard, can be completely fair when used the same way - everyone knows about it, everyone has the equipment to deal with it, and it doesn't dominate the fairway (er, dungeon). It's added to increase the challenge by making you avoid it, or if you can't/don't avoid it, by making you wade through it. Mages have the ability to detect changes in mana levels, passively and without the use of fatigue or spells, meaning bad mana isn't even well hidden. In a larger dungeon, having a zone of weird mana over part of it (a few rooms, say) is as fair as having a room full of marbles. In a smaller dungeon you could have the whole dungeon weird, since it's relatively easy to retreat to sane mana.
Bad mana can also be used like the mini-putt hazards - anything from annoying windmills that are totally obvious, totally blocking your way, but also obviously can be dealt with, to the mysterious black box type that are obviously something and can be figured out with experimentation and observation without it eating your ball. If the Dungeon Of The Four Elements has four quadrants, each of which is Low Mana for an elemental college and a paired themed college, but high mana for the opposing elemental college and a paired theme college, that's a bit of a puzzle but it's not picking on your wizard.
Bad Mana can also be used abusively, much like the water that turns into acid after you drank it. If everything, everywhere, all the time is Low/Twisted Mana, and your players didn't sign on for that, it's mean. If the mana change is impossibly well disguised and there's no way to find out via rumour or research that this is a thing, it's still mean (finding out you have a -5 to cast after you've rolled your dice and watch a reasonable dice roll turn into a critical failure is infuriating). Mana changes that impact PCs only, but not NPCs using exactly the same spell, For No Reason, is mean.
These "worst" situations can be made into mini-putt hazards by putting a little more effort into describing them, and turning all the "No!" into "Yes but" or "No but". A campaign explicitly set in Caithness in Banestorm, where it is low mana, and your players are repeatedly warned and the wizard is explicitly walked through what this implies can be lots of fun - I ran this game once. An impossibly well disguised mana change that you can instead find out about via talking to locals or via research or finding notes in a monsters effects is one that changes how you find it, not if you can find it. Mana changes that the NPCs are evading due to a McGuffin that can be swiped, pickpocketed, or killed effectively restricts the size of the low mana area to "until you get the juju stick" rather than "to those four rooms".
Storytime! (Or: An example of successful use of mana hazards, whichever)
In mlangsdorf's DF game, we encountered a small dungeon with tainted, and death-aspected mana - -2 to EVERYTHING except Necromancy, an extra -5 to healing spells (total -7), +5 to Necromancy and such, and both critical successes and failures in that region did some horror-themed things. The critical successes did things that helped us, but did it in the most terrifying way possible.We knew it was bad when we went there - it was the Dungeon Of Many Deathy Cursed Things That Are Dead And Cursed, Did We Mention The Curses And The Death? It wasn't secret, and we had choices. We had alternates to healing spells (potions), the dungeon was small so we could always retreat outside to heal (but sacrificing the initiative if we did so), and generally it was a hazard we chose to deal with. We could have always just written the place off and gone somewhere else, although I sympathize with player groups who don't understand the word "retreat"; we were pretty fuzzy on the concept ourselves.
I wasn't playing a caster, but I was playing a character dependent on lots of healer babysitting (SM +1 berserker, an easy target :P). I soaked up SO much healing despite the penalties, until my barbarian's leg got broken in the final fight and the party was left with the problem of how to move 600 lbs of nearly-dead berserker plus over 200 lbs of his equipment. Not counting treasure, which they were sort of hoping he'd do the heavy lifting on.
I had a lot of fun - because I knew we were going into the Dungeon Of Many Deathy Cursed Things. It's like going into a dungeon in an active volcano - the GM isn't picking on you because you get set on fire a few times, and if you forget to pack burn ointment, well, that's your problem, not the GMs.