So how do we put this magic system into tabletop? My thought is that Savage Worlds would work well...

So how do we put this magic system into tabletop? My thought is that Savage Worlds would work well, since the majority of the time alchemy is basically ritual magic. The only problem is that alchemist circles are pretty open-ended in what they do, which Savage Worlds doesn't do all that well. For instance the circles on Roy Mustang's gloves don't create fire so much as they let him more generally control oxygen around him, to the extent that at one point he's even able to separate oxygen and hydrogen from water molecules. Isaac McDougal can affect the freezing and boiling points, apparently solely of water. Basque Grand literally just turns metal objects into guns and hand-to-hand weapons, which is a frankly bizarre skill.

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Transmutation circles are just spells. There's no actual science involved.

it's just spells with domain/school focus

The real challenge for FMA game is making the extremely fatal yet high powered setting a thing.

>It's just spells

I mean are they though? It feels against the spirit of the setting to lock the characters into specific effects. Mustang uses literally two circles in his entire time in the show, both of which are variants of one another. The entire point of the magic system in FMA is that you get, like, one specific spell effect and then break it as hard you possibly can.

You're overthinking this. Let the players buy whatever spells they want, so long as it fits within the theme of their transmutation array. Then don't have it represent them having a ton of arrays, but having one array that they know a ton of uses for.

That seems more like the answer to "how can I play a game of D&D where my wizard has a theme" than "how can I play FMA"

You'll never get weird shit like freezing your own blood to throw at people like knives if you do that, though.

But you will, that's the point.

If a guy chooses the array that freezes blood and dumps everything into that array so he's really, really good at shit which involves freezing blood and complete ass at everything else, that would suddenly be a pretty good ability for him to use because his other range options are fairly limited.

The point is that the character who does that only has the ability to freeze water. As a last resort he improvises and freezes the water in his own blood.

I want to evoke that sense of experimentation and improvisation.

So, Savage Worlds. Give your players creative choice in their Trappings.

Then, let them spend a Benny either to use another spell with their Trapping, or to use this improvised magic system: talesoftheramblingbumblers.com/2008/09/05/improvised-magic-in-savage-worlds/

If they like the effect, keep it in mind for their next advance as a new Power.

But all he does is shoot fire. Most other alchemy is just earthbending. I understand what you're saying and appreciate it, but it just isn't really related to the narrative of FMA, despite it being true of the setting, ya dig? The magic is just so complex, exploring something like that enough for us to extrapolate a useful rule set for gaming is just not good drama, it would ruin the show.

Now, The Kingkiller Chronicles on the other hand, is exactly what you're looking for. Look it up, check it out, maybe read the books, it's really great stuff. I've actually been trying to build that stuff in Hero System since that's what the author used when he was designing the system.

>"ya dig?"
>thinks anyone hasn't heard of Patrick Rothfuss
>goes into discussion and suggests just doing some completely different thing

You're the worst kind of person.

For instance, making the trappings of someone like Armstrong makes your Powers actually use "fighting" instead of "arcane," which is pretty fucking neat.

Too many explosions

Source on Rotpuss using HERO?

That's not his fault, it's just the nature of alchemy in FMA. Every alchemist has a theme, but that's more of a personal choice than an inherent limitation in alchemy. Alchemy has the potential to do almost anything.

>The magic is just so complex

You draw an array and whatever the writer wants to happen, happens.

Yeah nah, amazingly deep worldbuilding there.

Why does he keep snapping his fingers? After the first explosion, there's already an ignition source. He can just stand there and transmute oxygen or whatever the fuck the reasoning behind his blaster wizard powers was.

To be fair he was pretty fired up

The logic of the show was pretty internally consistent regarding magic, you need component of whatever your transmuting unless you have a Philosophers Stone

So he snaps his fingers a bunch?
What, is he a sassy womyn of color?

He's death's conductor, I always liked to think his fire control was more akin to guiding an orchestra

>you need component of whatever your transmuting
Is that why Ed-boy keeps pulling metal weapons out of brick walls?

Besides, it's not hard to remain internally consistent if the condition you've made up barely limits anyone, ever.

>Oh no, I need matter in order to be able to transmute something
It's a good job that you're living on a world of matter, then.

"Alchemy is the art of deconstructing and reconstructing matter"
Provided you know the the structure of Y and the rough structure of X, you can turn something into anything.
Know the structure of concrete and the structure of steel? You can turn concrete into steel. Know water in detail? You can freeze or boil it. Know there's water in blood? You can use that to effect the blood entirely. Know Iron? You can take it out of blood.

I believe the author's explanation in that regard was that he was refining the stone in the pavement into metal.

Granted you'd only get about 4 grams of iron out of an average adult male's blood. So not terribly efficient to use in combat

It'd be a really simple magic system if you were to lay out some kind of ruleset for it.
Level 1: Pick a material. You can change and transform that material.
Level 2: You can extract your chosen material from other things.
Level 3: Even if a thing only contains traces of your chosen material, you can extract it.
Level 4: You can take any material and turn it into your chosen material.

The only thing you'd have to limit would be scale and the fact that, short of doing human transmutation and meeting god, alchemy is basically rune magic. Even then, so long as you have a catalyst with an alchemy circle on it you're good to go - Mustang's gloves, Armstrong's bracer, etc.

>refining
That's a cop-out. What's he refining? Clay? Turning it into iron and carbon?

Then why did he go to the trouble of gathering all of the component elements of an adult human body to transmute his mother?

Why not simply get a shitton of something cheaper, like dirt, and 'refine' it into the correct elements?

It's all just rule of cool and writer fiat, not an intricate, internally consistent system of science magic. That's okay, but let's not pretend it's something else.

What the shit. I've been bingewatching Brotherhood these past two days and here's a thread, why does this keep happening?

You're a low-level psychic user. When you think about something it happens.
I've been wanting to run an FMA game for a long while and this thread shows up, but that's not quite the same thing.

That's cool. Last week i was reading a cookbook that mentioned marble rye and that seinfeld episode where he steals a loaf, lo and behold, that episode ran later that night. Where is your god now?

But that's the ultimate strangulation move. If you drew out all the iron, even without really harming the body, the brain would suffocate and lose consciousness in one or two minutes max.
If you want to get metaphysical, any elemental atom is only different from another thanks to the number of protons in the substance. Let's say you want to turn a clay brick, roughly 60% SiO2 and the rest is Al2O3, silica and aluminum oxides. Simply throw the oxygen away, add the atomic mass of the two elements together, this would create a brick of cobalt. Blast off 1 proton of the cobalt mass and you get iron. Shape it along, and you get a really shit pure iron weapon, but that's besides the point.

Now what do you think is easier, transmutting dirt, a complete jumble of materials, using the method above but with actual calculations involved, or buying a sack of coal and a jar of water?

Given that Ed-boy does it on the fly when it comes to weapons, transmuting seems easier.

He often uses his own prosthetics. He's not changing the material, only the structure. A lot of alchemy really is more akin to last airbender bending

Those aren't the transmutations I'm referring to.

I'm talking about the times when he handily pulls a polearm out of a brick wall.

>rothfuss setting
Only if I can have 2 chapters dedicated to my sexomancy abilities and ONLY my sexomancy abilities.

Just refluff Battle Century G. It handles shounen shit and supers excellently, if you're not lazy to do some customizing.

The source has to be related to the circle. Unless he's sticking his hands into the fire so the glove and thus the circle is in contact with the new ignition source he needs to light up every single spark for every single transmutation as amestrian alchemy doesn't function at range. Same reason armstrong has his gloves and ironblood his gauntlets.

As I already said, every brick is 40% aluminum. Simple extraction

So it would have been easier to get a cheap, uniform substance to make his mom out of, and the author is just going by rule of cool.

That's what I'm saying.

Different user.
At the time Ed was a retard and didn't know this shit but then again what 11 year old does so he just gathered each individual ingredient as required by weight.
After he went through the door he got force fed high-tier alchemical knowledge that his PTSD'd brain only allows him cursory but instinctual understanding of.
The end result is he knows the atomic structure inherently of pretty much all materials to date in the setting and piggybacking off his general knowledge of what shits contents should be he can transmute X from Y with cheating levels of ease.
Know what trace materials among the bulk in your local dirt is? Ed does and he also knows how to parse it all out to make metal weaponry because that's his gig. Its broken beyond belief but you get what you pay for.

Savage Worlds is pretty bad but if you want to run it I can't stop you.