magic-denial

The conflic between what players know, and what the game world knows

     I think this is worth exploring from various perspectives, to get a clear idea of what things are going to
look like from the player end. Discussion on the matter might also help us hone the direction of magic denial
and how to approach it so that our attempts to create such a world are not getting in the way of player enjoyment.

     The player will go into the game expecting magical abilities to be a given. My aim would be to create a
plausible explination for magical things that the player could see as being accepted by the denizens of the world,
despite his/her own knowledge that it is definitely a part of the game world. I look back to some authors I've
read in the past for inspiration on this. 

     Lovecraft, in many cases, used fear as the explination. At least at first. 
His stories typically confirmed the existence of elder magic in his world, or sometimes even started being told
from the perspective of a character that, had they not had the experience they are recounting, would have flat out
denied any sort of power from beyond. 

     Anne Rice might be another example, but with a different approach, especially of we look at the character
Lestat, who can be pointed to as an example of humanity losing their belief in the supernatural over time. Early
in his vampire days, it seems that vampires where believed to exist not by all, but by far more than what is evident
as we follow his story into modern times. The closer we get to today's time, the more those baseline humans waved 
off the supernatural as myth, with only a few remaining that fostered the belief. Of course, this was semi-intentional
on the part of the vampires, in order to stay hidden and thus remain free to operate as they pleased within the confines
of deniability. 

     I like a combination of the two, personally. Those that are "in the know" with regards to the existence of magic,
take advantage of people's natural inclination to explain the unexplained (even with theories that are often just as
crazy as the phenomenon), because the unexplained causes fear. So, the magic users feed into that, and help it grow in
directions that allow them to do what they do without being obvious about it and subjecting themselves to persecution or
being ostrisized. This sort of conspiratorial approach works regardless of how we decide magic is able to enter the 
world, or why it exists. 

     It also doesn't try to impose anything on the player, since the player will be a practitioner. That is, if they
want to be. If we leave the choice open, we offer up more ways to customize characters and role play, so a player
can choose to be a magic denier if they wish to add some challenge to their game, provided we have a good amount of 
physical abilities to choose from (and I have to assume we will).