How do science and magic relate?

[LostHanyou]

I was thinking recently about how magic in d&d is usually portrayed as academic, and especially arcane magic can be studied. But how far does the connection between science and magic go? Do wizards study physics, biology and chemistry along with magic - and do hard sciences actually affect magic in some way? A lot of the fantasy I'm familiar with doesn't go into great detail about the coexistence between the two, but Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) comes to mind. In that setting, alchemy is described as a science despite being magic, and is connected with real science in how it functions. However, I've noticed in 5e that most players don't bother portraying their wizard as being proficient in any kind of science, even if they're a character whose purpose is to seek knowledge.

[BurgerBeast]

It's probably functionally easiest to separate them, which is what most people do, I think.

But it doesn't sit right with me. I read an article somewhere that said, more or less: in any world in which magic exists, magic is a naturally occurring part of that world and therefore the realm of science. But it is also necessarily indistinguishable form natural processes, because it in fact is natural. Thus, much of what we see as mundane in the real world would actually be magic in a fantasy world. For example, the ability to read might be a form of magic, the notion that chicken noodle soup is good for someone with a cold might be a magical property of the soup or of chickens, and the best blacksmiths in the land may be considered to magically infuse their blades (or the methods they use may be considered magical).

This is the best way to view it, in my opinion. But then there are gray lines between moving silently and casting silent on yourself, or between a motivational speech and the bless spell, for example.

[Millstone85]

I just wrote, in another thread, something that was essentially about that. So I will take the liberty of quoting my post.
Alright so I didn't get my point across at all. My bad.

I wasn't calling magic an absurdity because it allows the mental summon of fire or any such thing. I could have, but I was comparing it to sci-fi tech that does the same thing. Teleportation circles, teleportation devices, same initial suspension of disbelief.

What I was actually referring to is the aspect of magic that you seem to regard as absurd here. The notion that magic is somehow not another aspect of nature, but something beyond it, something supernatural. The notion that magic doesn't run on any particular set of physical laws, but rather on principles that are metaphysical.

And yes, it might make as much sense as saying "On a scale of 1 to 10, this goes up to 11". But it is part of what is expected when a story involves magic. I have seen some interesting discussions on this recently with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Is Stephen Strange using "real magic", or is it "merely" extradimensional energies that bend to the human will? Is Robbie Reyes possessed by an actual demon from Hell, or just another kind of alien entity? It is a distinction people care about.

Now, you can absolutely approach even a setting like the Forgotten Realms with the idea that such a distinction shouldn't even be considered. Here is a world with things like kinetic energy and necrotic energy, both studied by mages using the wizarding method. But then, I tell you, this fantasy is starting to sound just a little sci-fi.

Though I guess that's not all that important to this thread.
But a more boring answer to your question would be that, just like a biologist might not double as a chemist and triple as a physicist, an arcanist isn't necessarily any of these things, nor are they also a psionicist.

[lunaticfringe]

So I usually think of magic as a Reality Hack. A wizard (the only Intelligence caster so magic is less a science now) isn't studying Physics he is studying a way to work around it. Gravity still exists, but he can ignore it with spells such as Fly & Feather Fall. When Fly ends he is back to living with gravity.

I don't buy the if there is magic everything is magic argument. Observation and rational thought by the nonmagic using population (which is most people) would still exist. There would probably be people that hated wizards and magic with high Intelligence among them.

[dejarnjc]

I like how magic worked in The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Essentiall, magic was a kind of hack of the laws of the universe and it definitely could be studied BUT it was a study into and of itself. Basically, knowing the physical sciences wouldn't hurt you as a a magician but it also wouldn't necessarily help you. Magic was it's own completely independent branch of study. Additionally, you could study and practice magic and do everything right but even that wouldn't guarantee you that your spell would work, it required something else that was undefinable.

[LostHanyou]

It's probably functionally easiest to separate them, which is what most people do, I think.

But it doesn't sit right with me. I read an article somewhere that said, more or less: in any world in which magic exists, magic is a naturally occurring part of that world and therefore the realm of science. But it is also necessarily indistinguishable form natural processes, because it in fact is natural. Thus, much of what we see as mundane in the real world would actually be magic in a fantasy world. For example, the ability to read might be a form of magic, the notion that chicken noodle soup is good for someone with a cold might be a magical property of the soup or of chickens, and the best blacksmiths in the land may be considered to magically infuse their blades (or the methods they use may be considered magical).

This is the best way to view it, in my opinion. But then there are gray lines between moving silently and casting silent on yourself, or between a motivational speech and the bless spell, for example.

If it's capable of being studied and is a natural part of the world it should certainly be considered a science is what I've always thought, though I never considered taking it to the next level and applying it to everything. Would magic then override real science? In your example with the chicken soup, someone might explain that chicken noodle soup is good for curing colds because of the nutrients inside and its ease of digestion. In a world where magic is a natural process, would it override what we would consider the rational/scientific explanation for occurrences? I maybe could see it, though I'd never include it in a game unless that was the entire point.


So I usually think of magic as a Reality Hack. A wizard (the only Intelligence caster so magic is less a science now) isn't studying Physics he is studying a way to work around it. Gravity still exists, but he can ignore it with spells such as Fly & Feather Fall. When Fly ends he is back to living with gravity.

Good point. A wizard need only understand the very basics in that case. So magic is actually on the opposite side of science, despite the capacity for it to be studied. I think it could be interesting to take it in another direction and say some wizards might work with science rather than break it, perhaps because it's more efficient to do so. For example, magically creating fire through modifying natural processes as opposed to simply creating fire out of nothing.

[Naanomi]

Magic is a specific science; one that deals in using extraplanar energies to create specific effects when introduced in certain proportions and patterns into another world... historically (1e) mixing positive and negative energy planar energies, but other planes get in the mix as well.

Other 'sciences' likely have some 'magic' elements as well... alchemy is the study of the Elemental energies bound up in physical matter (2e planescape had discussions about 'fire atoms' and 'positive energy spin' and the like when discussing alchemy)... and 'naturally occurring magic' probably means that some 'sciences' exist in a magic universe that are nonsense on a nonmagic one (astronomy, feng shui, alternative medicine, etc)

[PhoenixPhyre]

This is strongly setting dependent. In Eberron, for example, magic is relatively systematized. Artificers rely on small, consistent spells. Forgotten Realms....it depends on exactly who the God(des) of magic is. Generally much less so than Eberron, judging by the state of technology. Others? Who knows. My personal setting doesn't really have science as such--the closest it gets currently is alchemy. It used to have a systematic (better word IMO than scientific) exploration of magic, but that died when the magic system changed. There, physics, chemistry, biology etc are explicitly magical. Everything is magic. An arcanist (or cleric, or...) may study how magic relates to the "ordinary" world, but does so as a magic-user primarily.

[Millstone85]

It is worth remembering that our universe doesn't run on "science". That's just the method by which we study it.

But "magic", that could be both what wizards do and something present in the setting independently of them.

Edit: Eh, replace science with one of its branches, like physics, and the ambiguity is there too. Nevermind.

[solidork]

Yes, you can study magic like a science, but in the default magic system for D&D (which is Forgotten Realms, I guess), the magic that everyone uses is mediated by the will and power of the goddess of magic. Like, Magic in D&D is essentially an API that Mystra has put together for you. You can do amazing things with it, but it's not going to be very helpful figuring out how to write in assembly or how a computer processor is designed.

[Unoriginal]

Magic in D&D usually has rules that can be studied and understood. So science is possible, in theory.

Now the question is, does your D&D world has science? Because the scientific method and science are something that showed up relatively late in human history, all thing considered.

[Sigreid]

I always liked how it was done in a video game called Arcanum. Both science and magic worked, but were like matter and antimatter. They caused each other to fail and serious science and powerful magic coming together were likely to cause a powerful explosion.

[BurgerBeast]

So, in my view, many of the opinions expressed in this thread appear to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is, and why science takes the form it takes on 21st-century earth.


Science is merely an attempt to understand the universe through observation (Empiricism).

Scientific Laws are not prescribed or invented. They are merely the observable truth about our universe. Science has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they exist, and ansolutely nothing to do with their character. Science merely tries to explain them.

It is a property of our universe that natural laws are universal. This is the only reason that scientists treat them as such, and in fact scientists always remain open to the idea that they may not, in fact, be universal, which is why scientists still consider and investigate questions such as those involving prayer, telepathy, and telekinesis. It just turns out that in out universe there is no evidence to support the truth behind those phenomena.

But if an event happened tomorrow, such as an observable instance of telekinesis, or the arrival of Jesus Christ on earth... the reaction of a scientist would not be "Well, the supernatural just happened!" But nor would it be a denial of the evidence. Instead, the scientist would say something more akin to "wow, we appear to have had some serious misunderstandings," followed by "what exactly is going on here?"

A scientist in Faerun would not think that the gods exist outside of science. A scientist in Faerun would view the gods as real, observable, and a part of the universe. The consequence is that science in Faerun would appear to be much different than the science of 21st-Century earth.

If magic on Faerun is able to alter "reality" as we think of it on earth, this would not cause Faerunians to see magic as supernatural. Rather, it would cause them to adjust to their view of reality to include the possibility of such ccurances.

But it would not be different, in principle. The science would be exactly the same. Merely the universe would be different.

Another point of confusion exists, which I conceptualize as a confusion over the distinctions between science/magic and scientific/magical.


From our earthly point of reference, science is real and magic is not. This translates into our explaining fantasy worlds, such as Faerun, as having natural properties (non-magical and understood through science) and other properties (magical, understood through magical studies). Exploitation of science is thought of as technology and exploitation of magical studies is known as magic.

But this is a consequence of our understanding of our own universe and what is possible. We consider what is possible to be the realm of science, and what is impossible to be realm of magic. That's it - that's the only distinction.

So, applying this same mode of thought to Faerun, the existence of gods and magic fall under the realm of what is possible. Therefore they fall under the realm of science. The scientists of Faerun would conceptualizer the world in a way that is consistent with the observable evidence, which includes the existence of gods and magic, and perhaps even the notion that the natural laws of the universe are mutable.


So I usually think of magic as a Reality Hack. A wizard (the only Intelligence caster so magic is less a science now) isn't studying Physics he is studying a way to work around it. Gravity still exists, but he can ignore it with spells such as Fly & Feather Fall. When Fly ends he is back to living with gravity.

The problem with this is that physicists would admit that gravity can be worked around, and either try to explain how the gravity can be worked around (as earthly physicists did when they had to explain how a 747 can fly) or they would adjust their conception of the law of gravity (as they did when confronted with the evidence that we can see objects that are behind the sun during an eclipse, which led to the abandonment of Newtonian gravitation in favour of Einsteinian).


I don't buy the if there is magic everything is magic argument. Observation and rational thought by the nonmagic using population (which is most people) would still exist. There would probably be people that hated wizards and magic with high Intelligence among them.

People who had never seen evidence of magic would probably not believe it, that's true. But it's true on earth and in Faerun. The question is what would an earthling or a Faerunian do when confronted with evidence of magic? Probably more or less the same thing. Uri Geller and the like are shunned and ridiculed by the scientific community as charlatans, because attempts to produce the same results under controlled conditions have always failed. However, if an earthling was able to cast a magical spell reliably under controlled conditions, it would not be ridiculed. It would become scientific evidence, and science would get to work on trying to explain it.

(Note that, even on earth, millions of people believe that people like Uri Geller and Sylvia Brown really are magic. This says a lot about how uncommon scientific understanding is on earth, with our current level of technological advancement. How much more likely would people be to view others as magicians in a world where such things were indeed rare but possible? It would be very hard to be skeptical, yet simultaneously very hard to explain. The scientists would have work to do.)

The difference is that, on Faerun, events that an earthling would consider to be magical can and do happen. Any scientist on Faerun would be confronted with this, whereas scientists in earth are not.


I like how magic worked in The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Essentiall, magic was a kind of hack of the laws of the universe and it definitely could be studied BUT it was a study into and of itself. Basically, knowing the physical sciences wouldn't hurt you as a a magician but it also wouldn't necessarily help you. Magic was it's own completely independent branch of study. Additionally, you could study and practice magic and do everything right but even that wouldn't guarantee you that your spell would work, it required something else that was undefinable.

So, the problem here is that (and I admit no familiarity with Grossman, so my response is limited to what you've written) physicists would be forced to admit that magic is real. They could not simply ignore real evidence and still claim to be doing legitimate physics.


Would magic then override real science?

I hope that my explanations have shown that this question becomes nonsensical. Magic would be real. So science would be forced to acknowledge it and study it. From our modern perspective, it would not be "magical" anymore. At some point in our past, 747s and televisions would have seemed magical, but they are not, and they never were.


In your example with the chicken soup, someone might explain that chicken noodle soup is good for curing colds because of the nutrients inside and its ease of digestion.

Yes, insofar as they know about nutrients and digestion. So if they know about these things, they explain them scientifically and they seem to be mundane. But without knowing about nutrients and digestion, the reality of chicken noodle soup's effectiveness is still plainly obvious. So how do you explain it? It's magic. Note that this applies even to the practitioner: a modern doctor would say "there's no magic involved, it's just nutrition and digestion" whereas a primitive medicine-man would not think of nutrition and medicine in the same contexts, and would offer some false explanation or say "it's magic." From our earthly perspective, "it's magic" translates as "I don't know."


In a world where magic is a natural process, would it override what we would consider the rational/scientific explanation for occurrences?

No. It would be real, rational, and therefore a part of scientific reality. If we could explain it, we would. If we could not, we'd say "it's magic" or "it's not currently understood" which are more or less equivalent. It's a mystery.


(in response to someone else)
So magic is actually on the opposite side of science, despite the capacity for it to be studied.

Technology is technology that we can currently explain.

Magic is technology that we cannot currently explain.

From our earthly mindset, in a universe with immutable, mathematical laws, we simply cannot imagine technology that is unexplainable, so we will always default to: "one day we'll be able to explain that" or "what I'm seeing is not what's really happening."

But if your lived experience was full of instances of the natural laws changing, or magical events standing up to scrutiny, you would simply accept their reality and through familiarity they would become mundane.

It's only because do not live on 21st-century earth that we consider events on Faerun to be either earth-like (mundane, scientific, explainable) or not-earth-like (magic, magical, unexplainable).


This is strongly setting dependent.

I would argue that it is not. While what is possible in particular universe may vary, all this does is set the natural laws.

In principle, science is unchanged: it is still the investigation of the natural laws in order to explain them.

What is explainable is mundane. What is not is either "currently unknown" or magic.


It is worth remembering that our universe doesn't run on "science". That's just the method by which we study it.

Yes. This.


But "magic", that could be both what wizards do and something present in the setting independently of them.

Yes. Just a natural fact of the universe. Mundane to the wizard but magical to the sorcerer.


Yes, you can study magic like a science, but in the default magic system for D&D (which is Forgotten Realms, I guess), the magic that everyone uses is mediated by the will and power of the goddess of magic.

Which only means that the will and power of the goddess of magic is real. Understanding her, her will, and her power would be (by definition) a scientific endeavour.


Like, Magic in D&D is essentially an API that Mystra has put together for you.

I don't know anything about APIs, but again, if Mystra put it together, it's a real thing that can be understood.


You can do amazing things with it, but it's not going to be very helpful figuring out how to write in assembly or how a computer processor is designed.

Again considering I don't know anything about APIs, this doesn't seem to pose a problem. There is plenty of useful scientific knowledge that is limited in its scope.

If the universe is the way it is, that's just the truth if the matter.


Magic in D&D usually has rules that can be studied and understood. So science is possible, in theory.

I would say by necessity. Science is always possible, so long as there is a conscious being to perceive and think.


Now the question is, does your D&D world has science? Because the scientific method and science are something that showed up relatively late in human history, all thing considered.

The formalized scientific method showed up late, but science and the scientific method (in more primitive forms) have been along since humans have, and probably longer. There are videos of crows learning about the world by trial and error, which is I would argue is an indirect example of primitive scientific understanding.

[Naanomi]

Science is made a more difficult endeavor (or at least one with a more limited scope) by planar mechanics. There are planes where gunpowder works, and planes where it doesn't... there are places on the planes where many basic chemical reactions just don't happen; where gravity doesn't exist... and that isn't even getting into 'places' like the FarRealm where the concept of 'reality', 'cause and effect', and 'reason' break down.

'Fundamental truths' are (with few exceptions) going to be bound to particular planes or even portions of planes; and subject to sudden shifts

[PhoenixPhyre]

<snip>

I'd dispute this (speaking as a scientist and a science teacher). Scientific laws are attempts to systematize observations. It's entirely an assumption (a necessary one and a parsimonious one at that) that these laws are universal. It is entirely consistent to posit a universe where the "laws of nature" are local and time-dependent. It would (probably) be a very strange universe (from our point of view), but there's nothing forbidding it.

Science (and the scientific method) are attempts at predicting outcomes. Nothing more, nothing less. Science != Truth. Science doesn't care about what's actually True of the underlying reality. It only sets conditions on what we can predict and observe. In short, saying that anything we understand is mundane and the rest is magic is either nullity (we don't really understand anything) or hubris. It's a statement verging on the religious, taking science WAY out of its place.

Other issues:
+A fantasy universe may not even be approachable rationally. Many myths imply a reality where the principle of non-contradiction (which says that A != A is false) does not hold. In such a universe multiple mutually-contradicting things can be true simultaneously. The "scientific" method fails here--its basic axioms don't hold.

+If there are a) Gods who can b) act capriciously and c) override pre-existing laws, the scientific approach to reality is limited at best. From an in-universe perspective the best predictions are based on the idiosyncrasies of the Gods and are fallible at best. There are no physical laws. "The Gods did it" is the only true explanation in such a universe.

[BurgerBeast]

Science is made a more difficult endeavor (or at least one with a more limited scope) by planar mechanics. There are planes where gunpowder works, and planes where it doesn't... there are places on the planes where many basic chemical reactions just don't happen; where gravity doesn't exist... and that isn't even getting into 'places' like the FarRealm where the concept of 'reality', 'cause and effect', and 'reason' break down.

'Fundamental truths' are (with few exceptions) going to be bound to particular planes or even portions of planes; and subject to sudden shifts

Yes, but if we were to discover, tomorrow, that there are different planes of reality in this "universe" (which would now be a multiverse), what would happen?

We would not simply say, well, science is only applicable in this universe. We would say, instead, that we have discovered other planes of existence, and that the laws that govern those planes appear to be different than the laws that govern ours, so we now need to do science on those planes to learn about them.

My point is that science itself does not change just because the laws of a universe (or plane of existence) change. Science acknowledges the reality and works within it.


I'd dispute this (speaking as a scientist and a science teacher). Scientific laws are attempts to systematize observations. It's entirely an assumption (a necessary one and a parsimonious one at that) that these laws are universal.

I do not dispute this at all (I'm also a qualified scientist and qualified science teacher [but I currently teach math], but I wouldn't say that gives me any added credibility because I often find that scientists are the worst culprits when it comes to misunderstanding science).


It is entirely consistent to posit a universe where the "laws of nature" are local and time-dependent. It would (probably) be a very strange universe (from our point of view), but there's nothing forbidding it.

Agreed. To my knowledge I never denied this. In fact, I meant to make it clear.


Science (and the scientific method) are attempts at predicting outcomes. Nothing more, nothing less.

It only depends on what you mean by "nothing more." I can accept what you're saying here, but I think the construction of theoretical models are a little more than simply concern with predicting. I can understand and accept your view though, that such models are just a part of the predicting.


Science != Truth. Science doesn't care about what's actually True of the underlying reality. It only sets conditions on what we can predict and observe. In short, saying that anything we understand is mundane and the rest is magic is either nullity (we don't really understand anything) or hubris. It's a statement verging on the religious, taking science WAY out of its place.

That's not what I meant.

I am not saying that everything we understand is mundane. I'm saying people accept it (or will eventually accept it) as mundane. Perhaps a better word would be normal, or natural, or nonmagical. It can still be complex and amazing - it's just not mysterious or magical.


Other issues:
+A fantasy universe may not even be approachable rationally. Many myths imply a reality where the principle of non-contradiction (which says that A != A is false) does not hold. In such a universe multiple mutually-contradicting things can be true simultaneously. The "scientific" method fails here--its basic axioms don't hold.

Two problems, here.

First (and not particularly important): we're not talking about those kinds of universes. We're talking about the universes that follow the rules in the PHB.

Second, the basic axioms of science still hold, but they aren't useful. The scientific method is unchanged. The laws (or lack thereof) are just different. But yes, the scientific method ultimately fails in universes that are not, in principle, explainable. But it must also be true that in those worlds you can systematically learn to do anything, including magic. So they are not relevant.


+If there are a) Gods who can b) act capriciously and c) override pre-existing laws, the scientific approach to reality is limited at best. From an in-universe perspective the best predictions are based on the idiosyncrasies of the Gods and are fallible at best. There are no physical laws. "The Gods did it" is the only true explanation in such a universe.

(b) is irrelevant. People can act capriciously in out universe. Capriciousness has no bearing.

(c) pre-supposes that laws can be over-ridden. What I am saying is that if a law can be over-written then it was not a law to begin with. If there are natural laws that can be over-ridden, then there are either laws that govern how the over-riding occurs, or there are not. If there are then those laws can be examined scientifically. If there are not, then the scientific method will eventually stumble upon its own futility. In other words, science will discover that the laws of the world are inconsistent, and try to work form there.

[Unoriginal]

I would say by necessity. Science is always possible, so long as there is a conscious being to perceive and think.

Well, I meant that it's possible as in, it's possible that people in a setting would study magic as a science, rather than, say, being people who know how to obtain the results but have no idea how it works.




The formalized scientific method showed up late, but science and the scientific method (in more primitive forms) have been along since humans have, and probably longer. There are videos of crows learning about the world by trial and error, which is I would argue is an indirect example of primitive scientific understanding.

That... not really accurate. While knowledge and scholars have always existed, science as we define it is not something that works "in more primitive forms". The primitive forms were the precursor of science, but not science itself.

For exemple, Aristotle, Pliny the Elder or Albert the Great were all scholars who knew a lot of things, and we know some of their works at least are based on what they observed and deduced, but they cannot be called "scientists".



Now, I agree that magic is indeed more than likely considered something natural, observable and that can be reproduced in a controlled environment, so it is likely that people would use the scientific method on it. Testing which sound, gesture and ingredient produce which effects, analyzing the powers of various creatures, and the like, could be what you see happening in a wizard's school.

[Sigreid]

I'd dispute this (speaking as a scientist and a science teacher). Scientific laws are attempts to systematize observations. It's entirely an assumption (a necessary one and a parsimonious one at that) that these laws are universal. It is entirely consistent to posit a universe where the "laws of nature" are local and time-dependent. It would (probably) be a very strange universe (from our point of view), but there's nothing forbidding it.

Science (and the scientific method) are attempts at predicting outcomes. Nothing more, nothing less. Science != Truth. Science doesn't care about what's actually True of the underlying reality. It only sets conditions on what we can predict and observe. In short, saying that anything we understand is mundane and the rest is magic is either nullity (we don't really understand anything) or hubris. It's a statement verging on the religious, taking science WAY out of its place.

Other issues:
+A fantasy universe may not even be approachable rationally. Many myths imply a reality where the principle of non-contradiction (which says that A != A is false) does not hold. In such a universe multiple mutually-contradicting things can be true simultaneously. The "scientific" method fails here--its basic axioms don't hold.

+If there are a) Gods who can b) act capriciously and c) override pre-existing laws, the scientific approach to reality is limited at best. From an in-universe perspective the best predictions are based on the idiosyncrasies of the Gods and are fallible at best. There are no physical laws. "The Gods did it" is the only true explanation in such a universe.

This is forum greatness

[obryn]

I think BurgerBeast is on target.

Also, Brandon Sanderson tackles questions just like this in all of his novels. What we'd call "magic" is just part of the various worlds, and it can be tested and observed using scientific methods. The characters, in fact, do just that, and may even talk about how magic isn't real.


Anyway. D&D clumsily tries to have it both ways. "Magic is weird and mysterious!" while also saying "Magic follows extremely specific rules!"

I mean, think about it - with enough empirical observation, a character (or, say, a group of wizards) in a fictional D&D universe must have an in-universe understanding of spell level and character levels. With more observation, let's throw in intelligence/wisdom scores, hit dice, saving throws, and probably things like hit points. But D&D's worlds generally pretend like that's not a thing.

If you want spooky/mysterious/dangerous magic, I think Dungeon Crawl Classics does it the best of what I've seen so far.

[Naanomi]

We would not simply say, well, science is only applicable in this universe. We would say, instead, that we have discovered other planes of existence, and that the laws that govern those planes appear to be different than the laws that govern ours, so we now need to do science on those planes to learn about them.

<snip>

First (and not particularly important): we're not talking about those kinds of universes. We're talking about the universes that follow the rules in the PHB.

Second, the basic axioms of science still hold, but they aren't useful. The scientific method is unchanged. The laws (or lack thereof) are just different. But yes, the scientific method ultimately fails in universes that are not, in principle, explainable. But it must also be true that in those worlds you can systematically learn to do anything, including magic. So they are not relevant.

That is really the bigger point; not that science isn't possible but just that (in a multiversal sense) it doesn't have a lot of explaintory power... the rules of 'nature' are too variable from place to place, and powerful entities can change almost any of them. You can, at best, have a good grasp of what works in your local area of existence right now (probably still pretty useful for day to day life). Perhaps ironically, the 'rules of magic' have a lot more universal applicability than most classic scientific fields of study.

Also, on the second point, there are 'places' in the cosmology where the suppositions underlying the scientific method fail... most prominently the Far Plane, but also some parts of the Deep Astral, Deep Shadow, Temporal Energy Plane, and some other minor planar locations are places where the basic tenants of logic and reason don't apply in any comprehensible sense, meaning the multiverse as a whole isn't 'in principle explainable'.

((Also I teach science sometimes, as a Special Ed teacher I end up teaching a bit of everything))

[JeenLeen]

There's a book series, sort of like an alternate reality Sherlock Holmes (not called Sherlock Holmes, but obviously influenced by it), where magic was done as a science. The 'Watson' there is a magician, who uses forensic magic to help identify who did a crime or detect clues. It's a cool way of seeing magic as a real science. (One short story also hints that science as we know it in real life is possible, but just wasn't really developed since most researchers did research into magic instead.)
Sorry I can't recall the title.

I tend to think of magic/tech as both are possible, and really magic is just another aspect of reality one can study. It can be fun to have settings like Arcanum where magic and tech don't work together, but that seems to mean you need magic to be unreliable (not itself a science) to keep an internal consistency. Of course, internal consistency is not always needed, but my personal taste is to have it.


Do wizards study physics, biology and chemistry along with magic - and do hard sciences actually affect magic in some way? However, I've noticed in 5e that most players don't bother portraying their wizard as being proficient in any kind of science, even if they're a character whose purpose is to seek knowledge.
I would think they could certainly, but it's definitely not a pre-requisite.
As a (I hope useful) analogy, I'm a computer programmer. But I have very little knowledge of hardware, just the parts that impact my code (like, I understand that saving a huge dataset can make my program take a long time due to memory constraints in the server or computer's memory.) Not to boast, but I'm really good using the language I use and I can do a lot of complicated stuff when I need to--but I couldn't explain the underpinings of why my code does what it does when interacting with the computer.

I think magic could be similar. A wizard knows that these spells do X, Y, or Z. They probably understand some basics of the reality they are manipulating, and thus why it takes more energy to cast Fireball than a cantrip, but they don't really need to know the underpinings.

Also, in 5e, magic is explicitly stated in the PHB as being from the Weave (under whatever name the Weave has in a given setting). Of course, DMs are welcome to change that, but it is the default. So I would think the Arcana skill would be sufficient to figure out new application of the Weave (i.e., research new spells or how spells work) and thus one doesn't need to know any 'real life' sciences. To add to the analogy, if I find it's hard to program X due to some hardware limitation, I can find code that gets around the limitation without needing to really understand the limitation--I just need enough knowledge of the language (parallel: the Weave) to bypass the hardware (parallel: reality without magical influence.)

[Sir cryosin]

In my home game my setting is a million of years into are own future. But they way I explain magic Woods Wizards are physicists they studied the laws of physics and the universe and manipulate those laws to create effects that simulate magic spells. Clerics are just doctors, Druids are biologists ect. Magic is just advance technology and advance understanding of are reality and performing magic is just manipulating the laws of our reality.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yes, but if we were to discover, tomorrow, that there are different planes of reality in this "universe" (which would now be a multiverse), what would happen?

We would not simply say, well, science is only applicable in this universe. We would say, instead, that we have discovered other planes of existence, and that the laws that govern those planes appear to be different than the laws that govern ours, so we now need to do science on those planes to learn about them.

My point is that science itself does not change just because the laws of a universe (or plane of existence) change. Science acknowledges the reality and works within it.


Science does nothing. Scientists do things

We could call the result science, but it would look very dissimilar to our current conception of it. That's a definition quibble though, no more.



I do not dispute this at all (I'm also a qualified scientist and qualified science teacher [but I currently teach math], but I wouldn't say that gives me any added credibility because I often find that scientists are the worst culprits when it comes to misunderstanding science).


Very true. I merely wanted to make it clear that I wasn't speaking as a world-builder or DM but as someone with a vested interest in clarity about the proper role of science.



That's not what I meant.

I am not saying that everything we understand is mundane. I'm saying people accept it (or will eventually accept it) as mundane. Perhaps a better word would be normal, or natural, or nonmagical. It can still be complex and amazing - it's just not mysterious or magical.


Again, a definition difference. I'll admit to a knee-jerk reaction against the idea that we "understand" anything through science. I've seen too many fetishize Science and use it as a substitute pseudo-religion. Maybe it would be better in this context to use "magical" for those things that differ from the reality as observed by the players. "Mundane" are those parts that are the same.



Two problems, here.

First (and not particularly important): we're not talking about those kinds of universes. We're talking about the universes that follow the rules in the PHB.

Second, the basic axioms of science still hold, but they aren't useful. The scientific method is unchanged. The laws (or lack thereof) are just different. But yes, the scientific method ultimately fails in universes that are not, in principle, explainable. But it must also be true that in those worlds you can systematically learn to do anything, including magic. So they are not relevant.


Not necessarily. The rules in the PHB can also be thought of as a set of translation conventions between the alien rules (or lack thereof!) and the player's reality. A user-interface of sorts. This is at odds with the "rules as physics" concept. Both are allowed and can't be ruled out.



(b) is irrelevant. People can act capriciously in out universe. Capriciousness has no bearing.

(c) pre-supposes that laws can be over-ridden. What I am saying is that if a law can be over-written then it was not a law to begin with. If there are natural laws that can be over-ridden, then there are either laws that govern how the over-riding occurs, or there are not. If there are then those laws can be examined scientifically. If there are not, then the scientific method will eventually stumble upon its own futility. In other words, science will discover that the laws of the world are inconsistent, and try to work form there.

A God is someone (by definition) with at least a limited ability to change the status-quo ante rules. In the presence of capricious, powerful beings who have root access (to borrow a computer science analogy) to the universe, any systematic understanding of reality is limited (or futile, depending on how fast things change). Thus, people wouldn't approach things "scientifically"--they'd try to get in good with one or more Gods.

I'll admit. Most universes people play in can probably be approached scientifically. I'm in large part trying to push back against the idea that ALL universes must be "our universe with different user settings." There is space for the truly weird and fantastic. Not everything can (or should) be fit to the Procrustean bed of western logical positivism and scientific rationality.

Edit--if my brother heard me say that last bit...wow. I'm usually the one pushing against the woo-woo new-age misuse of scientific vocabulary and pushing for a rational explanation.

[Laurefindel]

Yeah, as it was said before, science is a method, not a "thing". It is thus possible to have a scientific approach to magic, or on the contrary, a more intuitive one.

To me that's the whole wizards vs clerics dichotomy: Wizards study magic through documented observation and experimentation, either their own or that of others. For them the laws of physics and other natural sciences are probably not different from other forces at work and they probably do not see a big divide there. Clerics are taught prayers and are told that their faith will channel the power of their god(s) into magical effects. They probably perceive the world as under a set of "natural laws", with a select few that have the ability to change/affect them.

Perhaps the thread should have been more about magic vs technology? (and I use technology in the broadest sense of the term here, like how crop rotation was a technological advance in the Middle Ages).

[Unoriginal]

Anyway. D&D clumsily tries to have it both ways. "Magic is weird and mysterious!" while also saying "Magic follows extremely specific rules!"

It's not really clumsily. Some magic is weird and mysterious (what does this portal does? Why are giant flying squids showing up each morning on the town square? etc), but a lot of it is understood and follow reliable patterns.

[Naanomi]

To me that's the whole wizards vs clerics dichotomy
Wizards are definetly the most inclined for 'scientific magic'

Using the 'reality is a computer program metaphor
-Wizards study programming, to write their own code and modify the system
-Warlocks hang with hackers and either learn or use their tools or just ask them to mess with the system
-Clerics know the admins, so can beg them to make changes for them
-Druids know the hardware really well, so can make some modifications in that level
-Sorcerers accidentally had their account set as admin accounts, and can make changes without knowing much about it
-Bards learned a bunch of tricks (like those above) without really studying any one method, 'self-taught computer guy'
-Psionics soup up their own personal laptop and connect it to the larger network

[DivisibleByZero]

Why do you need to differentiate the two?

The Doctor: I named her. The power of the name. That's old magic.
Martha: But there's no such thing as magic.
The Doctor: Well, it's a different sort of science. You lot, you chose mathematics. Given the right string of numbers, the right equation, you could split the atom. Carrionites use words instead.

[Millstone85]

Why do you need to differentiate the two?Need or want?

I think that what many people expect when they open a fantasy book is to be told about a fictional setting where science is wrong. That goes beyond the findings of scientists in real life, versus what they would find in that story. The method, nah, the philosophy itself must have failed.

Equating magic with sufficiently advanced or insufficiently understood stuff is a science fiction approach. Here we see Captain Valerius Ace Dictorian landing on the alien world of Toril, where a planetary-wide energy field allows some of the natives to use various forms of telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation and so on. But that field isn't as strong as it used to be, so Val investigates and he eventually finds Mystra, a member of a much more ancient species, who built the energy field in the first place. He helps her with a problem, probably bedding her at some point, and then he flies toward the stars once more.

But if magic isn't supernatural, is it magic? No, there is a fundamental difference between what is accessible to our senses and reason, and the truth within our souls. Have faith, my child, and all shall be revealed! Including how to cast Fireball.

[Naanomi]

he eventually finds Mystra, a member of a much more ancient species, who built the energy field in the first place.
Hey now, Mystra (like most, but not all Gods) is an energy being built from the collective subconscious psychic power of other beings, in this case an ascended human named 'Midnight'... imprinted on filling a template constructed by an even more ancient extradimensional being (Ao)... she isn't an alien species in the classic sense

[Hrugner]

Science isn't a set of facts, it's a means to discovery. Magic would need to appear very random in order for science to be of little use when examining it. If the mechanism behind magic can't be clearly observed or tested, the field of magic could end up being closer to history than science, with wizards passing on their successful guess work to future generations. It could also be closer to psychology where some of the facts are known, much of the material is observable, but multiple theories are fairly accurate but imperfect predictors.

In order to get the most separation between the two, I'd go with magic as history. The experimentation would still require scientific method, but you wouldn't need to study the other sciences.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Science isn't a set of facts, it's a means to discovery. Magic would need to appear very random in order for science to be of little use when examining it. If the mechanism behind magic can't be clearly observed or tested, the field of magic could end up being closer to history than science, with wizards passing on their successful guess work to future generations. It could also be closer to psychology where some of the facts are known, much of the material is observable, but multiple theories are fairly accurate but imperfect predictors.

In order to get the most separation between the two, I'd go with magic as history. The experimentation would still require scientific method, but you wouldn't need to study the other sciences.

I'd call your comparison to psychology apt to many forms of science, particularly our current models of quantum physics and astrophysics - a lot of analysis and experimentation is done to see the results of things that we can't observe directly, and we have models of how we think things probably work, but they're definitely describable as "fairly accurate but imperfect predictors".

D&D/general RPG magic is probably something like that - something with underlying rules that can be approximated through experimentation, observation, and deductive reasoning like science does with other parts of nature, but not something that can be observed directly.

[BurgerBeast]

That... not really accurate. While knowledge and scholars have always existed, science as we define it is not something that works "in more primitive forms". The primitive forms were the precursor of science, but not science itself.

For exemple, Aristotle, Pliny the Elder or Albert the Great were all scholars who knew a lot of things, and we know some of their works at least are based on what they observed and deduced, but they cannot be called "scientists".

I don't know enough about precisely what Aristotle or Pliny the Elder did or didn't do, but I know this: anyone who observed the real world, thought they understood it, and then tried to exploit it (whether successful or not), was doing science. The first human to start a fire was performing a technological task at the time, but absolutely must have used scientific reasoning to get the idea. Even before that, the very first tool was evidence of scientific reasoning.


That is really the bigger point; not that science isn't possible but just that (in a multiversal sense) it doesn't have a lot of explaintory power... the rules of 'nature' are too variable from place to place, and powerful entities can change almost any of them. You can, at best, have a good grasp of what works in your local area of existence right now (probably still pretty useful for day to day life). Perhaps ironically, the 'rules of magic' have a lot more universal applicability than most classic scientific fields of study.

But this is still a tonne of utility. Furthermore, it would be possible to understand precisely why the universe is so variable, because however complex, the actions of the entities that alter reality (and the entities themselves) are real and explainable.

I am imagining an ant hill, and a child who destroys it and squashes hundreds of ants under his shoes. One of the ants has a melt-down and shrieks "what is happening? The world is crumbling!" And another ant says "It's the will of the humans! There's nothing we can do but accept our fate! The universe is as unpredictable as the whims of humans!"

Well, even so... those humans still exist and are still subject to examination for anyone with the means to do so.

So, what advanced scientists would be doing is looking at the various planes of the multiverse to try to determine whether there are laws that can explain them and their differences. This is similar to how modern physicists are looking into whether there is a grand unification theory, because as it strands, on this single plane of existence, there appear to be different laws working on different levels.


Also, on the second point, there are 'places' in the cosmology where the suppositions underlying the scientific method fail... most prominently the Far Plane, but also some parts of the Deep Astral, Deep Shadow, Temporal Energy Plane, and some other minor planar locations are places where the basic tenants of logic and reason don't apply in any comprehensible sense, meaning the multiverse as a whole isn't 'in principle explainable'.

I disagree with the way you've phrased this. There are either laws, or there are not. If there are no laws, that's the end of it. Science doesn't apply. If there are laws, then science applies. But to even be able to say that there is a Far Plane, or the Deep Astral, is to make a claim about reality that is a scientific claim.


((Also I teach science sometimes, as a Special Ed teacher I end up teaching a bit of everything))

Nice.


[PEEVE]Not necessarily. The rules in the PHB can also be thought of as a set of translation conventions between the alien rules (or lack thereof!) and the player's reality. A user-interface of sorts. This is at odds with the "rules as physics" concept. Both are allowed and can't be ruled out.

So, to be more specific, I do not mean the rules about saving throws, movement speeds, and action types (which are user-interface). I mean the rules that say wizards can cast fireball and it will create a blast of a particular radius and deal measurable, predictable damage. I mean the rules which are necessarily a direct measure of the characters' reality.


A God is someone (by definition) with at least a limited ability to change the status-quo ante rules.

This is certainly true from our perspective, in which we do not acknowledge that gods are real. But if the gods are real, then they are a part of the multiverse. Science must acknowledge this, and structure itself accordingly. The existence of the gods would be a scientific truth.


In the presence of capricious, powerful beings who have root access (to borrow a computer science analogy) to the universe, any systematic understanding of reality is limited (or futile, depending on how fast things change).

I don't agree here. In such a world, that would be the reality. The scientific truth would be that the gods can influence the world. There must be some mechanism for how this happens, or else the gods themselves would not be able to do it. So there is room to investigate how, precisely, the gods manipulate the universe, and if it is beyond human access, then the gods themselves might be able to access it.

On a very deep level, as soon as you posit anything about a multiverse, you're admitting a certain amount of structure or organization. If you say "it's nothing but a swirling chaos," then you might have a point. But if you say "there are capricious gods," then you're supplying some facts that can be investigated scientifically. What is a god? How do you know s/he's capricious? How do you know the god exists? Who are you? Etc.


Thus, people wouldn't approach things "scientifically"--they'd try to get in good with one or more Gods.

Agreed. But this is a matter of practicality. In such a world, prayer would get you farther than science. But there would probably still be people who would cling to science. After all, in our world, where science is far more useful, there are still those who resort to, or place stock in, prayer.


I'll admit. Most universes people play in can probably be approached scientifically. I'm in large part trying to push back against the idea that ALL universes must be "our universe with different user settings." There is space for the truly weird and fantastic. Not everything can (or should) be fit to the Procrustean bed of western logical positivism and scientific rationality.

We probably would disagree on this if we gone into it, but it's not relevant, as far as I can tell. I agree with the sentiment, I just think logical positivism and scientific rationality can be applied to anything, whether it is useful to do so or not. More practically, the multiverses we are talking about are necessarily not these types of universes. The universes we are talking about must be able to have player characters inside of them, for example.


Edit--if my brother heard me say that last bit...wow. I'm usually the one pushing against the woo-woo new-age misuse of scientific vocabulary and pushing for a rational explanation.

Ha! Fair enough.

[Thrudd]

D&D magic, at least the sort practiced by PCs in the form of spells, is best understood as a form of technology. The way spells work in no way suggests that a wizard actually knows anything about the fundamental laws of magic and nature in their universe - they are using technology someone else invented and know only how to make those specific things happen according to a proscribed set of actions. At least as far as the game mechanics are concerned. Maybe the technology was invented by a much more advanced lost civilization, maybe it was handed down by the gods, or maybe it was formed over generations of trial-and-error experimentation, but the reality for the PCs is that wizards rarely have opportunity to demonstrate any sort of scientific mastery of the fundamental universal forces - they are more like craftspeople who learn a trade, master to apprentice, they are people who know how to use a particular set of tools and skills that require special training to master.

The broader question has been answered already - science is just the practice of studying one's universe via unbiased observation and experimentation. How this practice might relate to "magic" depends on how that word (magic) is defined in whatever fictional universe we're talking about.

It is important to note that the concept of practicing science, as we understand it, was not a thing that existed in our world until the last few hundred years (at least not beyond a few isolated individuals). So it is not necessary that any given fantasy setting has a body of scientific knowledge or any group of people who know or study the fundamental laws of nature (which means it is not necessary for the DM to detail all these things, either). Wizards don't need to be "magic scientists", in fact the game mechanics do not really reflect that vision of them at all.

[Naanomi]

I largely agree with the above, except that the narrative nature of the Far Plane is that it is defintionally beyond reason and rationality... calling it a 'place' is just us trying to label the incomprehensible. I agree that this rankles my 'scientific instinct' as well, but it is defined as a 'place' where rules have no hold, even basic rules like cause and effect, and x=x

That aside, in planescape there are several groups that 'study' the Gods and have a pretty good practical understanding of how they operate. There are exceptions that make scientific deiology a mess (The Blood Queen is a big one, but there are others); and there are parts of reality very well hidden from mortal view (the action of overpowers and even more so their superiors) that make real understanding a challenge... it doesn't help that people who explore such things tend to get killed by the Gods or become one themselves.

[Nerd-o-rama]

D&D magic, at least the sort practiced by PCs in the form of spells, is best understood as a form of technology. The way spells work in no way suggests that a wizard actually knows anything about the fundamental laws of magic and nature in their universe - they are using technology someone else invented and know only how to make those specific things happen according to a proscribed set of actions. At least as far as the game mechanics are concerned. Maybe the technology was invented by a much more advanced lost civilization, maybe it was handed down by the gods, or maybe it was formed over generations of trial-and-error experimentation, but the reality for the PCs is that wizards rarely have opportunity to demonstrate any sort of scientific mastery of the fundamental universal forces - they are more like craftspeople who learn a trade, master to apprentice, they are people who know how to use a particular set of tools and skills that require special training to master.

The broader question has been answered already - science is just the practice of studying one's universe via unbiased observation and experimentation. How this practice might relate to "magic" depends on how that word (magic) is defined in whatever fictional universe we're talking about.

It is important to note that the concept of practicing science, as we understand it, was not a thing that existed in our world until the last few hundred years (at least not beyond a few isolated individuals). So it is not necessary that any given fantasy setting has a body of scientific knowledge or any group of people who know or study the fundamental laws of nature (which means it is not necessary for the DM to detail all these things, either). Wizards don't need to be "magic scientists", in fact the game mechanics do not really reflect that vision of them at all.

"Wizards as scientists" comes more from the fluff of Wizard classes and the fact that most of the NPC wizards you meet tend to be locked away in towers doing ambiguous research to invent new spells or new half-assed Monster Manual entries. It would be more accurate to say that a subset of Wizards are "scientists" developing new spells and studying magic to learn new things about it, albeit not in the rigorous, peer-reviewed way that post-Enlightenment scientific research tends to be done in reality. Which is presumably why "magical industrial revolutions" don't happen in many D&D worlds - even if the knowledge is there, it's imperfect and patchwork and often not shared except through very Classical Greek lines of master and apprentice philosopher. (It also runs into the Steam Engine Problem of "yeah we can heat water up enough to get energy out of it but we don't have a means to mass-produce it nor any place to use that where it's more practical than manual labor yet").

PC Wizards, on the other hand, are often more like engineers. Using known scientific/magical principles to solve practical problems, like bridging a chasm or knocking out the trio of orcs that are about to dismember you.

[Lombra]

I believe that it is entirely up to the setting, a world might use the physics of ours for most of the things, and magic simply puts exceptions here and there, while another world could be working entirely just because of magic, gravity is magic, light is magic, elements are magic, and people are magic and use it to change and understand the world like we do with calculus and physics. It's one of those session-zero questions to ask to the DM. Personally I prefer the heavy magic over the heavy science because I like my fantasy games more fantasy and less real-world-faithful.

[druid91]

Science as a discipline relies upon a universe who's rules are hard to discover but fixed.

D&D is full of litteral immortal beings who can just tell you how the universe works and even change it if it's in their domain. Much like Mage the ascension the removal of fixed physical laws makes science a useful but not vital discipline. Because like what Happened to gunpowder in faerun, if you find something the gods don't like, they just change the laws.

Magic is a tool crafted by divine entities. Nothing more and nothing less.

[Theodoxus]

Magic is just mindhack; Perception alteration. All magic is illusion. That's the fun thing about our brains, we are only as good as what our minds perceive. If you can make a person (or group) believe that a ball of fire is burning them, awesome! Ever wonder why you can make a Dex save in an otherwise empty room to avoid half the damage?

It doesn't conform to natural sciences because you can make your brain believe anything you want. Dreams are the closest we humans will get to fantastical magic - you can fly, be impervious, control others, etc in dreams.

[dejarnjc]

Magic is just mindhack; Perception alteration. All magic is illusion. That's the fun thing about our brains, we are only as good as what our minds perceive. If you can make a person (or group) believe that a ball of fire is burning them, awesome! Ever wonder why you can make a Dex save in an otherwise empty room to avoid half the damage?

That doesn't work when you consider the multitude of spells that affect the environment or spells that teleport.

[pwykersotz]

I play magic as some people have stated, as a reality hack. Magic breaks the rules. It connects or twists or breaks things in ways that natural law would not allow. It is absolutely separate from nature and science. That said, I don't use modern science either, I use the four elements system and extrapolate upwards. This means no cellular biology or anything.

Since the scientific method is all about observing and measuring phenomena to understand how they operate, I make it so that magic cannot be properly observed or measured. It changes, a LOT. From person to person, from time to time, from place to place. And it never stays the same. That said, I let the existing spells function without impact. I attribute this to the Weave and Mystra (both of which are dramatically changed in my setting, but I keep the names for the sake of recognition). The Weave is Mystra's gift to the world, to allow some order in the chaos of magic. But that gift is subject to alteration too, at Mystra's whim. Wizards have it tough. Sorcerers are lucky.

[Vogonjeltz]

I was thinking recently about how magic in d&d is usually portrayed as academic, and especially arcane magic can be studied. But how far does the connection between science and magic go? Do wizards study physics, biology and chemistry along with magic - and do hard sciences actually affect magic in some way? A lot of the fantasy I'm familiar with doesn't go into great detail about the coexistence between the two, but Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) comes to mind. In that setting, alchemy is described as a science despite being magic, and is connected with real science in how it functions. However, I've noticed in 5e that most players don't bother portraying their wizard as being proficient in any kind of science, even if they're a character whose purpose is to seek knowledge.

Probably because those subjects, although potentially of interest to the same character, aren't intertwined even if they can be applied in tandem.

i.e. One can be a spellcaster without training in Nature (terrain (geology), plants (botony), animals (part of biology, Medicine being the other), the weather (meteorology), and natural cycles (also meterology)). Or alchemy (chemistry) from Guild Artisan or Sage backgrounds (Sage also could specialize in Astronomy or general Research.)

Millstone85 hit the nail pretty directly, being good at one subject doesn't impact capacity or interest in any other subject, and being a Wizard is a very specific focus.

[Thrudd]

I play magic as some people have stated, as a reality hack. Magic breaks the rules. It connects or twists or breaks things in ways that natural law would not allow. It is absolutely separate from nature and science. That said, I don't use modern science either, I use the four elements system and extrapolate upwards. This means no cellular biology or anything.

Since the scientific method is all about observing and measuring phenomena to understand how they operate, I make it so that magic cannot be properly observed or measured. It changes, a LOT. From person to person, from time to time, from place to place. And it never stays the same. That said, I let the existing spells function without impact. I attribute this to the Weave and Mystra (both of which are dramatically changed in my setting, but I keep the names for the sake of recognition). The Weave is Mystra's gift to the world, to allow some order in the chaos of magic. But that gift is subject to alteration too, at Mystra's whim. Wizards have it tough. Sorcerers are lucky.

But that statement doesn't make sense. Nothing can be "separate from nature and science" - science is a method of studying things, and nature is basically everything that exists. Magic users in a fictional world may not generally practice science the way we think of it, but that doesn't mean science could not ever be practiced in their world. If "reality" can be "hacked", then it isn't really all there is to reality, is it? If magic spells exist, then they are a part of "natural law" - it is something that really happens, and interacts with "natural" things, therefore it is both real and natural and there is some sort of mechanism that allows it to function which hypothetically could be discovered by someone.

You perform an action, it has an effect, and in the case of spells very specific, defined and repeatable effects. So there is something in the universe that allows that to happen. People in the world may not necessarily have the curiosity to question and seek for the answers, the DM may not need to develop a detailed set of fantasy physics for their world because it's really complicated and not relevant to the game play, but there are/must be answers and reasons in any fictional universe that dictate how things work there. Even if gods alter reality by conscious decision and this is "magic", gods must be made of something, they are "something", and their consciousness operates somehow to form reality, and how does that work? The answer may be far beyond the ability of anyone in that universe, maybe even the gods don't know, but there must be an answer, and that answer is part of the "nature" of that universe.

[Beelzebubba]

I was thinking recently about how magic in d&d is usually portrayed as academic, and especially arcane magic can be studied. But how far does the connection between science and magic go? Do wizards study physics, biology and chemistry along with magic - and do hard sciences actually affect magic in some way? A lot of the fantasy I'm familiar with doesn't go into great detail about the coexistence between the two, but Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) comes to mind. In that setting, alchemy is described as a science despite being magic, and is connected with real science in how it functions. However, I've noticed in 5e that most players don't bother portraying their wizard as being proficient in any kind of science, even if they're a character whose purpose is to seek knowledge.

Alchemy was the precursor to Science in the 12th-18th centuries, especially chemistry.

They did a whole lot of mixing, burning, distilling, refining and other things but viewed it as a spiritual pursuit to find the divine. So they attached a whole lot of nonsense that only fell away once the Scientific method of 'falsifiable hypothesis' came into being.

If you want to be really pedantic, I'd say Wizard magic is a form of science, because it's repeatable, verifiable, and evidence-based.

[Theodoxus]

That doesn't work when you consider the multitude of spells that affect the environment or spells that teleport.

Why not? You're thinking purely with/about meat. If your brain is literally a VR machine, then teleportation is simply reimaging where 'you' are, say, from your living room to your work space.

If we remove the concept of time, then any movement is just teleportation. Heck, your mind right now, erases all but the most interesting aspects of your travels. Unless you've got a photographic memory, you can't remember exactly, second by second, your drive from home to work. Anything you conjure up as 'memory' is actually your brain reprocessing buttloads of data to make a composite memory. You might remember something distinctive (there was a hot air balloon flying over my turnoff this morning, it was yellow and orange striped with "Balloon Rides Bucket List" written on the side) - but I don't recall what cars were in my way on the freeway, or what color the truck was that was carrying pipes that made me veer away from my normal route (because Paranormal Activity).

Magic hacks the VR system of your mind. It changes the way the brain interprets the laws of physics, doing things that it normally can't.

But then, this is a purely solipsistic construct... otherwise it requires a mindlink of all involved - and/or mass hypnosis if you're suddenly using magic to fly and others witness this 'miracle'.

[pwykersotz]

But that statement doesn't make sense. Nothing can be "separate from nature and science" - science is a method of studying things, and nature is basically everything that exists. Magic users in a fictional world may not generally practice science the way we think of it, but that doesn't mean science could not ever be practiced in their world. If "reality" can be "hacked", then it isn't really all there is to reality, is it? If magic spells exist, then they are a part of "natural law" - it is something that really happens, and interacts with "natural" things, therefore it is both real and natural and there is some sort of mechanism that allows it to function which hypothetically could be discovered by someone.

You perform an action, it has an effect, and in the case of spells very specific, defined and repeatable effects. So there is something in the universe that allows that to happen. People in the world may not necessarily have the curiosity to question and seek for the answers, the DM may not need to develop a detailed set of fantasy physics for their world because it's really complicated and not relevant to the game play, but there are/must be answers and reasons in any fictional universe that dictate how things work there. Even if gods alter reality by conscious decision and this is "magic", gods must be made of something, they are "something", and their consciousness operates somehow to form reality, and how does that work? The answer may be far beyond the ability of anyone in that universe, maybe even the gods don't know, but there must be an answer, and that answer is part of the "nature" of that universe.

In the real world, sure. And if you dilute the term "nature" to the point of uselessness, sure. But your definitions are overbroad.

When I say separate from science, I mean the phenomena cannot be reliably tested or measured or reproduced. It defies being studied.
When I say separate from nature, I mean separate in the way the Far Realm is separate. If reality is conceptualized as a table in a room, the Far Realm is An asteroid made of purple on the far side of the broccoli star, and magic is the nucleus of the atom that makes up the sound of one hand clapping.

However, if by nature you mean to say "all things, no matter what", then yes, I suppose that would be encompassed by that definition. But then it's also not a meaningful term.

[Unoriginal]

When I say separate from science, I mean the phenomena cannot be reliably tested or measured or reproduced. It defies being studied.

Most D&D magic can be reliably tested, measured AND reproduced. And doesn't defy being studied.

[Thrudd]

In the real world, sure. And if you dilute the term "nature" to the point of uselessness, sure. But your definitions are overbroad.

When I say separate from science, I mean the phenomena cannot be reliably tested or measured or reproduced. It defies being studied.
When I say separate from nature, I mean separate in the way the Far Realm is separate. If reality is conceptualized as a table in a room, the Far Realm is An asteroid made of purple on the far side of the broccoli star, and magic is the nucleus of the atom that makes up the sound of one hand clapping.

However, if by nature you mean to say "all things, no matter what", then yes, I suppose that would be encompassed by that definition. But then it's also not a meaningful term.

All terms are meaningless until you define them. And the way I'm using it is one of the normal definitions of that word, it's not a dilution of the term.

Nature:
the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.

the universe, the cosmos

the physical force regarded as causing and regulating these phenomena.
"it is impossible to change the laws of nature"

the basic or inherent features of something, especially when seen as characteristic of it.

That a phenomenon cannot be studied is not an inherent property, but a function of the capabilities of the observers who might perform the studying. For practical purposes in a D&D world, sure - there might be lots of things that can't be studied by the characters. That doesn't mean there is not and cannot be any way for those phenomena to ever be explained.

If there is a far realm, an asteroid made of purple, etc, then those are "things" that are a part of "the cosmos"/reality, which is included in "nature" according to the English language definition of the word.

[pwykersotz]

All terms are meaningless until you define them. And the way I'm using it is one of the normal definitions of that word, it's not a dilution of the term.

Nature:
the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.

the universe, the cosmos

the physical force regarded as causing and regulating these phenomena.
"it is impossible to change the laws of nature"

the basic or inherent features of something, especially when seen as characteristic of it.

That a phenomenon cannot be studied is not an inherent property, but a function of the capabilities of the observers who might perform the studying. For practical purposes in a D&D world, sure - there might be lots of things that can't be studied by the characters. That doesn't mean there is not and cannot be any way for those phenomena to ever be explained.

If there is a far realm, an asteroid made of purple, etc, then those are "things" that are a part of "the cosmos"/reality, which is included in "nature" according to the English language definition of the word.

Cool. I define magic as:


mag·ic
ˈmajik/Submit
noun
1.
the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

su·per·nat·u·ral
ˌso͞opərˈnaCH(ə)rəl/Submit
adjective
1.
(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.

By definition, magic is beyond the laws of nature. These are standard definitions.


At this point I should mention, I'm only interested in clarifying my position and terms. I'm not arguing which is better. I love worlds with a magic-as-nature setup. But it is possible and fun to do a magic as not nature as well. Which you seem to be saying is impossible, because you define nature as the biggest possible set of stuff.

[Millstone85]

See, the last two posters are both right.

Nature, the Universe, is everything that exists.

Magic, the supernatural, is beyond it.

So you could say that not only magic doesn't exist, it doesn't exist by definition. :smallsmile:

[pwykersotz]

See, the last two posters are both right.

Nature, the Universe, is everything that exists.

Magic, the supernatural, is beyond it.

So you could say that not only magic doesn't exist, but it is by definition impossible. :smallsmile:

That's a cool way to think of it. Those fireballs aren't magic, because definitionally anything that happens CANNOT be magic!

I like it. :smalltongue:

[Naanomi]

My own 'model' of this is that the DnD cosmology is set up in a way that is law based and 'understandable' in the ultimate sense... and thus subject to scientific inquiry of a sorts... but a lot of the underlying forces of existence are (some by definition) beyond the understanding of mortals; there are truths that even given an unending amount of time to study, even the most brilliant mortal mind will be unable to wrap their mind around. Even the Gods, existing at a 'higher' level of inherent awareness (and thus being capable of 'understanding' a lot more than mortals) are limited in their capacity to truly comprehend some of those underlying principles; particularly as they pertain to the really 'broken' parts of existence (the deep part of any of the transitive planes, the Far Realm, probably the deepest depths of the Hinterlands of the Outlands and the great depths between worlds in the Prime Material Planes' wildspace... and a few other places as well) that are understood only by beings of a higher order... perhaps the Overdeities, or perhaps only the 'Old Ones' they serve.

Because so much of the underpinnings of existence are beyond comprehension... and in fact a few actually work in *defiance* of comprehension actively... that science, as it exists, is 1) really only good at defining local laws, even at the highest order of understanding only really encompassing the 'normalish' parts of reality and 2) inherently incomplete and with a non-insignificant degree of unpredictability... that you may think you understand every tiny aspect of how teleportation works and control for every conceivable variable, but still you might accidentally rip a hole into the universe's dark backside because of factors at play far beyond your ability to understand or even perceive them. This encompasses both magical research and 'traditional' scientific pursuits.

Which isn't to say that either are useless... far from it... just that the scope; even the potential scope; of such endeavors is inherently limited, and 'ultimate truths' of physics and the like are definitively, narritively, beyond what is achievable

[JackPhoenix]

Just because you're currently unable to understand the laws of the universe, or perceive/measure everything happening around you doesn't mean those laws do not exist, or that it is unachievable. You just need to find the current limits of your understanding, and then work to overcome them. When the universe doesn't behave as your theory predicts, it is not the universe that's wrong, it's your theory. You must create a new theory, or modify the old one to account for the differences. That doesn't mean the new theory is perfect or correct, though... you must test it against the universe, again and again, always modifying it to account for the new experimental data, until there's nothing the universe can throw at you to disprove your theory. Don't be surprised when the final theory says "It's all just a game, and the DM is a richard for forcing you to go through all that"

Also, I recommend reading "Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality". Best fanfic I've ever read.

[Naanomi]

I understand that, I'm just saying that the term 'beyond mortal comprehension' gets thrown around a lot in DnD cosmology... leads me to believe that the underpinnings of reality are much more complex than the 'relatively simple' mathematical principles that seem to be able to describe ours. I'm not trying to claim that such rules don't exist, just that even useful approximations of those rules may be impossible to understand because of their complex or inherently illogical nature (by human comprehension standards).

Very few quantum physicists have been 'driven mad from the revelation' of their research, nor been transformed into abberations or ascended to divinity... yet that sort of thing happens to beings that 'learn too much' in DnD cosmology. Even Gods (which arguably have 'minds' better able to handle such information, both in quantity and in conceptuality) occasionally get 'broken' this way

[The Eye]

They don't. :smallannoyed:

[Thrudd]

Cool. I define magic as:



By definition, magic is beyond the laws of nature. These are standard definitions.


At this point I should mention, I'm only interested in clarifying my position and terms. I'm not arguing which is better. I love worlds with a magic-as-nature setup. But it is possible and fun to do a magic as not nature as well. Which you seem to be saying is impossible, because you define nature as the biggest possible set of stuff.

Right, it is "beyond scientific understanding."
Which is to say, people don't understand how it works, yet. Not that it is impossible for anyone ever to understand it, nor that it's effects are somehow not a part of reality. If it's "real", if it manifests and has an effect on something in the universe, then the rules of the universe apply to it, whether or not anyone understands those rules. If it isn't real, then the point is moot. Nothing is actually happening.

[Naanomi]

Right, it is "beyond scientific understanding."
Which is to say, people don't understand how it works, yet. Not that it is impossible for anyone ever to understand it, nor that it's effects are somehow not a part of reality. If it's "real", if it manifests and has an effect on something in the universe, then the rules of the universe apply to it, whether or not anyone understands those rules. If it isn't real, then the point is moot. Nothing is actually happening.
Yes but if every time someone attempts to study it their brain turns into a slug and devours the rest of their body or the like... and that is if you can keep the Gods from obliterating you the second you start... that part of reality is likely to stay 'not understood'

[pwykersotz]

Right, it is "beyond scientific understanding."
Which is to say, people don't understand how it works, yet. Not that it is impossible for anyone ever to understand it, nor that it's effects are somehow not a part of reality. If it's "real", if it manifests and has an effect on something in the universe, then the rules of the universe apply to it, whether or not anyone understands those rules. If it isn't real, then the point is moot. Nothing is actually happening.

A) Beyond does not need to mean that we don't get it yet, it can also mean beyond it in total. My computer is beyond the set of all types of jello. It cannot be measured in those terms.
B) You missed the part after the "or". Another definition is "beyond the laws of nature".

I'm not arguing exclusivity here. Your point is valid insofar as you choose to interpret it that way, and that's fine. But your point isn't exclusive either. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the point of your argument seems to be to cram magic in a box. If you can justify that magic is part of nature, you can say that magic obeys the scientific method, and you can say that magic is an extension of science, which (definitionally) "is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."

I'm telling you that I'm interpreting it in a way that shatters that box. It is beyond testing. It is beyond classification. And it cannot be used to construct a predictable model. Thus, outside of the scientific method, and outside of nature.

[JackPhoenix]

I'm telling you that I'm interpreting it in a way that shatters that box. It is beyond testing. It is beyond classification. And it cannot be used to construct a predictable model. Thus, outside of the scientific method, and outside of nature.

Then perhaps you're using a wrong box. If nature exists, and magic exists, and nature is defined as everything that exists, then magic is a part of nature. Problem starts when you define nature as "everything that exists, except magic"... because at that point, I can just as well define nature as "everything that exists, except everything that's not magic". How do you know it's beyond testing? Perhaps you're just using wrong testing methods. For Democritus, inner composition of atom was beyond testing. Does that mean that we, with our much more advanced technology and better understanding of physics, can't test if electrons, protons and neutrons exist? If you think something is beyond your current clasification, create a new classification. We've thought there are 3 possibly states of matter, solid, liquid and gaseous, and all matter must fit into one of these... guess what, we found out that's not the case, and now we also have plasma, Bose-Einstein (spelling?) condensate and the sixth one I can't remember off-hand. Perhaps in a hundred years, we'll know 3 more possible states of matter.. Why do you can't construct a predictable model? Aren't you just limited by your current understanding of reality? To ancient Greek, lightning bolt was a sign of Zeus' wrath... he was unable to predict where is it likely to strike and why. Well... we've had lightning rods for a long time now, and can predict the propability of being hit by lightning with a reasonable precision (not 100%, not because it's impossible, but because it's impractical, unneeded and we don't have sufficiently advanced computing methods to account for every variable. Yet.)

[pwykersotz]

Then perhaps you're using a wrong box. If nature exists, and magic exists, and nature is defined as everything that exists, then magic is a part of nature. Problem starts when you define nature as "everything that exists, except magic"... because at that point, I can just as well define nature as "everything that exists, except everything that's not magic". How do you know it's beyond testing? Perhaps you're just using wrong testing methods. For Democritus, inner composition of atom was beyond testing. Does that mean that we, with our much more advanced technology and better understanding of physics, can't test if electrons, protons and neutrons exist? If you think something is beyond your current clasification, create a new classification. We've thought there are 3 possibly states of matter, solid, liquid and gaseous, and all matter must fit into one of these... guess what, we found out that's not the case, and now we also have plasma, Bose-Einstein (spelling?) condensate and the sixth one I can't remember off-hand. Perhaps in a hundred years, we'll know 3 more possible states of matter.. Why do you can't construct a predictable model? Aren't you just limited by your current understanding of reality? To ancient Greek, lightning bolt was a sign of Zeus' wrath... he was unable to predict where is it likely to strike and why. Well... we've had lightning rods for a long time now, and can predict the propability of being hit by lightning with a reasonable precision (not 100%, not because it's impossible, but because it's impractical, unneeded and we don't have sufficiently advanced computing methods to account for every variable. Yet.)

As did Thrudd, you left out the definition of magic, which is that which is beyond nature. And more, but you can reference the posts above for that. The existence of magic literally tells you that nature is not the ultimate set of things.

Honestly I'm surprised that this idea is meeting so much resistance. It's a pretty basic staple of fantasy. I get it, we all like science. It's neat and it gives us a way to understand the world. In the real world, it's pretty much the best thing ever and has led to insane levels of advancement. But I'm not interested in making it iron-clad in the game world. I chose the four elements system because it's wrong and fun to extrapolate to different results. I chose to make diseases spirits because of the same reasons. So magic isn't physics and can't be modeled as such. It has truly unpredictable results. That matches a lot of lore, that matches the definition, and that matches what I imagine to be fun.

[JackPhoenix]

As did Thrudd, you left out the definition of magic, which is that which is beyond nature. And more, but you can reference the posts above for that. The existence of magic literally tells you that nature is not the ultimate set of things.

No, if magic exists, it means that one of the definitions is wrong. Either the nature isn't everything that exists, or magic isn't beyond nature. You can't have both. Both definitions together work in our world, where magic doesn't exist, but not in D&Dland.

[pwykersotz]

No, if magic exists, it means that one of the definitions is wrong. Either the nature isn't everything that exists, or magic isn't beyond nature. You can't have both. Both definitions together work in our world, where magic doesn't exist, but not in D&Dland.

That's one explanation, and an acceptable one. I would choose nature to be the definition that broke. However, that is not my default position. There are many definitions of nature, and to select only one and say it must be the one that is used is misleading. But definitions ultimately don't matter much. I'm after results.

I want magic to break rules, not conform to them. Basically, if you can define a law of nature, I want magic to exist outside of it and be able to break it. Hence, not of nature. If gravity is a universal law, I want magic to be able to levitate stuff. If the four elements are natural law, I want magic to defy them. If quantum mechanics are natural law, I want magic to subvert them. Because what makes magic fun for me in my world is to treat it like it is special. Like it is dangerous and chaotic and powerful in all sorts of ways. Just like a computer program that overwrites a variable will lead to unexpected outcomes, so to does magic.

Now I shorthand that as "defies the scientific method and nature". That seems reasonable to me, and I'm willing to argue it to a point. This point, in fact. But I'm not willing to go further, because the spirit of what I am saying is being lost now. Define nature how you like. I was only explaining why my shorthand made sense. But you'll hit a wall really quick if you treat magic as scientifically quantifiable in my world.

[Naanomi]

There are Gods of Nature that probably get to decide what counts as natural or not to some degree...

[pwykersotz]

There are Gods of Nature that probably get to decide what counts as natural or not to some degree...

Oh probably. Also, I didn't comment, I like your method. It's a slick way of handling it. And your brain-slug analogy was excellent. :smallbiggrin:

[Thrudd]

My point is, whether you call it "nature" or "the cosmos" or "all existence" - the phenomena we're calling magic either exists or it doesn't in your world (any world). If it exists, then it is a part of the set of all things that exist. The scientific method is a way of studying stuff that exists. There is no "box" to break out of from this point of view. Therefore, it is hypothetically possible to apply the scientific method to magical phenomena, no matter how your world is structured, how strange and random it might appear to us or its denizens.
It may be impossible, unachievable or incomprehensible by us or the people of the fictional world being depicted - but that's not the same thing as something "beyond everything" (which is impossible). Magical phenomena may behave according to separate rules from things deemed "non magical", but there are still rules at work - it is just a more complicated situation than a place where there is a single unifying principle (which we don't even have for our own universe yet). The setting may not include any possibility of characters or players figuring things out, and that is fine. I understand not wanting to provide your players with a set of fictional physics that they can try to use to find exploits and loopholes in spell descriptions and other things.

In my D&D world, characters don't understand how magic works, either. It is "sufficiently advanced technology", and it is hypothetically understandable using the scientific method, but with the level of civilization present in the world - and the resources accessible to the players- it is not possible to do that. Magic users collect and practice spells by rote and ancient traditions just like adventurers collect "magical" artifacts that nobody alive has any hope of recreating. Might the players one day uncover the underlying principles of magic? They might - likely not until they are basically the level where the campaign is ending and their characters are all rulers and immortals and can go find the people who invented "magic" in the first place...

[pwykersotz]

My point is, whether you call it "nature" or "the cosmos" or "all existence" - the phenomena we're calling magic either exists or it doesn't in your world (any world). If it exists, then it is a part of the set of all things that exist. The scientific method is a way of studying stuff that exists. There is no "box" to break out of from this point of view. Therefore, it is hypothetically possible to apply the scientific method to magical phenomena, no matter how your world is structured, how strange and random it might appear to us or its denizens.
It may be impossible, unachievable or incomprehensible by us or the people of the fictional world being depicted - but that's not the same thing as something "beyond everything" (which is impossible). Magical phenomena may behave according to separate rules from things deemed "non magical", but there are still rules at work - it is just a more complicated situation than a place where there is a single unifying principle (which we don't even have for our own universe yet). The setting may not include any possibility of characters or players figuring things out, and that is fine. I understand not wanting to provide your players with a set of fictional physics that they can try to use to find exploits and loopholes in spell descriptions and other things.

Which is exactly what I thought you were saying. I suppose we're at an impasse if you keep denying all of my assertions and I keep denying all of yours. Ah well. Such it is. I trust I have made myself clear to others, at least. Still, I appreciate the challenge. Being forced to try to explain myself in detail always provides me with greater clarity as to the benefits and drawbacks of my assertion, so thank you. I hope the same is true for you and your point. :smallsmile:

[Sigreid]

I think to an extent you could look at them this way.

Science: Operates on principals that do not defy the common understanding of the way the world works.

Magic: Operates on principals that do not fall within the common understanding of the way the world works, and those who do understand it don't feel obliged to explain it to the rest of us. I tend to like to view magic as quantum physics taken to a ridiculous extreme that we can't even see from here.

Edit: In a Beyond the Supernatural game I played a character that was a physicist spell caster. I described him as understanding the quantum physics behind the ancient spell rituals. To him, a fireball was just math done right.

[Unoriginal]

The problem is that if you want magic to break all the rules, then there can be no rule to magic.

Meaning that there is no reason why a farmer could't turn the BBEG into a rutabaga. Or why you couldn't create a planet by sneezing.

[ShikomeKidoMi]

It's probably functionally easiest to separate them, which is what most people do, I think. But it doesn't sit right with me. I read an article somewhere that said, more or less: in any world in which magic exists, magic is a naturally occurring part of that world and therefore the realm of science. But it is also necessarily indistinguishable form natural processes, because it in fact is natural. Thus, much of what we see as mundane in the real world would actually be magic in a fantasy world. For example, the ability to read might be a form of magic, the notion that chicken noodle soup is good for someone with a cold might be a magical property of the soup or of chickens, and the best blacksmiths in the land may be considered to magically infuse their blades (or the methods they use may be considered magical). This is the best way to view it, in my opinion. But then there are gray lines between moving silently and casting silent on yourself, or between a motivational speech and the bless spell, for example.

This is how the Exalted RPG works, at least in older editions, I haven't tried the newest one. It's interesting because, for example, things like atomic weights and chemical reactions don't exist. Magical processes which ape those from a sufficient distance exist instead. Not that stops technology from being created, a now fallen civilizaton had magical computers with AI and a magical kill-sat, for example. To give an example of what I mean, fire isn't a chemical reaction, it's a the tiny gods in the burning things reacting to the source of ignition.

I think Dungeons and Dragons goes for a more hybridized style, though, where some of the laws of physics still exist, they can just be overcome by magical forces, the same way a helicopter's lift can overcome gravity. On the other hand, not all the laws of physics seem to function the same way (or exist at all), since in some settings the sun may be a portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire or you might have Earth standard gravity despite a hollow world. In these cases, it's not just that magic can override them, magic has supplanted them from the beginning. It's probably a good idea to work out as many of these as possible in advance when building a setting.


Magic: Operates on principals that do not fall within the common understanding of the way the world works, and those who do understand it don't feel obliged to explain it to the rest of us. I tend to like to view magic as quantum physics taken to a ridiculous extreme that we can't even see from here.
That works in a modern setting where you're trying to differentiate magic from the technology we're familiar with, but in many worlds magic is the common understanding of how the world works.

[Logosloki]

Given the context that D&D is a timelocked pseudomedieval universe, magic is what cannot be explained by the natural philosophers due to the lack of sufficient tools to study it. This does not mean that magic is entirely without study, there are after all schools of magic and various ways to tap into that power.

[JackPhoenix]

I want magic to break rules, not conform to them. Basically, if you can define a law of nature, I want magic to exist outside of it and be able to break it. Hence, not of nature. If gravity is a universal law, I want magic to be able to levitate stuff. If the four elements are natural law, I want magic to defy them. If quantum mechanics are natural law, I want magic to subvert them. Because what makes magic fun for me in my world is to treat it like it is special. Like it is dangerous and chaotic and powerful in all sorts of ways. Just like a computer program that overwrites a variable will lead to unexpected outcomes, so to does magic.

I think the bolded part is what causes our disagreement. We don't define laws of nature, they just exist and we must discover them. If scientists believe the law of gravity is "things fall down when dropped", and Levitate make things not fall down when dropped, it means that either the scientists are wrong and the law of gravity is actually "things fall down when dropped, unless you target them with Levitate", or that they are still right, and things fall down when dropped, but holding the things up with Levitate is fundamentally no different than holding them up in your hand, hanging from a string, or suspended in a magnetic field. And the scientists would then go research why and how does the Levitate make things to not fall down... and they can do that, because in D&D, Levitate can be reliably replicated by just casting it again, it's a discreet effect and it's got its limitations written in the spell description (and if those limitations are somehow circumvented, say, knowing that Levitate normally has a range of 60', but you see someone cast it on a target 90' away, it's because there are other factors at work, like the caster being a sorcerer using distant spell metamagic).

[Unoriginal]

Again, if you want a setting, magic must have rules, and if there is rules, it can be studied.


If you took Middle Earth and applied "magic = no rule", then nothing would have stopped the Hobbits from throwing giant kittens to the orcs and teleporting Mt. Doom next door to throw the One Ring in. Or to turn the One Ring into a killer banana and have it fight purple bears.

[pwykersotz]

Okay, now that I'm done hitting my keyboard with my face...

Put down the science and the sets and the classifications for a moment. This isn't about those, and I haven't disagreed with anyone on those fronts. This is about philosophy. It's about creating an idea to explore outside of the norm and the fun in trying to reconcile it. It's not about having the answers, it's about finding the answers. It's about asking absurd and impossible questions and then questing for the resolution which may not exist.

Everyone saying "Well, it would have to follow no rules at all!" is missing the point entirely. Dare to ask the question. What if there were a difference betwen natural laws and unnatural ones? What would that look like? How would you tell? What can you do to work within an unknowable and irrational set of criteria as best you can?

This isn't about saying "no, that's impossible" it's about trying to figure out HOW it can be possible. Remember, my point has never been to say "It must be this way", it's only ever been about "What if it was this way?" And if you can't do that with the idea of magic in a game of imagination, then that is a terrible pity.

A great many people in this thread have posited interesting ideas worthy of praise on multiple facets of the question of how science and magic relate. The most shameful thing I can imagine is telling them "no, your imagination is invalid because things don't actually work that way." And yet it appears to be happening.

If your hackles are raised by any of these points, then just ignore me. You are approaching the game from an incomptabible angle to mine, and that's fine. It's probably even "corect" for what that's worth, and it's not worth making anyone frustrated. But in my opinion, it is also a terrible waste of a vast realm of territory to explore. But to quote a great man, "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong."

[Naanomi]

I don't mind magic being systematic and understandable... that levitation always works and the range and the like are well understood (using the example above) is totally fine

What I do mind is the assumption that this means we get to know 'why'. What if levitation spells work, and detect magic shows it is magic... but no other form of investigation gives any more hints as to why it works. Nothing, no matter what, reveals any more information beyond 'it is magic'; because the fundamental forces at work are inherently unobservable by mortal minds (and barely perceivable by most immortal minds). This allows the study of magic to be... 'systematic guesswork' I guess... but not capable of real theory based research

[Unoriginal]

Everyone saying "Well, it would have to follow no rules at all!" is missing the point entirely. Dare to ask the question. What if there were a difference betwen natural laws and unnatural ones? What would that look like? How would you tell? What can you do to work within an unknowable and irrational set of criteria as best you can?

Well, that's not what you said.


I want magic to break rules, not conform to them. Basically, if you can define a law of nature, I want magic to exist outside of it and be able to break it. Hence, not of nature. If gravity is a universal law, I want magic to be able to levitate stuff. If the four elements are natural law, I want magic to defy them. If quantum mechanics are natural law, I want magic to subvert them. Because what makes magic fun for me in my world is to treat it like it is special. Like it is dangerous and chaotic and powerful in all sorts of ways. Just like a computer program that overwrites a variable will lead to unexpected outcomes, so to does magic.

It's not about destroying your idea or anything, it is, like you said, about philosophy, and philosophy is based on logic.

Sure, you could qualify the laws of magic as unnatural, and oppose them to the natural laws... but how would you do it?

If magic follow rules, it means that those rules are as much part of the fabric of the universe than anything else. Gravity is a force that follow X principles... except in those cases where magic rules put an addendum to them to say "and in Y circumstances, it works like that instead".

So, the question is, what is unnatural about being able to fly, or shoot fire from your hands, if the laws of the universe make room for it to be possible?

It's like the idea of doing something impossible. If you do it, then it's not impossible, just unlikely.

If you take D&D, Aberrations are often described as "unnatural", and they're generally more "outside the paradigm of nature as it currently is." Aboleth existed before the gods, so their existence was shaped by a world without the gods' laws shaping it. Illithids come from the future, from a time so distant the way things work s different, and so they are "out of place". Beholders come from the dream of a mad god, and so their creation didn't follow the same path as the one of most other species. Neogi come from a different world, so their existence and survival are not based on the same criteria than the beings native from this world. And Grells come from a different Material Plane... so their biology is not typical to this one.

All of them could be said to be "unnatural", because they are not in the part of Nature that produced them. But the Nature that produced them is possible, and did/does/will exist, so it's a question of context/relatively to the majority.


I don't mind magic being systematic and understandable... that levitation always works and the range and the like are well understood (using the example above) is totally fine

What I do mind is the assumption that this means we get to know 'why'. What if levitation spells work, and detect magic shows it is magic... but no other form of investigation gives any more hints as to why it works. Nothing, no matter what, reveals any more information beyond 'it is magic'; because the fundamental forces at work are inherently unobservable by mortal minds (and barely perceivable by most immortal minds). This allows the study of magic to be... 'systematic guesswork' I guess... but not capable of real theory based research

Well, that's true for any knowledge. All our "laws of physic" and the like are just recording of what we approximately observed and guessed to be systematic enough to be considered systematic. No one can prove that the next day the Moon will not start accelerating and circle the world in 2 hours, but we can certainly guess that it's not likely to happen.

[Thrudd]

Okay, now that I'm done hitting my keyboard with my face...

Put down the science and the sets and the classifications for a moment. This isn't about those, and I haven't disagreed with anyone on those fronts. This is about philosophy. It's about creating an idea to explore outside of the norm and the fun in trying to reconcile it. It's not about having the answers, it's about finding the answers. It's about asking absurd and impossible questions and then questing for the resolution which may not exist.

Everyone saying "Well, it would have to follow no rules at all!" is missing the point entirely. Dare to ask the question. What if there were a difference betwen natural laws and unnatural ones? What would that look like? How would you tell? What can you do to work within an unknowable and irrational set of criteria as best you can?

This isn't about saying "no, that's impossible" it's about trying to figure out HOW it can be possible. Remember, my point has never been to say "It must be this way", it's only ever been about "What if it was this way?" And if you can't do that with the idea of magic in a game of imagination, then that is a terrible pity.

A great many people in this thread have posited interesting ideas worthy of praise on multiple facets of the question of how science and magic relate. The most shameful thing I can imagine is telling them "no, your imagination is invalid because things don't actually work that way." And yet it appears to be happening.

If your hackles are raised by any of these points, then just ignore me. You are approaching the game from an incomptabible angle to mine, and that's fine. It's probably even "corect" for what that's worth, and it's not worth making anyone frustrated. But in my opinion, it is also a terrible waste of a vast realm of territory to explore. But to quote a great man, "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong."

I think the only thing that has raised hackles slightly is the misunderstanding/misrepresentation/misuse of the term "science" and how it applies to nature/reality.
The game you just described, the motivation to find out how something strange could be possible, is the driving force behind scientific inquiry. You have described a situation where the players/characters would act as scientists/discoverers in a world with different properties from our own world.

"Ideas outside the norm" does not contradict anything we've discussed - that describes just about every fantasy world, ever.
You might have some idea that the type of world I am advocating for must adhere to real world physics in all ways, and all magic in that world is somehow explainable by current real world physics. This is not what I meant at all. The argument is that a fantasy world with fantasy rules of physics could have fantasy scientists that study those rules (and players naturally tend to fall into that category due to their natural curiosity). The fantasy world may have properties which are completely weird and different and outside anything that exists in the real world and vague enough that the players/characters could never really make progress on that front even if they wanted to.

This isn't in contradiction to anything anyone has described so far, either, not even me. You are focused on the players/characters not knowing all the answers and needing to search for them or ponder them or just delight in the different weirdness of a fantasy world. I agree, that's what I want in my games, too.

This is an argument of pedantry, only. What we all want is similar - cool fantasy worlds where things "out of the ordinary" can happen. I don't think anyone is talking about having a game where "you win" if you happen to be a physicist in the real world and can solve the mystery of how everything in the game world works with real-world theorems. We're talking about fantasy characters who live in those fantasy worlds observing the things that happen around them, and arguing about how to define "normal" and "magical" and "science" and "nature" from their (the fantasy people's) point of view.

[pwykersotz]

Well, that's not what you said.

I apologize for the lack of clarity, the next sentence was supposed to make it obvious that I meant the rules by which natural law worked. Evidently that did not come across, which is why I clarified further.


It's not about destroying your idea or anything, it is, like you said, about philosophy, and philosophy is based on logic.

Sure, you could qualify the laws of magic as unnatural, and oppose them to the natural laws... but how would you do it?

If magic follow rules, it means that those rules are as much part of the fabric of the universe than anything else. Gravity is a force that follow X principles... except in those cases where magic rules put an addendum to them to say "and in Y circumstances, it works like that instead".

So, the question is, what is unnatural about being able to fly, or shoot fire from your hands, if the laws of the universe make room for it to be possible?

It's like the idea of doing something impossible. If you do it, then it's not impossible, just unlikely.

If you take D&D, Aberrations are often described as "unnatural", and they're generally more "outside the paradigm of nature as it currently is." Aboleth existed before the gods, so their existence was shaped by a world without the gods' laws shaping it. Illithids come from the future, from a time so distant the way things work s different, and so they are "out of place". Beholders come from the dream of a mad god, and so their creation didn't follow the same path as the one of most other species. Neogi come from a different world, so their existence and survival are not based on the same criteria than the beings native from this world. And Grells come from a different Material Plane... so their biology is not typical to this one.

All of them could be said to be "unnatural", because they are not in the part of Nature that produced them. But the Nature that produced them is possible, and did/does/will exist, so it's a question of context/relatively to the majority.

I'll respond to this at a later time, becuase it is worth responding too, but my lunch break is over, and I have to get back to work. :smallredface:

And Thrudd, not to put too fine a point on it, but from my perspective the pedantry began with you refusing to take the spirit of my idea and arguing terms, whittling it down to a finer and finer point. I apoligize if I misinterpreted you, and I'm happy the conversation seems to be moving past that point now.

[Sigreid]

That works in a modern setting where you're trying to differentiate magic from the technology we're familiar with, but in many worlds magic is the common understanding of how the world works.

I would argue that in a fantasy setting people being aware that there is magic and knowing that some people can use it. That doesn't mean everyone understands it. They just accept it.

[Naanomi]

Well, that's true for any knowledge. All our "laws of physic" and the like are just recording of what we approximately observed and guessed to be systematic enough to be considered systematic. No one can prove that the next day the Moon will not start accelerating and circle the world in 2 hours, but we can certainly guess that it's not likely to happen.
I get that, but what if beyond what it takes to cast the spell and the effect of that spell there is nothing else... no detectable method of action, no other consistent rules, nothing other than 'cause and effect', no detectable consistency on verbal or somatic components to effect the can be found. Every time, without fail. A 'yes' on detect magic means 'you will never know anything more about this than what you know now, no matter how hard you look'.

I'm not saying that it doesn't make the underlying nature 'scientific' or (by some definitions of the word) 'natural'; but it definetly makes magic distinct from other natural phenomenon (and makes it avoid becoming 'too sciencey' from a narrative standpoint)'

[Unoriginal]

I get that, but what if beyond what it takes to cast the spell and the effect of that spell there is nothing else... no detectable method of action, no other consistent rules, nothing other than 'cause and effect', no detectable consistency on verbal or somatic components to effect the can be found. Every time, without fail.

That's debatable.

We know that mages can create spells using the knowledge and theories they have, and that some spells are based on other spells.

It's probably dependent on the setting, but there is nothing stopping all the spells containing fire, for exemple, to share a part of their process. Or it could be decided that all mages have to reinvent the wheel from scratch any time they want to create an orb-shaped spell even if they know 5 other orb spells and already have created two.

[Naanomi]

That's debatable.

We know that mages can create spells using the knowledge and theories they have, and that some spells are based on other spells.

It's probably dependent on the setting, but there is nothing stopping all the spells containing fire, for exemple, to share a part of their process. Or it could be decided that all mages have to reinvent the wheel from scratch any time they want to create an orb-shaped spell even if they know 5 other orb spells and already have created two.
Oh I'm not claiming that is the default assumption; more of a 'what if' to explore potential demarcations between science and nature (though my home campaign isn't far off from this)

[Millstone85]

Perhaps the most mind-blowing TRPG I will never play is Nobilis.

It pushes animism to the extreme, and reality is basically a social contract with an emphasis on authority.

For example, there is a soul that is married to you as your reflection, and is also subordinate to the soul of light, as well as a guest of the various souls that have taken on the role of mirrors. The inanimate interpretation of these things is just a narrative.

It is very Pixaresque. Yes, your emotions have souls of their own, as do your reason, your conscience, your memories... It takes quite the team for a single soul to be human.

Thus, doing miracles becomes a matter of diplomancy. If my reputation precedes me, maybe I can send my reputation on a scouting mission for me? Yes, it is a little against the rules, but am I nobility or what?

So the underlying reality here would be "What the heck is a soul anyway?".

[Thrudd]

I get that, but what if beyond what it takes to cast the spell and the effect of that spell there is nothing else... no detectable method of action, no other consistent rules, nothing other than 'cause and effect', no detectable consistency on verbal or somatic components to effect the can be found. Every time, without fail. A 'yes' on detect magic means 'you will never know anything more about this than what you know now, no matter how hard you look'.

I'm not saying that it doesn't make the underlying nature 'scientific' or (by some definitions of the word) 'natural'; but it definetly makes magic distinct from other natural phenomenon (and makes it avoid becoming 'too sciencey' from a narrative standpoint)'

It makes it difficult for those people to make further progress on understanding that phenomenon, yes, besides the causal connection "bat poo+ certain hand wavey + the saying word 'abracadabra' makes a fireball appear". That is a limitation of the fictional people's ability to observe or understand the relevant factors. Maybe there's even an actual force in that world that affects people's ability to think about things, exerting a force on the mind or spirit or whatever it is that holds their consciousness, and this makes it literally impossible for them to think about certain things. From a practical, gameplay standpoint, it is hard or impossible to engage in scientific inquiry along those lines, and that is generally purposeful. This has been accepted from the beginning. Arguing that it isn't possible for the characters/players to understand the natural/magical laws of their world for various reasons is different from arguing that magical phenomena somehow do not obey any laws in the world where they exist.

I think some confusion also came from whether or not we were considering "natural" to be that set of things that exist in our real world, and applying that set of things with that label to the fictional world, or whether the term was defined from within the fictional world, to include all things that exist in that world. Comparing our world to the fantasy world, "magical" is all those things in the fantasy world that can't be explained and don't exist within the set of "natural" things of our world. From the perspective inside the fantasy world, "magical" things are part of the set of things that exist, and so it doesn't have the same definition.

What is magical to us is something that really exists for the fantasy people. Wizards using spells, manipulating forces nobody really understands are not really different from a metalworker in the ancient world practicing a trade that very few people are skilled at - they know through trial and error and generations of experience how certain techniques have the results of hardening metal and forming alloys, but they have absolutely no idea why those techniques have those effects (the chemical reactions and molecular properties of different minerals). There is no possible way, in their world with their technology, to identify and confirm the existence of molecules or atoms.

[pwykersotz]

I think some confusion also came from whether or not we were considering "natural" to be that set of things that exist in our real world, and applying that set of things with that label to the fictional world, or whether the term was defined from within the fictional world, to include all things that exist in that world.

No, becuase then the four elements system would not be natural. Rather, the confusion is between those who believe that there can be a certain guiding forces that allow for an intact and functional world without any outside interference but with things from outside that order that routinely come and interfere, and those who don't.

Which is why some people consider the Far Realm of all things, to be part of nature.

Apparently we haven't passed that point after all. :smallsigh:

[Thrudd]

No, becuase then the four elements system would not be natural. Rather, the confusion is between those who believe that there can be a certain guiding forces that allow for an intact and functional world without any outside interference but with things from outside that order that routinely come and interfere, and those who don't.

Which is why some people consider the Far Realm of all things, to be part of nature.

Apparently we haven't passed that point after all. :smallsigh:

Ok, so I'm hearing that you're defining "natural" as that set of things which are a part of the every day experience of the characters in the game in the limited part of the cosmos where they happen to live. The far realm, and magic in general, are things that should be surprising and unexplained to them. Your fictional cosmos has distinct regions each with their own local rules and behaviors, which cross over and interact in some places. You want there to be weird and unexplainable regions of the cosmos from the perspective of the characters, beyond their ability to comprehend.

Fair enough. So what is "natural" to them is not the totality of nature and the cosmos of their world, just what they are familiar with. Which means, as the game progresses, their definition of "real" and "natural" and "explained" is going to expand quite a bit, as they start experiencing things of the far realm and magic and weird stuff. This is not in conflict with my understanding of nature, magic and science.

I also think you are saying something like magic is/should be "well, more than you could imagine."
and I'm saying "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit."

[Sigreid]

Perhaps the most mind-blowing TRPG I will never play is Nobilis.

It pushes animism to the extreme, and reality is basically a social contract with an emphasis on authority.

[/I]".

In World of Darkness's Mage game reality is imposed by the collective unconscious of mankind (or possibly all creatures) with rules based purely on the common belief. Mages get their power to mess with it based on how well they have internalized that it's all BS.

[Unoriginal]

I also think you are saying something like magic is/should be "well, more than you could imagine."
and I'm saying "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit."

So you're saying that there is no mystical energy field controlling your destiny? It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense?

[Thrudd]

So you're saying that there is no mystical energy field controlling your destiny? It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense?

lol Nope, I'm saying "Crazy thing is... it's true...The Force... All of it... It's all true."

That's someone who didn't believe in stuff before, witnessed its effects first hand, and now knows it's a part of the universe, even though he doesn't understand how it works. That's going to happen to every single person who witnesses crazy creatures from the "far realm" and sees magical effects that seem to defy their understanding of what is real and possible. They accept that their understanding was limited and the universe has more stuff in it than they thought it did. Or they don't accept it, believe that they are constantly hallucinating or living in a dream and the things they see aren't real, and begin behaving erratically or treating real things as thought they aren't really there (and eventually get eaten by a grell that they were convinced wasn't really there).

[Unoriginal]

Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerous ways, Thudd.

[BurgerBeast]

@pwykersotz:

The place where you’re losing me is where you talk about the choice of the speaker to view nature this way or that way. There is no choice. Nature is the observable (via the five senses) universe. If gods actually do things that we can observe, then they are a part of the natural world.

Nobody gets to decide what is and is not observable.

@Naanomi:

You’ve raised two very important points of contradiction that are worth talking about: the Far Realm and spells such as detect magic, which, by their very existence, differentiate magic from the rest of nature.

The Far Realm: as far as I can tell, it’s a failed attempt to force Lovecraftian horror into D&D. I admit that I know essentially nothing about Lovecraftian horror (what I do know I learned second hand from the Angry GM), but from what I understand the “horror” of Lovecraftian horror is that logic falls apart. This doesn’t stand up to the requirements of a role-playing game, by which I mean to say that without predictability there is no game.

Detect magic: also, I think, a spell that entered the game before the question (of the delineation between nature and magic) was dealt with in any depth (I could be wrong and it may have been a spell in Vancian fiction). I think the existence of spells such as this can only make sense from the earthling perspective and, from the in-world perspective, they are necessarily irreconcileable.

[Unoriginal]

Detect Magic doesn't separate magic from nature anymore than a metal detector separate metal from nature.

Magic is a quality some natural things can have.

[Beelzebubba]

Detect Magic doesn't separate magic from nature anymore than a metal detector separate metal from nature.

Magic is a quality some natural things can have.

Tell that to my DM who said "Nature skill doesn't help you determine what a Beholder's weaknesses are."

:smallmad:

[Unoriginal]

Tell that to my DM who said "Nature skill doesn't help you determine what a Beholder's weaknesses are."

This one makes sense.

Beholders are the dreams of a mad god. They are not based on the same principles than a mouse, a monkey or an humanoid.

Also, they're sapient beings. Using Nature to find their weaknesses would like using Nature to find the weaknesses of an human bandit leader.

Not to mention that the Beholders don't really biological weaknesses, unless you consider their senses of smell, of taste and of touch that are less developed than the ones of humans. Beholders have psychological weaknesses, but it'd require maybe Insight to notice that.

If you tried to find the weaknesses of, say, an hippogriff, I would allow you Nature.

[Millstone85]

@Naanomi:

You’ve raised two very important points of contradiction that are worth talking about: the Far Realm and spells such as detect magic, which, by their very existence, differentiate magic from the rest of nature.
Detect Magic doesn't separate magic from nature anymore than a metal detector separate metal from nature.

Magic is a quality some natural things can have.It is interesting that BurgerBeast said "differentiate magic from the rest of nature" instead of "differentiate magic from nature". It is like he solved the contradiction himself without realizing it.

The spell could be interpreted as doing one or the other, and work just as well.


The Far Realm: as far as I can tell, it’s a failed attempt to force Lovecraftian horror into D&D. I admit that I know essentially nothing about Lovecraftian horror (what I do know I learned second hand from the Angry GM), but from what I understand the “horror” of Lovecraftian horror is that logic falls apart. This doesn’t stand up to the requirements of a role-playing game, by which I mean to say that without predictability there is no game.I don't know much about Lovecraftian horror either, and D&D probably fails to capture it properly, but for me the main feature of the Far Realm is that it is not tied to any aspect of the Material. The Abyss may appear alien, but it is really made of the same chaos and evil that define the Material along with law, good, fire, air, water and earth. The Far Realm is truly alien to the Material, and that's in my opinion already a great concept.


Tell that to my DM who said "Nature skill doesn't help you determine what a Beholder's weaknesses are."

:smallmad:
Beholders are the dreams of a mad god. They are not based on the same principles than a mouse, a monkey or an humanoid.

Also, they're sapient beings. Using Nature to find their weaknesses would like using Nature to find the weaknesses of an human bandit leader.Oh yeah, for the purpose of the Nature skill, there is definitely what is natural, what is unnatural or man-made, the people themselves, and what is supernatural. And if you ask a druid what violates the natural order, their answer may include things like metalworking.

[Naanomi]

The Far Realm is supposed to represent a 'place' definitionally incomprehensible. Basic things like foundational logical premises (cause and effect) or mathematical principles ( x = x ) don't apply consistently there... in fact by both mortal and divine standards nothing is either comprehensible or reliably predictable when it comes to the Far Realm. While someone might philosophically say 'well it is part of the greater multiverse and is therefore natural'; in any meaningful sense it is alien and disruptive to everything in the cosmology; and doesn't follow any of even the most basic 'natural laws' that might apply everywhere else.

The same isn't true for denizens of that 'place' that come to the Great Wheel cosmology (they are thought to be 'translated' to fit our universe in some way, like how Piscaethecese 'became' the 'god' called the Blood Queen); though I think it is still a stretch to call such things 'natural' in any meaningful sense... like coral that has grown over leaky barrels of nuclear waste in the ocean

[Millstone85]

I also like to think that the Far Realm meets the Great Wheel in many different points:
* Go far enough into the Upper Planes, and celestials start looking like ophanim.
* Go far enough into the Lower Planes, and what I said about the Abyss no longer holds true.
* Go far enough into the Elemental Chaos, and you will find unobtainium, exoticite and other elements you don't want to bring anywhere on the Material.
* Go far enough into the Dreamscape, specifically the region of fever nightmares, and you will find beholders and such.
* Go far enough back in time, and here be aboleths.
* Go far enough into the future, illithids everywhere.
* Go far enough into the current Material, even, and there are things like grell.

That's why it is called the Far Realm. You travelled too far away. It is their realm now.

[Unoriginal]

The Far Realm: as far as I can tell, it’s a failed attempt to force Lovecraftian horror into D&D. I admit that I know essentially nothing about Lovecraftian horror (what I do know I learned second hand from the Angry GM), but from what I understand the “horror” of Lovecraftian horror is that logic falls apart.



I don't know much about Lovecraftian horror either, and D&D probably fails to capture it properly, but for me the main feature of the Far Realm is that it is not tied to any aspect of the Material.

Well, actually, Lovecraftian horror is not that logic falls apart, it's that the character realizes what true logic is.

Lovecraft's mythos could be summarized by "humans don't know a lot about how the world really work, and learning about it is pretty scary and stressful."

The idea was that humans lived unaware of a lot of reality, and that seeing the "man" behind the curtain was shocking, sometime nerve-wrecking.

There is typically three kinds of Lovecraft stories, with exceptions of course: man meets alien beings from another planet/dimension who are kind of more aware of how the world work, and they're likely to do nasty things to you due to their alien mindset; man realizes there is something nasty going on in a family/bloodline (often their own) because said family/bloodline has done something nasty (or at least that the author consider nasty) in the past (often with alien beings involved or just plain horrible human cruelty) ; and man encounter something weird that turns out to be linked to a very powerful alien being that might an entity responsible for how the world work. And they generally end with some light shed on the ambiguousness of what was actually happening, but not too much.


All this stuff about "if you see a monster you're going to lose your sanity" was added by later authors, and very exaggerated for the RPG.

Lovecraft's creatures were scary either because they were weird and dangerous, like an Illithid would be, or because they were way greater than humans in term of power and place in the universe. But Chtulhu himself only caused people to lose their **** because they were suddenly confronted to a gigantic and very powerful being, while a math student could go visit Azathoth, greatest of the gods from beyond the boundaries of time and space, without any ill effect just because he had read a bit on the subject before and was prepared.

So in a way, D&D's Far Realm is closer to the Call of Chtulhu RPG than of Lovecraft.

[Thrudd]

The Far Realm is supposed to represent a 'place' definitionally incomprehensible. Basic things like foundational logical premises (cause and effect) or mathematical principles ( x = x ) don't apply consistently there... in fact by both mortal and divine standards nothing is either comprehensible or reliably predictable when it comes to the Far Realm. While someone might philosophically say 'well it is part of the greater multiverse and is therefore natural'; in any meaningful sense it is alien and disruptive to everything in the cosmology; and doesn't follow any of even the most basic 'natural laws' that might apply everywhere else.

The same isn't true for denizens of that 'place' that come to the Great Wheel cosmology (they are thought to be 'translated' to fit our universe in some way, like how Piscaethecese 'became' the 'god' called the Blood Queen); though I think it is still a stretch to call such things 'natural' in any meaningful sense... like coral that has grown over leaky barrels of nuclear waste in the ocean

Not "natural" only from our point of view. Probably perfectly natural from the point of view of the things that dwell there. It doesn't follow the same laws doesn't mean it doesn't follow laws - just not the ones we are familiar with. Not possible for us to comprehend, maybe because we lack nine-dimensional brains or whatever. But are we comprehensible to them, the outer gods or the great old ones, or whatever? Our universe might be like an ant hill to them, our whole existence maybe of the same complexity and consequence to their minds.

The "meaningful sense" is a purposefully limited perspective of people who consider only their own personal experience and not the whole of the cosmos as "natural", and only what is comprehensible to them as "logical". The existence of a far realm would mean that the cosmos is a bigger and stranger place than people thought it was, and that their lives may be far less significant than they ever imagined.

That's the "horror" of Lovecraft - people discovering that they are small, insignificant specks in a universe that doesn't care about them; and that their culture, civilization, or even their planet and sense of reality are ultimately meaningless in the face of eternity. To us, nowadays, this isn't as "horrific" as it might have been to him - we have since made great leaps in cosmology that have shown we are far more insignificant than even people knew in Lovecraft's day, when they were still contemplating whether or not the galaxy was the entirety of the universe (and Lovecraft likely wasn't aware of the cutting-edge astronomy and physics going on at the time that would have freaked him right the-f-out).

I'm not sure I get the reference to coral growing over nuclear waste - what isn't natural about that? Study of Nature (in this case biology and chemistry) absolutely tells us how coral grows and why the coral will look the way it looks. Mutation caused by radiation is a thing we can study and predict.

[pwykersotz]

@pwykersotz:

The place where you’re losing me is where you talk about the choice of the speaker to view nature this way or that way. There is no choice. Nature is the observable (via the five senses) universe. If gods actually do things that we can observe, then they are a part of the natural world.

Nobody gets to decide what is and is not observable.

Oh yeah, I was going to respond to some things here...I forgot about that!

So as I've stated repeatedly, my goal is to try and create interesting and imaginative resolutions in impossible situations. Like declaring that a box contains both weasles and no weasles. It can't be both, but what if it is?! Bam, you have the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment that illustrates quantum physics.

So we have a case-in-point example of a within-nature example of logic as we understood it breaking down. All I'm doing is extending that to "What is magic, really?" You have all things which are nature, and you have magic which is defined as beyond nature. They're both there, so what is magic? It's a bigger box to explore, but it's the same basic dichotomy. The problem I have is that people are skipping the step of identifying the new box and just lazily classifying it as "more nature". And they are then extrapolating that all the logic that applies to nature as we know applies to everything within that box. This is the flaw that I'm protesting. Sure it COULD be that way, but it isn't necessarily that way.

But you bring up an even better point with the gods, and it might illustrate my idea more clearly (or muddy the waters more, I can never tell with the playground). Assume that your definition holds true and that being observable is necessary to be part of nature. Assume the gods are not observable. Then they manifest an effect in the world. Is that effect "natural"? If so, does that make the gods natural even though they themselves cannot be observed? At what point does this occur?

The answer I find boring is "It's all natural and subject to the scientific method." The interesting answer is to actually grapple with the problem and see if unconventional answers solve the problem in unexpected ways or give us a new paradigm to play with. Again, I have never said Thrudd or Unoriginal are wrong, just that there are more ways to look at it.

[KorvinStarmast]

Magic is a specific science; one that deals in using extraplanar energies to create specific effects when introduced in certain proportions and patterns into another world... historically (1e) mixing positive and negative energy planar energies, but other planes get in the mix as well. Before the VSM component decisions (OD&D) (which were somewhat based on old stories that included sympathetic magic) magic was less mechanical and more vague in its origins. It was also more closely related to Chaos in the meta sense, when you consider its link to the Primary / Secondary world model. That said, I like the way you put that.

It is worth remembering that our universe doesn't run on "science". That's just the method by which we study it. Given the current researches into Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and the ongoing research into quantum principles and effects, yeah. The universe works, and the human race has discovered some of how it works, albeit somewhat biased by our frame of reference as the beginning of any given line of inquiry.

I can see magic being a harmonious analogue to that, and even a part of the "what they have not figured out yet" for purposes of a game world or a story.

Now the question is, does your D&D world has science? Yes, given that the world has steel and other alloys produced by various races to include humans and dwarves. Granted, metallurgy may be treated as a guild or an arcane knowledge school, as it was on Earth over a thousand years ago, but I'll say that the default D&D 5e world has science based on metallurgy existing.
Science as a discipline relies upon a universe who's rules are hard to discover but fixed. The presumption is that there is a mechanical answer of some sort (cause - effect) that is discoverable and findable. Won't derail further.
D&D is full of litteral immortal beings who can just tell you how the universe works and even change it if it's in their domain. I'd say that's due to D&D existing in a multiverse, rather than a universe.

Magic is a tool crafted by divine entities. Nothing more and nothing less. The Weave's description in the 5e PHB suggests otherwise, though what you say is true enough for any divine caster/divine magic.

Alchemy was the precursor to Science in the 12th-18th centuries, especially chemistry. If you want to be really pedantic, I'd say Wizard magic is a form of science, because it's repeatable, verifiable, and evidence-based. Yeah, and those wild magic sorcerers are downright irresponsible in their messing about with the weave! (/grumpy old wizard mode off)

There are Gods of Nature that probably get to decide what counts as natural or not to some degree... Where planes intersect we'd expect to see the mixing of the primary world with the secondary world. (See also old legends/fairy tales about the Siede and Morgan Le Fay and portals into the land of Fairie that are somewhat modeled in the 5e default setting by the Feywild). This accommodates magic, the intersection of different planes of reality, much like the boundary between land and ocean, the littoral, is full of unique life forms. Where differing things meet and mix you get some wonderful things happening.

I don't mind magic being systematic and understandable... that levitation always works and the range and the like are well understood (using the example above) is totally fine What I do mind is the assumption that this means we get to know 'why'. I know quite a few people who can fly a plane, even though they don't understand lift generation all that well, and could not design a plane if you put a gun to their heads.

Detect Magic doesn't separate magic from nature anymore than a metal detector separate metal from nature. Magic is a quality some natural things can have. Nice.

I tend to view magic as the category of exceptions. The primary world is the same as our world ... except ... and it takes the ability to make unique alterations in energy states to create those exceptions.

To use a very coarse analogy, the general rule is that humans can't fly. The exception is via the magic of flying machines which most people don't understand (though a few do).

[Unoriginal]

So as I've stated repeatedly, my goal is to try and create interesting and imaginative resolutions in impossible situations.

Thing is, with impossible situations, there is either no resolution or the situation turns out to be possible, after all.



Like declaring that a box contains both weasles and no weasles. It can't be both, but what if it is?! Bam, you have the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment that illustrates quantum physics.

Actually, the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment doesn't illustrates quantum physics, it illustrates what Schrödinger thought to be a problem in the typical interpretation of quantum mechanics by applying it to everyday objects. He thought that claiming the cat was both alive and dead until you checked in the box was nonsense, despite the Copenhagen interpretation that "physical systems generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probabilities that measurements will produce certain results".



So we have a case-in-point example of a within-nature example of logic as we understood it breaking down.

Are you still talking about the Schrödinger's Cat?



All I'm doing is extending that to "What is magic, really?" You have all things which are nature, and you have magic which is defined as beyond nature. They're both there, so what is magic? It's a bigger box to explore, but it's the same basic dichotomy. The problem I have is that people are skipping the step of identifying the new box and just lazily classifying it as "more nature". And they are then extrapolating that all the logic that applies to nature as we know applies to everything within that box. This is the flaw that I'm protesting. Sure it COULD be that way, but it isn't necessarily that way.

See, the thing is, you're focusing on the wrong box. If magic is a bigger box to explore, no scientist or natural philosopher or whatever would go "the rules of the little box apply to the bigger one." They would go "we have to understand the rules of the bigger box we just discovered in order to understand the rules of the little box we thought of incorrectly."

If magic exist, it expends the definition of nature until everything that is magical is included within, which means that there is a whole new realm of science to explore.



Assume the gods are not observable. Then they manifest an effect in the world. Is that effect "natural"? If so, does that make the gods natural even though they themselves cannot be observed? At what point does this occur?

If the gods aren't observable, then you cannot demonstrate that the phenomenon is their effect. The phenomenon would be natural, but unless the gods are observable then you cannot attribute them this effect. And if there is a way to demonstrate the gods are responsible for said effect, it means that the gods are observable.

[pwykersotz]

Trhing is, with impossible situations, there is either no resolution or the situation turns out to be possible, after all.

I agree. This is correct. It's also boring. So I use my imagination to break it.

Edit: For those curious, no I do not run magic in my game as a chaotic mess. This discussion is about the theoretical side of magic, and it does not actually come up in play very often. It's more for armchair forum posts and personal and friendly intrigue, and sometimes weird things get added to game as a result of that intrigue and discussion, such as all conjurations tasting like strawberries. (Strawberries don't taste like strawberry, they taste like conjuration :smallsmile:)

[Millstone85]

It can't be both, but what if it is?! Bam, you have the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment that illustrates quantum physics.
Actually, the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment doesn't illustrates quantum physics, it illustrates what Schrödinger thought to be a problem in the typical interpretation of quantum mechanics by applying it to everyday objects. He thought that claiming the cat was both alive and dead until you checked in the box was nonsense, despite the Copenhagen interpretation that "physical systems generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probabilities that measurements will produce certain results".Yeah, Schrödinger wasn't going "It can't be both, but what if it is?!" and rather "It can't be both, our model says it will be both, so our model is ****ty".

And I don't know if the cat's current popularity is due to new developments in the field, or if it is in fact a meme cat repeating "I can haz undaych?".


I agree. This is correct. It's also boring. So I use my imagination to break it.Star Trek: Voyager had a great Q episode (soon to be followed by two terrible ones) where the idea was that the Q's definition of the impossible, of the limits of their so-called omnipotence, was something the human mind could not even conceive of. But it made the Q feel trapped, in a box they knew had no outside.

[Unoriginal]

I agree. This is correct. It's also boring. So I use my imagination to break it.


Well, ironically, that's not possible.

You can think of a solution to the impossible, but in this case it's possible. Or you can imagine it's impossible, but then there is no solution.



And I don't know if the cat's current popularity is due to new developments in the field

I think it's due to people not understanding what Schrödinger's Cat is.



Star Trek: Voyager had a great Q episode (soon to be followed by two terrible ones) where the idea was that the Q's definition of the impossible, of the limits of their so-called omnipotence, was something the human mind could not even conceive of. But it made the Q feel trapped, in a box they knew had no outside.

And as it turns out, the Q do have limits. Their capacities include changing the laws of physics of the Star Trek universe, yet Q can be countered by Q.

[pwykersotz]

Yeah, Schrödinger wasn't going "It can't be both, but what if it is?!" and rather "It can't be both, our model says it will be both, so our model is ****ty".

And I don't know if the cat's current popularity is due to new developments in the field, or if it is in fact a meme cat repeating "I can haz undaych?".

Star Trek: Voyager had a great Q episode (soon to be followed by two terrible ones) where the idea was that the Q's definition of the impossible, of the limits of their so-called omnipotence, was something the human mind could not even conceive of. But it made the Q feel trapped, in a box they knew had no outside.

Yeah, I know. I have this terrible forum sin I commit where I consider the big picture before I consider details, painting with broad strokes as it were. As you can see, it gets me into trouble with specifics sometimes. :smalltongue:

But yes, I'm well aware of the details of the cat, I actually added that as an afterthought. I had originally just thought of the weasles + no weasles thing. And yes, that was a great episode of Voyager. :smallsmile:

[Sigreid]

On the idea of magic being unnatural, this could work in a multiverse. Basically, x is impossible in our universe, but is possible and in accordance with the natural law of y iniverse. Tim the Enchanter can connect the two universes, just for an instant, allowing him to play by universe y's rules on a limited basis.

[Naanomi]

I guess what I was trying to say is that if 'natural' means 'absolutely everything no matter what' than the term is pretty useless. Instead I think it is better to conceptualize it... from the 'perspective' of the reef ecosystem, the dumped chemicals are 'unnatural' even though in the perspective of 'stuff on earth' it isn't.

In this sense, Magic may or may not be 'natural' given the perspective taken... if magic is the manipulation of extra-planar energies to do stuff, then maybe it is 'unnatural' from the 'perspective' of a given plane...

It is in this way that I say the Far Plane is almost definitionally 'unnatural'... from the 'perspective' of the known cosmology, it shouldn't be there...

And, some clarifications on the Far Plane according to existing (mostly older edition) cannon:

-not all abberations are related to the Far Plane, that was 4e's conceit

-things on the Far Plane are not 'above' things in our cosmology, just irreconcilably different than it. Just like we have Gods and Overpowers and Draedens, so do they... but the Far Realm has its 'ants' and 'plants' in its relative power scale as well, it isn't just a difference of perspective

-There is a great deal of evidence that things from 'our' world are just as confusing and toxic to them as it is to us, forces in the Far Realm work to eject intruders and close up holes as well. There are exceptions, just like there are exceptions (idiots) on our side trying to open holes there

-While it works well as a cosmology to have the Far Realm 'encompass' reality (so if you go 'too far' and reality starts to fall apart, you are entering the 'far realm'); that is not its place in the Great Wheel. Rather it is explicitly an 'elsewhere' that doesn't or shouldn't belong in any relationship to reality as we understand it, unrelated to the many many other 'lovecraftian' places that are in fact part of the Great Wheel

-Creatures from the Far Plane tend to get 'turned into' stuff more comprehensible if they are forced to spend time here (and survive)... like how Piscaethces eventually became 'just' a God. Likewise beings from our reality that spend time 'there' are twisted into forms that fit that environment better (this was the origin of my 'toxic waste covered in coral' analogy... the toxic waste barrel 'doesn't belong' in the reef, but eventually gets covered up so it fits better even if it is still a terrifying and horrible thing)

-Aboleth didn't always exist, there was a time before they were present... they predate the Gods but not the Prime Material Plane and definetly not the Cosmology itself. The very first things were probably Draeden, but there is some debating that

-the realm of nightmares in the dream plane *is* related to the Far Plane... it is a 'cerebotic blot'... an area of lasting 'far realms contamination' from a gate/hole that was left open too long and stuff 'bled through'. The gate is probably closed, and was opened as a way to 'channel energy through their dreams' by a group of stupid wizards (sure, blame the wizards!)

[Millstone85]

And as it turns out, the Q do have limits. Their capacities include changing the laws of physics of the Star Trek universe, yet Q can be countered by Q.That was well established at the beginning of the episode, with the crew of the Voyager finding a Q (later called Quinn) trapped inside a comet of sort. It was a prison of Q design, and they should really have better proofed it against outside interference. Fans of the previous series would also remember several examples of Q using their powers against Q.

But Quinn's big emotional speech near the end of the episode wasn't about that box. Well, maybe metaphorically, and he sure wasn't happy with current Q regulations. But what it was really about was how the Q as a species and civilization, the Q Continuum, had reached the absolute limit of knowledge and power. What lied beyond it wasn't just unknowable, it was literally nothing. And he wanted Captain Janeway to appreciate being an explorer with still so many places to see.


And, some clarifications on the Far Plane according to existing (mostly older edition) cannonI knew most of that, but I liked that 4e conceit of linking aboleths, beholders, illithids, whole constellations and other Lovecraftian-looking creatures and places... all to the Far Realm.

They don't have to be directly from it. Even in 4e, the dominant idea was that things from the planes got changed by the Far Realm, and things from the Far Realm got changed by the planes, resulting in things that really belonged to neither. As ever, the true Far Realm isn't supposed to see much use in a game.

So why limit ourselves to the plane of nightmares as an antechamber of the Far Realm? Yes, I still want Hadar, with its arms and hunger, to be "the extinguished cinder of a star lurking within the cloaking nebula of Ihbar" and I want my goolock to "wake from nightmares where every light in the night sky simultaneously blinks open, revealing eyes" (Dragon #366 p44).

[Naanomi]

I knew most of that, but I liked that 4e conceit of linking aboleths, beholders, illithids, whole constellations and other Lovecraftian-looking creatures and places... all to the Far Realm
I wasn't a fan... I like my cosmology with all kinds of weird and unexplained stuff and places... relegating it all to Far Realms stuff not only 'normalizes' the planes on ways I don't like, but also trivializes the special flavor of nonsense that is the Far Realm. If every world has 90 types of monsters on it spawned from a place, it isn't that weird and distant and alien anymore (to me).

[ShikomeKidoMi]

I would argue that in a fantasy setting people being aware that there is magic and knowing that some people can use it. That doesn't mean everyone understands it. They just accept it.

Depends on what you mean by 'understand it'. A lot of people don't fully understand an internal combustion engine, they just accept their car works. But they're still generally familiar with the basic ideas of science that went into its construction. Same for electricity and their light sockets.

Magic in many settings is similar. Most people know a little bit about it (the main magical elements are earth, wind, fire, and water, for example) but not in-depth enough to use it.

[Vogonjeltz]

lol Nope, I'm saying "Crazy thing is... it's true...The Force... All of it... It's all true."

That's someone who didn't believe in stuff before, witnessed its effects first hand, and now knows it's a part of the universe, even though he doesn't understand how it works. That's going to happen to every single person who witnesses crazy creatures from the "far realm" and sees magical effects that seem to defy their understanding of what is real and possible. They accept that their understanding was limited and the universe has more stuff in it than they thought it did. Or they don't accept it, believe that they are constantly hallucinating or living in a dream and the things they see aren't real, and begin behaving erratically or treating real things as thought they aren't really there (and eventually get eaten by a grell that they were convinced wasn't really there).

Yes, it's the Arthur C. Clarke third adage - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Magic, in D&D terms if just a force that infuses all of creation: "Raw magic is the stuff of creation ... permeating every bit of matter and present in every manifestation of energy throughout the multiverse." (PHB 205)

Magic is accessed through the Weave, which acts as an interface for magic in D&D (PHB 205). "All magic depends on the Weave, though different kinds of magic access it in a variety of ways" (PHB 205)

Arcane magic relies "on an understanding-learned or intuitive-of the workings of the Weave."
Divine magic "is mediated by divine power-gods, the divine forces of nature, or the sacred weight of a paladin's oath." (PHB 205)

The rest of the text box after this last quote explains exactly how magic is done in D&D and what it means to cast a spell, canonically.


Detect Magic doesn't separate magic from nature anymore than a metal detector separate metal from nature.

Magic is a quality some natural things can have.

Not even some; all things which exist have magic (PHB 205).

[Millstone85]

I wasn't a fan... I like my cosmology with all kinds of weird and unexplained stuff and places... relegating it all to Far Realms stuff not only 'normalizes' the planes on ways I don't like, but also trivializes the special flavor of nonsense that is the Far Realm. If every world has 90 types of monsters on it spawned from a place, it isn't that weird and distant and alien anymore (to me).You are not alone in this opinion. But to me, the Far Realm depicted by your list isn't so much mysterious and unique as it is bare-bones.

See, if the Far Realm can only be known through creatures and places of the Great Wheel that have been warped by it, and there is only one iconic example... Then it would in my opinion make more sense for the PHB to mention that Plane of Nightmares and how it contains something that may be a portal to a place unlike anything in the Great Wheel, or may be no portal at all but the fear of the unknown made manifest, the ultimate darkness at the bottom of the stairs. That's where the story is, pretty much all of it.

Now, if several big things are rumored to be touched by the same alien influence, like the god Ghaunadaur on Toril, then the Far Realm is worth mentioning in the description of the planes of existence and as a possible source for a sorcerer's wild magic or a warlock's GOO patron.

But it is much the same problem as with magic. Do we give it origins and mechanisms only for game reasons? Or is that actually more interesting than letting magic do whatever? Threads like this one show it can be a point of disagreement.


Not even some; all things which exist have magic (PHB 205).Yeah, but if Antimagic Field doesn't remove that magic, instead smoothing the Weave in the area, I would say that Detect Magic similarly doesn't care about the raw energy and focuses on finding relevant patterns in the Weave.

[Sigreid]

Depends on what you mean by 'understand it'. A lot of people don't fully understand an internal combustion engine, they just accept their car works. But they're still generally familiar with the basic ideas of science that went into its construction. Same for electricity and their light sockets.

Magic in many settings is similar. Most people know a little bit about it (the main magical elements are earth, wind, fire, and water, for example) but not in-depth enough to use it.

I'm pretty sure that to the natives of South America the primitive guns used against them were, at least initially, magic.

It's entirely possible that the common D&D person thinks they now a little bit about the nature of magic. It's also entirely possible that they are wrong.

Regardless, that's not really what I mean. Lots of people don't know the specifics of how a car works and certainly couldn't build one. Pretty much everyone at this point understands the basic idea that gas gets burned to push cylinders that moves the car. It's pretty normal to us. We've seen wheels, we've seen hot air move things, etc. The whole concept falls well within our normal experience of how the world works. Even in a D&D universe a person's normal experience doesn't lead to some bat crap, crazy hand gestures and the ravings of a madman = a fireball. But they know some make that happen.

[Naanomi]

There are lots of places the Far Realm had touched the wheel... all aboleth ultimately descend from that contact, firestorm peak of course, the great vortex in spelljammer, wherever the thoon and kaori went, etc. The Realm of nightmares is hardly the only place of such influence.

I like the idea that when you get far enough into the abstract world of pure thought that things become incomprehensible (the deep astral), that the mysteries of the outerplanes are built on a base indescribable and largely unnavigable to mortals (the hinterlands), that when you go to far out into the void between cosmolgies, you risk being too far from any reality at all (the deep shadow), that even the prime material plane... the most 'normal' of planes... has mysteries even the greatest sages don't understand (wildspace away from the flow)

Incidentally I don't like the weave being standardized to all the planes either, it is such an inherently Forgotten Realms concept...

[Sigreid]

Incidentally I don't like the weave being standardized to all the planes either, it is such an inherently Forgotten Realms concept...

The weave has been banished from my games.

[Unoriginal]

The weave has been banished from my games.

It's a weave of lie?

[Naanomi]

The weave has been banished from my games.
It's fine in FR with its super integral and involved Deities; just not something that should be shoehorned in everywhere

[Unoriginal]

The weave has been banished from my games.


It's fine in FR with its super integral and involved Deities; just not something that should be shoehorned in everywhere

Plus people will complain that Banishment is OP even more than they already do if it works every time.

[ShikomeKidoMi]

Regardless, that's not really what I mean. Lots of people don't know the specifics of how a car works and certainly couldn't build one. Pretty much everyone at this point understands the basic idea that gas gets burned to push cylinders that moves the car. It's pretty normal to us. We've seen wheels, we've seen hot air move things, etc. The whole concept falls well within our normal experience of how the world works. Even in a D&D universe a person's normal experience doesn't lead to some bat crap, crazy hand gestures and the ravings of a madman = a fireball. But they know some make that happen.

It kind of is in normal people's experience, though. You can learn magic with a feat, you don't even need a class. And in most settings, low level casters are rarer than low level members of other classes but still fairly common. You can pick up some degree of healing at most temples.

[Sigreid]

It kind of is in normal people's experience, though. You can learn magic with a feat, you don't even need a class. And in most settings, low level casters are rarer than low level members of other classes but still fairly common. You can pick up some degree of healing at most temples.

It's true that any character can learn magic but I've always had it as most people aren't capable of it. So it's setting specific, I guess.

[sotik]

In my homebrew magic and science go hand in hand really. There has been no case of science in my game as it exist today. However, in my world alchemy isn't making potions and throwing magic into them. It is the science of finding plants with certain magically abilities, and combining those to create a potion. So really anyone who studies herbalism can learn to find plants with certain magical properties, and then if they know how to mix them together with alchemy then they can make potions out of them. So while my players take advantage of this to make potions, they are unknowingly practicing science, but they consider it something magical because they are finding plants that have magical properties.

In our world outside of D&D, this would be herbalism and botany, a science of studying plants and using them for medicinal purpose. So it is a "science" in my world, but it is also closely tied into magic. Necromancy could also be a realm of science meets magic. Because to me in my home brew, a necromancer is learning about biology, but also mixing magic into it so they can bring people back from the dead.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The weave has been banished from my games.

I agree with this. In my setting, aether (I'm super creative with names) exists in everything and is the foundation element of reality. Spells are patterns within the soul of the caster that resonate within the ambient aether, allowing amplification of the input. Spell slots are pockets of aether in the soul--these are quantized so two first-level slots =/= one second level slot. Concentration effects require you to parcel out the energy into the pattern slowly over time and can be disrupted.

The only difference between divine and arcane casters is how they acquire the knowledge to create these resonant patterns. The patterns themselves are the same but expressed differently between casters. Components are (for the most part) sympathetic elements that make it easier. This is why sorcerers can learn to remove the need for them and why some casters (monsters mostly) can cast without needing components at all.

I also tend to take the "spells do that specific thing with those specific numeric effects" as a gameplay contrivance rather than a description of in-universe reality. Your fireball and my fireball won't be exactly the same, but for the sake of the game we standardize. Some people may have learned to do unique magic that relies on their soul's quirks that no one else can learn (or can only learn to cast from higher-level slots). These spells aren't in the book.

This makes wizards less of "learn from published spells" and more of "figure out the patterns through intellect, practice, and tradition." This allows spellcasters from different areas/traditions to have "magical accents" so to speak. The simplest spells can be cast by just about anybody (magic initiate) but more than that requires a gift for creating and holding patterns.

[Naanomi]

Very cool. Custom cosmologies and systems of magic and the like are always fun to explore.

In my setting, all 'essences' (like souls but some inanimate things have them, and all living things do) have the inherent ability to serve as 'bridges' between planes and draw energy from one plane to another.

Most creatures with essences don't do much with this ability; though subconsciously tapping it is essential for reproduction... a few creatures naturally channel those energies in specific ways (creatures with basic magic or supernatural abilities). Intelligent creatures with more innately powerful essences are able to tap into planar energies in more complex patterns, which we call 'magic'.

The process is always somewhat instinctual, something all beings in the cosmos can do to some degree. Sorcerers continue to rely on that instinctual ability, strengthening it like a well used muscle. Wizards instead learn proven and practiced methods... meditation aids and conceptually resonant tools... to channel the energy in more intricate combinations for greater effect.

Beings can also link their essence to that of other beings... clerics connect their essence to powerful 'essence resivoirs' we call Gods, and in turn can channel portions of that energy for themselves (the Gods do the work of shaping the patterns so Clerics don't need to know what they are doing the same way way wizard does); warlocks perform similar bindings to their patrons, but because the patrons are less 'natural' channels of essence, the pacts tend to need to be more tightly binding than that with the Gods.

Druids (and rangers) instead connect their essences to a myriad of lesser creatures, and in some cases features of the land itself; and this draw on their collective energy to bolster their own.

Personal willpower is highly associated with the ability to manipulate essence, it is a trait that all spellcasters must possess to some degree. Paladins exemplify this, eschewing all finesse or outside support in their spellcraft in favor of the pure focus of will in their oath.

Some beings, rather than learning to better manipulate the essence with themselves instead increase the power of their essence itself, saturating it with planar energies instead of calling those energies when needed. Through meditation and a variety of esoteric practices they can pool masses of 'primed essence' within their body (monks) or minds (mystics) to unleash and emulate magical effects, though there are subtle differences between ki or psionics and 'real magical arts'.

Very little in the universe can effect essence itself. Effects that detect or influence magic (like anti-magic fields, dispel magic, counterspell, or detect magic) instead operate by influencing the channels between planes which essence opens; making it impossible to channel planar energies, or detecting such channeling as it occurs.

Some inanimate objects naturally contain essence or absorb planar energies without essence involved in some way; these substances often act as material components for spells or serve as the basis of alchemical arts. Channeling essence from a living spellcaster to an inanimate object to transfer planar energy to such an object is the basis of most enchantment; though intelligent items are created by transferring essence itself to such an item.

The planar energies vary, though generally all magic involves some energy drawn from both the positive and negative energy planes (creation and destruction, in measured proportions and patterns); however drawing from energy from the inner planes (mostly in arcane magic), outer planes (in divine magic), or the transitive planes (either) is involved in most spells as well. Some spells even draw on more esoteric or dangerous sources of energy, such as the temporal energy plane or the Far Realm; though it isn't uncommon for such magic to be forbidden

On some worlds, barriers exist that prevent the unfettered channeling of planar energies beyond the very basics needed for life to function. On Faerun, Mystra had set up a barrier (called the Weave) to prevent unfettered channeling without her awareness or permission. Athas has a deep barrier around it preventing easy movement of planar energies, causing locals to rely on local natural sources of planar and life energy to work their magic. Some worlds, like Earth, have virtually no channeling possible at all because of local planar mechanics at work.

[Bohandas]

I was thinking recently about how magic in d&d is usually portrayed as academic, and especially arcane magic can be studied. But how far does the connection between science and magic go? Do wizards study physics, biology and chemistry along with magic - and do hard sciences actually affect magic in some way?

In a world where it's real magic is a hard science.

[Gryndle]

eh science is the unassuming guy (or lady) that gets things done & makes sure things work the way they are supposed to. Magic is the bully that tells him to get in the corner, sit down and shut up.

[ShikomeKidoMi]

eh science is the unassuming guy (or lady) that gets things done & makes sure things work the way they are supposed to. Magic is the bully that tells him to get in the corner, sit down and shut up.

That kind of duality's a very modern view, though. In a lot of settings there isn't a hard line between the two like that. Magic may very well be the cause of the sun, for example (if it's a pinhole portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire as it sometimes is) and that's a pretty big part of everyday functioning for the planet.

[Squiddish]

Magic can be analyzed scientifically just as everything else can. Of course, if you can't get more information than the PHB gives you, the laws of magic start to closely resemble chapter 8 of the PHB.

[Millstone85]

There are lots of places the Far Realm had touched the wheel... all aboleth ultimately descend from that contact, firestorm peak of course, the great vortex in spelljammer, wherever the thoon and kaori went, etc. The Realm of nightmares is hardly the only place of such influence.Sorry for taking so much time to mull this over, but you are right of course.

My "go far enough" idea was overenthusiastic for the Far Realm, and WotC may have been too when they connected all aberrations to it in 4e.

[JackPhoenix]

When I was doing an archive binge of one of my favorite comics, I found something that reminded me of this thread...

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ggmain/strips/ggmain20081205b.jpg

[raygun goth]

When I was doing an archive binge of one of my favorite comics, I found something that reminded me of this thread...

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ggmain/strips/ggmain20081205b.jpg


This is how I assume all Sorcerer <-> Wizard interactions go. What with wizards being analytical and junk.

[Bohandas]

That is really the bigger point; not that science isn't possible but just that (in a multiversal sense) it doesn't have a lot of explaintory power... the rules of 'nature' are too variable from place to place, and powerful entities can change almost any of them..

That sounds kind of like the string theory landscape

[Sigreid]

That sounds kind of like the string theory landscape

Apparently, it's a common belief among theoretical physicists that our natural laws are what they are purely as a fluke, randomly generated at the creation of the universe. I've seen a few talks where they posit that instead of the physics etc. that we currently have at the time of creation anything could have been the natural order of things.

So it would be entirely possible if something had been different that in our universe words+bat guano=fireball.

[Bohandas]

The point is that there's an underlaying set of rules that governs the various sets of effective rules

[djreynolds]

I was thinking recently about how magic in d&d is usually portrayed as academic, and especially arcane magic can be studied. But how far does the connection between science and magic go? Do wizards study physics, biology and chemistry along with magic - and do hard sciences actually affect magic in some way? A lot of the fantasy I'm familiar with doesn't go into great detail about the coexistence between the two, but Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) comes to mind. In that setting, alchemy is described as a science despite being magic, and is connected with real science in how it functions. However, I've noticed in 5e that most players don't bother portraying their wizard as being proficient in any kind of science, even if they're a character whose purpose is to seek knowledge.

The thing is for me in D&D, it is the simple stuff that grounds us in game.

For instance, since we playing a fantasy game, we have to go Mars. Now we now we do not have light speed, but we have to come up with a way plausible way to get out protagonists to their setting. So we use hibernation. It grounds us in reality. Obviously the aliens we are about the meet up with are the fantastical aspect.

Its the same with magic, magic is breaking the laws of physics. What grounds us in game is stuff like resting and exhaustion and spell slots, we can only push the natural laws so far.

Its why we fight over crossbow expert, because its mundane and should be explainable. These thing ground us in reality. The we don't worry that Dave the wizard is now Dave the T-Rex

[Thrudd]

The thing is for me in D&D, it is the simple stuff that grounds us in game.

For instance, since we playing a fantasy game, we have to go Mars. Now we now we do not have light speed, but we have to come up with a way plausible way to get out protagonists to their setting. So we use hibernation. It grounds us in reality. Obviously the aliens we are about the meet up with are the fantastical aspect.

Its the same with magic, magic is breaking the laws of physics. What grounds us in game is stuff like resting and exhaustion and spell slots, we can only push the natural laws so far.

Its why we fight over crossbow expert, because its mundane and should be explainable. These thing ground us in reality. The we don't worry that Dave the wizard is now Dave the T-Rex

Magic breaks our laws of physics. The laws of physics in the world with magic must be different. Yes, we don't worry about explaining how magic works in great detail for most games because it just isn't relevant. And to the people in the fantasy world, magic may also appear to break the laws of physics that they are aware of.

You don't need light speed to go to Mars. With present-day technology it would take less than a year to send some people there. They don't need hibernation for that. At light speed you'd be there in like ten minutes.

[djreynolds]

Magic breaks our laws of physics. The laws of physics in the world with magic must be different. Yes, we don't worry about explaining how magic works in great detail for most games because it just isn't relevant. And to the people in the fantasy world, magic may also appear to break the laws of physics that they are aware of.

You don't need light speed to go to Mars. With present-day technology it would take less than a year to send some people there. They don't need hibernation for that. At light speed you'd be there in like ten minutes.

Suspension of Disbelief, you only have to give the audience enough to say I believe this and not this is BS

[Bohandas]

Magic breaks our laws of physics. The laws of physics in the world with magic must be different.

exactly



You don't need light speed to go to Mars. With present-day technology it would take less than a year to send some people there. They don't need hibernation for that. At light speed you'd be there in like ten minutes.

I think it could be upwards of 30 if they were on opposite sides of the sun

[raygun goth]

I think it could be upwards of 30 if they were on opposite sides of the sun

Closest approach: 182 seconds, or just over 3 minutes. Farthest approach: 1,342 seconds, or just over 22 minutes.