Gaming: A Discussion of Sanderson's Third Law, Storytelling Impacts, and Game Design

As a refresher, Sanderson's Third Law states:

"The author should expand on what is already a part of the magic system before something entirely new is added, as this may otherwise entirely change how the magic systems fits into the fictional world."

Keep in mind that I believe that you could delete the word "magic" out of most of these, or substitute in "technology" or "social order," and they'd be equally valid - it's part of why the further you get into Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 universe, the less sense it makes and the less satisfying it is, because every time the Monoliths do something, it makes less sense of their previous behavior, and despite Clarke's Law, the Monoliths are very clearly triggered by technology.  Same with drow society in Menzoberranzan - it's a matriarchal theocracy, except then it turns out that there's this guild of male mercenaries that hasn't ever been crushed underfoot, and also there's this super-powerful wizard who trumps all the female power structures, and... you get the idea, every time another feature gets bolted on, it makes less sense of the original concept.

The point is that Sanderson's Laws can be generalized to any underpinning system of a fictional world, and don't apply specifically to magic.

Let's talk about an obscure example of how this can be done really badly, in such a way that it breaks immersion - lightsabers.  Lightsabers are the traditional symbol of a Jedi, and from the very first fwoosh as Luke hits the trigger in Ben Kenobi's hut, they're set up as something special.  But did you know that, according to the (now-Legends) comic series Golden Age of the Sith, this iconic weapon that "for a thousand generations" was the symbol of the Jedi, was once powered by a fanny pack battery, and that only five thousand years before A New Hope? I want you to think about that for a moment - that sword work, where balance and mobility are absolutely critical, requires you to fight with a twenty-pound battery on your hip.  Then think about the fact that your sword now has a tether, slightly longer than your sword arm, that can be cut, otherwise it quits working.  Then think about the fact that as a swordsman, you're now carrying a piece of gear guaranteed to snag on something at some point in a fight.

It is, in short, a really dumb way of explaining the evolution of the lightsaber.  It would have worked as a demonstrator, that everyone involved agrees is impractical until the power supply can be miniaturized, but as a piece of the universe, it makes less sense than shrugging and saying it's always been that way.  It's also not the first time Kevin J. Anderson did something like this in Star Wars, and frankly it's super-common in most franchised fiction, because each author wants to be memorable, but the result is that their wow moment makes less sense of the rest of the universe.  This is the cardinal sin of J. J. Abrams - he is very fond of wow moments that don't take into account the behavior of anything else in the universe outside of that moment, and as a result, for instance, Jedi can now teleport and resurrect the dead but have never shown any signs of doing so ever before, even when the ability to do so would have massively changed the game.

Another example that undermines its entire franchise - Harry Potter.  Placing Harry with the Dursleys, and then for all intents and purposes abandoning him for more than a decade, means that the entire leadership of the wizarding world is complicit in child abuse, because they didn't bother to do a health and welfare check occasionally, by magic or mundane means, and when they did discover that the Dursleys were abusive, their attitude continued to be "welp, nothing I can do!" The Potterverse is full of these, and since they are all the work of one author, it's hard to blame it on franchise authors in this case.

Let's talk about an RPG-specific example now.  In the Time of Troubles, shifting from 1st to 2nd Edition AD&D, the over-god Ao banished all of the gods to Toril in the Forgotten Realms.  This was supposed to allow them to rejigger the gods and explain why the rules had changed, because the gods' own rules were being changed on them.  Unfortunately, it introduced a whole new set of questions - So the gods could be killed? Did the gods depend on worship for sustenance, and if they did, what happened if their mortal forms convinced people to worship them, as, say, Bane did? Did Ao require worship for sustenance? Where had Ao come from to begin with? When gods die, but they still have worshipers, what happens to those prayers? Now, most people weren't going to think about that too closely, because most people played under one edition or the other, but this was a setting where it was entirely possible to run into, or even become, a physical avatar of one of the gods, so the behavior and mechanics of divinity could potentially matter, and the behavior and mechanics were vague to begin with and made even more vague by the Time of Troubles.

Mechanically, this was part of the problem with D&D4E - they tried to make non-casters able to use magic, which was a great decision, using ritual magic.  This was a good idea, and it was thematic and in keeping with plenty of genre fiction.  The problem is that they failed to justify it or make it play well with other magic; because a wizard was even more of a requirement than it had been in previous editions, there simply wasn't a purpose for this awkward bolt-on and they failed to persuade the fandom that it was necessary.  I've done plenty of similar things with games in the past, where ritual magic was kind of the default, but "plot handwavium" works with good group synergy, and as the shelf-standard game, D&D has never been able to afford the assumption of group synergy because it's played, and marketed, at a very diverse spectrum of tables (speaking of marketing - future subject, marketing and the RPG industry, and why single-system dominance is bad).  Having a system that is more cumbersome to use, costs resources, and can be bypassed by a member of the group, even if that system is otherwise a good idea, is not a gain, it's just page-filler.

I've spent a lot of time talking about places where the addition didn't work, because they hadn't really thought through how it relates to the rest of the world.  Let's talk about an example where it does work, in my opinion.  5th Edition D&D adds the Warlock as a base class - yes, I know, it or variants of Pact Magic had been around for a while, but the Warlock is a core-book class.  The idea of a warrior who draws some form of mystic power from an outside bond had been around a long time; we call that the Paladin, and it goes back to the very beginning (though you could argue it goes at least as far back as Sir Galahad), and you could totally play Pathfinder with a magus who's basically an arcane paladin.  It had never been given a statistical form for an arcane caster in D&D, though, and because of D&D's rich history and its perception of being the industry standard, being included there gave it a form of legitimacy.  It allowed the development of character types that the game had only sort-of supported before, who had made a Faustian bargain prior to game play, and it made them make sense in the context of the broader system.  I suppose it could be argued that they were not truly an addition, if you assume that each iteration of D&D is a separate thing, but especially in the case of D&D, it is an accretive, iterative game, where each new edition comes with the baggage of previous editions.  To take a concept like that and add it in to the core book, cleanly and in a well-thought-out fashion, is no small feat in a game that has screwed up psionics with every edition that has touched the subject, to the point that the easiest way to handle psionics is "wizard with trappings," rather than any published method.

Let's talk about another example, this time of expanding rather than adding - Avatar: The Last Airbender.  It is established fairly early on that earthbending does not work on metal; it is also established early on that Toph Beifong is not only a prodigy, she is a savant, probably the greatest earthbender of her generation.  When she is trapped in a metal container, with nothing to do but think, she realizes that she doesn't have to bend the metal itself, she has to manipulate the impurities in the metal - and it manages to function as a wow moment.  This is even referenced later on, in Legend of Korra, where sufficiently-pure metals are still proof against benders, but it also lines up with what we see in other places in ATLA, with plantbenders (bending the capillary water in plants to control the plant), bloodbenders (same, but with animals), lightning benders (variant firebenders), et cetera.  Avatar had a knack for exploring the niche implications of its systems, rather than bolting on whole new system, and it had a knack for explaining how the niche implications fit into the bigger whole.

I probably shouldn't finish this series of posts without a discussion of Sanderson's own work, and how the laws are reflected therein.  First, it's fairly obvious, from both Mistborn and Stormlight Archive at the very least, that Sanderson works out a detailed explanation, visible to the author and buried in the appendices, for how magic works in his worlds, but the characters themselves frequently do not understand those rules, generally because they've been lost.  This manages to preserve the sense of wonder and world-exploration, while making sure there is some level of internal consistency as to what characters can do and what they can't - he knows what his rules are, even if the characters, and thus the audience, do not.  Perhaps my favorite example of this is the Lord Ruler in Mistborn, who uses all three of the major forms of magic found in the world, but because he was really bad at literal world-building when he held the power of Creation, he didn't understand how any of the rules worked and accidentally broke the planet, then had to keep compensating in a series of pendulum swings.  Sanderson explains this toward the end of the series, and it both makes sense in the moment, and makes sense of a lot of what happened before, even though we can be fairly certain, based on their length, that he didn't plot out the entire Mistborn series before getting the first one to print.  The reason that it works is because his systems, even when they're revealed stage-by-stage so the audience can be surprised, are internally consistent.

So - if you are going to write a thing into a story, or a mechanic in a game, it really helps if that thing makes sense from a purely logical point of view (lightsaber fanny packs), a story point of view (JJA), and a mechanical point of view (4E ritual magic).  It's easier when it's an iteration on an existing thing (variant bending) than a whole new addition (warlocks).