How did WotC handle M:TG colors in the D&D rules?

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So Wizards of the Coast have, in the past few years, started converting some of their Magic: The Gathering settings for use under D&D rules. I haven't had the opportunity to really leaf through any of these M:TG --> D&D books. How did they handle Magic's strong five-color theming under D&D's clearly not five-color rules?

Did they just ignore them mechanically and leave it up to the players and GMs to decide what color things were for pure flavor? Did they decide certain classes, races, features, spells, and monsters had certain colors and could mechanically affect each other along those lines?
 
Heh, WotC understand that the 5 colors of magic are describing the cosmology underpinning their MtG settings and not just a game mechanic? Who do you think they are, an RPG company or something? :grin:
 
Look, it's WotC: they did not adapt the system to the setting in any meaningful capacity, they adapted the setting to the system.

Why do you think I don't care if they reboot any of my favorite settings or not?
Yeah, somedays I wonder if "adapting a setting" is just a fool's errand. I'm having trouble thinking of anything but the most generic game setting that's hasn't had major conceptual omissions or jarring contradictions when it's ported to a newer ruleset.
 
So Wizards of the Coast have, in the past few years, started converting some of their Magic: The Gathering settings for use under D&D rules. I haven't had the opportunity to really leaf through any of these M:TG --> D&D books. How did they handle Magic's strong five-color theming under D&D's clearly not five-color rules?

Did they just ignore them mechanically and leave it up to the players and GMs to decide what color things were for pure flavor? Did they decide certain classes, races, features, spells, and monsters had certain colors and could mechanically affect each other along those lines?
They don't. They're not Magic -> D&D conversion books; The D&D books use D&D rules for everything, and treat the settings as they would any other D&D settings. Where Magic would use colours as a shorthand sometimes, the D&D version actually gives the full details and concepts in a detail that Magic doesn't have the space to do.

iirc in the Magic multiverse "colours" aren't actually a thing that many characters specifically interact with (Except for maybe the high-powered ones like planeswalkers), they're more of a method of grouping similar things, in a similar way to something like alignment.
 
Yeah, somedays I wonder if "adapting a setting" is just a fool's errand. I'm having trouble thinking of anything but the most generic game setting that's hasn't had major conceptual omissions or jarring contradictions when it's ported to a newer ruleset.
It can be fun too though. Take a very D&D setting like Forgotten Realms and run it with say a BRP system instead. Suddenly magic loses a lot of power and changes a lot, depending on the rule set priests may no longer have any supernatural abilities at all (or they could, if you use RuneQuest or Mythras they slot right into Theism) and the whole thing becomes a lot gritter.
 
Yeah, somedays I wonder if "adapting a setting" is just a fool's errand. I'm having trouble thinking of anything but the most generic game setting that's hasn't had major conceptual omissions or jarring contradictions when it's ported to a newer ruleset.
Well that's just it - the rules should describe the phenomenon of the setting not the other way around.

This is what makes a lot of the D&D adaptations of various non-D&D (and even in some cases - D&D specific) settings not work well.

Dark Sun is a good outlier. It's a weird non-standard D&D setting that they practically invented an entire sub-system (Psionics) to support. And they made fundamental changes to the classes and races.

For Magic The Gathering - they should have recodified the magic rules into something effects-based where the Colors act as trappings with specific advantages/disadvantages against their opposing colors. Likewise those effects should be limited based on the domains of the Color.

It could definitely be done. But there is little chance WotC is going to do that. They're feeding off of their own IP's for casual players and GMs without trying to push the envelope for obvious corporate reasons (like not falling into the arguable false trap of TSR with multiple competing lines).

I think there are a lot of other systems that could make this work better.
 
I'm interested in colors of magic, but know nothing about Magic the Gathering. The only place where I can recall using colors for magic was the old SPI wargame Sorcerer where each mage had a particular color -- low level had one, higher levels had more than one -- and the board had all sorts of colors on it whereby the color of the hex where the unit was found meant something and monsters summoned had various colors. I'm thinking that there was a master grid where each color beat other colors but then got beat by other colors, sort of like a complex version of rock-paper-scissors. I was thinking that there were moons and a chart where if the moon was in a certain color that affected the strength, but I may be thinking of another game.

Does the magic color in MtG work anything like that?
 
Does the magic color in MtG work anything like that?

Somewhat. MtG has five colors, each with very clear themes and associations to a variety of fantasy tropes from creatures to landscapes. Each color is 'allied' to two others and 'opposes' the remaining two, but this is not a strict rule as to how they can be combined in the fiction or mechanics - It just means that if you play red, for example, you're more likely to find support in black and green and you're more likely to have specialized tricks that harm blue and white. Almost everything in an MtG setting has an affiliation to one or more colors, but as Ladybird Ladybird pointed out they aren't usually aware of it.
 
I'm interested in colors of magic, but know nothing about Magic the Gathering. The only place where I can recall using colors for magic was the old SPI wargame Sorcerer where each mage had a particular color -- low level had one, higher levels had more than one -- and the board had all sorts of colors on it whereby the color of the hex where the unit was found meant something and monsters summoned had various colors. I'm thinking that there was a master grid where each color beat other colors but then got beat by other colors, sort of like a complex version of rock-paper-scissors. I was thinking that there were moons and a chart where if the moon was in a certain color that affected the strength, but I may be thinking of another game.

Does the magic color in MtG work anything like that?
Yes, but no?

The colours in Magic are more like tendencies; Red is the colour of impulsiveness and freedom, for example. Colours have two allies, which in the case of Red are Green (Green respect's Red following it's instincts; Red respects Green's ferocity) and Black (Black respect's Red's single-mindedness; Red respects Black's tendency to break down order). Colours also have two enemies; White (White likes order and structure, and everything knowing it's place), and Blue (Blue is all about planning and strategising, which Red doesn't have time for because it's off smashing things). And no colour is innately good or evil; your opinion on Red, for example, is likely to depend on whether they're on your side or not. Any colour can be your best friend or worst enemy.

In game terms there are concepts which certain colours tend to be better at, for example Red is very good at aggression and directly hurting things, but it's not so good at defense or control effects. This is reflected through mechanics that only appear on Red cards, or are potentially more cost-efficient on Red cards than other colours. But there's no specific "type advantages" or anything, and you're free to mix cards of any colour into a given Magic deck (You may not want to, one or two colour decks tend to be more effective simply due to more consistent card draw, but you can). There are also cards with multiple colours, for things which borrow from multiple families of effect.

There's a bigger breakdown here.
 
Yeah, somedays I wonder if "adapting a setting" is just a fool's errand. I'm having trouble thinking of anything but the most generic game setting that's hasn't had major conceptual omissions or jarring contradictions when it's ported to a newer ruleset.
And yet some people keep trying to port new settings to 5e/OSR mechanics. Which gives me d20 era flashbacks:grin:!
 
They simply don't talk about it. They want their cake and eat it too by having no hard setting decisions made; if it remains mostly undefined, who can get mad at that except high-maintenance meanies? :tongue: It is very much name dropping cards without attached in-setting meaning -- which thankfully at least avoided most MtG metaplot. Too much "yes, and" and precious little "no."

I like that they touched upon the settings at all, but it has been very safe by being light, broad strokes. WotC has been backtracking on hard character & setting restrictions for decades now just to avoid the heat, so I expected nothing less for 5e. Very "It's anything & everything you want it to be!" sales pitch, everything is becoming fungible to a fault.

A bit of a lost opportunity in their neutrality, especially given the lore already present.
 
Many years ago, my group was actually in the playtest for the Manastorm: the MTG RPG. It featured the deck colors pretty heavily, and had some really interesting ideas...but then Wizards bought TSR, acquired D&D, and killed it. Still have my playtest files and notes...but according to Wizards, the gag order is still in effect...
 
Many years ago, my group was actually in the playtest for the Manastorm: the MTG RPG. It featured the deck colors pretty heavily, and had some really interesting ideas...but then Wizards bought TSR, acquired D&D, and killed it. Still have my playtest files and notes...but according to Wizards, the gag order is still in effect...

Darn, I have so many questions, none of which you can legally answer.
 
Many years ago, my group was actually in the playtest for the Manastorm: the MTG RPG. It featured the deck colors pretty heavily, and had some really interesting ideas...but then Wizards bought TSR, acquired D&D, and killed it. Still have my playtest files and notes...but according to Wizards, the gag order is still in effect...
I can only imagine. :sad: So much sad from what could have been... and 20+ years is apparently not long enough distance. Big corporations camping on IPs (or otherwise wiping their ass with them) is an all too common story.
 
I can only imagine. :sad: So much sad from what could have been... and 20+ years is apparently not long enough distance. Big corporations camping on IPs (or otherwise wiping their ass with them) is an all too common story.

This is why Ryan Dancey deserves more praise for making the D&D SRD happen.
 
Well that's just it - the rules should describe the phenomenon of the setting not the other way around.

This is what makes a lot of the D&D adaptations of various non-D&D (and even in some cases - D&D specific) settings not work well.

Dark Sun is a good outlier. It's a weird non-standard D&D setting that they practically invented an entire sub-system (Psionics) to support. And they made fundamental changes to the classes and races.

For Magic The Gathering - they should have recodified the magic rules into something effects-based where the Colors act as trappings with specific advantages/disadvantages against their opposing colors. Likewise those effects should be limited based on the domains of the Color.

It could definitely be done. But there is little chance WotC is going to do that. They're feeding off of their own IP's for casual players and GMs without trying to push the envelope for obvious corporate reasons (like not falling into the arguable false trap of TSR with multiple competing lines).

I think there are a lot of other systems that could make this work better.
The best example of this is the Everquest vs. WoW D20 RPGs. The EQ one was a faithful port of EQ, classes were different, spells were different, races were different...everything was described in EQ terms. Where EQ and 3e differed, EQ won. WoW did the opposite.

Everquest was a great EQ RPG. Warcraft was a lackluster conversion that was just D&D.
 
I almost convinced my group to play EQd20 a couple of months ago while we were in the midst of playing Project1999.

It's a real gem of design. I completely agree that it fully accepts the conceits of the EQ setting and represents it mechanically very well. Plus they have the handy conversion from the MMO to the TTRPG rules in the back. It was a blast to see how monstrously powerful our end-game raid characters were. Phenomenal.

Warcraft was indeed uninspired.

I currently am in a progression-raiding guild, and my players and I have booted around the idea of converting WoW to SWADE. Using the Class and Iconic Frameworks would be the perfect choice for modeling Demon Hunters, Death Knights, and some of the other modern concepts. Leveraging the SW Rifts rules could easily capture the god-mode end-game of WoW too.
 
A quick Google search finds a few homebrew RPGs that use actual M:tG cards and mechanics as the base, what a concept.
 
A quick Google search finds a few homebrew RPGs that use actual M:tG cards and mechanics as the base, what a concept.
Personally I think pretty much any fantasy RPG could run everyday life in most settings, because for the majority of inhabitants there's nothing really unusual going on. It's the interplanar / Planeswalker level where you really need a custom system; and for that, I'd be likely to use something like Fate Accelerated, using the colours (WUBRGC) as Approaches and general Fate mechanics to handle their particular abilities. But I'd be loathe to try and use entirely the same system for both, as even modern planeswalkers are ridiculously powerful compared to regular folk.
 
I am not sure you need to convert, so much, as adapt.

We have multiple forms of magic in PF, and DnD 5e so far from Spheres of Power, the various Magic books. So adding one more type would not be an issue.
 
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