Breaking the Paradigm

I've been thinking about that last post. 

What if a mystic had the words "destroy" and "light", and they accumulated enough energy to magnify their effect to cover the orbital distance to the moon (radius of effect - 10), plus the energy to get their effect centred on the sun (distance to centre of effect - 7), made it an effect that lasted centuries or longer (duration 6+), and applied a few levels of success to the number of penalty traits applied (let's say 4 or 5)?

We know that this would be feasible for a mystic with a minimum capacity score of 3, because they could feasibly generate 36 energy over the course of 3 rounds, so 28 is certainly within the realms of possibility. But what would this look like?

Would they extinguish the sun? Would they cause a collapse in the sun's energy output that would cause it to become a supernova? Would the darkness effect actually cause the sun to collapse into a black hole? 

I think that one of the key things to consider here is "What might have stopped a mystic from doing this in the past?" and "Is there anything stopping mystics from doing it now?".

It reminds me of the question in D&D which asks "If I can create water as a basic spell, can I just create it in someone's lungs and instantly drown them?", and the basic answer comes down to the idea that whatever the players characters are able to do, their opponents are also able to do. If the player characters can come up with the idea, then it's certainly feasible that other characters in the setting have done so too. At that point it basically comes down to initiative... who can create the water in their opponent's lungs first, or who had the foresight to prepare some kind of countermeasures to prevent the water forming in their lungs (a protective amulet or counterspell effect). 

It's a potential moment that instantly ends the story for one person who instantly dies, but it's not the instant point where the world ends and reality collapses for everyone in the story. Unless you're including the type of high level magical "wish" that you encounter in some systems, it's the kind of freeflowing and potentially catastrophic magic that I've only seen in one game, and not surprisingly it's the game that this magical system is predominantly inspired by... Mage the Ascension.

That game handles the issue in a few elegant ways which are basically digetic, in addition to the non-diegetic die rolling. A character has a belief about how magic works in the world, and understanding of how their practices manipulate the underlying forces that control reality, and how they can pull strings or manipulate the flow of metaphysical power to change the way reality manifests around them. Maybe they believe they can perceive new realities through herbs, or maybe commune with angels who control reality, or use gadgets that manipulate subatomic particles. Every type of magic has things that make sense within the practice, and things that just don't seem possible. Herbs wouldn't work on a piece of technology, Angels can only be spoken to by the faithful (and they'd be unlikely to cause injury or harm to others), gadgets might require regular power supply. Mage also has the idea of coincidental and vulgar magic (where coincidental magick can be explained away as a fluke or luck, while vulgar magick is blatant).

I really want to incorporate something like this into the system, but we already have something that can be applied to rein in extremes. Since this magic system will first be used in Familiar, it's a game about underdogs. We can assume that most opponents will have counterspell effects in play, and any sources of power that might generate high energy levels will be controlled by the secret societies that have dominated the world for centuries. Most available sources of power will only generate 1 or 2 energy per activation (at best), and most attempts to do something stupid will face massive barriers from groups who have spent centuries building a power structure... the last thing these groups would want is an upstart mystic accidentally destroying the reality they've spent centuries working to dominate. 

I really like the idea of coincidental and vulgar magick, and it might be easy enough to incorporate the idea by simply applying a difficulty factor to any effect produced by a mystic. 

If the player can describe the effect as a subtle effect that could be explained away by an observer as a freak accident or lucky break, then the invocation of the magical effect has a standard difficulty, If it takes  a more convoluted description to justify the effect, or if an observer wouldn't believe that the effect is real and they'd spend time trying to work out "how it's done", then the invocation of the magical effect would suffer a penalty trait on it's outcome. If the mystic knows that the effect is supernatural, and can't be justified within their paradigm of universal understanding, it suffers two penalty traits. These penalty traits work to ensure magic looks natural rather than supernatural.

Another effect might simply be that when the energy spikes before massive spells, that alerts the local spirits and other mystics in the area. A character doing something small, or gradually acccumulating power for their effects will have a much lower energy profile than someone who tries to cast a big effect quickly. Spirits might whisk a dangerous mystic into a parallel reality to keep the prime timeline intact, while the mystic find themself and their companions flung into a plane where the unexpected result of a magical effect has less impact.

I've got more ideas, but that will do for now.