Magic must be Mysterious

Shieldhaven made a great comment on my revised totem list that he didn't feel like some of the effects were very valuable and that some were likely to cause his group to not take it seriously (citing Cypress as something that would do this). I was going to reply in comments but I started running long, so here is a full post.

The first part, the unbalanced nature of the list, was intended. The thing I am trying to illustrate is that totem effects can range from something that would be hard to truly benefit from (Cedar's bouyancy, for example) to something really valuable (Granite's Armor bonus). This serves several functions (such as that it gives more freedom to the GM to create what they want) but there is a big fat honkin' reason that drowns those out.

Magic needs to be variable and unpredictable

Having such a wide range of effects in the examples gives the player the impression that the range of potential in the actual world is really wide. You can get a near-zero-value effect or you can get a really valuable effect. Who knows what kind of totem that strange rock you found will become? That adds mystery to the game that is hard to capture if everyone knows everything. Most of the materials in the list are available in most locales if you have the coin to buy them. They represent things that have been experimented with repetitively by other magic users.

The only way to get the really good effects is to try a lot of things. Some of them are going to yield low-grade effects like Cedar or Amber. Some are going to be really powerful. But experimentation and your lack of knowledge is key to the process.

Donald Rumsfeld once distilled awareness down to a few simple points...
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

The short list in the book are the "known knowns". The variability in the list is to reinforce the idea there are totem materials that you may be aware of, but that are not fully tested and nobody is 100% sure what they do (known unknowns) and there are also materials out there that you don't know exist and which therefore you cannot possibly know what they do (unknown unknowns).

James Raggi doesn't include a lot of monster stats in his game. He has argued that once he makes a monster stat block, you become aware of it. To integrate the idea into the above, it moves from being an unknown known (i.e. it is known to the GM but not to you) to a known known (it is known to everyone). This drains the mystery and horror out of what is supposed to be a monster.

Magic should be the same way, in my opinion. It should be variable, dangerous, and unpredictable. When magic becomes a choice between Melf's Acid Arrow and Invisibility, that is totally destroyed. Having a spell list (which Novarium will not have since everything is constructed ad-hoc) or a master list of all known magical effects (which I would never create) drains the mystery out of magic. Magic becomes technology.

There has to be a much larger number of unknown unknowns than known knowns.

Here is a mystery. WTF did I intend you to think of by placing the pic here?

To address the 2nd point on "seriousness", perhaps my gaming group is different from others. I don't know that having someone aware that using a Cypress totem to power a spell means that the target of the spell will become very sad for an hour would cause any problems. My group would probably find someone who was guarding something, make them sad and maybe add some kind of soft charm effect, then tell the person they really should go home and have a good cry. Then they would slip past the guard. That kind of thing, or they would just never put a Cypress totem in their pool.

Is my group weird? Do people see this as an open door to players goofing off and not taking the game seriously?

I am very curious about this.