Flipping the "Mundanes Find Magic Disturbing and Incomprehensible" Stereotype?

[Vrock_Summoner]

The usual way magic vs mundane works is that it's considered "mind vs body," with non-mages lacking in mental understanding and mages lacking in physical capability. But I had an idea that was both somewhat interesting and made me laugh a bit... Especially in worlds where magic-users are of a different species (LotR) or experience the world differently (Dragon Age), what if we had the mages be totally baffled and horrified by concepts most mundanes would have no trouble understanding? And before you start, I mean an actual mage/non-mage divide, not things that are simply a matter of circumstance, such as the typical shut-in (but otherwise human) mage who doesn't understand friendship or love for having not experienced it.

I'm having trouble thinking of things that aren't extremely fundamental to our nature, though. Maybe we could go there, though, if we're assuming mages who are so connected to magic that they can't comprehend these things. Maybe in the same way we can't comprehend how they manipulate magic to move their form, they can't comprehend how we manipulate out muscles to move independently of magic? Hm...

How do you think this could be made to work? (And should I have posted this in World-Building? It seems like more of an RP issue, and thus appropriate for here, but I dunno.)

[Honest Tiefling]

What about water? Mages burn at the touch of water, and possibly die if submerged. As for food, either they cannot eat overly wet foods, or because the universe hates them, they still must eat and drink as normal. So they have to very carefully imbibe small amounts of that which kills them.

Perhaps water burns parts of them, such as spell tattoos they wear to focus their spells, so their face is fine. In wetter weather, they cover everything but their face for protection. It could also just react very badly with their blood, so eating, drinking and bathing is fine, but if they are wounded suddenly rainfall can become deadly. Perhaps it even sets their blood aflame, making them deadly not just to themselves, but to everything around them.

Screw that necromancer, he's not too bad, but that water mage? What a monster!

[calam]

They could be so invested in learning magic that they don't understand the basis of mundane solutions like technology. While levitating a block of stone is simple for them they have no clue how a pulley works and doesn't understand how you can lift more with it than you could with your bare hands. Someone with magic might not even understand the basics of physics or chemistry!

[LibraryOgre]

Isn't this more or less the situation of the Wizarding World in Harry Potter? Most are ignorant of even basic technology... when Sirius is on the loose, they have to explain what a gun is to the Wizarding world.

What if being constantly immersed in magic means that you start losing understanding of basic physics? Kind of like when you switch video games and suddenly can't remember how to do basic things... because you can't remember if this game's engine lets you jump, much less what button you press.

[Honest Tiefling]

Maybe mages go into an ethereal form through meditation. This form releases them from the needs of the physical body and lets them cast great magic. However, the tie between their fleshy body and their will is loosened, so you have the case of mages returning to their bodies and forgetting how to breath without concentrating it, or understanding that the unpleasant sensation they have is hunger and that they really need to focus on swallowing so they don't choke.

[VoxRationis]

You could go the obvious route and have mages be blind for one reason or another. They might sense the world via alternate means, like finding disturbances in magical fields, but come into situations where the magical sense doesn't quite make up for the lack of vision.

In fact, if magic is a thing completely separate from technology, such a handicap could explain why mages have trouble with technology: living creatures affect the flow of magic in easily distinguishable ways, but all inanimate objects seem about the same, so a computer or clock looks just like a box.

[Honest Tiefling]

Expanding on this magic sense, what if it renders them unable to read? Many fields in many time periods would rely on written knowledge (such as engineering or medicine), further explaining why they are divorced from technology. It would also put a neat spin on things, in that mages either intrinsically know things through eldritch forces, or have oral traditions passed down. Your average fighter would stand a better chance of being a well-read and well-rounded individual.

[GlasgowPhill]

There's an excellent series of books called Shadows of the Apt which uses this exact thing. Characters are either Apt because they understand and can work technology or they are Inapt which means they retain some echo of magic. Because the technology gets quite advanced by the end of the series it's quite clearly a big deal not to understand it.

Sadly despite being written by a roleplayer it doesn't have an attached roleplay system that I've heard of but maybe Adrian will write one or work with someone to write one some day.

[Kane0]

Mages rely on a constant flow of magic to sustain themselves. If they can't rest or regain that flow somehow after a hard days work magicing around they run the risk of seriously injuring themselves, not just feeling a little tired. They cannot begin to understand how non-mages can survive a half night rest with just a cup of coffee or two, or how people can manage to stay up all night drinking and only get a headache in the morning.

Mages have a constant, near telepathic link to other magic users in their vicinity, and are attuned to the flow of magic. Too many casters or attuned in one place creates interference and is like a dull roar in their heads all the time. For them crowds are a nightmare, cities are deathtraps and libraries/colleges are tortuous prisons. The few that have built up resistance to this or learned to block others out to some extent come off as divorced from reality or devoid of most emotion and other basic responses.

I had a third, but I forgot.

[Flickerdart]

You could go for the low-hanging fruit and make magic require a supremely logical and organized mind, to the point that a spellcaster can no longer understand things like beauty or pleasure. You could also make magic so seductive that they can no longer comprehend why anyone bothers to do anything but study or practice it. In most cases, this just makes mages devoid of initiative and easily manipulated, but in extreme cases they could forget to eat, breathe, etc.

[Cealocanth]

What if a mage is someone who exists outside of the normal bounds of reality. They have no real corporeal form, only what they create for themselves, and manipulate 'magic', essentially meaning the fabric of reality, just to stay alive. Absorbing life energy from the world around them is as fundamental to them as is eating and drinking, and reshaping the world in order to allow for movement is as easy as walking is to us. The powers of some of the most benign of such creatures would be magic indeed to the ordinary eye, but they would see practical things such as tool use or chemical interactions such as love and morality as alien and purely superficial concepts. "Why do these odd creatures need an object to shape their world, and why do they need to damage the earth to use its stone? Wouldn't it just be easier to conjure some stone where they want it? How inefficient."

Another idea: What if mages are born with a speical "gift" from some sort of divine creature that acts as both a blessing and a curse. They can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste reality just like anyone else, but all machinations of logic and reason come across as utterly alien to them. Instead, the obvious parts of the world come from emotion and morality. To ask "what causes this to happen?" would be as difficult and unsolvable a question as "what is the right thing to do?" Yet give any mage a situation in which there is no clear right and wrong answer and present a moral dilemma that would baffle even the most practiced of ordinary humans and they will answer "This is obviously the correct choice." The source of magic, in this case, would come in their uncanny knack for the minds of others. Human courses of action are obvious, and so they gain an Oracle-like foresight of events. With practice they can persuade anyone and everyone they know to do one thing or another, to think a certain way. A society of mages would be impossible, as the very notions of civilization and organization would baffle them, but an ordinary society could be seen to worship the "cult of mages" for their incredible abilities to lead.

[Jacob.Tyr]

Maybe Mages could be so out of touch with the physical world that they fail at basic things like not soiling themselves while simultaneously being amazed that other people can just tell when they need to use the bathroom. They could be incapable of controlling their breathing, constantly choking, falling asleep without realizing they were ever tired.

[Knaight]

To some extent, you can take the wonder that already exists. People have accomplished ridiculous physical feats, from moving in extremely controlled and impressive ways to surviving extremely grievous injuries to feats of amazing endurance. On the mental side, there's the complexity of all sorts of specialized fields, the amount of knowledge so called "primitive" societies have about the world around them, savants learning dozens of languages in a week or performing mathematical calculations at amazing speeds.

Now, say there's a culture where magic is just the norm. It's used for just about everything, it's what just about everyone specializes in. People from that culture are pretty likely to be shocked when coming upon the extremes of natural ability. Said extremes are likely to be seen as incomprehensible, seeing them as disturbing is also very much possible. After all, that person walked a hundred miles with a spear stuck through them on no food and next to no water. That person just performed a bunch of impressive acrobatics with a bar. That person calculated the precise behavior of something without even magically looking at it.

[Kantaki]

You could go for the low-hanging fruit and make magic require a supremely logical and organized mind, to the point that a spellcaster can no longer understand things like beauty or pleasure. You could also make magic so seductive that they can no longer comprehend why anyone bothers to do anything but study or practice it. In most cases, this just makes mages devoid of initiative and easily manipulated, but in extreme cases they could forget to eat, breathe, etc.

The opposide is fun as well: the arcane energies are a absolutely chaotic force. Those that are attuned to them, either by birth or through study, are unable to grasp the pure logic needed for the mundane sciences. Basicly while they could draw an perfect summoning circle thanks to their knowledge of magic they have no idea of the math behind it.

[Mando Knight]

Or, perhaps, the ability to use magic requires so much of one's mental capacity that they simply can't remember anything else. A thief dabbling in cantrips might be a little airheaded sometimes but otherwise alright, while the wizard might have forgotten his own family just so he could memorize one more spell.

[Hjolnai]

Maybe magic causes agonizing bodily degradation, so that wizards have little understanding of a number of human activities. Aversion to the risk of death or injury is alien to them, when they live in constant pain and can expect only a few years more. Planning for the future? Why? They won't be around to see it.

This also gives a pretty good reason for most people with magical potential to refuse to use it. The cost is far too high for the benefits.

[nedz]

You could just make the use of magic addictive — like gambling or various substances — and have mages acquire the usual side effects of such behaviour. This would give rise to things like Temperance movements, Prohibition, Component running and Mages Anonymous.

[NichG]

One interesting take on it might be that if you understand magic, it stops working for you. So basically, mages have to either be capable of dissociating their own mind at will, lying to themselves really well, or must remain ignorant of the details of how their powers work. The idea would be something like there being a set of paradoxes which, if you believe in both sides of them fully, it causes the universe to become undetermined in a way that you can subconsciously control. But if you understand why they're paradoxes and thus what part of the universe they blur, you can't believe both sides of them and get the effect.

[Shalist]

In Peter Hamilton's 'Nights Dawn' series, those able to connect with other minds from birth ('Edenists,' via an artificially developed telepathy gene; vice 'Adamists,' who oppose such tampering) find the thought of not being in constant contact with their peers to be terrifying. Imagine not having that openness and intimacy with everyone, or losing a loved one to something as preventable as death (since they eventually just upload their minds into the local hub)...

Really, any societal split between magic / mundane could lead to significant differences in quality of life, i.e. "Why...why in the world hasn't that person just gone to the Healers to get [whatever] fixed?" And that can run both ways ("What in the world is this 'indoor plumbing' of which you speak?").

An unrelated anecdote...There was a Forgotten Realm trilogy that took place in Halruua, a kingdom where magic is so omnipresent that at one point a main character (who was incapable of using it) performing on the street was unable to convince a crowd that her tricks were really just sleight of hand and such, vice actual magic :P

[Blackhawk748]

Expanding on this magic sense, what if it renders them unable to read? Many fields in many time periods would rely on written knowledge (such as engineering or medicine), further explaining why they are divorced from technology. It would also put a neat spin on things, in that mages either intrinsically know things through eldritch forces, or have oral traditions passed down. Your average fighter would stand a better chance of being a well-read and well-rounded individual.

This made me chuckle. "Ya Wizard, the Fighter is the knowledge junky now!!"

[Ettina]

In Dresden Files, wizards tend to make technology fail by being near it. As a result, it's pretty tough for them to make use of technology, and most of them know very little about it. In one book, a regular human takes something the wizards want and cuts a deal with them to tell them where it is. To avoid double-crossing, he has the information in the form of GPS coordinates on a flash drive so they can't find it if they steal it from him.

[Slipperychicken]

mages totally baffled and horrified by concepts most mundanes would have no trouble understanding?

[at a gym]
Wizard: "Let me get this straight. You're telling me that every day you lift these objects up and put them back down again.."
Fighter: "Eee-yup"
Wizard: "And you restrict your diet..."
Fighter: "Uh huh. Protein shakes, steaks, no sweets"
Wizard: "And you endure other harships.."
Fighter: "No pain no gain, bruh"
Wizard: "For MONTHS on end.."
Fighter: "Years, actually.
Wizard: "And repeating the same rituals, for countless months, somehow makes you strong enough to wrestle a dragon"
Fighter: "Pretty much. You do have to increase the intensity if you want to get big"
Wizard: "And then SOMEHOW, WITHOUT MAGIC, this also increases your physical size"
Fighter: "If you don't believe me, just check these gains" [flexes]
Wizard: "And I thought the arcane secrets were baffling!"

[Segev]

A concept I had once involved "elves" being a race of intangible creatures that are incapable of effecting real, solid things, but which find illusions to be quite real. And they're able to conjure them. Their illusions can't actually effect humans, except for the sensory input, however. Through possession during procreative acts, half-elves can be born who are tangible and find illusions to be all too real, as well.

Such a setting might create this kind of mutual bafflement.


Take old traditional restrictions on witches or fae and apply them to mages. Can't cross running water, must repay any debts incurred, unable to cross the threshold of a home uninvited... Mages would understand these rules as intrinsically as we appreciate gravity and the fact that we can't walk on water or take to the air and fly on a whim. So seeing us do them would be as fascinating to the mage as the mage's ability to teleport is to a non-mage.

[Marlowe]

There's an excellent series of books called Shadows of the Apt which uses this exact thing. Characters are either Apt because they understand and can work technology or they are Inapt which means they retain some echo of magic. Because the technology gets quite advanced by the end of the series it's quite clearly a big deal not to understand it.

Sadly despite being written by a roleplayer it doesn't have an attached roleplay system that I've heard of but maybe Adrian will write one or work with someone to write one some day.

Read a bit of that. Some races are building clockpunk airforces but can't do magic at all while others can throw around the equivalent of low-level spells as easy as wiggle their fingers, but can't figure how a doorknob works or how to open a window.

[hiryuu]

You could go for the low-hanging fruit and make magic require a supremely logical and organized mind, to the point that a spellcaster can no longer understand things like beauty or pleasure.

I hate this stereotype. So much.

Anyway, the traditional D&D "mage" is based on a mistake made early during D&D's development about a large number of preconceived notions of druids, Gandalf, Merlin, Islamic alchemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan (who was a badass - his big trick was that he claimed he could make people with the right chemical compounds), and the fact that the devs were super big fans of The Dying Earth. So, before getting in to anything, bear in mind that our ideas about what constitutes a "magic user" in standard thought in regards to D&D and a lot of gaming in general are actually very limited. In cultures around the world, magicians are priests and warriors and explorers and comedians (this is actually a deadly serious role in many cultures).

In all these iterations it is important to note that what we're calling a "wizard" is actually a very hermit-like priest attempting to determine how god (or gods) created the world and what needs to be done to keep that world working properly. It is, essentially, the same story as a scientist, but without our modern method of discernment from logical deduction; anybody who was going to be a chemist or a biologist had to deal with the prevalent zeitgeist and assume certain things that had been guessed outright. This changes in, say, a D&D universe, mind you, where there is obviously some form of scientific methodology going on - wizards and the like aren't just randomly guessing and never bothering to directly test it, they're actually doing tests and running experiments and making up new spells. In our world, this kind of testing led to telegraphs and phones and cars and skyscrapers and it's propelling us to other planets and potentially other universes.

Of course the entire point of this is the "mundanes" in our universe often find "magic" disturbing and incomprehensible. Don't believe it? Go to youtube and look for how many people are there trying to "debunk" evolution, thermodynamics in general, AIRPLANES, and the idea that genetically modifying crops is somehow a completely different process than hybridization just on a much faster scale. I can wait.

That's why it's a stereotype. Because to the uneducated, an educated person is mysterious, scary, and seems confident to the point of disgusted aloofness. Now imagine that scary guy doesn't have to fly to Sweden to fire up his particle accelerator to fry you. She can do it right there. With the right word to the right place at the right time with the right hand motions. D&D mages, at least, are freakin' Dr. Who.

Anyway, in the mythology I grew up with, mages were all "big men," I guess you could call them. Glooscap and giants, the stikini owl-women, Chokfee and Breathmaker. Imagine how weird it would feel if you were suddenly introduced to this whole fantasy novel business and the only stories that you could relate were stuff about the time Chokfee stole tobacco from possum so he could sneak into Thunder-man's pavilion, and rode around on his cloud for a while, or where all the magicians you heard about punched holes in the sky and wrestled lightning for sport, and suddenly you're confronted with the bearded white man in every book. An endless parade of this strange being, who might as well be an alien to you, seems to be taken for granted by the entire community you're meeting.

Which I think is the crux of my problem in all these sorts of ponderings - if magic exists in the universe, then it is a perfectly normal part of that universe's physical laws (whether the common folk know about it or not), and someone studying it will certainly learn and forget more about the universe than your average peasant just by necessity. "Magic" isn't a system or a process, at least as D&D presents it. It's a force, and if it's a force, then a system designed to describe forces can definitely step in and deal with it - and once they start applying the scientific method to their universe, well, magic will fall in line. At least enough to get us that class we call "the wizard."

[Marlowe]

So, magic in a D&D-verse is a known natural force that follows observable and empirically proven laws, a spellcaster is more like a scientist who brings his lab and gadgets with him wherever he goes than a mysterious manipulator of the supernatural, and that distrusting "magic" makes as much sense in this milieu as distrusting physics or chemistry does in ours.

I agree with that. Only trouble is diving into this leads to a campaign atmosphere more akin to science-fiction than fantasy. I don't have a problem with this, but I've noticed a few people do.

Completely unrelated, I now have a desire to play a character who doesn't believe in "magic", and explains away everything the spellcasters do as the result of spontaneous combustion, freak weather, mass hysteria, marsh gas, ball lightning, or whatever.

Bonus points if he's a high-level Swordsage who throws around supernatural abilities like peanuts.

[LudicSavant]

You could go for the low-hanging fruit and make magic require a supremely logical and organized mind, to the point that a spellcaster can no longer understand things like beauty or pleasure.

I hate this stereotype. So much.

Anyway, the traditional D&D "mage" is based on a mistake made early during D&D's development about a large number of preconceived notions of druids, Gandalf, Merlin, Islamic alchemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan (who was a badass - his big trick was that he claimed he could make people with the right chemical compounds), and the fact that the devs were super big fans of The Dying Earth. So, before getting in to anything, bear in mind that our ideas about what constitutes a "magic user" in standard thought in regards to D&D and a lot of gaming in general are actually very limited. In cultures around the world, magicians are priests and warriors and explorers and comedians (this is actually a deadly serious role in many cultures).

In all these iterations it is important to note that what we're calling a "wizard" is actually a very hermit-like priest attempting to determine how god (or gods) created the world and what needs to be done to keep that world working properly. It is, essentially, the same story as a scientist, but without our modern method of discernment from logical deduction; anybody who was going to be a chemist or a biologist had to deal with the prevalent zeitgeist and assume certain things that had been guessed outright. This changes in, say, a D&D universe, mind you, where there is obviously some form of scientific methodology going on - wizards and the like aren't just randomly guessing and never bothering to directly test it, they're actually doing tests and running experiments and making up new spells. In our world, this kind of testing led to telegraphs and phones and cars and skyscrapers and it's propelling us to other planets and potentially other universes.

Of course the entire point of this is the "mundanes" in our universe often find "magic" disturbing and incomprehensible. Don't believe it? Go to youtube and look for how many people are there trying to "debunk" evolution, thermodynamics in general, AIRPLANES, and the idea that genetically modifying crops is somehow a completely different process than hybridization just on a much faster scale. I can wait.

That's why it's a stereotype. Because to the uneducated, an educated person is mysterious, scary, and seems confident to the point of disgusted aloofness. Now imagine that scary guy doesn't have to fly to Sweden to fire up his particle accelerator to fry you. She can do it right there. With the right word to the right place at the right time with the right hand motions. D&D mages, at least, are freakin' Dr. Who.

Anyway, in the mythology I grew up with, mages were all "big men," I guess you could call them. Glooscap and giants, the stikini owl-women, Chokfee and Breathmaker. Imagine how weird it would feel if you were suddenly introduced to this whole fantasy novel business and the only stories that you could relate were stuff about the time Chokfee stole tobacco from possum so he could sneak into Thunder-man's pavilion, and rode around on his cloud for a while, or where all the magicians you heard about punched holes in the sky and wrestled lightning for sport, and suddenly you're confronted with the bearded white man in every book. An endless parade of this strange being, who might as well be an alien to you, seems to be taken for granted by the entire community you're meeting.

Which I think is the crux of my problem in all these sorts of ponderings - if magic exists in the universe, then it is a perfectly normal part of that universe's physical laws (whether the common folk know about it or not), and someone studying it will certainly learn and forget more about the universe than your average peasant just by necessity. "Magic" isn't a system or a process, at least as D&D presents it. It's a force, and if it's a force, then a system designed to describe forces can definitely step in and deal with it - and once they start applying the scientific method to their universe, well, magic will fall in line. At least enough to get us that class we call "the wizard."

This post is absolutely fantastic, and I couldn't agree more about hating that stereotype. I am sick to death of straw vulcans (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan). Emotion and logic do not run counter to each other. In fact, logic often serves emotion (just look up instrumental rationality, for instance).

[Segev]

If you want excellent works that examine magic in a way that both retains the sense that it is magical (because it operates in ways that are wholly impossible to real-world physics, most notably violations of the three laws of thermodynamics), but treat it as a learnable and masterable subject with definite rules that can be explored and understood, read any of Sanderson's novels set in his Cosmere. A good starting point is the Mistborn trilogy, but all of it is very, very good.

[Blackhawk748]

If you want excellent works that examine magic in a way that both retains the sense that it is magical (because it operates in ways that are wholly impossible to real-world physics, most notably violations of the three laws of thermodynamics), but treat it as a learnable and masterable subject with definite rules that can be explored and understood, read any of Sanderson's novels set in his Cosmere. A good starting point is the Mistborn trilogy, but all of it is very, very good.

Ive read a bit of Mistborn, seemed really interesting, i just never got around to reading the rest of it :smalltongue:

[Segev]

Ive read a bit of Mistborn, seemed really interesting, i just never got around to reading the rest of it :smalltongue:

It's worth it. Elantris is another great one, and there are several others. His magnum opus, that starts pulling the background elements together, is his Stormlight Archives series; the first book is The Way of Kings, and is well over a thousand pages long.

Mistborn, in particular, however, does a great job of establishing that Magic A is Magic A, and then exploring what you can DO with it. But magic still is magical; it's controlled by the practitioner's will and is something you do, not something you use a tool to do (even if you built the tool).

I think that might be the essential bit of "magic" vs. "technology:" Magic - and psionics - is almost like an extra limb or sense, whereas technology, even when you build and design it yourself, is done through the medium of your very human body pushing, pulling, and manipulating things that technically any other human could do. In a sense, martial arts and extreme levels of gymnastic and other athletic performance are more "magical" to most modern humans than technology is just because they get their bodies to do things that most of us cannot.


So, in a sense, if the mages just don't have the ability to balance on one hand, lift ox-pulled carts out of rutts, or run for long periods of time, but the mundanes do, that could almost seem magical. (The reason it often doesn't to mages we're used to is that "magic can do anything," so the mage can do all of that with the right spell, too.)

[erikun]

Tales of the faerie or the fae tend to involve strange changes in time or direction. It's been said that a person lost in the fae for several hours can be gone for years, or could travel great distances in a short journey. Perhaps the same could be said for people who practice magic? That is, the more and the stronger magic they research and understand, the more familiar they are with the fae lands. A highly accomplished wizard could end up taking fae as the 'normal' and everything else as strange.

"What, how do you mean you grow food? You put it in the ground, and it gives food as it gets older? How do you know when it's ready? What, you could the days? What if you miss one? What if a month or two passes by when you're asleep? What if the plant wants to age backwards? What if you go outside, and the ground has decided to get up and leave? It just seems like a terribly impractical way of doing it, so prone to uncertainty."

[NichG]

Yeah, the two major characteristics that generally separate 'magical'-feeling things from technology-feeling things are the idea of something that resides within individuals rather than something shared and independent of the users, and the idea of the relevancy of mind.

The former manifests in how stories about or including magic usually tie it to individuals who have the special and personal ability to use it. It might be that they are a magical creature, or have 'a gift' or even just have undergone extensive training of a specific sort, but it usually remains something that has a tight sense of belonging and integration into particular actors in the story rather than something that renders the user interchangeable the way technology tends to do.

The latter manifests in the tendency of the internal logic of magic to directly interact with concepts which are first-order to our experience as humans, rather than having to go through some lower-scale phenomena. In stories of magics, the magic often can influence, or directly depend upon: emotions, thoughts, intentions, morality, 'truth', promises/vows, taboos, language, rhyming, etc. The idea of chanting in order to work magic implies a universe for which the human level of existence is the most fundamental one - e.g. some kind of aware, conscious universe whose underlying laws are the laws of people not the laws of physics.

Sometimes this kind of thing can still appear in stories about technology, but usually the author will inject an intervening opaque level of reality in order to give it the feeling of having been demystified. Technology in a story needs a 'because' to explain how it reads minds or why emotions matter to it or why it can interpret the wording of a wish or whatnot. But for magical stories, those are treated as immediately available natural concepts.

[roko10]

Alternatively, make it so that mages give up their capability to comprehend and speak normal human speech for the ability to speak gibberish and make the impossible happen just by saying some words of that gibberish.

Other people would not understand anything that a mage says, and to a mage, normal speech sounds like a cross between animal sounds and horrifying eldritch "sounds" that men weren't meant to hear.

No wonder why mages become hermits and/or a tad insane.

[Roderick_BR]

Instead of magic vs technology, do the opposite, for these mages, their magic IS technology.

Imagine someone used to cars, elevators, automatic doors, computers, smartphones suddenly having to spend time at a town without eletricity or fuel-based machines.

Now imagine a wizard used to have all kinds of magic items spending a day in a town without any.
"Wait, 4 days to reach the other city? Riding what?!"
"Your oven is taking too long. Mine would be finished by now. I know it's been only 5 minutes, that's why I think it's broken."
"Why are you making holes in the ground with that weird tool?"
"You just plucked something outta that tall plant and put it in your mouth?! Savage!"

[erikun]

Instead of magic vs technology, do the opposite, for these mages, their magic IS technology.

Imagine someone used to cars, elevators, automatic doors, computers, smartphones suddenly having to spend time at a town without eletricity or fuel-based machines.

Now imagine a wizard used to have all kinds of magic items spending a day in a town without any.
"Wait, 4 days to reach the other city? Riding what?!"
"Your oven is taking too long. Mine would be finished by now. I know it's been only 5 minutes, that's why I think it's broken."
"Why are you making holes in the ground with that weird tool?"
"You just plucked something outta that tall plant and put it in your mouth?! Savage!"
"Why are you killing that small animal?! Just buy meat from the store like any civilized individual!"

[Vrock_Summoner]

"Why are you killing that small animal?! Just buy meat from the store like any civilized individual!"

Correction: "Just use a food-creation spell like any civilized individual! ... What, you can't do that? What is wrong with this place!?"

I'm loving the suggestions so far guys! Especially the idea that they can't control their own body functions... Keep it up!

[Blackhawk748]

"Why are you killing that small animal?! Just buy meat from the store like any civilized individual!"

If any of my party ever plays a mage like this i am so gonna play a Druid who has "Animal" turned up to 11.

*Holds up raw rabbit* "Want some?"

[hiryuu]

So, magic in a D&D-verse is a known natural force that follows observable and empirically proven laws, a spellcaster is more like a scientist who brings his lab and gadgets with him wherever he goes than a mysterious manipulator of the supernatural, and that distrusting "magic" makes as much sense in this milieu as distrusting physics or chemistry does in ours.

And distrusting it should be remarkably common. You know where the myth that medieval people couldn't read comes from? It's because the church insisted on using Latin for everything and didn't allow the public to learn it. They didn't want the surprisingly literate rabble reading their own bibles (you'd be surprised how literate a society gets when everyone has to be their own lawyer and accountant).


I agree with that. Only trouble is diving into this leads to a campaign atmosphere more akin to science-fiction than fantasy. I don't have a problem with this, but I've noticed a few people do.

Have you ever read the novels they based Vancian casting systems on?

That is exactly what they are.

Honestly, I think spell research rules should be huge and robust and cover a wide variety of situations. I think a small handful of spells should be offered for each school and then everyone should be encouraged to develop their own. I think "schools theory" should be debated by wizards who insist that the eight schools are correct and they get into fistfights with "elementalist theory" wizards and have huge academic rivalries with "great wheel" theory wizards. I think there should be discussions on the mathematical nature of the quadratically expanding power of spells - "The Nine Circle problem applies limits on the iterations of the energy utilized in framing spellcasting, and imposes a hard limit on its capacities, but unfortunately, the math only works if you use ten as your base, but multiples of three as a series of imaginary numbers, it's been driving mages insane since the third century when it was first proposed in calculation." I think mage spellbooks should have fold-outs and inserted folios and have to be strapped onto your back with a series of chains because our real ones would have to be (https://c4.staticflickr.com/8/7159/6515045023_31f712b217_b.jpg). I think spellbooks cost so much to inscribe spells because you need to illuminate the pages for not just "magical" or scientific reasons, but spiritual ones. You didn't just flick your quill out and start working when you were inscribing books. You needed silver, gold, berries to make ink, willow bark, charcoal, leather pressing kits, multiple pens, brushes, and mercury. When you open a spellbook it had better look like the Book of Kells (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/KellsFol032vChristEnthroned.jpg). It would blow my mind if I were running a game and someone said "no, wait, stop, you're making magic too much like science fiction."

I guess if you want a "fantasy" "feeling" system, you'll have to rebuild entirely from the ground up - and lots of people have. My current favorite is Spheres of Power, but even in a setting like that, there's still magical energies to decipher and name.

Which, that leads into another peeve of mine - there's this big trope that goes around lots of movies and books about the "nature aligned" people asking what use names are. There has never been a culture that does not name things nearby where they live. There has never been a culture where people do not have names. It is stupid. It needs to stop. When you have a character questioning a need for names, they are questioning having any kind of language at all, and it's a vicious and painful kind of irony.

Anyway, I really do urge people playing wizards to read about Roger Bacon, Jabir ibn Hayyan, medieval monks, cunning folk, Marianos, Hero of Alexandria (who was so cool he proposed steam trains, combat robots, and vending machines in the TENS AD, but Caligula was a jerk and said that it would eliminate the need for slaves), and Al-Tughrai. It's important to note that just about all of our current philosophy of science and mathematics comes from the Islamic golden age - who were HUGE Greek/Roman fanboys. They preserved and added to so many Greek works that we have stuff that still hasn't been translated to this day sitting in libraries and museums around the world, and that's after the various crusades burned a 9/10ths of it. It's a great place to crib ideas for wizards.

[gomipile]

Perhaps the magic users could be disgusted at the idea of eating food that isn't conjured, and outright horrified at eating meat that actually used to be part of a live animal. Note that they eat meat and vegetables, they just hate the idea of eating a plant that used to grow or an animal that used to be alive.

Yes, this is inspired by Star Trek replicator conversations on TNG.

[Marlowe]

And distrusting it should be remarkably common. You know where the myth that medieval people couldn't read comes from? It's because the church insisted on using Latin for everything and didn't allow the public to learn it. They didn't want the surprisingly literate rabble reading their own bibles (you'd be surprised how literate a society gets when everyone has to be their own lawyer and accountant). Well, yes. How many people IRL do distrust modern sciences? And modern scientists don't usually turn up at random flinging fireballs. Of course, you bought this up before.




Have you ever read the novels they based Vancian casting systems on?

That is exactly what they are. Never seen a copy of "The Dying Earth". Have read "Eyes of the Overworld" and some other stories from the setting. Very very soft Science fiction. There's one where they have wizards walking about on the surface of a neutron star looking for IOUN stones without worrying about vaccum or gravity. The same story has an immortal wizard stranded on an alien planet for millions of years. He decyphers the inscriptions of the extinct alien race he finds by making up a series of invented languages/writing systems and comparing them to the originals until he finds a match. Monkey. Typewriter. Hamlet.

It's Vance. His Science Fiction generally smelt of Fantasy and his Fantasy even more often smelled of Science Fiction. And quite often, lets face it, he was being a little too clever.

What I meant was that taking this philosophy to a conclusion leads to spellcasters coming across like people from one of those old-school hard SF stories from Astounding, which stereotypically consist mostly of scientists and engineers discussing the problem in terms of their respective fields. The DIscussion between Redcloak and Jirix over the ghost-martyrs in the main strip is verging on this.

Problem is in D&D we get the guy that doesn't mind being (if you'll pardon the analogy) Spock, the guy that likes being McCoy, any setting can use a Kirk (much as we might wish this were not the case).

You also have the guys that want to play a flanderized version of Conan (minus that characters intelligence and adaptability) or as Cugel (hopefully with less rape, cowardice, malicious endangerment and whining incompetence). And those guys might not fit in as well.

So. You're right. Problem is many others are going into the game with a clear idea of what the game should be that's rather different from what it actually is.

[goto124]

Why is magic like technology? Because we're playing a tabletop game that has a magic system, so magic has to be systematic. Otherwise how are we supposed to use magic in a remotely reliable way? We could go the more storyline-based style of using magic, but you'll have to find a system that supports it.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with magic resembling sci-fi in some way.

That said, what sort of game systems would you use for the concepts we've come up so far? DnD, FATE, whatever?

[hiryuu]

Why is magic like technology?

Because it is a tool or process that solves problems.


Because we're playing a tabletop game that has a magic system, so magic has to be systematic. Otherwise how are we supposed to use magic in a remotely reliable way? We could go the more storyline-based style of using magic, but you'll have to find a system that supports it.

Trust me, "storyline" magic is the same way - I am a spec-fic author. If your protagonists can't solve problems with it, it's not technology, and it's just scene dressing and you don't need it. Knock it out, it's chuffa.


There isn't anything inherently wrong with magic resembling sci-fi in some way.

If internal consistency causes magic to seem like it's "sci-fi" to people, then those people probably shouldn't be in the spec-fic section anyway.


That said, what sort of game systems would you use for the concepts we've come up so far? DnD, FATE, whatever?

FATE is good, because the tools in that system allow you to wrap yourself around a problem like a starfish.

[Rakaydos]

[at a gym]
Wizard: "Let me get this straight. You're telling me that every day you lift these objects up and put them back down again.."
Fighter: "Eee-yup"
Wizard: "And you restrict your diet..."
Fighter: "Uh huh. Protein shakes, steaks, no sweets"
Wizard: "And you endure other harships.."
Fighter: "No pain no gain, bruh"
Wizard: "For MONTHS on end.."
Fighter: "Years, actually.
Wizard: "And repeating the same rituals, for countless months, somehow makes you strong enough to wrestle a dragon"
Fighter: "Pretty much. You do have to increase the intensity if you want to get big"
Wizard: "And then SOMEHOW, WITHOUT MAGIC, this also increases your physical size"
Fighter: "If you don't believe me, just check these gains" [flexes]
Wizard: "And I thought the arcane secrets were baffling!"

Just wait for the barmaid to explain to the wizard where babies come from. Without a 9th level spell.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Okay, I had to stop myself from writing out a more detailed account of a whole organization based on this idea.

The only beings capable of magic in the world are eunuchs created via surgical procedure or grievous injury to their reproductive sexes before passage into adulthood. They are viewed as even-tempered, rather sedate in mannerisms and generally rather agreeable.

As excess children from noble houses or orphans are sent to live in their conclaves from a very young age, most of the initiates hardly know any other life. Their diets are vegetarian and their environment is peaceful and sedate. They renounce a life free of the pursuit of material possessions, seeking instead to study the domains of knowledge only accessible to their brethren.

Now and then one of their numbers travels into the outside world to perform a task in service to their vassal lord and is astonished to find the world is rife with material aggression, child-like emotional outbursts and impulsive carnal actions of those that mistakenly attribute their flagrant debauchery, stupidity or outright betrayal as 'love'.

I realize this sort of thing makes both sides of this divide a bit alien to the other. But if you were to make the perspective character one of these magic users keeping a journal of their observations while on a pilgrimage or quest, you'd have plenty of opportunity to make them baffled by normal things. Like jealousy, rage, self-destructive actions based on love or spite, etc...

[LudicSavant]

If magic is real and observable, then you can learn about it with science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science). If magic is a tool, process, or technique that can be utilized for a purpose, then it's technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology). When a competitive gamer finds a new combo or trick in a fighting game, the community refers to it as "technology." This is correct use of the word.

[Komatik]

No one's mentioned the Darksword Trilogy by Weis and Hickman yet?

[Marlowe]

No one's mentioned the Darksword Trilogy by Weis and Hickman yet?

No. Because not everyone who plays D&D reads D&D novels.

How is it relevant?

http://somethingpositive.net/arch/sabrina.gif

[NichG]

If magic is real and observable, then you can learn about it with science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science). If magic is a tool, process, or technique that can be utilized for a purpose, then it's technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology). When a competitive gamer finds a new combo or trick in a fighting game, the community refers to it as "technology." This is correct use of the word.

Repeatability is important here. You can construct real, observable things which can't be generalized because they're not consistent under repetition. Fairytale magic tends to not be very repeatable, but is still usable (in the case of fairytale magic, the repeatable phenomenon is that when someone tells you 'X object does Y', then usually they're telling the truth, so there is still some ability to apply methodologies). The other thing is that in stories, you can have hidden information - the protagonist always believes the guy who tells them what the magic object does, because the alternate story of them not believing the guy doesn't tell the story the author wants to tell. Its a subset of reversed causality processes (he doesn't do X because if he did he would fail even if he could not know that).

Systematic reversal of causality might be an interesting seed for a magic system. The underlying principle is 'at X time, Y event must happen' - and therefore, whenever one does something that threatens to prevent that future then it provokes the occurrence of a low-probability event in order to repair the timeline towards the occurrence of the target event. So its ends up being something like a one-time pad - someone who possesses knowledge of what the target event is can figure out systematically what actions evoke what 'magical' effects, but someone who lacks knowledge of the target event cannot deduce it from observations that are sufficiently distant from the event (because there may be missing information about things that are currently outside of the person's light cone).

[goto124]

That works for single-author stories as opposed to tabletop games, right?

[NichG]

That works for single-author stories as opposed to tabletop games, right?

Its hard to do in a tabletop game, but possible. Basically you need the PCs to be the guys with the one-time-pad.

[Ettina]

One example of a kind of spell that wouldn't necessarily be repeatable is if you ask some powerful outsider for a favour. They might or might not be willing to grant it, but I doubt they'd grant the exact same favour in the exact same way each and every time they're asked.

[LudicSavant]

Repeatability is important here.

If a lack of repeatability did absolutely anything to stop science from applying, we'd have an awful lot more trouble with concepts like the Big Bang than we actually do.

[Vrock_Summoner]

Lots of interesting awesome stuff.
I'm not normally the sort to do this, but you seem like the sort to appreciate what Ars Magica has to offer, so I'm going to go ahead and recommend it.

My only real disagreement is with your discrepency between science/technology and magic, but then I've never agreed with the entire concept of "sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology" and vice versa.

[hiryuu]

I'm not normally the sort to do this, but you seem like the sort to appreciate what Ars Magica has to offer, so I'm going to go ahead and recommend it.

Ha! I almost mentioned Ars Magica a couple times - my only real issue with it is some quibbles about the devs' personal politics getting shoved into the game. You know it's harder to change someone's sex than it is to turn them into a dog? Yeah.


My only real disagreement is with your discrepency between science/technology and magic, but then I've never agreed with the entire concept of "sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology" and vice versa.

The problem is that almost no one seems to understand the context and meaning of that quote and therefore think they can swap the words around willy-nilly "sufficiently advanced magic" blah blah blah. Again, technology is a tool or procedure which solves a problem. A spell is a technology, whether you made it up on the spot and can only use it once or not. "Magic" is not a process of description - it's just a nebulous, undefined thing. Once you start defining it, it will become technology. It will fit into the body of knowledge that us on Earth would call "science."

I'm getting myself off track here.

Imagine for a moment, say, a smartphone. You may not know how it works, but you know how to operate it, yes? You know how to download apps and use apps and set up a password and check your e-mail. You know how to tell a message is from your friend and you know for a fact that she's on the other end, shooting you messages about how the guys at the store don't believe her that her feet are too wide for normal pumps. You know there are satellites in orbit and how they got there and about metal and plastic and float-glass and the internet in general.

Now imagine for a moment someone who has no context in any of these things. Picture, if you will, a Carolingian citizen (Western France in the 700s). They do not know how fire works at a base level (that won't come along for another thousand years) - they have no clue what oxygen even is. The innards of their bodies they are forbidden to even look at, much less know about. They don't know about hygenics or dentistry or that Hero invented the steam engine in 60 AD. They know a few things - cutting open a sprain relieves it, which plants alleviate headaches, how to build a nice sturdy house, not a lot of tooth decay (no straight sugar in the diet - the sweetest thing these people have ever tasted is watered-down honey), and 80 holidays off work plus the weekends. Let's imagine for a second these two people can meet - and that the infrastructure that makes your phone work is going at it.

Now here you come with your smart phone.

"Oh, I'm just talking with someone in Japan." He doesn't know what Japan is. To you, just a country someplace. To him, a strange world perhaps.

"Let me check my pulse." What? How? You're not listening to your own chest or touching your wrist.

"Hold on I need to take a picture." THE HELL IS A PICTURE

"Let me send this to my mom" WHERE HOW

"Check out this GPS" ...

"Got some youtube videos you have to see" THAT IS HILARIOUS PLEASE DON'T KILL ME

Hopefully you can see how this works now: you're just holding a smartphone. To someone without any of the context required? You are a mighty demon wizard holding a talisman from the faerie realms and you are communicating with otherworldly beings. That's what Clarke meant, that to any culture without the ability to frame an event, it's magic. To a culture with the ability to frame the event, it's already a part of that culture.

Or, maybe put another way. "From the point of view of the mage, magic is mundane."

It is also important to note that it wasn't until the 1700s that "magic" and "natural forces" were even separated, and most cultures never did - look at Japanese culture as an example.

[Rakaydos]

I'm not normally the sort to do this, but you seem like the sort to appreciate what Ars Magica has to offer, so I'm going to go ahead and recommend it.

My only real disagreement is with your discrepency between science/technology and magic, but then I've never agreed with the entire concept of "sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology" and vice versa.

You have the two saying conflated.

Any sufficently advanced technoligy is indistinguashable from magic
Any sufficently UNDERSTOOD magic is indistinguisable from technoligy

[Cluedrew]

Understanding is a type of advancement so I think both work. Personally, I have very different definitions of magic and technology depending on the context.

As for the main topic, how about magic have trouble understanding logic.

Or at least a logic as we see it, for instance:
A wizard contacts a mundane friend via telepathy.
M: "AAAHHH! Oh sorry you caught me off guard, what is it?"
W: "You said I have to go under the arch on Kings Road to get to the blacksmith's."
M: "Yes, it is near the other end of King's Road."
W: "There are three arches, does it matter which one I go through?"
M: "All of them just cover a third of the road."
W: "But does it matter which one I go under?"
M: "No, it does not."

In other words, in understanding the complex contradictory rules of the universe, their grasp of the simple consistent rules fades.

[NichG]

If a lack of repeatability did absolutely anything to stop science from applying, we'd have an awful lot more trouble with concepts like the Big Bang than we actually do.

The Big Bang is a derived consequence rather than a first-order component. And its only been fairly recently that it got pinned down because we got better mastery of the first-order components like relativity and high-energy physics. Relativity is a bit of a strange bird and is closer to what you're getting at, because it basically came more out of spontaneous insight than it did testing and verification, but of course without the discipline of testing and verification it would have been very hard to distinguish it from any number of crackpot theories that would have seemed equally insightful at the time to the people having them at least.

Another aspect is that relativity has utility because it's repeatable - I can apply it in the future without having to worry that it will become invalid (so yes, the next GPS satellite will be the same as the previous) and I can also apply it in a generalizable way across multiple problems. On the other hand, if all you gave me was 'there was a Big Bang and the initial expansion curve looked like this particular r(t)' then I can't really do much with that directly - it may be correct information you've given me, but because the circumstances will never happen again it can never actually become 'technology'.

With fairytale magic, the overall story of things matters. The science of fairytale magic is basically literature analysis and psychology - the repeatable first-order components are the elements of stories. But the protagonists who use magic in such stories don't have access to those first-order components by construction (they don't break the 4th wall), so instead their success in employing magic is tied to intrinsic characteristics of the protagonist that are correlated to those meta components: e.g. the author wants to elevate the virtue of bravery, so if the protagonist happens to be brave they will also end up being successful in employing magic, and so on.

Of course, fairytale magic is only one example of stories about magic. For the particular story-physics point of view, you can go a bit broader than just fairytales though. Its a general phenomenon associated with stories in which magic is used to serve the plot directly rather than serving the plot through the hands of an agent. It's also very common as a signature to indicate cosmic approval or disapproval of certain intrinsic characteristics - 'this guy's sword can pierce the dragon's scales when no one else's can because he is virtuous and his deity guides his hand' or 'this guy was a gracious host and so obtained a boon from a supernatural creature whose role is to approve of people who are gracious hosts' or so on.

But of course that isn't 'all stories involving magic'. Stories involving ritual, for example, are specifically trying to communicate repeatability - when you do X, Y happens. The overarching thing that sometimes but not always implies non-repeatability is that stories about magic connect the forces of nature to the human scale directly without intervening abstraction. And so the rules of magical physics end up being the rules of human or human-like psychology - which is basically something that has a ton of hidden information and non-stationarity.

[Ettina]

Relativity is a bit of a strange bird and is closer to what you're getting at, because it basically came more out of spontaneous insight than it did testing and verification, but of course without the discipline of testing and verification it would have been very hard to distinguish it from any number of crackpot theories that would have seemed equally insightful at the time to the people having them at least.

Actually, the crackpot theories probably seemed more insightful to their creators. The guy who came up with the idea of quanta (discrete, indivisible energy quantities) thought the idea was utterly ridiculous and only useful as a mathematical shortcut. It was some of his colleagues who realized it might actually be accurate, and he spent a lot of effort trying to convince them they were wrong.

Einstein, too, hated quantum physics, and spent much of his later life trying and failing to debunk it, even though his discoveries laid the foundation for the field.

[Sith_Happens]

As for the main topic, how about magic have trouble understanding logic.

Or at least a logic as we see it, for instance:
A wizard contacts a mundane friend via telepathy.
M: "AAAHHH! Oh sorry you caught me off guard, what is it?"
W: "You said I have to go under the arch on Kings Road to get to the blacksmith's."
M: "Yes, it is near the other end of King's Road."
W: "There are three arches, does it matter which one I go through?"
M: "All of them just cover a third of the road."
W: "But does it matter which one I go under?"
M: "No, it does not."

In other words, in understanding the complex contradictory rules of the universe, their grasp of the simple consistent rules fades.

I like this idea. If magic frequently depends on imperceptible differences between seemingly arbitrary options, it stands to reason that someone neck-deep in magic might at least occasionally forget that some things really are arbitrary.

[Cluedrew]

Thanks Sith_Happens, that's actually a better way of putting what I was trying to say.

[Segev]

Looking at the hypothetical conversation between a mage and a bodybuilder, I'm reminded that a lot of mysticism involves dietary restrictions, ritual purifications, etc. It probably wouldn't actually seem all that alien; it's just a different set of rituals that the bodybuilder follows.

The Darksword Trilogy is not a D&D novel; it's a story about how mages left Earth because those non-mage types were becoming numerous and dangerous. Something about not trusting magic-users because magic-users tended to try to lord it over the mundanes. They founded their own world ages ago, and the plot revolves around this one young man who is born without magic, and how his mother goes to great efforts to hide this, and how he grows up and what he strives to do about it.

Another way to look at the "alien" nature of mages/non- would be to consider, again, the ritual proscriptions under which mage-types might live. Think for a moment just about cultural and religious mores. Even without magical powers as rewards, some people find sets of activities and behaviors to be...uncomfortable...while others engage in them whole-heartedly. Both sides of such a cultural divide might view the other as a bit alien. What if the practitioner of some religious proscriptions had unquestioned, acknowledged magical powers, and they were conditioned upon obeying the proscriptions?

Even without powers, practitioners of cultural proscriptions get very uncomfortable around (or moreso, participating) in the proscribed activities. With powers, they have even more incentive not to. So to them, those without powers might seem hedonistic or otherwise very strange, being comfortable doing something that feels...WRONG...to the mage.


In my own D&D games, I tend to treat magic as being more about diplomacy/contract-law than science. I use it as an animist sort of setting, with "spirits" that underly just about everything. Divine casters are officially inducted into the hierarchies and/or societies of these spiritual beings, and act with authority granted by their position to command the spirits of the world to perform functions for them. Arcane casters are masters of ancient (or new) contracts with spirit realms and entities, performing rites (when they prepare their spells) to make themselves beneficiaries of certain privileges which they can later invoke. Spontaneous arcane casters, instead, tend to have strong personal influence with the spirits. Maybe they operate under a contract or few, but they're signatories rather than one-off beneficiaries; they also simply have friends that are in that realm who do them favors regularly.

[Maglubiyet]

So, in a sense, if the mages just don't have the ability to balance on one hand, lift ox-pulled carts out of rutts, or run for long periods of time, but the mundanes do, that could almost seem magical. (The reason it often doesn't to mages we're used to is that "magic can do anything," so the mage can do all of that with the right spell, too.)

Or even if they could do it, they have never had the opportunity to experience these things. The typical day for a mage is spent in puzzling out extra-planar geometries, dealing with incorporeal spirits, dueling with lightning spheres, making pacts with ancient elementals, and phizthaikting the b'urzl's, all from within the hallowed halls of the Ivory Palace of Infinite Portals. They've never actually witnessed a cart getting stuck in the mud.

Reminds me of some of my college roommates who went to private schools growing up.