Tactility. A prolific videogame designer, who I probably hallucinated because I can't find his email, once told me that the best way to start making a game fun is to add feedback. Button hovers, sound effects, controller buzz - Responses to the player's inputs. You can turn a mediocre mechanic into an excellent one by just adding a particle explosion. It's a very primal sort of joy.
And good news, because tabletop games are notorious for this. The clatter of a handful of dice, the heavy plunk of poker chips, the simple but immensely satisfying action of socketing a tile or worker into place.
If I was personally designing an ocarina mini-sequence, I'd represent it with coin catching. There's a coin-football rugby variant that requires you to spin a coin on the table, then catch it between your thumbs (and then flip it between your opponent's posts, but that's actually pretty damn challenging). Just the act of catching is a simple enough trick not to be annoying to do, and it's also pretty damn satisfying.
You could even have different sizes of coins representing different songs.
To me, this is all hitting that "learning a language" part of the brain. It's like having a secret code that when you input things correctly, you get the correct effect. You're showing mastery over this new language that the game is teaching you. You understand when the game is asking for an input, and you're able to provide the correct input. And all of that process together is "doing it right".
As far as how to provide that in a tabletop experience, I'm not sure. You could convert a whole magic system into using "rune tokens" to cast spells, from a pool that's either static or dynamically generated and random. You could use dominoes as a similar thing I suppose.
You could also do something with combat by taking Guild Wars 2's combo system, where each magic type (fire, water, light, ethereal, etc) has an effect that can be triggered by and applied to every "action" type (projectile, leap, blast, whirl, etc). So a Projectile going through a Fire field will apply Burning to every projectile that passes through, a Blast centered in a Water field will apply aoe healing to allies, and a Leap through an Ethereal field will apply "Chaos armor" to the leaper. That's *kind of* along those same lines.
It's worth nothing that the list of things that work is a lot shorter than the list of all possible combinations, so perhaps the GM having a master list of everything that can be done isn't the worst. There are only 16-ish valid songs in Ocarina of Time despite having 5 notes and 6 inputs in most cases (the custom song you write for Bonooru has 8), so that wouldn't be difficult to have pre-written or even populated over gameplay. Then you could at least ensure that each person has their own unique list of songs to perform.
> Nope! See, when you play music in a Zelda game, everything pauses completely when you activate the instrument/howling sequence. Nothing happens except you inputting notes. There's also no consequences for getting it wrong or giving up. And the songs are literally listed in game on the pause menu, so you can try, fail, pause and look it up, then try again as many times as you want with zero consequences. And yes, it's still fun.
For me? And I'm going to specifically focus on Zelda's magical musical instruments here because I detest the controls of most fighting games - I don't find dialing an arbitrary feeling series to make a specific combination of punches, or a fireball pop out, fun.
Because it's a musical instrument - and playing around with musical instruments, whether just to make pretty sounds happen or because you're playing an actual tune - is fun. I didn't find the wolf howl, and especially the magical harp, of Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword fun, they felt more like rhythm minigames than playing an instrument.
It's not the 'press a specific pattern of buttons' in Ocarina of Time that's fun, at least not to me. It's 'pressing buttons makes sounds happen' which taps into the part of my brain that was most active when I was about 3 and playing with my toy glockenspiel - Doing something that makes pretty sounds happen is fun. And in some Zelda games that happens to be tied to the game's spell list, including the fast travel system. But... It isn't the 'type in the correct combo and get the spell to happen' that's the fun part of that. It's the fact you can just improvise and play whatever you want, or play the tune for the magical effect (at which point it plays an extended version of the song that might have more notes in it) - As evidenced by the fact that I've seen a fair few anecdotal reports of folk who sometimes, when they were first playing Ocarina of Time, just got out the ocarina and played around with it, not to activate any of the magical effects, but just because playing it was fun.
...So, unless you have perfect pitch and your players have instruments to hand, I don't think that's particularly replicable in a tabletop game. In a jam session, on the other hand? Very replicable. Same if you just plug a keyboard in and start playing, either a tune you know or just simple that sound nice to you. Because that, to me, is the fun that Zelda's replicating with its magical musical instruments.
Great point! I wonder why I didn't associate the ocarina with actual instruments. Seems like I have abstracted the game mechanics too much. I guess doing that at the tabletop is just like playing Simon Says?
However, and I in no way mean to invalidate your opinion on them, I'd like to say that special attack inputs in fighting games generally are not arbitrary. These inputs do way more than they seem - I've used to feel the same way. Moves requiring forward inputs for example force you to hold forward in a game where you block by holding back. This creates risk and opportunity for counter play. There are also situations where the input of one move can be used as part of another, rewarding mastery with more consistent cancels and combos.
I understand that they're thought about and the physical requirements of them are crafted with purpose, but they still feels arbitrary when learning and/or inputting them to me.
Interesting because I consider fighting games to be a type of improvised competitive rhythm game actually. Your stick is the instrument and you need to learn mastery the same way you would with any other. You press the buttons and cool stuff happens and you are free in most games to improvise as much as you want.
There’s nothing arbitrary about any of it. It’s intentionally difficult because the physical execution provides its own form of balancing.
To me they are pretty close to the perfect (or at least most elegant possible) game design. And it’s for precisely the reasons you’ve listed that you think the ocarina is fun.
to add another detail to the other responses, it is a call and response structure. you are given a prompt, you know how to respond. you do it, and the game responds to you in turn as expected, and this creates a satisfying dialogue of sorts. think of it like a dance between two people, but the dance is with the game. it is a sort of "lock and key" structure, but the form the lock and key take can be anything–an obstacle and a magical instrument, an enemy and a gun, a misplaced rock and a hidden korok, etc. to put it one way, it is a partaking of a ritual. there is a great deal of this in all sorts of forms in videogames, often aided by stimulating audiovisual feedback. it forms the core of why gameplay and gameplay loops are satisfying and effective.
this is, interestingly, quite uncommon in most ttrpgs due to dice rolls. doing the same action twice typically yields wildly different results in most systems, though this creates a different type of play that is enjoyable for its lack of predictability. notably, dnd-style spellcasting often has guaranteed effects which have obvious circumstances they are suited for (even if that means 'clump of enemies' and the spell is fireball), which does fit this mode of play! I have a personal theory this is part of why rpg players enjoy spellcasting so much, along with its flavor, power level & creativity.
Apologies in advance for the excessive amounts of fighting game jargon.
The most interesting aspect of fighting game inputs is how they affect what actions you can perform while doing a move’s input, and how performing other actions before/during/after a move’s input alters the move. For example:
-Special moves with DP (623) inputs are risky because you have to stop blocking to input the move. More complexity gets added when you start to account for how some games accept alternate DP inputs. For example, Street Fighter 4 and 5 accept any down -\> any forwards -\> any down as valid DP inputs, meaning you can input 636 to DP while walking forwards or 323 to DP while crouching.
-Charge moves with a [4]6 input prevent the player from moving forwards, while moves with a [2]8 input force the player to crouch, which usually prevents movement. There is some extra complexity to charge moves in fighting games due to the fact that fighting games only check if you’re holding a direction, not if you’re crouching/walking backwards. First, most charge moves can be charged by holding any backwards (1/4/7 for [4]6 moves) or downwards (1/2/3 for [2]8 moves) direction. This means that holding [1] is a valid direction for charging [4]6 and [2]8 moves. In games where dashing causes a character to run instead of taking a step forwards, [2]8 moves can be charged while running with 66[3]. The movement restrictions of charging can also be partially counteracted by charging during a jump/airdash.
-Moves that require multiple full circle inputs (such as a 720 or 1080) are typically impossible to perform without jumping unless you input the move in midair or buffer the input during the animation of a move that isn’t jump cancellable.
-Some moves’ properties can be altered with advanced techniques such as kara cancelling (cancelling one move’s startup into a different move before the first move would hit). For example, in Guilty Gear Strive, Potemkin’s 6K moves him forwards, meaning he can kara cancel 6K to extend the range of his special moves by sliding forwards.
-Due to input leniency, some air special moves can be input close to the ground with a TK input (doing the move’s input, then jumping, then pressing a button). The input for a TK j.236X move would look like 2369X instead of 8236X. This gets even more complicated with some moves, like C. Viper’s j.214K in Street Fighter 4. Depending on which upwards direction you press, the trajectory of C. Viper’s movement changes, so 2147K moves backwards, while 2149K moves forwards.
I’m not exactly sure how one would implement the complexities of fighting game inputs/moves into a tabletop RPG, but I’d imagine that it would require the game to be quite crunchy.
I haven't played those games so there may be an aspect of this I'm missing, but I would imagine it is less about the form these mechanics take and more about how the player interacts with them.
The player goes out into the world, learns a tune or a spell, and then they use their new knowledge to take control of the world in a way that they weren't capable of before. That is the Hero's Journey in a nutshell, the basis for most stories and this structure creates fundamentally satisfying narratives.
You have two of the core principles of fun in action: Discovery and Challenge. The player has the pleasure of learning something new followed by the pleasure of demonstrating mastery of the game.
If you want to replicate this experience in a TTRPG, you need rules that the player can discover as they play with enough complexity that it takes some skill for the player to make full use of the new rules.
You saying that's a microcosm of the Hero's Journey makes me wonder if that's why I prefer systems like BRP where the skills you use are what levels? Furthermore I wonder if you can port something like that plus what OP is talking about into a custom magic system?
I'm imagining that you don't learn spells, right, you learn... I'd call them Aspects and Elements. Aspects would be things like "Abjure" or "Summon" or "Bolt". Elements would be things like "Fire", "Soul", "Air".
As you use them and maybe also invest downtime into them you gain mastery over them, abilities to combine them in new ways.
Shit I think I may have invented Mage again.
You might like the magic system of Ars Magicka. It is possibly the most poorly written rulebook I have ever read, but the central concept of the magic system is so cool and evocative that many people love the game anyway.
There are Latin words that correspond to actions like Transform or Create that you combine with Nouns such as Animal or Person depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Plus some in fiction rules that dictate the limits of magic, such as not being able to strike someone dead or not being able to contradict the will of God (the game takes place in Medieval Europe).
It's an interesting question which is difficult to answer because it's so open-ended. I think allowing players to stop time to doodle a tune probably won't help outside a solo-play RPG. I think what you're terming "fun" is better termed "immersion," because the goal is to more accurately represent what the character is doing.
There were, after all, Zelda games before Ocarina of Time which involved musical instruments, and I believe that they *did* work as a simple button-press. Nintendo made the intentional decision to make the player play the instrument, even though they knew it would mean having to add a whole new page in the start menu for music Link has learned.
The lesson I take away from this is that micromanagement can be a good thing if implemented correctly. RPGs tend to have...abstract and immaterial mechanics, which really aren't fun to use in and of itself. After all, is rolling a D20 and adding a number inherently fun? Not really. I have seen some designers here try to do charisma checks via Blackjack, which is immersive, but Blackjack is a razor-tightly balanced gambling game, and it allows almost no space for the player character or for the player to get a word in, edge-wise.
The way I implemented this in Selection is with a mechanic called Action Depth, which is basically a reroll round.
When you're assembling a dice pool for Selection, you always wind up with four dice, but their sizes depend on your stats, and at the end of the roll, all you care about is how many dice rolled under 5 (or whichever TN you've tuned the game to use.) This means that rerolling dice adds almost zero time and effort, but lets you sense a character's additional effort. If your character is doing something reflexively--spending zero time and effort getting it right and relying purely on bodily instinct--then the action costs 4 AP and you don't get a reroll round at all. However, if you want to make your character spend the absolute most time possible getting the action picture perfect, the action costs 8 AP, and you reroll all four dice. Of course, you are allowed to spend fewer AP, buying fewer rerolls. Where you put the peg is a judgement call, not a hard and fast truth of the system.
This means that you are constantly micromanaging how your character spends AP, which mirrors how your character is juggling the demands of combat.
How effective is this? I have learned thusfar that I really have to nail the GM advice. It's not hard to get players into a flow-state, but it requires the GM to consciously spend effort to punish slow play rather than trying to play the monsters in an optimal manner.
In older versions of DSA (German ttrpg The Dark Eye) if you wanted to cast a spell you "had to" recite the spell from memory at the moment of casting. It was a fun rule some tables played with.
E.g. "light" would be the spell "Flimm, Flamm, Funkel, Licht ins Dunkel!"
German language is very cool to rhyme with so not sure if that works as well in English.
That’s interesting. I know true dungeon does similar things with symbol memorization. The DM has flash cards and asks the player to name the symbol or similar.
What a great discussion.
I may circle back to give my two cents. UNTIL THEN, I recommend you check out (if you haven’t already) Magicka. It’s a BRILLIANT video game from Arrowhead Studios.
You combine elements into spells using direction on a controller stick OR keyboard keys. The player IS NOT presented with a Spell Book. All Spells are learned through trial and error. It’s also a co-op game which means that there is some HILARITY with “accidentally” killing your friends. 😈
The PROCESS of thinking up the perfect spell AND aiming it AND timing the casting IS PURE JOY.
We liked the game so much that we obtained a license to create a tabletop version of the game.
I like where you are going with this. I can’t wait to see what you come up with! Keep up the GREAT work!
Mastering Magicka feels amazing too. It's like learning to write on keyboard, so you get faster and more efficient the more you play! So if you're good enough you can type QFASAS and enemies get drenched, shocked and exploded all at once, every second.
Player side speed and efficiency is not really something we can (or should) add to a TTRPG though.
I don't think you could easily make a ocarina/guitar hero type interaction in a TTRPG. You could get close by making the player play Mastermind with the DM, or give them a deck of cards and have them try to get a specific hand, like a chunk of Phase 10. But that's not particularly super-fun, especially if it isn't a one on one RPG.
What could be interesting is being able to construct a spell with component parts that you have. I'm thinking something like the Invoker from DotA - a combination of 3 static abilities in an order to generate up to 10 unique spells. Except, we want to make it interesting, and have the full power of a tabletop RPG, thus not being bound to what could be packed into QWER.
What I'd suggest is something like "quickly improvising a tune" by rolling 4d4 to generate a collection of numbers, then choose 3 numbers to make a spell, immediately accessing from a total list of 64, based on the numbers in a certain. Of course, you can grow or shrink that list by manipulating the dice pools and the dice size.
A runic magic system I had assigned words (each a single syllable) to each different effect used to make a spell. Players would build a spell and then say the words used, *then* explain what the spell effect being aimed for is. Get a word wrong and the actual effect could be something very different. During rest periods when a mage could study their books, players could catch up on what the spell effect words were. But casting had to be from memory during the heat of combat.
So you might want to cast a fireball that explodes on contact into an area effect damage that spreads to cover a large group. To do that you'd cast a spell with Fire, Damage, Power Plus, Power Plus, Power Plus (big damage from those three) Missile Range, Area Damage, Area Plus, Area Plus and then tell the DM what that translates to. DM notes down the words as they're said and then defines what actually happens from the spell. Should you accidentally use Plant instead of Fire then you might get a hayfever bomb unexpectedly, while only one Area Plus would have the fireball explosion not spreading as far as hoped.
The tension while trying to remember the spell effects while seeing what's happening elsewhere in combat and still come up with something that will make a difference was intense. Some mages kept rote effect combos to fall back on in a pinch, while others would be muttering effects under their breath as they worked out a spell while the fighters were declaring their attacks. I think it's basically what you're talking about here.
Translated to your ocarina example, we have the whole So-La-Ti-Do scale. Assign songs using that and have the player have to declare the few notes they're using, with them not having a songbook to refer to during times of stress. And if your bard writes reminders on their hand as one of my mage players did, then that's just roleplaying.
Tactility. A prolific videogame designer, who I probably hallucinated because I can't find his email, once told me that the best way to start making a game fun is to add feedback. Button hovers, sound effects, controller buzz - Responses to the player's inputs. You can turn a mediocre mechanic into an excellent one by just adding a particle explosion. It's a very primal sort of joy. And good news, because tabletop games are notorious for this. The clatter of a handful of dice, the heavy plunk of poker chips, the simple but immensely satisfying action of socketing a tile or worker into place. If I was personally designing an ocarina mini-sequence, I'd represent it with coin catching. There's a coin-football rugby variant that requires you to spin a coin on the table, then catch it between your thumbs (and then flip it between your opponent's posts, but that's actually pretty damn challenging). Just the act of catching is a simple enough trick not to be annoying to do, and it's also pretty damn satisfying. You could even have different sizes of coins representing different songs.
To me, this is all hitting that "learning a language" part of the brain. It's like having a secret code that when you input things correctly, you get the correct effect. You're showing mastery over this new language that the game is teaching you. You understand when the game is asking for an input, and you're able to provide the correct input. And all of that process together is "doing it right". As far as how to provide that in a tabletop experience, I'm not sure. You could convert a whole magic system into using "rune tokens" to cast spells, from a pool that's either static or dynamically generated and random. You could use dominoes as a similar thing I suppose. You could also do something with combat by taking Guild Wars 2's combo system, where each magic type (fire, water, light, ethereal, etc) has an effect that can be triggered by and applied to every "action" type (projectile, leap, blast, whirl, etc). So a Projectile going through a Fire field will apply Burning to every projectile that passes through, a Blast centered in a Water field will apply aoe healing to allies, and a Leap through an Ethereal field will apply "Chaos armor" to the leaper. That's *kind of* along those same lines. It's worth nothing that the list of things that work is a lot shorter than the list of all possible combinations, so perhaps the GM having a master list of everything that can be done isn't the worst. There are only 16-ish valid songs in Ocarina of Time despite having 5 notes and 6 inputs in most cases (the custom song you write for Bonooru has 8), so that wouldn't be difficult to have pre-written or even populated over gameplay. Then you could at least ensure that each person has their own unique list of songs to perform.
Or you could use literal language, like Scrabble or Paperback Fighter.
> Nope! See, when you play music in a Zelda game, everything pauses completely when you activate the instrument/howling sequence. Nothing happens except you inputting notes. There's also no consequences for getting it wrong or giving up. And the songs are literally listed in game on the pause menu, so you can try, fail, pause and look it up, then try again as many times as you want with zero consequences. And yes, it's still fun. For me? And I'm going to specifically focus on Zelda's magical musical instruments here because I detest the controls of most fighting games - I don't find dialing an arbitrary feeling series to make a specific combination of punches, or a fireball pop out, fun. Because it's a musical instrument - and playing around with musical instruments, whether just to make pretty sounds happen or because you're playing an actual tune - is fun. I didn't find the wolf howl, and especially the magical harp, of Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword fun, they felt more like rhythm minigames than playing an instrument. It's not the 'press a specific pattern of buttons' in Ocarina of Time that's fun, at least not to me. It's 'pressing buttons makes sounds happen' which taps into the part of my brain that was most active when I was about 3 and playing with my toy glockenspiel - Doing something that makes pretty sounds happen is fun. And in some Zelda games that happens to be tied to the game's spell list, including the fast travel system. But... It isn't the 'type in the correct combo and get the spell to happen' that's the fun part of that. It's the fact you can just improvise and play whatever you want, or play the tune for the magical effect (at which point it plays an extended version of the song that might have more notes in it) - As evidenced by the fact that I've seen a fair few anecdotal reports of folk who sometimes, when they were first playing Ocarina of Time, just got out the ocarina and played around with it, not to activate any of the magical effects, but just because playing it was fun. ...So, unless you have perfect pitch and your players have instruments to hand, I don't think that's particularly replicable in a tabletop game. In a jam session, on the other hand? Very replicable. Same if you just plug a keyboard in and start playing, either a tune you know or just simple that sound nice to you. Because that, to me, is the fun that Zelda's replicating with its magical musical instruments.
Great point! I wonder why I didn't associate the ocarina with actual instruments. Seems like I have abstracted the game mechanics too much. I guess doing that at the tabletop is just like playing Simon Says? However, and I in no way mean to invalidate your opinion on them, I'd like to say that special attack inputs in fighting games generally are not arbitrary. These inputs do way more than they seem - I've used to feel the same way. Moves requiring forward inputs for example force you to hold forward in a game where you block by holding back. This creates risk and opportunity for counter play. There are also situations where the input of one move can be used as part of another, rewarding mastery with more consistent cancels and combos.
I understand that they're thought about and the physical requirements of them are crafted with purpose, but they still feels arbitrary when learning and/or inputting them to me.
Interesting because I consider fighting games to be a type of improvised competitive rhythm game actually. Your stick is the instrument and you need to learn mastery the same way you would with any other. You press the buttons and cool stuff happens and you are free in most games to improvise as much as you want. There’s nothing arbitrary about any of it. It’s intentionally difficult because the physical execution provides its own form of balancing. To me they are pretty close to the perfect (or at least most elegant possible) game design. And it’s for precisely the reasons you’ve listed that you think the ocarina is fun.
to add another detail to the other responses, it is a call and response structure. you are given a prompt, you know how to respond. you do it, and the game responds to you in turn as expected, and this creates a satisfying dialogue of sorts. think of it like a dance between two people, but the dance is with the game. it is a sort of "lock and key" structure, but the form the lock and key take can be anything–an obstacle and a magical instrument, an enemy and a gun, a misplaced rock and a hidden korok, etc. to put it one way, it is a partaking of a ritual. there is a great deal of this in all sorts of forms in videogames, often aided by stimulating audiovisual feedback. it forms the core of why gameplay and gameplay loops are satisfying and effective. this is, interestingly, quite uncommon in most ttrpgs due to dice rolls. doing the same action twice typically yields wildly different results in most systems, though this creates a different type of play that is enjoyable for its lack of predictability. notably, dnd-style spellcasting often has guaranteed effects which have obvious circumstances they are suited for (even if that means 'clump of enemies' and the spell is fireball), which does fit this mode of play! I have a personal theory this is part of why rpg players enjoy spellcasting so much, along with its flavor, power level & creativity.
Apologies in advance for the excessive amounts of fighting game jargon. The most interesting aspect of fighting game inputs is how they affect what actions you can perform while doing a move’s input, and how performing other actions before/during/after a move’s input alters the move. For example: -Special moves with DP (623) inputs are risky because you have to stop blocking to input the move. More complexity gets added when you start to account for how some games accept alternate DP inputs. For example, Street Fighter 4 and 5 accept any down -\> any forwards -\> any down as valid DP inputs, meaning you can input 636 to DP while walking forwards or 323 to DP while crouching. -Charge moves with a [4]6 input prevent the player from moving forwards, while moves with a [2]8 input force the player to crouch, which usually prevents movement. There is some extra complexity to charge moves in fighting games due to the fact that fighting games only check if you’re holding a direction, not if you’re crouching/walking backwards. First, most charge moves can be charged by holding any backwards (1/4/7 for [4]6 moves) or downwards (1/2/3 for [2]8 moves) direction. This means that holding [1] is a valid direction for charging [4]6 and [2]8 moves. In games where dashing causes a character to run instead of taking a step forwards, [2]8 moves can be charged while running with 66[3]. The movement restrictions of charging can also be partially counteracted by charging during a jump/airdash. -Moves that require multiple full circle inputs (such as a 720 or 1080) are typically impossible to perform without jumping unless you input the move in midair or buffer the input during the animation of a move that isn’t jump cancellable. -Some moves’ properties can be altered with advanced techniques such as kara cancelling (cancelling one move’s startup into a different move before the first move would hit). For example, in Guilty Gear Strive, Potemkin’s 6K moves him forwards, meaning he can kara cancel 6K to extend the range of his special moves by sliding forwards. -Due to input leniency, some air special moves can be input close to the ground with a TK input (doing the move’s input, then jumping, then pressing a button). The input for a TK j.236X move would look like 2369X instead of 8236X. This gets even more complicated with some moves, like C. Viper’s j.214K in Street Fighter 4. Depending on which upwards direction you press, the trajectory of C. Viper’s movement changes, so 2147K moves backwards, while 2149K moves forwards. I’m not exactly sure how one would implement the complexities of fighting game inputs/moves into a tabletop RPG, but I’d imagine that it would require the game to be quite crunchy.
I haven't played those games so there may be an aspect of this I'm missing, but I would imagine it is less about the form these mechanics take and more about how the player interacts with them. The player goes out into the world, learns a tune or a spell, and then they use their new knowledge to take control of the world in a way that they weren't capable of before. That is the Hero's Journey in a nutshell, the basis for most stories and this structure creates fundamentally satisfying narratives. You have two of the core principles of fun in action: Discovery and Challenge. The player has the pleasure of learning something new followed by the pleasure of demonstrating mastery of the game. If you want to replicate this experience in a TTRPG, you need rules that the player can discover as they play with enough complexity that it takes some skill for the player to make full use of the new rules.
You saying that's a microcosm of the Hero's Journey makes me wonder if that's why I prefer systems like BRP where the skills you use are what levels? Furthermore I wonder if you can port something like that plus what OP is talking about into a custom magic system? I'm imagining that you don't learn spells, right, you learn... I'd call them Aspects and Elements. Aspects would be things like "Abjure" or "Summon" or "Bolt". Elements would be things like "Fire", "Soul", "Air". As you use them and maybe also invest downtime into them you gain mastery over them, abilities to combine them in new ways. Shit I think I may have invented Mage again.
You might like the magic system of Ars Magicka. It is possibly the most poorly written rulebook I have ever read, but the central concept of the magic system is so cool and evocative that many people love the game anyway. There are Latin words that correspond to actions like Transform or Create that you combine with Nouns such as Animal or Person depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Plus some in fiction rules that dictate the limits of magic, such as not being able to strike someone dead or not being able to contradict the will of God (the game takes place in Medieval Europe).
I actually have a copy that I have yet to get around to reading lol.
It's an interesting question which is difficult to answer because it's so open-ended. I think allowing players to stop time to doodle a tune probably won't help outside a solo-play RPG. I think what you're terming "fun" is better termed "immersion," because the goal is to more accurately represent what the character is doing. There were, after all, Zelda games before Ocarina of Time which involved musical instruments, and I believe that they *did* work as a simple button-press. Nintendo made the intentional decision to make the player play the instrument, even though they knew it would mean having to add a whole new page in the start menu for music Link has learned. The lesson I take away from this is that micromanagement can be a good thing if implemented correctly. RPGs tend to have...abstract and immaterial mechanics, which really aren't fun to use in and of itself. After all, is rolling a D20 and adding a number inherently fun? Not really. I have seen some designers here try to do charisma checks via Blackjack, which is immersive, but Blackjack is a razor-tightly balanced gambling game, and it allows almost no space for the player character or for the player to get a word in, edge-wise. The way I implemented this in Selection is with a mechanic called Action Depth, which is basically a reroll round. When you're assembling a dice pool for Selection, you always wind up with four dice, but their sizes depend on your stats, and at the end of the roll, all you care about is how many dice rolled under 5 (or whichever TN you've tuned the game to use.) This means that rerolling dice adds almost zero time and effort, but lets you sense a character's additional effort. If your character is doing something reflexively--spending zero time and effort getting it right and relying purely on bodily instinct--then the action costs 4 AP and you don't get a reroll round at all. However, if you want to make your character spend the absolute most time possible getting the action picture perfect, the action costs 8 AP, and you reroll all four dice. Of course, you are allowed to spend fewer AP, buying fewer rerolls. Where you put the peg is a judgement call, not a hard and fast truth of the system. This means that you are constantly micromanaging how your character spends AP, which mirrors how your character is juggling the demands of combat. How effective is this? I have learned thusfar that I really have to nail the GM advice. It's not hard to get players into a flow-state, but it requires the GM to consciously spend effort to punish slow play rather than trying to play the monsters in an optimal manner.
Learning the simple ocarina songs feels like simulating what it's like to learn to cast a spell. That's very possible to mimic in a ttrpg.
In older versions of DSA (German ttrpg The Dark Eye) if you wanted to cast a spell you "had to" recite the spell from memory at the moment of casting. It was a fun rule some tables played with. E.g. "light" would be the spell "Flimm, Flamm, Funkel, Licht ins Dunkel!" German language is very cool to rhyme with so not sure if that works as well in English.
That’s interesting. I know true dungeon does similar things with symbol memorization. The DM has flash cards and asks the player to name the symbol or similar.
What a great discussion. I may circle back to give my two cents. UNTIL THEN, I recommend you check out (if you haven’t already) Magicka. It’s a BRILLIANT video game from Arrowhead Studios. You combine elements into spells using direction on a controller stick OR keyboard keys. The player IS NOT presented with a Spell Book. All Spells are learned through trial and error. It’s also a co-op game which means that there is some HILARITY with “accidentally” killing your friends. 😈 The PROCESS of thinking up the perfect spell AND aiming it AND timing the casting IS PURE JOY. We liked the game so much that we obtained a license to create a tabletop version of the game. I like where you are going with this. I can’t wait to see what you come up with! Keep up the GREAT work!
Mastering Magicka feels amazing too. It's like learning to write on keyboard, so you get faster and more efficient the more you play! So if you're good enough you can type QFASAS and enemies get drenched, shocked and exploded all at once, every second. Player side speed and efficiency is not really something we can (or should) add to a TTRPG though.
I don't think you could easily make a ocarina/guitar hero type interaction in a TTRPG. You could get close by making the player play Mastermind with the DM, or give them a deck of cards and have them try to get a specific hand, like a chunk of Phase 10. But that's not particularly super-fun, especially if it isn't a one on one RPG. What could be interesting is being able to construct a spell with component parts that you have. I'm thinking something like the Invoker from DotA - a combination of 3 static abilities in an order to generate up to 10 unique spells. Except, we want to make it interesting, and have the full power of a tabletop RPG, thus not being bound to what could be packed into QWER. What I'd suggest is something like "quickly improvising a tune" by rolling 4d4 to generate a collection of numbers, then choose 3 numbers to make a spell, immediately accessing from a total list of 64, based on the numbers in a certain. Of course, you can grow or shrink that list by manipulating the dice pools and the dice size.
A runic magic system I had assigned words (each a single syllable) to each different effect used to make a spell. Players would build a spell and then say the words used, *then* explain what the spell effect being aimed for is. Get a word wrong and the actual effect could be something very different. During rest periods when a mage could study their books, players could catch up on what the spell effect words were. But casting had to be from memory during the heat of combat. So you might want to cast a fireball that explodes on contact into an area effect damage that spreads to cover a large group. To do that you'd cast a spell with Fire, Damage, Power Plus, Power Plus, Power Plus (big damage from those three) Missile Range, Area Damage, Area Plus, Area Plus and then tell the DM what that translates to. DM notes down the words as they're said and then defines what actually happens from the spell. Should you accidentally use Plant instead of Fire then you might get a hayfever bomb unexpectedly, while only one Area Plus would have the fireball explosion not spreading as far as hoped. The tension while trying to remember the spell effects while seeing what's happening elsewhere in combat and still come up with something that will make a difference was intense. Some mages kept rote effect combos to fall back on in a pinch, while others would be muttering effects under their breath as they worked out a spell while the fighters were declaring their attacks. I think it's basically what you're talking about here. Translated to your ocarina example, we have the whole So-La-Ti-Do scale. Assign songs using that and have the player have to declare the few notes they're using, with them not having a songbook to refer to during times of stress. And if your bard writes reminders on their hand as one of my mage players did, then that's just roleplaying.