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S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-20, 04:46 PM
So a while ago I did a thread asking "If you were a wizard in a fantasy land, what would your research be?"

A lot of people said that they would try to truly understand how magic works, so that's me me wonder, how does magic work in your head? What is the justifications for things to happen the way they do? Or do you just go "It's magic I don't have to explain s***"? How do explain the gross violation of the laws of physics? How do you explain the break form the laws of thermodynamic?

Do you guys even take that in consideration when creating a game setting? Or just roll with it as it goes?

If a group of players decided to study the nature of magic what will they find?

Kiero
2018-04-20, 05:09 PM
It's trickery and charlatanism, in other words, it doesn't. If I'm designing the setting, it doesn't have any "real" magic in it.

Cluedrew
2018-04-20, 05:17 PM
If I limit myself to role-playing game stories (because there are less of those) partly. I mean D&D's lack of flavour in its magic system feels like a wound some times, so I go beyond that, but some times not by much.

So most of the magic actually comes from this ethereal wind that comes gushing out of the centre of the earth. When it reaches the surface of the world it begins to settle and create noticeable effects. (Many of these put forms the basis of the world, so the surface of the world actually exists where the wind begins to settle instead of the other way around.) By using things that are not entirely material (most things aren't but not always in a useful way) you can manipulate this settling wind for interesting effects. I don't have formulas for it, but that is the base of the system.

On the other hand there are people who can cause some basic magic to happen directly, seeming to skip the above system. That is black boxed and there is quite a number of people in setting trying to figure out why it works like that.

Segev
2018-04-20, 05:28 PM
I've written about this before, but a longish while ago, now, I was contemplating how I would make D&D-style "vancian" magic feel, well, magical, rather than like a science, while still making it something to be studied and worked.

I came up with the notion that spells aren't scientific formulas based on some fundamental understanding, the way technology and engineering is. Instead, they operate in an animist world, where there is a spirit-like essence behind everything. Magic is performed by convincing the sentient or pseudo-sentient forces behind physical law to do something for you.

Sorcerers make friends with various spirits and similar beings, who through that friendship gain sufficient personality to be good at particular stunts. They might befriend an essence of fire until it becomes a spirit that can help him cast burning hands and eventually fireball, or a fey spirit of lust and love that is the force behind his charm person spell and its ilk. He cultivates those relationships, but they only have so much attention to pay, and he only so much he can focus them to do, so eventually he runs out of spell slots until he rests up.

Wizards are more like lawyers than scientists. They work with similar kinds of spirits to the sorcerers (hence the same spell selection), but instead of befriending, they bargain. More, they work with bargains that are laid out as long-standing agreements. Much of a wizard's spell preparation is performing ritual tasks that in some way indebt spirits to him, or earn him boons from spirit courts. Not only does he have only so much he can do in a morning to prepare, but the more he does to prepare, the more snarled his many obligations become, so there is a limit to how much he can do in a day without starting to negate earlier privileges. As he gets better at it, however, he learns tricks to use some rituals to pay off others and to balance more things against each other, allowing him to prepare more spells. Spellcasting, for the wizard, is invoking his rights and privileges in particular ways.

Spell research for wizards can involve seeking out great spirit-kings and bartering for an agreement that will yield the effects he wants, but this is dangerous and costly and usually quite difficult. So they spend a lot more time researching already-extant bargains, and finding new ways to mix and match the costs and obligations to get the combination of privileges and rights he wants. Perhaps protection from fire came about from researching spells of cold that banish heat from an area, and modifying the obligations so that they only banish heat over a certain amount, and that only in the vicinity of the target's body.


Clerics are essentially officials in the courts of their gods, who, as gods, command vast authority within the spiritual realms. When they prepare their spells by praying, they're asking their god to give them authority, and when they cast, they're invoking that authority and the spirits and forces loyal to their gods obey, just as a king's trusted agent may command the service of his soldiers in the field in the king's name, in the manner or for the purpose the king granted him authority to invoke.

Druids are in some ways even more intimately involved with the spirits of nature, being recognized not as officers of the court, but as out-and-out members and allies. They still prepare, but they do so by establishing their place in the natural order, and receiving gifts and promises of aid and alliance.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-20, 05:28 PM
Apologies -- wish I could contribute, but it would involve discussing the fictional cosmology and fictional deities of my settings, which I'm no longer willing to risk.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-20, 05:52 PM
It doesn't.

While the setting has monsters and gods, the gods don't answer prayers and nobody casts spells. An elf can become invisible because elves can blend with the air, not because they know the invisibility spell (in the current version of the setting only humans are PC-suitable, I'm considering adding elves and dwarfs as PC options, but their invisibility and innate crafting prowess are difficulty). A player who wishes to play a magician should load up on Charisma and person skills.

This is partially an intentional contrast to what the other GM in the group does with her setting. She runs one where magic is common, priests heal for a fee, and nobody is surprised at wizard spells. So I very specifically went for a setting where there is no magic, beyond innate abilities of creatures (how do they work? In a poetic fashion), the gods are just the beings worshiped by religions, and if you want to take down a troll you'd better think on your feet instead of throwing fireballs. In both cases how magic works isn't spelt out, in one case it's because it's 'not important', and in the other it's because discovering that is part of the challenge (an elf can blend with air, so what happens if we contaminate the air?)

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-20, 06:03 PM
Apologies -- wish I could contribute, but it would involve discussing the fictional cosmology and fictional deities of my settings, which I'm no longer willing to risk.

I belive that as long as it's not related to Real-world religions and myths you are fine. :/

I'm suprised how many of you don't have magic in your settings, for me personaly fantasy settings without magic are rather boring and unapealing.

But then again I rather have that then magic as tecnology which feels so wrong it should be a sin xD


I've written about this before, but a longish while ago, now, I was contemplating how I would make D&D-style "vancian" magic feel, well, magical, rather than like a science, while still making it something to be studied and worked.

I came up with the notion that spells aren't scientific formulas based on some fundamental understanding, the way technology and engineering is. Instead, they operate in an animist world, where there is a spirit-like essence behind everything. Magic is performed by convincing the sentient or pseudo-sentient forces behind physical law to do something for you.

Sorcerers make friends with various spirits and similar beings, who through that friendship gain sufficient personality to be good at particular stunts. They might befriend an essence of fire until it becomes a spirit that can help him cast burning hands and eventually fireball, or a fey spirit of lust and love that is the force behind his charm person spell and its ilk. He cultivates those relationships, but they only have so much attention to pay, and he only so much he can focus them to do, so eventually he runs out of spell slots until he rests up.

Wizards are more like lawyers than scientists. They work with similar kinds of spirits to the sorcerers (hence the same spell selection), but instead of befriending, they bargain. More, they work with bargains that are laid out as long-standing agreements. Much of a wizard's spell preparation is performing ritual tasks that in some way indebt spirits to him, or earn him boons from spirit courts. Not only does he have only so much he can do in a morning to prepare, but the more he does to prepare, the more snarled his many obligations become, so there is a limit to how much he can do in a day without starting to negate earlier privileges. As he gets better at it, however, he learns tricks to use some rituals to pay off others and to balance more things against each other, allowing him to prepare more spells. Spellcasting, for the wizard, is invoking his rights and privileges in particular ways.

Spell research for wizards can involve seeking out great spirit-kings and bartering for an agreement that will yield the effects he wants, but this is dangerous and costly and usually quite difficult. So they spend a lot more time researching already-extant bargains, and finding new ways to mix and match the costs and obligations to get the combination of privileges and rights he wants. Perhaps protection from fire came about from researching spells of cold that banish heat from an area, and modifying the obligations so that they only banish heat over a certain amount, and that only in the vicinity of the target's body.


Clerics are essentially officials in the courts of their gods, who, as gods, command vast authority within the spiritual realms. When they prepare their spells by praying, they're asking their god to give them authority, and when they cast, they're invoking that authority and the spirits and forces loyal to their gods obey, just as a king's trusted agent may command the service of his soldiers in the field in the king's name, in the manner or for the purpose the king granted him authority to invoke.

Druids are in some ways even more intimately involved with the spirits of nature, being recognized not as officers of the court, but as out-and-out members and allies. They still prepare, but they do so by establishing their place in the natural order, and receiving gifts and promises of aid and alliance.

That sort of how Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné series magic works, it's just a lot more dark and gross.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-20, 06:05 PM
I belive that as long as it's not related to Real-world religions and myths you are fine. :/

Recent experience says otherwise -- even a list of entirely whole-cloth fictional deities isn't OK.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-20, 06:38 PM
I'm suprised how many of you don't have magic in your settings, for me personaly fantasy settings without magic are rather boring and unapealing.

But then again I rather have that then magic as tecnology which feels so wrong it should be a sin xD

For me it's a mixture of the fact the other GMs in the group tend to run high magic settings (although only two of us are willing to run right now), the fact I'd turn magic into technology anyway, and the fact that the game I'm going to be using (Psikerlord's Low Fantasy Gaming) has a magic setup I don't like but an Artificer class that I love representing the nonmagical engineer.

My world is also very much based on Berserk before certain developments, so there's lots of monsters but no actual spellcasters (while Berserk added spellcasters later I think it worked better without them).

I'm on the fence about including monks in the setting, while they fit thematically the class is a tad too magical for what I'm going for. Which leaves players with a choice of playing Artificers, Barbarians, Bards, Fighters, Rangers, and Rogues, which is a decent amount of diversity without bringing PC-usable magic into it. I just have no need for magic, and it allows me to present a world the group isn't that used to.

Celestia
2018-04-20, 11:56 PM
In my setting, all magic comes from higher beings. You either worship the gods or you bargain with familiars. Mortals cannot inherently use magic.

Cluedrew
2018-04-21, 07:06 AM
So most of the magic actually comes from this ethereal wind that comes gushing out of the centre of the earth.
the fictional cosmology and fictional deities of my settings,Right, I forgot to mention that at the center of the earth is... sort of a fused mass of different sleeping gods. Its complicated. So the wind sort of mixes together all the gods' powers and if you can separate out the power you can get more particular effects. Like growing plants instead of just pushing something around.

I'm not going to give the list of ~gods either. But that is because I haven't finalized the list yet.

Kiero
2018-04-21, 08:36 AM
I'm suprised how many of you don't have magic in your settings, for me personaly fantasy settings without magic are rather boring and unapealing.

But then again I rather have that then magic as tecnology which feels so wrong it should be a sin xD


I don't much like fantasy, I prefer to run straight historical.

By contrast, all-pervasive magic makes a setting rather boring and unappealing to me.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-21, 09:06 AM
I guess I end up at the other end of the spectrum from most. My setting goes for high magic prevalence (magic is everywhere), middling magic power (only a small fraction of magic is powerful), and low magic permanence (creating magic items is hard). The game system is 5e D&D.

Key principles:

Everything is magic. Quite literally--everything is made of anima; anima is created by creatures growing and learning. The whole world is suffused with ambient free anima. Some people manipulate external anima using spells, others draw it in and use it internally (all the other "can't do that on Earth" feats).

Spells are patterns that produce resonances in the ambient anima when fed energy. Empowering these patterns requires a talent that produces pockets of stored energy in a particular individual (abstracted as spell slots). So even if you know a pattern, you can't use it unless you have the proper "genetic" talent. And relatively few do, especially for higher-tier effects.

"Fire" or "lightning" magic (for example) isn't actually creating real fire--it's imposing the "fire" or "lightning" aspect onto a portion of the anima. Hence the lack of concussion from fireballs and the odd behavior of lightning bolts/lightning breaths.

Intrinsic magic relies on the caster's soul; patterns are idiosyncratic and rely on sheer will-power to wrestle the power into shape or to trick reality into doing what you want.
**Bards use rhythm and music to induce resonance, tricking reality into behaving.
**Paladins use sheer stubbornness and self-confidence. Their power comes from knowing that they're living by an oath. The patterns are subconsciously developed in line with what the paladin feels are the most important parts of their oath.
**Sorcerers use force of will to execute and modify patterns encoded in their souls either by heritage or by accident of birth.
**Monks and Barbarians rely on this style as well but turn the power internally to enhance their physical form instead of outward to produce spells.

Granted magic relies on other entities to provide the patterns.
** Clerics depend on the Great Mechanism after nomination by a god. Note that the god who feeds them patterns may not be the same one that nominated them. You can cleric-snipe.
** Druids depend on animistic spirits with which they make contracts--the druid feeds them energy and the spirit causes the resonance. When they wildshape, they summon and create a body for a beast spirit that serves as the interface. The beast spirit isn't harmed and gets the experience of being physical, the druid gets a new body.
** Rangers are like druids, except instead of making lots of impermanent contracts they make a few more permanent ones. More "spirits as friends" rather than "spirits as sources of power." Beastmaster rangers infuse their animal companion with these spirits (hence why it gets stronger).

Learned magic requires memorization of patterns and exact duplication. It does not necessarily involve understanding why the patterns work or how to modify them.
** Wizards use words and motions to directly manipulate reality. They can encode their spells in written form as they have to memorize the patterns they wish to use.
** Rogues and Fighters (even those that don't learn spells directly) learn their techniques to manipulate anima, allowing the superhuman feats (like evasion or action surges)

Warlocks are a hybrid of granted and learned magic. Those that make pacts with outsiders (as opposed to the Great Mechanism or natural spirits) have spell slots carved into their souls artificially, but they learn and progress their magic through research. Their magic isn't really their own which has advantages and disadvantages. Warlocks generally make a series of small bargains--not trading your soul for initial power, but trading favors for increased power.

Creating magic items takes fragments of your soul. Permanent magic items are costly to make and require embedding a portion of your soul into the item. The soul regrows, but it stunts your growth temporarily and can result in premature ageing. It used to be easier, but isn't anymore after a cataclysmic event. Note--even "permanent" magic items aren't--everything loses power eventually. Empowering a powerful item requires pulling on your own soul's reserves (hence the attunement limit and why things don't recharge unless they're owned).

Edit: I forgot to mention blood magic--using another creature's soul for power (or otherwise transferring, manipulating, or consuming souls). This is incredibly powerful but repeated use converts one into a demon. An old (fallen) empire used it to power magitech (by literally burning souls for power and creating "AI" by housing souls in inanimate objects) at a horrific cost. Most thinking beings (other than demon cultists) abhor this--there is no official alignment in the setting, but if there were, this would be EVIL.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-21, 11:24 AM
I guess I end up at the other end of the spectrum from most. My setting goes for high magic prevalence (magic is everywhere), middling magic power (only a small fraction of magic is powerful), and low magic permanence (creating magic items is hard). The game system is 5e D&D.

Interesting point. While my setting is low on magic prevalence (anything that does have innate abilities is rare), and low magic power (you're just not going to be doing anything large scale, if you have magic that actually affects others), but high magic permanence. If a magic item is successfully created than it's going to last, and dwarfs find making magic items easy. Although there's only about 1000 dwarfs in the world, and they're reluctant to part with their items. Magic items can be destroyed or lost, but they won't lose their magic without being destroyed. There's no such thing as a spell scroll, wand with limited charges, or potions of healing, because they're just too permanent.

EDIT: in many cases 'magic X' just means it's very well crafted. There's few things in the setting objectively magical, although you can make a sword that's just more sword than any in the real world.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-21, 11:32 AM
Interesting point. While my setting is low on magic prevalence (anything that does have innate abilities is rare), and low magic power (you're just not going to be doing anything large scale, if you have magic that actually affects others), but high magic permanence. If a magic item is successfully created than it's going to last, and dwarfs find making magic items easy. Although there's only about 1000 dwarfs in the world, and they're reluctant to part with their items. Magic items can be destroyed or lost, but they won't lose their magic without being destroyed. There's no such thing as a spell scroll, wand with limited charges, or potions of healing, because they're just too permanent.

EDIT: in many cases 'magic X' just means it's very well crafted. There's few things in the setting objectively magical, although you can make a sword that's just more sword than any in the real world.

I think we do ourselves a disservice when we lump all those facets into "high/low magic". You get very different settings at different points in that space--tippyverse can't happen in my setting because making magic items is hard. Eberron makes making items easy but has lower casting power. Etc.
Just springboarding here, not attacking.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-21, 11:46 AM
I think we do ourselves a disservice when we lump all those facets into "high/low magic". You get very different settings at different points in that space--tippyverse can't happen in my setting because making magic items is hard. Eberron makes making items easy but has lower casting power. Etc.
Just springboarding here, not attacking.

Oh sure. We can even break it down into spell magic and item magic. Do spells last for years, but all magic items are single shot? Sounds like it's high spell permanence but low item permanence.

I've moved almost entirely to low spell settings theses days, even in my 'high magic' settings if you want to do something big you use an item. I do play in a fair few high spell (full prevalence, power, and permanence for spells) games, because that's how people near me tend to run, and it is fun. I just prefer it when characters aren't chanting and something happens, personal preference.

For Eberron, as far as I can tell it's low on spell power and permanence, as well as on magic item power, but high on spell prevalence and magic item prevalence and permanence, just to show how this idea works.

Cluedrew
2018-04-21, 12:01 PM
EDIT: in many cases 'magic X' just means it's very well crafted. There's few things in the setting objectively magical, although you can make a sword that's just more sword than any in the real world.Sort of like a lot of elf works in Lord of the Rings. The elf travel bread is insanely filling (you need one "wafer" a day or something like that) but not inherently supernatural. Same with the weapons and cloaks. Their boats though, there is no explaining away the boats without magic.

To PhoenixPhyre: Yes, for us these distinctions are important but for many people less interested than us I don't even think the "high/low" distinction matters very much. I remember when a nearby library got a bunch of new books and the sign on the new sci-fi books had a crystal ball on it.

And (although this is now building on what Anonymouswizard said) we can go further, from categories to scales to compositions (multiple things we can mix together) to colours (different aspects have different compositions). For instance I have several types of "magic" in my system and all of the chart differently.

King of Nowhere
2018-04-21, 12:21 PM
Magic is a sort of natural radiation that can temporarily suspend the normal laws of physics. It is created by life, and particularly by intelligent life. If you think about something, you are sending a bit of magic to it. If a creature lives somewhere, it gives the place a bit of magic.
If we think of magical radiation as akin to sunlight, then wizards are solar panels and spells are electrically-powered devices. Aberrations and mutations are akin to skin cancer.
But magic is also not really real. It's like, it's real for long enough to do its job, but then it fades. when there is much magic around, reality becomes thin.

Because of that, highly non-magical weapons are particularly strong against highly magical creatures, because they are VERY real and will cut very well through something very unreal. But you need specific procedures to get highly nonmagical stuff, because magic is like background radiation, it's everywhere. You need to go in some small desert to make them, because the background radiation is low there. Not big deserts, because those are told about in stories and they have a certain aura of mistique which actually gives them more background magic than most places. Just places that are mostly empty and that nobody knows about. Incidentally, once you start using them, they start to get magical very soon. Space is also very nonmagical, because it has no life and while people think of it, it is very vast, so it gets little magic per unit of volume. You can't teleport to a point in space, and even getting basic spells to work there requires very powerful spellcasters and special measures. That becomes relevant because some liches with enough time available managed to get to the moon and hide their philactery there, and it's virtually unreachable now. A fly spell takes some 5 years to get there.

Florian
2018-04-21, 12:36 PM
"Magic" is an extreme form of high-tech and a left-over of a highly advanced precursor race.

Things are a bit more "physical" and follow a different organization than classic D&D. For example, a "laser spell" and "laser rifle" are indistinguishable and deal the same damage, with the same DC and so on, while at the same time no form of physical transport (teleportation) below the combined spells of Perfect Clone and Absolute Destruction exist.

Jay R
2018-04-21, 02:29 PM
First of all, I don't assume a base of modern physics with magical exceptions. In a game several years back, my introduction included the following:


"A warning about meta-knowledge. In a game in which stone gargoyles can fly and people can cast magic spells, modern rules of physics and chemistry simply don’t apply. There aren’t 92 natural elements, lightning is not caused by an imbalance of electrical potential, and stars are not gigantic gaseous bodies undergoing nuclear fusion. Cute stunts involving clever use of the laws of thermodynamics simply won’t work. Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche. But in a world with teleportation, levitation, and fireball spells, Newton’s three laws of motion do not apply, and energy and momentum are not conserved. Accordingly, modern scientific meta-knowledge will do you more harm than good. On the other hand, knowledge of Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval alchemy, or medieval and classical legends might be useful occasionally."

In that game, the stationary earth was in the center of the universe, and the seven classical planets (the moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) orbited around it in epicycles of epicycles, as described by Ptolemy. The first major quest involved seven artifacts based on the powers of the seven planets.

Beyond that, I don't try to develop a careful theory about magic, because I don't see any way in which that could improve the game.

I tried to, once, back in the 1970s, with original D&D. It was a carefully designed system to explain D&D's melange of monsters from many cultures, and an attempt to give a reason for some of the weird rules, like classes and advancement in discrete levels.

The world was identical to ours in all respects until 1054, when the light from the Crab Nebula supernova arrived, bringing with it raw manna - the stuff of magic. Originally, this had no effect, since nobody knew how to shape it. But little kids started seeing the bogeymen of their nurses' stories - goblins, kobolds, orcs, etc. They existed because all the children believed they did.

Imagine a world in which people's worst nightmares could become real. It soon descended into chaos, filled with monsters from every story from every culture.

But in a few places, there were little islands of sanity. If the lord, or priest, had a strong enough will, and enough determination, and could sway the minds of their followers, then a certain degree of order persisted in their lands - again, because what people believed in strongly enough came to pass.

Hence, Law was mostly good, and Chaos was mostly bad. [This was before the nine-way alignment system, back when Law meant Good and Chaos meant Evil.]

Over time, these great leaders started to die off - but their influence remained. The essence of all the mighty Warriors joined together into a great subconscious archetype of the Fighting Man. (Yes, that was the term in the books then.) Eventually, any Fighter who grew powerful was forced into the form of this archetype.

Similarly, the archetypes of Cleric, Wizard, Paladin, and Thief grew. As a person gained more experience, they could align themselves more fully with the archetypes, but only in certain quantum levels, which became experience levels as we know them.

As Europe collapsed under the weight of the nightmares, many of these great leaders sailed west in search of new land. The native Americans, whose culture leaned more toward living within nature rather than conquering it, had been much less affected. The only real changes were that woodland Indians became even more in tune with the woods, and this was the start of the elves. Dwarves grew out of mining communities that had been sheltered from the chaos by living in their mines.

Since the original Heroes were human, non-humans could not attune themselves to the archetypes past a certain point. Hence, racial limits on levels. The exception was the Thief archetype, made of those who didn't really fit into human society.

The scientific method does not work when an experimenter's beliefs change the results of the experiment, so the technological level never developed beyond the Middle Ages.

Once people started to study the changes, they learned how to manipulate it, to some extent. These were the first wizards. The more people have made it work a certain way, the stronger the pull for it to work in that way. This explains why a more-or-less arbitrary set of spells are the ones best known. People have cast these spells a lot, and so the manna is channeled to work in that way.

That's the gist of it. It was much more carefully worked out, and explained everything in the rules I could find a way to fit.

It was careful, mostly complete, and self-consistent. It was also totally irrelevant to the play of the game.

Once I realized that, I dropped it, and haven't been tempted to try to explain magic in the forty years since.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-21, 04:50 PM
I haven't yet had a chance to implement it in practice more than once or twice, but in the future magic in my games will follow the four laws of magic extensively discussed in this thread. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?542746-Old-School-magic-amp-metamagic&p=22688271#post22688271)

However, this is only a partial answer. The four rules allow for multiple highly different traditions based on how symbols are codified and understood by living beings. Traditions of magic are like languages, they live and die based on how widespread they are and how semantic understanding changes from speaker to speaker. Due to this, several magic-using civilizations have vanished without a trace. The fourth law ensures that once people who believe (in a particular sort of) magic are gone, nature will reassert itself, their spells will unravel and their artefacts rendered unusable.

In addition, the four laws of magic leave several questions about the existence and nature of the supernatural entirely open. Furthermore, the common people within my setting are not as a rule educated in magic and thus do not or cannot make a reliable distinction between four-laws-compliant magic and non-magical natural and supernatural phenomena. Many ill-understood things are called "magic" by common people regardless of whether this is correct.

To spoil some things: there is an actual objective world underlying existence, meaning that all of observable reality is not merely figment of someone's imagination. There are genuine, otherworldly beings which are part of the natural order and capable of inhuman feats that do not obey the four laws. Access to these otherworldly things can, via magical invocation, be used to achieve miracles which would not otherwise be possible. (Simplest example: the four laws do not allow you to turn into a giant flier if no (connection to) such creature exist.) There are things which can be (rightly) labeled "gods", but (as they do not rely on the four laws) they are independent of human belief, sometimes even beyond human comprehension entirely. The reverse is also (mostly) true, meaning humanity is independent of said "gods", but this is of very little solace to anyone.

Finally, there are "souls", or plasmic entities. These can be used to preserve or give sentience to inorganic objects, a step (almost) necessary for instilling an Oracle or a Demon into a magic item. These are technically a natural phenomenom, but the way they interact with magic makes scientific inquiry of them nearly impossible. (In absence of the four laws, they would reduce to the study of the same phenomena we call "dark matter" and "dark energy" in real life.)

King of Nowhere
2018-04-21, 05:08 PM
"A warning about meta-knowledge. In a game in which stone gargoyles can fly and people can cast magic spells, modern rules of physics and chemistry simply don’t apply. There aren’t 92 natural elements, lightning is not caused by an imbalance of electrical potential, and stars are not gigantic gaseous bodies undergoing nuclear fusion. Cute stunts involving clever use of the laws of thermodynamics simply won’t work. Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche. But in a world with teleportation, levitation, and fireball spells, Newton’s three laws of motion do not apply, and energy and momentum are not conserved. Accordingly, modern scientific meta-knowledge will do you more harm than good. On the other hand, knowledge of Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval alchemy, or medieval and classical legends might be useful occasionally."

As a scientist and a guy passionated with science, I'd never want to play with such premise. I work under a hard assumption that, barring magic influence, science stays the same. Neither I particularly like to depict magic under a particulary mystical light; it is just another tool to be used.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-21, 05:48 PM
As a scientist and a guy passionated with science, I'd never want to play with such premise. I work under a hard assumption that, barring magic influence, science stays the same. Neither I particularly like to depict magic under a particulary mystical light; it is just another tool to be used.

See, as another hard science type (PhD in quantum chemistry, teaching chemistry and physics), I'm just the other way. I know that any magic implies that physics as we know it has gone bye-bye long ago. If I want real physics, I'll go walk around the block. If I weren't allergic to all those green growing things and didn't burn in the sunlight anyway... :smallamused:

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-21, 05:59 PM
I'm going to side with 'like reality unless noted'.

Again, this feeds back into me rarely using magic in my games. I like the idea of struggling with only realistic tools, and so still do that.

It's still not real life because in real life you're not fighting a three meter tall troll with scaled skin that can't tolerate the sun. Or piloting a STL starship to another system (or an FTL one for that matter).

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-21, 06:10 PM
I'm going to side with 'like reality unless noted'.

Again, this feeds back into me rarely using magic in my games. I like the idea of struggling with only realistic tools, and so still do that.

It's still not real life because in real life you're not fighting a three meter tall troll with scaled skin that can't tolerate the sun. Or piloting a STL starship to another system (or an FTL one for that matter).

But all of those break physics. Hard. And since it's all a coherent system (in reality), breaking one part breaks it all.

I take it as "it's like reality on the surface" but expect the underlying physics to work completely differently. Because it has to be wildly different to be coherent.

It also seems to be a bit of a cheat, using knowledge of real-world physics (which the character wouldn't have) in game. Especially if you're doing so for mechanical advantage.

Cluedrew
2018-04-21, 07:20 PM
Beyond that, I don't try to develop a careful theory about magic, because I don't see any way in which that could improve the game.I do, but my context is a little bit different. One: I am developing a system, not flavouring an existing one. So I'm setting guidelines for the material I'm producing. I also just go by feel but having underlying logic helps me out. Two: The spells in said system are more open ended. Common uses are written out but you can improvise. Explaining some of the underlying rules lets people fill in those gaps more consistently.

Because of that, especially the latter, I do feel the need to lay out the rules. Especially since I think D&D suffers from its magic system not having enough underlying logic to it. How much depends, I think it should be higher in games where you interact with it as opposed to a book/movie where you just have to see it.


The only real changes were that woodland Indians became even more in tune with the woods, and this was the start of the elves.I suddenly want to do some re-favouring.

On Physics: Yeah, you can't just turn off physics went it is convenient. So if you want to switch back and forth you first have to decide how they interact. For instance, when does the fire in a fireball go from "magic file" to "physics fire".

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-21, 07:37 PM
On Physics: Yeah, you can't just turn off physics went it is convenient. So if you want to switch back and forth you first have to decide how they interact. For instance, when does the fire in a fireball go from "magic file" to "physics fire".

When it sets a physical object on fire. Which only happens if the spell specifically says it does. Spells don't have to make logical sense when compared to other things--they're alterations in the normal flow. And the current God of Magic doesn't want things to be easily understood. So he changes some of the constants around periodically. This only really screws up those who try to do fancy magic-on-magic things.

One fact about the magic in my world is that overuse can weaken the anima field, damaging all the life around it. So you want to make an industrial plant growth farm? You might get a year at best, but after that you'll start having net reductions in growth since you're aspecting all the anima in ways that make it harder for plants to grow right. It has little effect at the play level (they're rarely casting major spells enough in one place) but tamps down some of the world-building issues with D&D-style magic.

This all is why I went with "everything is magic" for my setting--it makes things much easier. Heck, the whole pocket universe it inhabits is the dream of a being who is themselves the product of the dream of the multiverse-spanning Dark. The Dark dreamed of self; if there is self there must be Other. The worlds all are dreams of these other Dreamers.

Necroticplague
2018-04-21, 08:12 PM
In my own, what would be considered magic in other settings is just an ofshoot of physics. When the gods made the world, they made it's natural laws, which includes possibilities that are different from our own. The art of manipulating non-tangible laws to some benefit, known as Pymary (name stolen from a webcomic with a somewhat similar concept), can sometimes produce similar affects to what would be magic in other setting. But there ultimately isn't much different between trying to make an improved gunpowder formula by experimenting with the laws of chemistry, and trying to make an improved fireball invocation by experimenting with the laws planar boundary invocation.

King of Nowhere
2018-04-21, 08:21 PM
But all of those break physics. Hard. And since it's all a coherent system (in reality), breaking one part breaks it all.

I take it as "it's like reality on the surface" but expect the underlying physics to work completely differently. Because it has to be wildly different to be coherent.

If we want to go technical (PhD to PhD) I say that my universe has the same standard physical equations, but with an added factor, which is always multiplied by magic. So, when magic is 0, you get the same results that you would in our universe. If magic is not zero, then all those laws are just different.
I liken it to relativity. Newtonian phhysics was a coherent system, and then people figured out that mass can change. that's a very big shake. And yet all it took was the addition of a few factors (generally with divisions by 1-(v^2/c^2), which goes to 1 when the velocity is much smaller than the speed of light), and most equations still work. If you remove the relativistic part by approximating that factor to 1, you get newtonian physics. And on the surface it looks the same, even if the underlying physics works completely differently. Magic would work the same.

But regardless of details, I just cannot imagine magic to be some random stuff doing anything it feels like. If we postulate that magic exists then it is a natural phenomenon, and if it is a natural phenomenon it must have rules and it must be consistent, in which case it's not really that different from other scientific phenomena. And I just can't imagine a magic that is not consistent. Even areas of random magic, where pigeons may pop up from the air and every time you cast a spell you must roll a table of random effects, have rules - although they would fit best with chaos theory, because they are not really predictable.





It also seems to be a bit of a cheat, using knowledge of real-world physics (which the character wouldn't have) in game. Especially if you're doing so for mechanical advantage.
I've never seen a situation where that could be the case. What are the players going to do, invent the steam engine? there are so many ways to stop them, it's not even fun to try.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-21, 08:34 PM
If we want to go technical (PhD to PhD) I say that my universe has the same standard physical equations, but with an added factor, which is always multiplied by magic. So, when magic is 0, you get the same results that you would in our universe. If magic is not zero, then all those laws are just different.
I liken it to relativity. Newtonian phhysics was a coherent system, and then people figured out that mass can change. that's a very big shake. And yet all it took was the addition of a few factors (generally with divisions by 1-(v^2/c^2), which goes to 1 when the velocity is much smaller than the speed of light), and most equations still work. If you remove the relativistic part by approximating that factor to 1, you get newtonian physics. And on the surface it looks the same, even if the underlying physics works completely differently. Magic would work the same.

But regardless of details, I just cannot imagine magic to be some random stuff doing anything it feels like. If we postulate that magic exists then it is a natural phenomenon, and if it is a natural phenomenon it must have rules and it must be consistent, in which case it's not really that different from other scientific phenomena. And I just can't imagine a magic that is not consistent. Even areas of random magic, where pigeons may pop up from the air and every time you cast a spell you must roll a table of random effects, have rules - although they would fit best with chaos theory, because they are not really predictable.


I've never seen a situation where that could be the case. What are the players going to do, invent the steam engine? there are so many ways to stop them, it's not even fun to try.

Sadly it's not that easy. Magic's going to break conservation laws and causality just if it occurs anywhere. And local violations of conservation laws mean that nothing we have makes sense anymore. Remember that the laws are descriptive, not prescriptive. And if they stop describing things...they're not valid. The only reason that relativity (or QM) and classical mechanics work together is that the one reduces to the other in the appropriate limits. You might say that relativity embeds classical mechanics in it. And the realm where classical mechanics fails is so far outside the normal regime for human observations that the failures don't affect us. Magic, if it's not going to be vanishingly rare, doesn't have any of those properties. The physics breakage is extremely non-linear and obvious even at magic = epsilon levels. Even the possibility of magic requires wholesale rewriting of laws.

I've seen people try to justify all sorts of things based on real-world physics. Making a blanket "physics as you know it doesn't work that way in this world" statement up front ends all those arguments right off the bat. It also allows for all sorts of things that "realistic" physics doesn't.

My setting has a couple of planets orbiting each other way inside the Roche limit. They share an atmosphere. The seasons are caused by the progression of the main planet through the influence of the para-elemental planes, which emanate from the central star and have fixed orientation in space, instead of any axial tilt. The two moons orbit in precise circles despite being close enough to affect each other gravitationally. A druid circle brought down one of the moons (there were 3) to end an empire without destroying all life. Races are created by mixing souls, not genetics. Goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears are the same race--an individual may go through most of his life as a goblin and then get transformed into a hobgoblin when the tribe needs it. Pockets of space and time can get separated from the rest by magical nukes, popping back in hundreds of years later.

All sorts of things that make physics go WAT, But are tons of fun to play through.

Cluedrew
2018-04-21, 08:54 PM
Magic is a sort of natural radiation that can temporarily suspend the normal laws of physics. It is created by life, and particularly by intelligent life. If you think about something, you are sending a bit of magic to it. If a creature lives somewhere, it gives the place a bit of magic.I forgot to say so before, but I like this system.


So, when magic is 0, you get the same results that you would in our universe.I remember in some science setting an enlightened individual (or one who know more about "science" at least) pointing out: "The laws of thermodynamics as you describe them are just a special case when delta e is 1 and delta i is 0. Which they usually are." I don't even know what those two variables where, or how they altered the laws of thermodynamics, but it allowed for a lot of crazy stuff like FTL, instant communication and some weird hive mind stuff.


All sorts of things that make physics go WAT, But are tons of fun to play through.Yup, just add Magic.

Guizonde
2018-04-21, 08:54 PM
from what i can tell, with my friends, magic is basically "willpower manifest". as in, either you pray so hard to your god that a spell happens, you nerd out enough that your spell goes off (int-based casters), or you bend reality through sheer charisma alone (cha-based casters).

you could call it "clap your hands if you believe", but we don't really think about it. in 40k terms, you've got blunts (strict non-casters), psykers (true or half casters), and orks (they bend physics, but nobody knows why or how. looking at you, monks and rogues).

that said, we do use a d20 homebrew mechanic when playing pf to gauge how awesome our casting is, allowing for critical effects on spells. we never take metamagic feats due to this homebrew, since that would break pf even more than it already is. i guess it represents how much our character is willing to break physics through sheer willpower.

it's just a fact of life in golarion, and we take it at face value without thinking too hard about it. if we did, our friday evenings would look like flamewars on this subforum without us ever playing. which would suck worse than a chest wound, if you'll pardon the metaphor. i mean, it could be fun to nerd out on that subject in person, but i'd rather just play a giant bomb-throwing rabbit than debate on the dubious physics of said giant rabbit or his ability to manufacture explosives without opposable thumbs. or his cannibal tendencies, which is a whole other pot of stew altogether. great, now i'm debating with myself about it, which both proves my point and infuriates me. i'll stop now.

NichG
2018-04-21, 09:29 PM
So a while ago I did a thread asking "If you were a wizard in a fantasy land, what would your research be?"

A lot of people said that they would try to truly understand how magic works, so that's me me wonder, how does magic work in your head? What is the justifications for things to happen the way they do? Or do you just go "It's magic I don't have to explain s***"? How do explain the gross violation of the laws of physics? How do you explain the break form the laws of thermodynamic?

Do you guys even take that in consideration when creating a game setting? Or just roll with it as it goes?

If a group of players decided to study the nature of magic what will they find?

In my meta-setting, each universe basically has its own somewhat arbitrary physics, but in the larger context the reason why so many universes have things like magic systems which constitute human-scale and somewhat sapient intuitive power sources is that there are organizations at the multiverse level which are seeding universes with different kinds of ideas or systems in search of 'special' rulesets that, through the things they construct and build, are able to sustain themselves even outside of the universe into which they're instantiated. So basically, 'magic' as particular systems has been evolved on the basis of its open-endedness, relatability, and extensibility.

The underlying multiversal physics corresponds to something roughly along the lines of 'whatever can be conceived of specifically enough to become its own thing, can exist somewhere'. That is to say, any set of rules which could be specified, such that someone else other than the originator of the rules could in principle agree on what would happen, satisfies the sufficient conditions for being instantiated as a universe - anything conceivably playable isn't ruled out from existing somewhere, in effect. However, instantiating such things requires the use of a resource that is plentiful but ultimately finite and conserved at the multiverse level - in-game it's a kind of computronium-like energy that 'runs' the rules and makes up space or time or whatever craziness a given universe uses for its underpinnings. You could call it 'soul' or 'spotlight time' or 'conservation of detail' or whatever.

Generally, that 'stuff' ends up being embodied in some (potentially different) form in each universe, since someone having control or influence over it basically could locally distort the physics of their reality even beyond whatever rules their universe is running. That is to say, they could, if they knew what they were doing, use it to bubble off a separate mini-universe for themselves and solipsize whatever existence they might like. But more often, they're just going to subconsciously use it to distort things a bit in their favor. In game systems, this stuff usually ends up getting mapped to either experience points (if the focus on the system is spontaneously developing new abilities or powers from nowhere), or any kind of dramatic editing/luck point/etc resources that might exist in the system. The stuff tends to be 'versatile' rather than 'powerful'.

Universes with an open structure (e.g. settings that themselves have multiple planes of existence/universe hopping/etc) tend to have permissive or reflexive rules - that is to say, their rules leave openings for new variables to be bound in from outside - and in such universes, the physics of different planes or realms or whatever can sometimes be clauses built into the core physics (as it is with the elemental planes, the astral, and the ethereal in Planescape) or can sometimes be emergent from internal heterogeneities of the computronium resource (which, in Planescape, I mapped to 'belief'). So the weirdness of the Outer Planes is a result of trillions of mortals each hammering semi-randomly on the rules text of the universe, in essence.

Even open-structured universes that have a computronium economy tend to have barriers between them and wildly different ones, so there are local groups and vast distances between conceptually divergent universes and things of that nature, and there are still weak emergent concepts such as locality, inertia, etc which govern their dynamics at that scale. Settings like Nobilis which are very big-picture tend to involve intentional reorganizations of the cosmos on that level - Excrucians stealing bits of creation is basically multiversal feng shui. The origin of those overarching concepts is essentially emergent from what happens when dissimilar rulesets come into contact with each-other, so there isn't a meta-computronium/etc that mediates it. It's more like, if you're next to a universe with universe-hopping powers, you're going to get bleed over between the rules.

This kind of meta-fiction is an agglomeration of stuff that made past campaigns I've run make sense as well as ideas cribbed from a series of campaigns I participated in. It's broad enough that pretty much any campaign I run can be compatible with it, yet cosmologically very different in detail in each case if I like.

Anonymouswizard
2018-04-22, 12:56 AM
But all of those break physics. Hard. And since it's all a coherent system (in reality), breaking one part breaks it all.

Only the FTL starship (depending on the validity of some potential technologies, but I'm personally skeptical). The STL starship would likely be a boring game, but nothing specifically forbids out from working. The Terrill was intentionally kept simple, no regeneration or anything, just big, scaly, and hates the sun.


I take it as "it's like reality on the surface" but expect the underlying physics to work completely differently. Because it has to be wildly different to be coherent.

It also seems to be a bit of a cheat, using knowledge of real-world physics (which the character wouldn't have) in game. Especially if you're doing so for mechanical advantage.

Eh, the reason I default to real physics is because it's the easiest way to adjudicate. I ain't got no time to extrapolate realistic alternate physics.

Arbane
2018-04-22, 04:09 AM
Two of my favorite games/settings are Exalted and RuneQuest, both of which used Marvelous Physics-Ignoring Method on day one and never looked back. (Both are flat worlds with a small sun traveling in the Upper Sky, for starters.)

Conversely, one random idea I had for a background is a fantasy world with 'magic' that's actually the work of a gone-for-aeons Precursor race's pervasive nanotech utility fog - it can reshape matter, cure wounds, detect a great many things, channel energy... but you can't turn someone into a frog (in a timely fashion), control minds, predict the future, etc. You have to be able to speak and gesture to use it, and incantations are learned from archaeology and memorized by rote, not the local equivalent of physics research.

Theoboldi
2018-04-22, 07:01 AM
In my setting, the world and reality as we know it is all part of a complex, living organism. Everything, all the way from humans to non-living matter play a part in how its body functions, and share a direct connection that is for the most port unobservable.

Beings with a sense of self, such as humans or most animals, can with lengthy training and meditation, or the use of mind-altering drugs, learn to perceive these connections. They then can enforce their own will, influencing reality in several ways. This 'magic', however, does not allow a complete altering of reality, or matter in particular. Mind-affecting abilities, telekinesis or even pyrokinesis all work, for instance, but there's no such thing as summoning magic or teleportation. Nor are there any illusions beyond painstakingly influencing individual people's minds to perceive things that are not there.

Also, due to reality being somewhat malleable by beings with a sense of self, there is also the fact that if someone gets good enough at a certain skill, they will eventually develop supernatural ability with it, becoming able to just do things that for any average person would be completely impossible.

There's also alchemy, which is more of a classical studied kind of magic that works by exploiting chemical reactions as well as the malleable reality of the world to create mystical effects. This can combine dangerously with the possibility of developing supernatural ability, as some alchemists become so capable that their devices and concoctions do literally impossible things, but only for themselves. These devices are often so removed from actual science and true reality that they fall apart in the hands of anyone else.

Also, there are otherworldly parasites that eat reality. People left alive in the wake of these creatures are left less real in some aspects, which most of the time leaves them essentially non-functioning, but sometimes they develop unique powers as a result of it. Somebody whose connection with space was disrupted might become able to move instantly between places, essentially teleporting at will.

I'll admit, it's not the most internally consistent of settings, but it contains places for all the stuff I think is cool. :smalltongue:

King of Nowhere
2018-04-22, 07:17 AM
Sadly it's not that easy. Magic's going to break conservation laws and causality just if it occurs anywhere.



yeah, but in this setting you no longer have laws of conservation of mass/energy. You have a law of predicted change of mass/energy, telling you that in a transformation the total change in the mass/energy of the system is dependent upon a factor, and if magic goes to zero that factor goes to zero too. I think it could be made to work. of course the physics would look very different from our own; cconservation laws would not apply as we know them - although I do try a soft application that "magic does not create anything permanent", to provent abuses like the infamous selling of walls of iron. We do have something similar, in that the conservation of mass/energy ccan be broken for very short amounts and very short times, linked by the plank constant. Magic does something similar on a longer time scale. To create something permanent, it requires some resource like material components or XP





My setting has a couple of planets orbiting each other way inside the Roche limit. They share an atmosphere. The seasons are caused by the progression of the main planet through the influence of the para-elemental planes, which emanate from the central star and have fixed orientation in space, instead of any axial tilt.

yeah, that kind of things work better without physics. I could still do it in my world, though, by postulating enough magic. Say, enough magic that if you got outside of the protective fields of the planets, you'd sprout a third arm in 1d4+1 rounds, and would require a FORT save to avoid becoming a random aberration once per minute.

Amaril
2018-04-22, 12:52 PM
In the setting I'm tinkering with for Torchbearer, the first magic was songs sung by the Fair Folk--they're part of the world, and the world is part of them, the will of each bending to that of the other. When mortals first started writing the songs down, they gave them permanence, the ability to persist when not being sung; these songs became spells, which, as the system suggests, behave more like living things summoned and bound than formulas or sequences of actions that can be repeated at will (hence the need for a wizard to prepare a spell every time they want to cast it). The ancient wizards wielded godlike power through their mastery of the art. Of those that didn't kill each other in magical wars, many fell to the Wild Hunts launched by the sidhe against those who had stolen their power; the few survivors retreated from the world for everyone's protection, locking their sanctuaries out of time and space. In the centuries since, almost all the old art has been lost, whether to time, or to persecution by non-practitioners afraid of the Wild Hunt's eyes falling on their homes. Wizardry is neither good nor evil--like any power, it all depends on how it's used.

Then, there's necromancy--the summoning and commanding of ghosts. Wizardry can be used to perform necromancy, but you can get some of the same results by just carving a ghost's name into a sacrificial blood offering and chanting around an altar, as long as you get the spirit's attention and can convince it to do what you want. Ghosts can have all kinds of weird powers no one really understands, the possession and animation of corpses being the most pedestrian. Necromancy isn't inherently, cosmically evil--if there is such a thing, no one can prove it--but since the dead can only remain in the world of the living by feeding on living souls, and the only dead souls that refuse to pass on are those that consider this a worthwhile trade, there's not much way to make use of them ethically.

Finally, there's the miracles performed by living saints of the Corellene Church of the Immortal Lords. No one really knows how their stuff works, or where it comes from--the Church claims living saints are those predestined to become Immortal Lords even before death, and since most people worship the Lords, most people believe that story. Of course, the Immortal Lords, if they exist, may or may not actually be a cabal of ancient ghosts posing as benevolent ancestor spirits to manipulate living society from the shadows in pursuit of world domination (much like the God Hand of Berserk). It would certainly explain why all living saints, regardless of what other miracles they perform, seem to share some amount of command over the restless dead.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-22, 01:06 PM
yeah, but in this setting you no longer have laws of conservation of mass/energy. You have a law of predicted change of mass/energy, telling you that in a transformation the total change in the mass/energy of the system is dependent upon a factor, and if magic goes to zero that factor goes to zero too. I think it could be made to work. of course the physics would look very different from our own; cconservation laws would not apply as we know them - although I do try a soft application that "magic does not create anything permanent", to provent abuses like the infamous selling of walls of iron. We do have something similar, in that the conservation of mass/energy ccan be broken for very short amounts and very short times, linked by the plank constant. Magic does something similar on a longer time scale. To create something permanent, it requires some resource like material components or XP

yeah, that kind of things work better without physics. I could still do it in my world, though, by postulating enough magic. Say, enough magic that if you got outside of the protective fields of the planets, you'd sprout a third arm in 1d4+1 rounds, and would require a FORT save to avoid becoming a random aberration once per minute.

As long as you realize that without at least local conservation laws everything looks completely different under the hood (so to speak). And no, we can't really break conservation of mass and energy, even at the plank scale. We have phenomena that are easiest to explain using current models as breaking those laws in unobservable ways. That's a problem with the models, not with the conservation laws.

And as soon as you do something like the following (where F_0 is the current model and F' is the magic part)

F = (1-magic) F_0 + (magic) F'

which is the simplest "sliding scale switch", you run into severe issues. Do that for gravity and you have planets no longer in closed orbits if 'magic' has ever been non-zero anywhere as closed orbits are a property of inverse-square laws only. Do that for the electromagnetic force and you no longer have atoms, since the balance there is supremely delicate.

There's also a lot of things that can't be done with an additive magic factor at all. I had a fight on the edge of the universe, with the participants on a shard of the broken crystal shell that englobes the universe, frantically trying to protect Marius and Luigius (the crack angelic engineering squad) from invading thought-forms taken physical shape.

jhonny
2018-04-22, 01:57 PM
for me magic is a form of manipulable energy

I would like to offer two ways of seeing magic.
The first way is: In our reality there is a theory of dark matter, it occupies 80% of our universe and it had dark energy that we still can not detect. If we could learn more about that matter can it be something like TRUE magic.
or maybe the energy needs to be extracted and we lose the ability to extract the energy when we lose the knowledge of the creation of temples and pyramids
check this out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhxlUAwUxOc

the second: we live in a universe where magical energy is banned and so we can not get in touch, but when visiting multiverses in whatever way ( dreams or traveling astrays ), we learn that it exists in other places.


how to manipulate, you need to give an order for energy to do something, but the only way to give such order is through mental energy ( I would differentiate mental energy from magic energy), so magicians, sorcerers and other magical beings would have to learn how to give orders to magic energy.

That is the way that I think about magic. The energy is out there, try to get it.

NovenFromTheSun
2018-04-22, 02:09 PM
I don't really intend to use this setting in a campaign, but I might as well use this to get my thoughts straight. The Tower has three regions, or "worlds" within it, each run by their own rules and processes. A creature's soul, however, exists in all three, and can bridge the gap between them for a brief moment.

Putting these mutually exclusive physical laws together creates a mass of contradictions, a paradox that must be resolved. This is done with the creature's "eidolon", the image of their soul, releasing this paradox and causing strange effects based on the nature of said image.

An eidolon's shape, and thus its effects, reflects the most basic nature and drives of its bearer. These drives are so primal that putting them to words will inevitably distort the whole context, but general links can be seen. Someone who's basic nature seeks safefy may have defensive effects, but what kinds depend on many factors.

A different setting that I'm more likely to use for a campaign uses a "everything is magical" principle. All entities whether living or not have a supernatural spark, spellcasting is the process of activating the magic that's already there.

Florian
2018-04-22, 04:09 PM
Conversely, one random idea I had for a background is a fantasy world with 'magic' that's actually the work of a gone-for-aeons Precursor race's pervasive nanotech utility fog - it can reshape matter, cure wounds, detect a great many things, channel energy... but you can't turn someone into a frog (in a timely fashion), control minds, predict the future, etc. You have to be able to speak and gesture to use it, and incantations are learned from archaeology and memorized by rote, not the local equivalent of physics research.

That's very close to an idea that I'm trying to build some rules and a world around.
A cornerstone for this is that magic is a purely external affair and is depending on "the cloud" to be available and the nano particles to be powered up to be able to create the desired effect.
While larger settlements are generally located in regions where the cloud is dense and/or generators for recharging it are located, in general terms, "magic" is less prevalent in population centers because more things use and drain it, while the lonely "wizard tower" in the outback doesn´t have that problem, or nomadic tribes wander along routes of "fresh" cloud.
Additionally, people have found a way to compress the cloud into sorta-kinda coins, for both storing energy as well as for trade.

FabulousFizban
2018-04-22, 05:37 PM
It's magic, I ain't gotta explain sh!t!

FreddyNoNose
2018-04-22, 06:50 PM
So a while ago I did a thread asking "If you were a wizard in a fantasy land, what would your research be?"

A lot of people said that they would try to truly understand how magic works, so that's me me wonder, how does magic work in your head? What is the justifications for things to happen the way they do? Or do you just go "It's magic I don't have to explain s***"? How do explain the gross violation of the laws of physics? How do you explain the break form the laws of thermodynamic?

Do you guys even take that in consideration when creating a game setting? Or just roll with it as it goes?

If a group of players decided to study the nature of magic what will they find?

I'd either not run a game that this is happening in or deal with it then. I would suggest that if I didn't it wouldn't be solvable because that would be a boring game to play in.

Jay R
2018-04-23, 11:23 AM
If a group of players decided to study the nature of magic what will they find?

I once had a player who said he wanted to research gunpowder. I told him that he could research how to create an explosion with saltpeter and sulfur if he wanted, but the end result would be a Fireball scroll. That's how sulfur and saltpeter create an explosion in that world.

Primarily, they would find out that I won't let them use modern scientific methods like controlled experimentation without Knowledge(Scientific method), and there is nobody to teach them that skill. And that they can't starting graphing data with Knowledge(Cartesian plane), and they can't begin to create most scientific formulae without Knowledge (Calculus).

I would also point out that it took hundreds of years of research to even begin to understand how fire, lightning, and gravity work in our world, and it's more complicated here. And I'd point out that it would take years of careful study not interrupted by adventuring even to begin. So if they want to do that, tell me how many decades you're working on it instead of adventuring, and I'll determine what one or two minor facts they discover.

And they would learn that I have no interest in running a science-developing game in a system not designed for it, but that they have my blessing finding a DM who would run it for them.

-------

Theoretically, if they convinced me that they could come up with the idea of multiple controlled experimentation:

They would learn that gravity is not universal, that Feather Fall, Levitation and Flight actually change the non-universal law of gravitation, that some planes don't have gravity, and that it is not based on the weight of the earth. They would perhaps learn that the use of such spells changes the rate of falling in the local area by a tiny amount, not noticeable without careful measurements.

They would learn that the idea of what happens when there is no magic going on is a meaningless concept, because magic is always going on - that spells are only a tiny part of the vast wonder that is magic.

They would learn that a fire attack is composed of phlogiston particles, and that a cold attack is composed of anti-phlogiston particles.

They would learn that damage from falling tops out at 20d6, so there is a limit to how fast something can fall, regardless of its weight and sail area.

They would learn that the human body is made of the four humors, that illness is caused by an imbalance of the humors, and that Heal spells re-balance the humors.

They would learn that the earth is the center of the universe, and that the planets, including the sun and the moon, orbit the earth in epicycles of epicycles, pushed by some unknown force distinct from gravity. They would learn that the atmosphere goes up to the moon's orbit and then stops, to be replaced by the quintessence. That the laws of nature are different above the moon's orbit, as they are on different planes.

They would learn that prayers can work, and that gods alter the laws of nature often (every time a cleric casts a spell, for instance).

And that trickster gods love changing the rules on experimenters.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-23, 11:45 AM
If we think of magical radiation as akin to sunlight, then wizards are solar panels and spells are electrically-powered devices. Aberrations and mutations are akin to skin cancer.


I really like this analogy.

Amaril
2018-04-23, 12:00 PM
Player: "I want to figure out the laws of physics/magic in this world. Shouldn't be that hard, right?"
Me: "Ok, you can do research with (knowledge/scholar/relevant skill). Where are you setting up your lab?"
Player: "Uh...I guess I'll start doing experiments in the inn common room."
Me: "It's far too crowded and chaotic to concentrate or set up any controlled tests, and if you start trying to blow stuff up or work with hazardous materials, the bartender comes and yells at you to take it somewhere else."
Player: "Well then I guess I'll buy a building to use."
Me: "Ok, a suitable place will cost you (amount of money it would take years of adventuring to accumulate)."
Player: "Crud, ok...I guess I'll find an abandoned building or something to set up a lab in."
Me: "Cool, you find a place. You spend a few days running experiments until you run out of food."
Player: "Alright, I guess I'll go buy more food."
Me: "With what money? You've been spending your time doing science, not adventuring or working for a living."
Player: "Okay, then...I'll go hunting."
Me: "Ok, you manage to hunt enough for a steady food supply. However, with all the time and energy that takes, plus keeping the abandoned building you're living in habitable despite the weather, you have little time left to do research."
Player: "You know, I'm beginning to understand why it took so long for people to do all this stuff in real life."
Me: "Well hey, if you want to do revolutionary science, why not make that a goal for after you retire from adventuring with hoards of money, a castle, and servants to take care of all the chores for you?"
Player: "Hey, that's not a bad idea..."

And so you get to go on with your game about adventuring, and then, once the game is done, the player gets to have a far-reaching effect on the future of the setting as part of their hard-won reward, and everybody wins.

Jay R
2018-04-23, 12:14 PM
Me: "Well hey, if you want to do revolutionary science, why not make that a goal for after you retire from adventuring with hoards of money, a castle, and servants to take care of all the chores for you?"
Player: "Hey, that's not a bad idea..."

Excellent. Exactly right.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-23, 12:22 PM
Player: "I want to figure out the laws of physics/magic in this world. Shouldn't be that hard, right?"
Me: "Ok, you can do research with (knowledge/scholar/relevant skill). Where are you setting up your lab?"
Player: "Uh...I guess I'll start doing experiments in the inn common room."
Me: "It's far too crowded and chaotic to concentrate or set up any controlled tests, and if you start trying to blow stuff up or work with hazardous materials, the bartender comes and yells at you to take it somewhere else."
Player: "Well then I guess I'll buy a building to use."
Me: "Ok, a suitable place will cost you (amount of money it would take years of adventuring to accumulate)."
Player: "Crud, ok...I guess I'll find an abandoned building or something to set up a lab in."
Me: "Cool, you find a place. You spend a few days running experiments until you run out of food."
Player: "Alright, I guess I'll go buy more food."
Me: "With what money? You've been spending your time doing science, not adventuring or working for a living."
Player: "Okay, then...I'll go hunting."
Me: "Ok, you manage to hunt enough for a steady food supply. However, with all the time and energy that takes, plus keeping the abandoned building you're living in habitable despite the weather, you have little time left to do research."
Player: "You know, I'm beginning to understand why it took so long for people to do all this stuff in real life."
Me: "Well hey, if you want to do revolutionary science, why not make that a goal for after you retire from adventuring with hoards of money, a castle, and servants to take care of all the chores for you?"
Player: "Hey, that's not a bad idea..."

And so you get to go on with your game about adventuring, and then, once the game is done, the player gets to have a far-reaching effect on the future of the setting as part of their hard-won reward, and everybody wins.

But we are talking about magic not science.

All a wizard needs is four spells: unseen servant, Create Food and Water, prestidigitation and that spells that creates you a house in the astral plane that I forgot the name and all the problems you created are solved. :smallconfused:

Amaril
2018-04-23, 12:24 PM
But we are talking about magic not science.

All a wizard needs is four spells: unseen servant, Create Food and Water, prestidigitation and that spells that creates you a house in the astral plane that I forgot the name and all the problems you created are solved. :smallconfused:

You're not wrong, at least if the system you're playing includes those spells. Personally, I wouldn't run a game about adventuring in any system that includes magic to make food a non-issue (for D&D, I'd remove create food and water, at the very least).

Jay R
2018-04-23, 01:10 PM
But we are talking about magic not science.

All a wizard needs is four spells: unseen servant, Create Food and Water, prestidigitation and that spells that creates you a house in the astral plane that I forgot the name and all the problems you created are solved. :smallconfused:

Correct. That allows you to live the life of a hermit, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to.

Boredboredboredboredbored.

I cannot imagine living that way when I could be out having grand magical adventures.

More to the point (since this is a game), I can't imagine spending my leisure time pretending to live that way.

DM: OK, it's morning. What do you do?
Player: I create enough food and drink for one day. I sit all day. I go to bed at night.
DM: OK, it's morning. What do you do?
Player: I create enough food and drink for one day. I sit all day. I go to bed at night.
DM: OK, ...

What a fun game!


You're not wrong, at least if the system you're playing includes those spells. Personally, I wouldn't run a game about adventuring in any system that includes magic to make food a non-issue (for D&D, I'd remove create food and water, at the very least).

I don't think you have to. It won't create enough to change the world, and any player who wants to use it that way instead of adventuring has opted out of the game.

More to the point, my players have never used it to avoid adventuring. My players want to play the game.

It's actually pretty easy to find a way to destroy the game, or at least to avoid all the adventures. With or without Fabricate or Unseen Crafter, any player could opt out of the party, hire some workers, and start the life of a merchant.

The simple solution is to run adventures for players who want to play the adventures

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-23, 01:20 PM
The simple solution is to run adventures for players who want to play the adventures

Ain't that the truth. As a DM, I'm not really worried about what they want to do, as long as they want to get there by adventuring. If they don't want to adventure, then they should retire that character (or play them in a different game) and bring one that does want to adventure.

Amaril
2018-04-23, 01:21 PM
I don't think you have to. It won't create enough to change the world, and any player who wants to use it that way instead of adventuring has opted out of the game.

More to the point, my players have never used it to avoid adventuring. My players want to play the game.

It's actually pretty easy to find a way to destroy the game, or at least to avoid all the adventures. With or without Fabricate or Unseen Crafter, any player could opt out of the party, hire some workers, and start the life of a merchant.

The simple solution is to run adventures for players who want to play the adventures

My aversion to those spells in adventuring games isn't because I'm worried about players using them to avoid the game. I just think any magic that makes food and shelter a non-issue is taking away what I believe should be primary challenges of a dungeon-crawling game. Basic survival should be an issue in a dungeon, I think. Arnold K. has written on the subject, more eloquently than I could.

That's why I much prefer Torchbearer to D&D for that kind of game these days--where D&D does all it can to save you from having to track things like food, Torchbearer instead builds them into the core mechanics to make them tense and engaging rather than just annoying bookkeeping.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-23, 01:25 PM
Correct. That allows you to live the life of a hermit, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to.

Boredboredboredboredbored.

I cannot imagine living that way when I could be out having grand magical adventures.

More to the point (since this is a game), I can't imagine spending my leisure time pretending to live that way.

DM: OK, it's morning. What do you do?
Player: I create enough food and drink for one day. I sit all day. I go to bed at night.
DM: OK, it's morning. What do you do?
Player: I create enough food and drink for one day. I sit all day. I go to bed at night.
DM: OK, ...

What a fun game!

Guys we are talking about magic here, if the prospect of learning about the nature of magic, the fundamental forces of the universe, the other planes and different realities, testing spells and exploring the aplications of magic with both your physical and your astral form doesn't sound cool and I don't know what is.

You guys need to open your eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayhTVShJCt0

I always hated how settings, movies and games that have magic rarely explore it's nature, we never learn where it comes from and how it works. Even on Harry potter that is set in Freakign School we never learn how magic works. We are forced to feed on small crumbs and try to picture the big picture with the clues we have.

Amaril
2018-04-23, 01:39 PM
Guys we are talking about magic here, if the prospect of learning about the nature of magic, the fundamental forces of the universe, the other planes and different realities, testing spells and exploring the aplications of magic with both your physical and your astral form doesn't sound cool and I don't know what is.

You guys need to open your eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayhTVShJCt0

I always hated how settings, movies and games that have magic rarely explore it's nature, we never learn where it comes from and how it works. Even on Harry potter that is set in Freakign School we never learn how magic works. We are forced to feed on small crumbs and try to picture the big picture with the clues we have.

Pitch me a game about being scholars pushing the boundaries of magical and scientific understanding, in a system built around this goal, and I'll be all over it. But if I sit down to play or run a game about crawling dungeons, I expect to crawl dungeons.

You have to choose or build a system whose mechanics are in line with what makes the thing you're doing interesting. If you want to crawl dungeons, pick a system with rules for survival, exploration, and combat that are fun to engage with. If you want to study magic, pick a system that builds mechanics around the cool parts of studying magic. I've never played Ars Magica, but I hear it does that pretty well.

Also, it's a common trope in dungeon-crawling games that the ancient society whose ruins you're picking through achieved heights of magical and scientific mastery that have yet to be equalled since. In such a world, dungeon-crawling and advancing magic and science can be one and the same, since instead of doing your own experiments to learn stuff from scratch, you can go track down old records to recover the knowledge of the past. I think that's a big part of why some people play wizards in those games; if I were to go that way, I'd love it if my DM rewarded my discoveries with actual explanation of how the world works based on what was found.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-23, 01:49 PM
I always hated how settings, movies and games that have magic rarely explore it's nature, we never learn where it comes from and how it works. Even on Harry potter that is set in Freakign School we never learn how magic works. We are forced to feed on small crumbs and try to picture the big picture with the clues we have.


Magic in the "potterverse" is inherently nonsensical, whimsical, and plot-driven.

More broadly, there's a common attitude that magic is only magical if it's wondrous, or mysterious, or personal, or subjective, or something.

This likely arises in part from the fact that in the real world, in our world, "magic" feels mysterious, and personal, and subjective, and unknowable, and so on... because it doesn't exist. It's nothing more than fiction, fraud, and superstition in some combination. It doesn't reveal itself to empirical, objective inquiry because it simply isn't there to be found.

Amaril
2018-04-23, 02:19 PM
Magic in the "potterverse" is inherently nonsensical, whimsical, and plot-driven.

More broadly, there's a common attitude that magic is only magical if it's wondrous, or mysterious, or personal, or subjective, or something.

This likely arises in part from the fact that in the real world, in our world, "magic" feels mysterious, and personal, and subjective, and unknowable, and so on... because it doesn't exist. It's nothing more than fiction, fraud, and superstition in some combination. It doesn't reveal itself to empirical, objective inquiry because it simply isn't there to be found.

This is why I try to avoid having people in my settings call anything "magic". To us, magic basically means "things that are impossible", and to any audience from the real world, the word will always carry that connotation. But to someone who lives in a world where these things happen, they're obviously not impossible. The easy thing to do is just say that "magic" means something different to people in that world, but I think going the little bit of extra distance to call it something else helps make it feel more real. In a fantasy world I'm writing, "wizardry" or "runecraft" or "awakening" aren't impossible things that happen outside of people's normal reality and can't be understood, they're just skills that exist and can be used by people who know how--rare and esoteric skills, perhaps, which most are unfamiliar with and will be amazed and impressed by, but not somehow outside the bounds of what "should be" possible.

That's why it bugs me when characters in D&D settings talk about "arcane magic" and "divine magic" and so on, with the common use of the term "magic" implying that these disciplines are all somehow the same thing. To us, they share the common element of being impossible, but without that, if they rely on entirely unrelated methods and have totally different effects, why would they seem to be the same?

Of course, none of that applies to things the characters actually do believe to be impossible. And if you have multiple magic systems in play, you can combine both--Patrick Rothfuss does this, with his two systems of sympathy and Naming. Sympathy can be learned by anyone with the proper training, and is fairly well-known among the world's educated, who might be impressed by it, but not amazed or shocked; Naming, on the other hand, is a lost art believed by most to be a myth, with visibly different and far more powerful effects, so people who see it happen will think of it as magic, because it goes against what they know to be possible in their reality.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-23, 02:23 PM
This is why I try to avoid having people in my settings call anything "magic". To us, magic basically means "things that are impossible", and to any audience from the real world, the word will always carry that connotation. But to someone who lives in a world where these things happen, they're obviously not impossible. The easy thing to do is just say that "magic" means something different to people in that world, but I think going the little bit of extra distance to call it something else helps make it feel more real. In a fantasy world I'm writing, "wizardry" or "runecraft" or "awakening" aren't impossible things that happen outside of people's normal reality and can't be understood, they're just skills that exist and can be used by people who know how--rare and esoteric skills, perhaps, which most are unfamiliar with and will be amazed and impressed by, but not somehow outside the bounds of what "should be" possible.

That's why it bugs me when characters in D&D settings talk about "arcane magic" and "divine magic" and so on, with the common use of the term "magic" implying that these disciplines are all somehow the same thing. To us, they share the common element of being impossible, but without that, if they rely on entirely unrelated methods and have totally different effects, why would they seem to be the same?

Of course, none of that applies to things the characters actually do believe to be impossible. And if you have multiple magic systems in play, you can combine both--Patrick Rothfuss does this, with his two systems of sympathy and Naming. Sympathy can be learned by anyone with the proper training, and is fairly well-known among the world's educated, who might be impressed by it, but not amazed or shocked; Naming, on the other hand, is a lost art believed by most to be a myth, with visibly different and far more powerful effects, so people who see it happen will think of it as magic, because it goes against what they know to be possible in their reality.


Largely agreed.

While discussing my settings in third-person worldbuilding mode, I might use "magic" as a shorthand because others will understand what I mean -- for anything in-setting I'm trying to avoid the word "magic" as such because it has errant connotations and implications for the way people would approach the forces of their own reality.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 02:45 PM
@Amaril: "magic" is not a synonym for "impossible" anywhere except in spe-fi circles with unhealthy love of non-standard semantics.

The actual prime definition of "magic" that comes up when you look the word up in a dictionary is "the art or practice of using charms, spells, or rituals to attempt to produce supernatural effects or control events in nature". Which makes just as much sense from in-universe perspective as it does from out-of-universe.

@Max_Killjoy: the opinions people have about magic are not best explained by magic being non-existent, they're best explained by our ideas of magic being founded upon magical thinking and other psychological pittfalls of human reasoning. And one of the identifying traits of such, shared by children of ages 2 to 7, is the thought that human mind has direct impact on the world around it. Even most "ill-explained" magic systems like Harry Potter's fall in line with such thinking lot of the time, explicitly in case of the Unforgivable curses. (Ie. you have to want to torture a person for the Cruciatus curse to work, you have to want to kill to use Avadakedavra etc.)

Once basics of magical thinking are understood, it's pretty easy to predict which fictional magic system will actually feel magical to real humans. Most obviously, all systems with fully transparent cause and effect independent of human will, beliefs and emotions will fail to feel magical.

Jay R
2018-04-23, 02:56 PM
I have no problem with the idea of a game built around exploring how magic works. But my character will be a researcher, not a D&D adventuring class, the system will be built around the idea of that kind of research, and the magic system I'm exploring won't be as arbitrary as D&D's.

Cosi
2018-04-23, 03:00 PM
@Amaril: "magic" is not a synonym for "impossible" anywhere except in spe-fi circles with unhealthy love of non-standard semantics.

The actual prime definition of "magic" that comes up when you look the word up in a dictionary is "the art or practice of using charms, spells, or rituals to attempt to produce supernatural effects or control events in nature". Which makes just as much sense from in-universe perspective as it does from out-of-universe.

When I google the phrase "magic definition", I get results including "the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces" and "used in magic or working by magic; having or apparently having supernatural powers", but of which reference "supernatural" and neither of which reference "charms, spells, or rituals".

The "charms, spells, or rituals" definition is also stupid, because all you've really done is shifted the semantics around. What is a "spell"? What is a "ritual"? When I place a phone call to order some food from a takeout place, is that a "ritual"? It requires a ritual implement (my phone), has a special invocation ("I'd like a number five with extra sauce"), and involves a sacrifice (when the delivery guy shows up, I give him some money). That seems like it follows the exact structure of most rituals, but I think we all clearly understand it isn't. The reason for that, of course, is that it works and we understand the mechanism by which it works. Which is, in at least some cases, the status of magic in a fictional universe.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 03:15 PM
@Cosi: why are you using google instead of, say, freedictionary.com ? The semantics of the terms you list are not at all mysterious. You can (correctly) argue the definitions of any given dictionary are not the only way words of a natural language are used, but I'll take their definitions as more representative of what's normal than whatever members of some message board happen to use.

Also, no, "we all" do not clearly understand the difference, because how (say) phones work is not transparent to everyone; there is no "we all". Clarke's third law is in full effect here.

Cosi
2018-04-23, 03:25 PM
@Cosi: why are you using google instead of, say, freedictionary.com ? The semantics of the terms you list are not at all mysterious. You can (correctly) argue the definitions of any given dictionary are not the only way words of a natural language are used, but I'll take their definitions as more representative of what's normal than whatever members of some message board happen to use.

What part of my post is talking about "some message board"? Google has a built in dictionary function. But, sure, whatever. Here's what freedictionary.com has to say (emphasis mine):


A comprehensive name for all of the pretended arts which claim to produce effects by the assistance of supernatural beings, or departed spirits, or by a mastery of secret forces in nature attained by a study of occult science, including enchantment, conjuration, witchcraft, sorcery, necromancy, incantation, etc.

That seems pretty incompatible with anything which actually works being magical. If doing the right hand gestures produces a fireball, you aren't "pretending" anything when you say you're a Pyromancer.


Also, no, "we all" do not clearly understand the difference, because how (say) phones work is not transparent to everyone; there is no "we all". Clarke's third law is in full effect here.

So is your contention that when I order takeout, I am in fact performing a ritual, and therefore doing magic?

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 03:40 PM
From a psychological viewpoint? You might be. I can't say for sure because I don't actually know if you possess correct knowledge of how a phone works. However, whether you, specifically, think you're doing a ritual is besides the point, as it does not prevent other people from considering ot such. Look up cargo cults. Again: Clarke's third law is in full effect here.

EDIT: and the reference to "members of some message board" was reference to Amaril's definition, not Google's. Even the definiton by Google you posted does not call out "magic" as synonym to "impossible", it does not feature impossiblity as definining. And he first thing I get by googling "definition magic" is Merriam-Webster saying the following:

"a : the use of means (such as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces
b : magic rites or incantations"

Amaril
2018-04-23, 03:53 PM
Why is the concept of things we consider normal being magical in a fantasy setting a bad thing? It can be amazing if done right. In Pyre, reading is magic. I've seen it claimed (not by sources I trust, but the ideas are still cool) that the old Norse considered both lockpicking and math to be magic, and that the Celts believed the same of satire, and made it illegal for comedians to get married because they were too powerful to be allowed to reproduce.

Anyway, I don't think a magic system that operates on consistent, comprehensible principles will necessarily fail to feel magical, as long as those principles are sufficiently weird and different from real life.

Gnoman
2018-04-23, 03:53 PM
In my setting, magic is a result of the opposing forces of Law and Chaos.

Chaos is raw existence, manifested in an orgy of energies - heat, gravity, raw kinetic force, etc. The vast powers of primal Chaos are effectively shapeless and without form, and thus those energies can't actually do anything except reduce everything the encounter to energy. Meanwhile, Law is pure structure, a cosmic construction so finely fixed and and immobile that it can't actually do anything.

Only in the small area of Infinity where these two forces met was anything else able to arise. The structure of Law bound the infinite strength of Chaos, and the first of the Gods arose. Born directly from the opposing forces, these Gods were able to manipulate both, slaying themselves to compose a great work of art - inscribing the Laws of physics on the cosmos and pouring Chaos into this new framework. This artwork was the material and immaterial universes that make up the planes of existence.

"Natural" magic is the result of the framework of Law twisting a little under the force of contained Chaos, changing the laws of physics ever so slightly. This can be what allows dragons to fly - in their part of the universe, Law kinked a bit and made it so their bones aren't affected by gravity, or that wings displace far more air than they should.

"Divine" magic is the result of the Younger Gods reaching out and reworking the cage a little bit. This can be on their own hook or at the request of a follower.

"Arcane" magic is a mortal that has learned to channel a slightly degenerate form of stray chaos (which is generally referred to as "mana", to fit with common conventions) to reach out and do some reworking on their own hook. So, for example, a wizard might have worked out that if you direct your mana in this exact pattern, you can temporally change the local "explode" conditions for sulfur, guano, and charcoal from "after being processed into a powder and mixed, flame can be applied" to "when I want an explosion at this location".

Cosi
2018-04-23, 03:55 PM
From a psychological viewpoint? You might be. I can't say for sure because I don't actually know if you possess correct knowledge of how a phone works. However, whether you, specifically, think you're doing a ritual is besides the point, as it does not prevent other people from considering ot such. Look up cargo cults. Again: Clarke's third law is in full effect here.

That definition still doesn't do what you want though. If fully understanding the mechanism for something makes it "not magic", then it is entirely possible for fireball and the like to not be magic.


Even the definiton by Google you posted does not call out "magic" as synonym to "impossible"

It says "supernatural". Which, in turn, means "attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature". So, again, things stop being magic when you have a causative mechanism for them, which the users of magic in a fictional setting do (at least potentially). There really isn't a coherent definition of "magic" in terms of some set of things that work, because magic doesn't work.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 04:08 PM
Why is the concept of things we consider normal being magical in a fantasy setting a bad thing?

I don't consider it a bad thing at all, Clarke's third law is a favorite trope of mine. I was merely trying to point out two things: one, that magic is not defined by impossibility; and two, that our beliefs of magic are based on psychology, not magic "not existing".

Indeed, it is because of the things that I'm trying to point out that "normal" (to us) things can be thought of as magic by other people. Reading, lockpicking, magnetism, medicine etc. can be and have been seen as magic, so a thing existing or being possible don't prevent something from feeling like magic. Hence why "phones are magic!" would not be a wondrous statement.


Anyway, I don't think a magic system that operates on consistent, comprehensible principles will necessarily fail to feel magical, as long as those principles are sufficiently weird and different from real life.

It's very, very hard for any system to be all of consistent, comprehensible, weird and different from "real life".

It is possible for a valid scientific theory to feel magical, but when that happens it's precisely because such theories are hard to comprehend. For example, quantum theory and general relativity are pretty odd from a layman's perspective, which is why both have given rise to whole loads of woo and superstition. But in both cases, the theories are difficult enough that cause and effect are no longer fully transparent. It takes specialist training to grok what is going on with them and make the "magic go away".

EDIT:

@Cosi: did you pay any attention to what I said? Because I specifically pointed out that the feeling of magic goes away when cause and effect are fully transparent. You aren't disagreeing with me, you are thinking I made a different claim than I did.

Arbane
2018-04-23, 04:20 PM
Player: "I want to figure out the laws of physics/magic in this world. Shouldn't be that hard, right?"

Slightly-less obnoxiously obstructionist answer:

"Better sages than you have spent their entire lives studying this, and still only know how much they don't know. Now, do you actually want to do any adventuring, or should I just run the game for everyone else?"


Pitch me a game about being scholars pushing the boundaries of magical and scientific understanding, in a system built around this goal, and I'll be all over it.

It's called "Ars Magica".

Amaril
2018-04-23, 04:22 PM
It's very, very hard for any system to be all of consistent, comprehensible, weird and different from "real life".

I think that depends on how detailed you get with it. Speaking purely from my own experience, I find Pyre's reading-as-magic plenty weird and fantastical, and consistent enough to not bother me. Although I tend to have a pretty high tolerance for plot holes...


It is possible for a valid scientific theory to feel magical, but when that happens it's precisely because such theories are hard to comprehend. For example, quantum theory and general relativity are pretty odd from a layman's perspective, which is why both have given rise to whole loads of woo and superstition. But in both cases, the theories are difficult enough that cause and effect are no longer fully transparent. It takes specialist training to grok what is going on with them and make the "magic go away".

Well, maybe I'm just weird then, because quantum mechanics don't feel at all magical to me, even though I'm the biggest layman you'll meet and haven't the faintest idea of how they work. I don't think I instinctively associate the feeling of "magicalness" that I get from reading about the fantastical with non-comprehension of things in real life. But that might just be semantics.

Cluedrew
2018-04-23, 04:23 PM
On Magic: I have actually studied magic from a historical perspective before (example: what did the Greeks thing magic was?). It is a very charged term people have used for many reasons. But trying to strip that away the best definition I have not only doesn't depend something being impossible, but creates a contradiction. May things that science supports where originally discovered and considered magic. But you know with science being the cool kid on the block a lot of the contributions of magic and magic practitioners (such as the scientific method) gets ignored.


I have no problem with the idea of a game built around exploring how magic works. But my character will be a researcher, not a D&D adventuring class, the system will be built around the idea of that kind of research, and the magic system I'm exploring won't be as arbitrary as D&D's.I am actually working on a system that supports that as a background but it is not really part of the campaign. For the simple reason that for setting consistency research of that kind progresses much like it does in real life. Which is to say slowly. So you would have an entire campaign about a single notable development in the field. Which would have any mechanical fall out (start effecting day to day life) for another campaign or two.

Amaril
2018-04-23, 04:34 PM
Slightly-less obnoxiously obstructionist answer:

"Better sages than you have spent their entire lives studying this, and still only know how much they don't know. Now, do you actually want to do any adventuring, or should I just run the game for everyone else?"

How is allowing a player to attempt something and encounter the practical obstacles associated with it more obstructionist than just telling them "I don't want you to do that"? Granted, if the situation actually came up, I would almost certainly just say what you've said, because I know the players in my group would all understand where I was coming from. However, I know there are players out there who take the view that any DM who won't run the game as a totally open-ended simulation where players are free to attempt anything they want at any moment isn't doing their job as DM. My intent was to provide an example of how a DM who doesn't want to run a game focused on magical research can compromise with a player who feels that way, by making the player feel that adventuring is a way of pursuing their goal of magical research. Though if your whole group feels that way instead of just one person, you should run a game about that, or find someone who wants to.


It's called "Ars Magica".

Yeah, like I mentioned later in the same post, I've heard of it. I understand it's pretty crunchy, so I'm not sure I'd enjoy it myself, but at least it proves a game like that can be interesting.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-23, 04:37 PM
On Magic: I have actually studied magic from a historical perspective before (example: what did the Greeks thing magic was?). It is a very charged term people have used for many reasons. But trying to strip that away the best definition I have not only doesn't depend something being impossible, but creates a contradiction. May things that science supports where originally discovered and considered magic. But you know with science being the cool kid on the block a lot of the contributions of magic and magic practitioners (such as the scientific method) gets ignored.


"Magic" gave rise to those useful, working understandings when those investigators who were applying a rational, empirical method started separating the wheat from the chaff. Magic doesn't hold up to the scientific method because it's so thoroughly not repeatable, or falsifiable. It's so thoroughly not repeatable or falsifiable because it's not real, doesn't exist, and doesn't work.

Larry Niven once quipped, “Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.” Magic, like so many other concepts -- aether, phlogiston, phrenology, astronomy, whatever -- eventually proved to be useless. It doesn't provide reliable answers or predictions. Other concepts have, and do. We're having this conversation over this medium because of the accumulated effects of those concepts proving to be useful, and real.

"Magic" seems mysterious because it can't be "solved"... it can't be solved because it doesn't exist to be solved. All theories of magic are equally valid, which is to say they're all equally invalid.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 05:03 PM
I think that depends on how detailed you get with it.

You are correct, just like an act of stage magic depends on how many details of the trick are known to the audience.


Well, maybe I'm just weird then, because quantum mechanics don't feel at all magical to me, even though I'm the biggest layman you'll meet and haven't the faintest idea of how they work. I don't think I instinctively associate the feeling of "magicalness" that I get from reading about the fantastical with non-comprehension of things in real life. But that might just be semantics.
Not semantics, psychlogy. I would not expect all cases of non-comprehension to trigger magical thinking in a healthy adult.

Rather, it depends on the uncomprehended thing having an apparent yet unexplained connection to the human mind. For example, in case of quantum theory, the chief guilty party is misunderstanding of the concept of observer: some people think a literal human observer is required for outcomes to be decided on the quantum level, and that is the underlying thought for many kinds of woo. If you lack such beliefs or the idea never occurred to you, it's not surprising if it does not feel magic to you.

In any case, propensity towards magical thinking varies by person. So you could indeed be weird, it's just not something I could verify easily. I would, for example, need records of your reactions to stage magic and then compare them to a number of statistically normal people.

---

@Max_Killjoy: magic was never a discreet theory nor a singular phenomenom which could be falsified in the way you suggest. Few hundred years ago, magnetism was considered an occult, magic thing. Deciding it was not magic once we figured out how it works is largely arbitrary, it is an example of (relatively recent) shift in semantics of language and worldview of the people who use it. It makes sense on psychological grounds but does not neatly reduce to your "we think magic is mysterious because it does not exist".

Cluedrew
2018-04-23, 05:12 PM
To Max_Killjoy: Magic contains both wheat (it works) and chaff (it doesn't). People just forget about the wheat half. ... OK a good deal less than half. But magnesium, the tides and aspen worked and that remains true even though psychic waves, horoscopes and leeches did not.

Segev
2018-04-23, 05:13 PM
@Max_Killjoy: magic was never a discreet theory nor a singular phenomenom which could be falsified in the way you suggest. Few hundred years ago, magnetism was considered an occult, magic thing. Deciding it was not magic once we figured out how it works is largely arbitrary, it is an example of (relatively recent) shift in semantics of language and worldview of the people who use it. It makes sense on psychological grounds but does not neatly reduce to your "we think magic is mysterious because it does not exist".

This is, in particular, a noteworthy comment, because it gets to a hard question: What, precisely, is "magic" in the context of this conversation? It has more than a few meanings in general English, mostly going back to "the unexplained" or "the seeming impossible." Tied in with "wondrous," too.

But in this context, "magic" is so often set at odds with "science" or "technology" because we're using it to describe things that don't work in our world but do in the magical setting. And then we start to study it as a concept in-setting, which makes us get muddied, because the denizens of that setting aren't going to look at their rules of magic and say, "Well, it doesn't work in that arbitrary Earth-planet's universe, so it's magic!"

One of the most defining traits, unspoken, of magic in general - as opposed to super-science of the sort we see in most sci-fi - is that it follows the WILL of the user, not a deterministic outcome of the manipulation of the user's environment. (In this, psychic abilities and/or psionics qualify as "magic," too.)

Cluedrew
2018-04-23, 05:32 PM
Interestingly enough will was not historically part of the definition or imagery of magic. For instance some said you could get divine magic from other religions (from your own) just by repeating the prayers of that religion. Instead it mostly had to do with knowledge and patterns, it was a lot more "scientific" than we see it now. Still not very scientific on the whole of course.

Still I agree it is part of (one of the many) modern definition(s) of magic.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-23, 05:37 PM
To Max_Killjoy: Magic contains both wheat (it works) and chaff (it doesn't). People just forget about the wheat half. ... OK a good deal less than half. But magnesium, the tides and aspen worked and that remains true even though psychic waves, horoscopes and leeches did not.


Magnesium, tides, and aspen aren't, however, magical. They never were.

"If it's stupid and it works, you're lucky and it's still stupid."

The fact that there was at one time a magical explanation asserted for certain phenomena doesn't make magic a correct explanation if some of those phenomena happen to actually occur, any more than the existence of fire makes phlogiston a correct explanation.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 05:56 PM
@Segev: your comment loops back to what I said to Amaril and Max at the get-go. Magic is "the art or practice of using charms, spells, or rituals to attempt to produce supernatural effects or control events in nature". This works in-universe and out. We can look at what, say, a D&D Wizard does and agree they're doing just that, and the Wizard can look at what they do and agree they're doing just that. Cosi with their phone might disagree, but we can point to people in Cosi's world who still think the phone is magic.

The point about human will I already agreed with, as that belief is characteristic of magical thinking.

So cross-setting definition of magic as a practice is not hard. Definition of magic as a feeling is not hard. Definition of magic only gets difficult if you ignore the practical and psychological aspects of it. If you do ignore them (by defining magic as "impossible on Earth", or as type of energy, etc.), then you'll end up with "magic" being an empty buzzword with an arbitrary setting-dependent meaning.

Cosi
2018-04-23, 06:23 PM
@Cosi: did you pay any attention to what I said? Because I specifically pointed out that the feeling of magic goes away when cause and effect are fully transparent. You aren't disagreeing with me, you are thinking I made a different claim than I did.

What you said was that people who though "magic" meant "impossible things" were using "non-standard semantics". You then presented a definition of "magic" that includes "ordering takeout". The irony of this was apparently lost on you.


Cosi with their phone might disagree, but we can point to people in Cosi's world who still think the phone is magic.

But what about the people in D&D land that have studied fireball well enough to understand the underlying mechanism by which it operates? Is fireball not magic to those people?

Your definition includes things no one would reasonably call magic, excludes things everyone immediately recognizes as magic, relies on fundamentally subjective judgments about the psychological states of fictional people, and still has to appeal to impossibility to be remotely coherent. Your definition is stupid, and it doesn't make "magic" refer to the set of things people mean when they say "magic". You know what does achieve that? Having "magic" mean "impossible".


"Better sages than you have spent their entire lives studying this, and still only know how much they don't know. Now, do you actually want to do any adventuring, or should I just run the game for everyone else?"

It seems to me that if you can't throw a couple of bones to a player who wants to explore the fundamental nature of magic into your campaign, you're not trying hard enough. Is it really that much effort to occasionally have loot include magical research tomes, or to have some of the plot hooks come from some kind of magical university? "I want to know what magic really is" should no more be met with "not in my campaign you don't" than "I want to come from a noble family" should. It's a source of plot hooks, and if you respond to that with passive-aggressive ranting, you are a bad DM.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-23, 07:15 PM
What you said was that people who though "magic" meant "impossible things" were using "non-standard semantics". You then presented a definition of "magic" that includes "ordering takeout". The irony of this was apparently lost on you.

There is no irony present when the process of "ordering takeout" involves a device than runs into Clarke's third law. Also, you haven't provided an example of anyone outside these boards defining magic as synonym for impossible.


But what about the people in D&D land that have studied fireball well enough to understand the underlying mechanism by which it operates? Is fireball not magic to those people?

D&D fireball was originally a science joke about making blackpowder. (Look at the material components.) And D&D borrowed from Vance and from science fiction. Long story short, many "magical" things in D&D were meant to be ill-understood science from the get-go. The wizards call "fireball" magic because they don't understand it, and probably would call it something else if they did.

Not all D&D authors ran with the joke, but it doesn't really help your case. It just means the spells as described by the rules are functional black boxes and every setting has different answer for what's inside. There is no single "D&Dland" I could give an answer for.


Your definition includes things no one would reasonably call magic...

I have no reason to believe you on either the "no-one" front or the "reasonably" front, as your argument so far seems calibrated to only apply to people with full contemporary scientific understanding. This wasn't the norm historically, and isn't in fantasy.


...excludes things everyone immediately recognizes as magic...

I have no reason to believe you on the "everyone" front either. Or at least you need more examples.


...relies on fundamentally subjective judgments about the psychological states of fictional people...

Are there humans in a setting? If yes, do they work homologously to real humans? If yes, then magical thinking must be a thing in that setting.

If the answer to either lead-up questions is no, there are bigger problems to solve than definition of magic.


... and still has to appeal to impossibility to be remotely coherent.

You have not demonstrated this in any shape nor form. The furthest you got was invoking definition of "supernatural" as something "not explainable by science", but that's not synonymous to "impossible" either.


Your definition is stupid, and it doesn't make "magic" refer to the set of things people mean when they say "magic". You know what does achieve that? Having "magic" mean "impossible".

Apparently your wizards don't use spells, charms and rituals then, nor do they try to influence the natural and supernatural phenomena with those.

And no, defining "magic" as "impossible" fails to achieve that. It excludes practical and emotional components of magic which are possible in real life, it fails to address why several possible things have historically been considered "magic", and it includes several things which I don't want to include in magic (such as FTL drives and alternate physics). And, like Segev and others pointed out, it fails from an in-universe viewpoint.

Also, it's not my definition. Unless you think I wrote Merriam-Webster and several other dictionaries.

Cosi
2018-04-23, 08:39 PM
Not all D&D authors ran with the joke, but it doesn't really help your case. It just means the spells as described by the rules are functional black boxes and every setting has different answer for what's inside. There is no single "D&Dland" I could give an answer for.

Wow, it's almost like providing a universal definition for a fictional thing on its own terms is not a thing you can do. What we can do is try to understand the categories of things people describe with words. And it seems obvious to me (and literally every person I have met, regardless of your bizarre assertions that "order takeout" is a thing people believe is a spell) that "it involves a ritual" is a much worse standard -- in that it less precisely maps on to the things colloquially referred to as "magic" -- than "is not possible in our world".


Are there humans in a setting? If yes, do they work homologously to real humans? If yes, then magical thinking must be a thing in that setting.

Uh, sure, but no one except you thinks "magical thinking" is what people mean when they use the word "magic". How many works from the source material can you make that substitution and retain coherence? Because I can't think of any.


it includes several things which I don't want to include in magic (such as FTL drives and alternate physics).

Yes, absolute definitions give imperfect results. But on the spectrum from "more magic" to "less magic", "FTL drive" is clearly closer to fireball than "order takeout" is. This is why one shows up in fiction and the other is a thing I could do right now.


Also, it's not my definition. Unless you think I wrote Merriam-Webster and several other dictionaries.

Yes, because it is a totally foreign way of speaking to say "your" when referring to something you advocate for rather than something you created. No one has ever done that, and no one would ever expect that use to be obvious.

Cluedrew
2018-04-23, 09:21 PM
Magnesium, tides, and aspen aren't, however, magical. They never were.

"If it's stupid and it works, you're lucky and it's still stupid."The first part doesn't really matter. I don't think of these things as magic in my day today life either. Even if by one of the three definitions of magic I used fairly commonly they technically are. The only reason I point out this stuff is A) for the laughs and B) the second part. There where intelligent people before 1500 or whenever they figured out phlogiston wasn't a thing.

Out of curiosity has anyone actually studied magic and the middle ages, beyond pop culture and "fun fact" knowledge. I know pop culture has "pyromancer" complexly wrong for one. Because if it is no we are basically just arguing opinions and there is little point to that.

2D8HP
2018-04-24, 12:09 AM
....That sort of how Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné series magic works, it's just a lot more dark and gross.


That reminds me of my favorite "Magic System": Chaosium's old Stormbringer! game that had a "magic system" based on summoning and attempting to control demons and elementals. It was completely BADASS! and I thought it was truer to Swords and Sorcery than D&D (just so METAL!)..

My other favorite is Pendragon in which all but the 4th edition the spell-casters are all NPC's and all the PK's (player Knights) rock!, and the "magic system" is a list of trope suggestions for the GM (unless you use the 4th edition in which magic use involves astrology, so you cast spells "when the stars are right", the 5th edition went back to magic use being NPC).

Both Stormbringer, and Pendragon are descended from the Runequest rules (as is the more popular Call of Cthullu).

Call of Cthullu had a magic system that I admire, in which the more you know of magic the more likely you'll go insane!*

And the sad truth is that the last time I gamemastered anything close to a "campaign" it was long ago for Call of C'thullu (my players wanted their PC's to have firearms, so CoC is what they got)

I longed to run CoC elements with Stormbringer!

Since in Stormbringer Instead of casting spells Stormbringer you summon demons and elementals to make magic, and for more poweful magic you had to summon more powerful beings that need to be persuaded!

So couldn't demons just decide to eat you up yum-yum or rend your psyche and soul instead?

Damn straight!

What part of "secrets man was not meant to know" didn't you understand?!

Practicing magic is a dangerous act, otherwise every Tom, Rick, and witch Hazel would do it!

Magic as tool box "Levels to move the world" is LAME!

Magic should be more like fire, specifically hellfire!

Yes you may boil your tea (and incinerate your enemies!), but you run the risk of dooming yourself.

Now that's genre!

But since I usually want to play Captain Sinbad the hero not the villainous Sokurah the Magician, and I just don't "grok" playing magicians myself, I'm bad at the whole "magic system" thing, but my preferences are:

Humans are never naturally magicians.

Magic comes from Faerie and Hell.

Magic is power.

Magic has a price.

The price is life.

The price is sanity.

The price is one's soul.

The price is the very nature of reality.

Good magicians (the few that they are) suffer for their spells, in the pain they feel, and in their shortened lifespans, and in tastes of madness.

Evil magicians try to make others pay the price (old AD&D had some rules like that for magic item creation), and/or they bring demons to earth for their power, most in time wind-up like René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Yara in The Tower of the Elephant, but still there are those who crave power and call upon demons.

Heroes try to stop them.

"As flies to wanton boys, are we to thegods; they kill us for their sport"

Priests busy themselves and try to appease the gods so people are not cursed, but no Gandalfs, no Angels may heroes rely on, at best there's petty charms and small magic done by half-mad wizened shamen and wise-women, as more powerful sorceries come from Evil, and in the dark the world is polluted by monsters that were called to earth by old magics, which heroes must fight if humanity is to survive.

Between humanity, gods, and demons are the "Fair Folk" who"s power and fickleness make them creatures who's attention the wise try to avoid, and telling them apart from demons, gods, and magicians is difficult.

Florian
2018-04-24, 01:12 AM
Out of curiosity has anyone actually studied magic and the middle ages, beyond pop culture and "fun fact" knowledge. I know pop culture has "pyromancer" complexly wrong for one. Because if it is no we are basically just arguing opinions and there is little point to that.

Why go back to the middle ages? It´s easier to get a glimpse at it when looking at what has endured until today, from customs, small rituals and in religion and ceremonies.

@Cosi:

You should look at the roots of myths and magic, how people thought that doing "this mundane act" will trigger "this supernatural effect" or "prevent this curse". "Knock on wood for luck" _is_ the actual spell and effect rolled into one. Frozen Feet is very correct in that the early D&D writers understood their own joke (Lighning bolt, rabbit pelt and amber rod? Fireball, bat guano and sulphur?), but the follow-up generation rather bungled it and copied stupid american superhero comic powers as spells.

Knaight
2018-04-24, 02:23 AM
As per usual in threads like these, "your setting" isn't really a thing for me - it's more "one of your settings", as the idea of having a single setting (or even genre) for all campaigns is just deeply opposed to how I operate. That said, there are a few that I use a lot more than others, or that stood out particularly well.

These settings can vary highly in terms of how magic operates. There's a fairly large chunk where there just isn't magic, made mostly out of a mix of historical and science fiction settings with a growing collection of pulp. Then there's the ones where magic is pretty incidental, most notably Port Alhabri. There's a couple of settings from when I was younger which had magic in them, usually in a very non codified way where some people just had some magic for some reason, often with very minimal restrictions. Then there's a few outliers, where magic was actually a focal point, deliberately crafted for a particular setting feel. These are the interesting ones, with two standouts for very different approaches.

Alchemquest: Alchemquest has exactly one form of magic, and it's complex alchemical rituals in the vein of elaborate glyphs that reference astronomical conditions to change things from one material to another. There was no battle magic beyond preparing traps well ahead of time, it was almost completely academic (though there were a couple of societies that didn't quite fit this, where instead it was more a matter of cultural lore through shamanism that happened to be similar), and it could be learned by anyone. This is largely because it was at the heart of one of the major setting conflicts, which is that a fair few monarchies were locked in political conflicts with each other that forced them to modernize, these alchemists presented the best source of industrialization, and yet the very scholarly institutions that they belonged to and the monarchs were funding were themselves an emerging power structure that threatened the monarchies; which the monarchs knew full well. The setting is about these sorts of cultural conflicts in a major way, and the game was largely about industrialization in a lot of ways, just with magic there.

I've used this for a number of campaigns, some of which never even directly featured an alchemist. It's probably the single setting I've made that I'm happiest with, though I made it in highschool and it could use an update.

Nomads' Gift: Nomads' Gift went in a weirdly parallel way, set in what was initially a mythic bronze age. Magic was part of the fabric of the world, and hard to disentangle from other events - sometimes a storm came through that turned everyone in a village to stone, sometimes people sickened and died from a sudden unexplained effect, and while the latter is a totally mundane pandemic both look pretty similar to a bronze age culture used to this stuff. Similarly there were special people touched by magic in far more beneficial ways, heroes in the old Grecian sense. There were no mages, and the closest you'd get would be observant people with access to generations of lore who had a better idea than most of how these strange events would happen - oracles, wise elders, but not mages.

However, this setting was born to fit a very particular genre request from my player group, which was a split between people wanting to do a game about the discovery of magic and people wanting to do a game heavy on magitech. As such, the inciting incident was about them finding a second source of magic, something a little less chaotic than the storms. In remote and inaccessible areas in the world are ancient spirits capable of bestowing gifts of power to those that reach them, and the PCs had the fortune of being the first to blunder, largely by accident, to an ancient spirit which gave them the ability to sense magic, and thus to start discovering these remote and inaccessible areas and exploring the functions of those gifts. As the PCs learned, spread this knowledge, and developed as mages they also started shifting the setting. This wasn't academic and this wasn't industrial, but there were still some similarities.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-24, 07:45 AM
Practicing magic is a dangerous act, otherwise every Tom, Rick, and witch Hazel would do it!

Magic is power.

Magic has a price.

The price is life.

The price is sanity.

The price is one's soul.

The price is the very nature of reality.[/indent]

Good magicians (the few that they are) suffer for their spells, in the pain they feel, and in their shortened lifespans, and in tastes of madness.

Evil magicians try to make others pay the price (old AD&D had some rules like that for magic item creation), and/or they bring demons to earth for their power, most in time wind-up like René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Yara in The Tower of the Elephant, but still there are those who crave power and call upon demons.

Heroes try to stop them.

"As flies to wanton boys, are we to thegods; they kill us for their sport"

I agree 100%, that's why i hate the high magic settings where magic acts as if it was technology, sending banal messages across distances or keeping food cold or whatever.

Magic is power, power has a cost, it always has a cost, so why should cosmic power be free? It makes no sense; it creates so many plot holes.

If anyone who studies arcane magic can create food, water and reshape reality why is life misserable? Why so many are poor? Why the world looks like medieval earth?
Magic is power and power can’t be free.

Amaril
2018-04-24, 08:21 AM
I agree 100%, that's why i hate the high magic settings where magic acts as if it was technology, sending banal messages across distances or keeping food cold or whatever.

Magic is power, power has a cost, it always has a cost, so why should cosmic power be free? It makes no sense; it creates so many plot holes.

If anyone who studies arcane magic can create food, water and reshape reality why is life misserable? Why so many are poor? Why the world looks like medieval earth?
Magic is power and power can’t be free.

I often agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate: why have so many people historically been poor and lived miserable lives in the real world? I think the assumption of "magic works like technology" only becomes inconsistent with "the world resembles medieval western Europe" if you're in one of those worlds that's been in pseudo-medieval stasis for thousands of years and presumably will stay that way. Part of magic behaving like technology is the notion that it has limits, which are continually being expanded as more is learned. If my magitech world resembles medieval Europe right now, that's just because that's the period in which we happen to be visiting it.

In my own fantasy system, Drifters, magic works much more like you describe. It comes from Chaos, and to fully master it, one must sacrifice their humanity--such is the price of power beyond human. In both cases, magic has limits, but I think the difference is that with magitech, the limits come from what's possible to achieve with magic, while in the other case, the limit is what one is willing to give up to achieve something with magic.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 08:28 AM
I agree 100%, that's why i hate the high magic settings where magic acts as if it was technology, sending banal messages across distances or keeping food cold or whatever.

Magic is power, power has a cost, it always has a cost, so why should cosmic power be free? It makes no sense; it creates so many plot holes.

If anyone who studies arcane magic can create food, water and reshape reality why is life misserable? Why so many are poor? Why the world looks like medieval earth?

Magic is power and power can’t be free.


As the worldbuilder, one at least needs to make choices, and follow through with them.

If magic can do those things, then show the effects.

If the effects are unwanted, then don't set magic up as able to do those things.

If magic can do those things, and the effects don't happen, then have very, very good reasons why they don't happen.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-24, 08:34 AM
I often agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate: why have so many people historically been poor and lived miserable lives in the real world? I think the assumption of "magic works like technology" only becomes inconsistent with "the world resembles medieval western Europe" if you're in one of those worlds that's been in pseudo-medieval stasis for thousands of years and presumably will stay that way. Part of magic behaving like technology is the notion that it has limits, which are continually being expanded as more is learned. If my magitech world resembles medieval Europe right now, that's just because that's the period in which we happen to be visiting it.

In my own fantasy system, Drifters, magic works much more like you describe. It comes from Chaos, and to fully master it, one must sacrifice their humanity--such is the price of power beyond human. In both cases, magic has limits, but I think the difference is that with magitech, the limits come from what's possible to achieve with magic, while in the other case, the limit is what one is willing to give up to achieve something with magic.

Life sucks irl because we don't have the power to create food out of thin air or reshape the very fabric of reality.

The power we do have irl (Tecnology) is not free, we may have doomed our planet with it and the costs are very high, why is magical cosmic power free? It makes no sense, the higher the power the higher the costs. That's the way I see.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 08:42 AM
Life sucks irl because we don't have the power to create food out of thin air or reshape the very fabric of reality.

The power we do have irl (Tecnology) is not free, we may have doomed our planet with it and the costs are very high, why is magical cosmic power free? It makes no sense, the higher the power the higher the costs. That's the way I see.



One could deliberately want to build or explore a magic-based post-scarcity setting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

2D8HP
2018-04-24, 08:51 AM
...the higher the power the higher the costs. That's the way I see.


IIRC (it's been decades since last read) Larry Niven's

The Magic Goes Away (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheMagicGoesAway)

had magic as a non-renewable resource (that could temporarily be restored by necromancy), and was a clear metaphor for fossil fuels.

It was really good, and I think that I'll dig up "What Good is a Glass Dagger" and have a re-read tonight!

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-24, 09:07 AM
Wow, it's almost like providing a universal definition for a fictional thing on its own terms is not a thing you can do.

You say while conveniently ignoring that even when contents of the black boxes change, the actual art and practice of using those boxes stays remarkably constant between D&D settings. Wizards use spells, chants and rituals to produce and influence supernatural and natural events. This holds whether you're playing in Planescape, Dark Sun or Faerun.


What we can do is try to understand the categories of things people describe with words. And it seems obvious to me (and literally every person I have met, regardless of your bizarre assertions that "order takeout" is a thing people believe is a spell) that "it involves a ritual" is a much worse standard -- in that it less precisely maps on to the things colloquially referred to as "magic" -- than "is not possible in our world".

You still have not demonstrated that magic is used to mean "not possible in our world" anywhere outside these boards. For purposes of a single discussion, you're free to define words in whatever arbitrary way you like, but if you want to make claims about what words colloquially refer to, you need to better than what's "obvious" to you.


Uh, sure, but no one except you thinks "magical thinking" is what people mean when they use the word "magic". How many works from the source material can you make that substitution and retain coherence? Because I can't think of any.

You're mixing up arguments. Did you see "magical thinking" as part of the definition I gave you? No, you did not. What I actually said is that widespread ideas of magic are influenced by magical thinking. That's a psychological claim, not a semantical one. You can look up it in Wikipedia and follow the references if the concept is unknown to you.

The important part is that if humans in your setting are psychologically homologous to real humans, they will develop similar ideas of what's magic, regardless of what's possible.


Yes, absolute definitions give imperfect results. But on the spectrum from "more magic" to "less magic", "FTL drive" is clearly closer to fireball than "order takeout" is. This is why one shows up in fiction and the other is a thing I could do right now.

"Fireball", in context of D&D, is a joke about misunderstood science. It is the cargo cult version of blackpowder, which is far less advanced than a modern cell phone. Following Clarke's third law, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinquishable from magic", ordering takeout with your phone is closer to the FTL drive than fireball is. You conveniently forget that up untill a hundred years or so, touching symbols on the surface of a device small enough to fit on your palm in order to send invisible signal to another person, was in in the realm of science fiction just as well.

Also, regarding "absolute definitions": my claim was that magic is not synonym to impossible. Synonym means that two words mean, and are used to mean, the exact same thing. If even you think "absolutely defining" magic as impossible leads to "imperfect results", then you are admitting that magic is not synonymous to it.


Yes, because it is a totally foreign way of speaking to say "your" when referring to something you advocate for rather than something you created. No one has ever done that, and no one would ever expect that use to be obvious.

I put emphasis on it because I was making a point of semantics outside this discussion, outside these boards, outside this hobby. You're arguing for your definition based on what's "reasonable" or "obvious", but somehow looking a word's common use in a dictionary fails to be either? At the same time, if your definition was "obviously" a better fit for how words are colloquially used, I'd expect you to be able to find a dictionary using it, because dictionaries do catalogue how words are colloquially used.

You can keep making statements of yourself and "everyone you've met", but you haven't given me a good reason to consider you and your acquitances a more representative sample than the samples used in making dictionaries.

Amaril
2018-04-24, 09:17 AM
Here's a thought: magic is always an allegory for something. Probably most often, for technology. To unlock its power requires a price in time, labor, and research; once this is paid, it can be used to alter one's reality within specific limits, which can be expanded with further time, labor, and research. Because this takes so long, there will be stretches of time when magic-users lack the power to effect broad, sweeping societal change and abolish social issues. Once magic reaches a new height of potential, however, its cost generally need not be paid again to access the same power; the exception being in the case of some catastrophe that causes huge loss of knowledge, resulting in a post-apocalyptic dark age where magic is severely weakened until the old learning can be rediscovered. Magic isn't inherently good or evil, creative or destructive--the power it offers can be used for whatever purpose it's put to by someone who knows how, and harm only need result if that power is abused or mishandled (as in the case of the ecological damage caused by our overuse of fossil fuels).

One reason I suspect magic-as-technology often seems like magic without price when used in games is because so many games gloss over the actual cost of magical power (time, labor, research). And even when they acknowledge it, they often fail to really make that investment feel meaningful to players, since it's hard to make someone feel like they've put a ton of time and energy into a monotonous task without having them actually do it. Thus, you either end up with mages feeling more powerful than other characters without having earned it, or mages being on completely equal footing with non-mages and thus raising the question why anyone bothers to learn magic in the first place.

The other big one, the one S@tanicoaldo seems to be advocating, is what I'd describe as "magic as sociopathy". In this allegory, magic becomes a source of functionally unlimited power that's easily accessible if one is willing to let go of the morality that keeps them from it. In real life, people unbound by conscience wield tremendous power, because they can screw over their peers for their own gain and lose nothing in the process--unless they get caught and punished (magic means selling your soul to the devil, and the second you die, it's straight to hell for you), or their selfishness ends up destroying the social framework upon which they depend (too much evil magic destroys the world). Of course, people with a conscience will be understandably horrified by the thought of ending up this way, but sometimes, they might feel that nothing else will allow them to accomplish their ends, and try to draw on just a little of that power without giving up too much of themselves--but that's a delicate balance to strike, if it can be done at all.

In both cases, magic is an allegory for some form of power in the real world. It's the type of power, and what the setting says about it, that determines how the magic works, what it costs, and what it can do. I would contend, therefore, that settings with magic that appears ridiculous, nonsensical, or inconsistent, enough to annoy the audience, result from a writer not fully understanding what allegory they're creating with their magic, and just copying ideas from other sources without thinking about why those sources used those ideas in the first place. Gee, I wonder where I might've seen that happen before...

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 09:32 AM
I can say with utter certainty and fact that in neither of my own settings, nor in any of the settings that I've contributed to, has magic been an allegory for anything -- not for technology, not for social issues, not for psychology.

More broadly... I don't do allegory (or symbolism).

Cosi
2018-04-24, 09:35 AM
You say while conveniently ignoring that even when contents of the black boxes change, the actual art and practice of using those boxes stays remarkably constant between D&D settings. Wizards use spells, chants and rituals to produce and influence supernatural and natural events. This holds whether you're playing in Planescape, Dark Sun or Faerun.

Wizards also do things in those settings that are impossible in the real world. Also, "constant between D&D settings" is kind of a stupid point to make in a thread that is not system specific. Of course the way things work within the same game is going to be similar.


You still have not demonstrated that magic is used to mean "not possible in our world" anywhere outside these boards.

Well it's a good thing we're having this discussion on these boards and not somewhere else, now isn't it?


"Fireball", in context of D&D, is a joke about misunderstood science.

fireball in D&D is explicitly called "magic". It doesn't work in an antimagic field, it is countered by dispel magic, and it is stopped by immunity to magic. It is a magic effect, regardless of what jokes may have been made about it forty years ago.


I put emphasis on it because I was making a point of semantics outside this discussion, outside these boards, outside this hobby. You're arguing for your definition based on what's "reasonable" or "obvious", but somehow looking a word's common use in a dictionary fails to be either?

Again, the test here is simple: have you ever seem someone call ordering takeout "magic"? If the answer to that question is not yes (and please, give me an example), then your definition is failing to capture what people use the word to describe. Dictionary definitions almost never capture the totality of the way a word is used. Terms like "necromancy" and "pyromancy", at least originally, referred to divination by the mechanism of undead spirits or fire. Does that mean that we can't call a Dread Necromancer a Necromancer, even if it has no spells on its list that use undead to see the future?

You could argue that the correct definition is the intersection -- rituals that do impossible things -- but that still makes "magic" a term that is not meaningful internal to the setting.

Amaril
2018-04-24, 09:36 AM
I can say with utter certainty and fact that in neither of my own settings, nor in any of the settings that I've contributed to, has magic been an allegory for anything -- not for technology, not for social issues, not for psychology.

More broadly... I don't do allegory (or symbolism).

Well, here we run into a fundamental difference of opinion, since I believe everything in fiction is an allegory and/or symbol, whether we mean it to be or not; the only difference is whether the allegory is skillful or inept, and refusing to acknowledge that we're creating it makes it more likely to be the latter. But I don't see much point in arguing about that.

2D8HP
2018-04-24, 09:36 AM
...More broadly... I don't do allegory (or symbolism).


How about metaphor?

Yes, I'm being silly

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-24, 09:49 AM
One could deliberately want to build or explore a magic-based post-scarcity setting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

I have no problem with that, the problem is that they just don't, most of the time it's a settign where they have the power to do that but they don't, and they have no explanation on why they don't do it, it just feels lazy and inconsistent.

To me when you add the possibility of magic in your setting you either make it great or break it, no middle ground.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 09:52 AM
Well, here we run into a fundamental difference of opinion, since I believe everything in fiction is an allegory and/or symbol, whether we mean it to be or not; the only difference is whether the allegory is skillful or inept, and refusing to acknowledge that we're creating it makes it more likely to be the latter. But I don't see much point in arguing about that.


What I write is only what I'm writing, there on the page, it means nothing else. When I build a world, I'm building that world, as a place-that-could-be-real -- not as a stand-in or symbol for anything else. When I write about a character, I'm writing about that character as a person-who-could-be-real -- not to fill a narrative role or convey some sort of message.

I also don't read other people's fiction to parse out allegory, symbolism, meaning, or message -- sometimes they make it obvious and plain, and that's fine, but I don't go digging for it. That sort of literary analysis slides into the asinine very easily -- sometimes rain is just rain, it's raining because it's raining, and nothing more.

Don't confuse what people infer from their own imaginations, with any sort of allegory, symbol, message, or meaning in the writing. It's ridiculous to hold the author or the work responsible for what some random stranger brings to the book decades after it's written.

(Rassum frassum postmodernist "everything is perception" garbage...)




How about metaphor?


Not in my fiction or worldbuilding or gaming, no.

And decreasingly not in discussion, because we've reached a point where instead of trying to understand the point being made, most people seem eager to just attack the analogy or metaphor, or try to run out the analogy to the most absurd caricature possible. The entire approach has become largely useless.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 09:54 AM
I have no problem with that, the problem is that they just don't, most of the time it's a settign where they have the power to do that but they don't, and they have no explanation on why they don't do it, it just feels lazy and inconsistent.

To me when you add the possibility of magic in your setting you either make it great or break it, no middle ground.

That's not far from what I meant when I posted this upthread, regarding magic doing things like easily making food and water, curing diseases, bending reality, etc:



As the worldbuilder, one at least needs to make choices, and follow through with them.

If magic can do those things, then show the effects.

If the effects are unwanted, then don't set magic up as able to do those things.

If magic can do those things, and the effects don't happen, then have very, very good reasons why they don't happen.

2D8HP
2018-04-24, 09:59 AM
What I write is only what I'm writing, there on the page, it means nothing else......


Where's the sport in that?

You can pry the Monty Python references from my cold dead fingers!!!

Amaril
2018-04-24, 10:10 AM
I have no problem with that, the problem is that they just don't, most of the time it's a settign where they have the power to do that but they don't, and they have no explanation on why they don't do it, it just feels lazy and inconsistent.

To me when you add the possibility of magic in your setting you either make it great or break it, no middle ground.

Out of curiosity, what are some settings you've seen where magic as presented should theoretically have the power to create a utopia, but hasn't? I imagine some of the published D&D settings like Forgotten Realms would be the biggest offenders, since they're designed to run on D&D game rules, which establish that magic has powers that would do this. In non-game fiction, though, when shown a non-utopian setting with magic, I tend to assume unless shown otherwise that it's because the magic isn't capable of solving all problems for everyone--that seems like the simplest solution to me, and therefore the most likely.


What I write is only what I'm writing, there on the page, it means nothing else.

I also don't read other people's fiction to parse out allegory, symbolism, meaning, or message -- sometimes they make it obvious and plain, and that's fine, but I don't go digging for it. That sort of literary analysis slides into the asinine very easily -- sometimes rain is just rain, it's raining because it's raining, and nothing more.

Don't confuse what people infer from their own imaginations, with any sort of allegory, symbol, message, or meaning in the writing. It's ridiculous to hold the author or the work responsible for

I...agree and disagree. It's hard to explain.

It's true, writers aren't solely responsible for what readers take from their text. However, they do have some ability to shape that outcome, and I think the best stories come from writers who understand that and do it intentionally--it's a lot harder to use a skill you don't believe you have. The more clear and consistent a writer is with their symbolism, the more likely readers will pick up on what it is they were trying to say, or, if not that, will come away with their own consistent impression of meaning. Contradictory symbolism will make it harder for any reader to get meaning out of a text, and while there are always gonna be things some readers find symbolism in that the author didn't intend, it's not totally arbitrary.

Now, when I talk about a reader getting meaning out of a text, I don't necessarily mean they have to be intentionally picking it apart for symbolism to extract some grand statement about the world. Some texts just want to entertain or offer escapism, and that's a great thing. But even readers who think about a text as little as possible will pick up on symbols, even if they don't realize it--when we engage with a text, we can't help but draw parallels between what we read and our own lives, it's just how our brains are wired. And the more consistent and well-built a world is, the easier it'll be for a reader to immerse themselves in it, to find that escapism they're looking for. So, when building magic into your world, you have to think about what role it plays in that world, and that's where the allegory comes in. If you have magic appearing to behave like technology, except when it suddenly doesn't with no explanation, a reader is more likely to be pulled out of the story. That's why thinking about magic as an allegory is helpful even if you're not using it to make any kind of intentional statement, because it helps ensure that a) you have a clear idea of what role it plays in your world, and b) it'll be consistent in how it behaves. Even if a reader isn't thinking about what your technology-inspired magic system says about how we use technology in real life, having it follow those patterns will make it easy for them to hang it on their natural mental hooks, understanding how it fits into the world they're entering. And because of how our brains work, the more closely magic parallels something in real life, the better it'll hang on those hooks.

Perch
2018-04-24, 10:17 AM
What I write is only what I'm writing, there on the page, it means nothing else. When I build a world, I'm building that world, as a place-that-could-be-real -- not as a stand-in or symbol for anything else. When I write about a character, I'm writing about that character as a person-who-could-be-real -- not to fill a narrative role or convey some sort of message.

I also don't read other people's fiction to parse out allegory, symbolism, meaning, or message -- sometimes they make it obvious and plain, and that's fine, but I don't go digging for it. That sort of literary analysis slides into the asinine very easily -- sometimes rain is just rain, it's raining because it's raining, and nothing more.

Don't confuse what people infer from their own imaginations, with any sort of allegory, symbol, message, or meaning in the writing. It's ridiculous to hold the author or the work responsible for what some random stranger brings to the book decades after it's written.

(Rassum frassum postmodernist "everything is perception" garbage...)




Not in my fiction or worldbuilding or gaming, no.

And decreasingly not in discussion, because we've reached a point where instead of trying to understand the point being made, most people seem eager to just attack the analogy or metaphor, or try to run out the analogy to the most absurd caricature possible. The entire approach has become largely useless.

Even Tolkien who was a big hater of analogy on his work adimited that he only has control on what he wrote not on what people see and read on it. so you can say that youw rite without thinking about symbols and stuff but that won't prevent me from identifying such symbols in your narative.

Cluedrew
2018-04-24, 10:17 AM
Magic is power.

Magic has a price.For me at least, nothing takes away the feel of magic so much as it being convenient. Or maybe standardization, separating it from the individual... well I'm not sure how to compare the amounts of those things. So basically, on top of the several definitions of magic I already have, there are innumerable rules about what I think magic should feel like.


Why go back to the middle ages? It´s easier to get a glimpse at it when looking at what has endured until today, from customs, small rituals and in religion and ceremonies.That would also work. If we were trying to do a formal study we should probably do both and pull in information from other sources as well. But we aren't, so being that rigours is (I hope) uncalled for.


As per usual in threads like these, "your setting" isn't really a thing for me - it's more "one of your settings", as the idea of having a single setting (or even genre) for all campaigns is just deeply opposed to how I operate.I actually agree, I just picked one that I could talk about the most. I mean modern or sci-fi settings might not have magic at all (they might have handwavium alloy or plot tech... which often ends up being similar), plus I know I have a couple of settings where magic is much more black boxed and less interesting to discus.

To 2D8HP: I also would choose Monty Python over an out of place discussion on narrative theory. Although that seems to be happening anyways. Hope it turns out well.

Perch
2018-04-24, 10:23 AM
For me at least, nothing takes away the feel of magic so much as it being convenient.

Yeah, if magic is free and no drawbacks why won't everyone use the damn thing? Why have warriors if you can stop time and shoot fire out of your eyes or something?

Just look at Marvel and Dc, we have magic users with a lot of power and no costs, why don't batman just learn magic? Then he will be able to do all the things he already does plus powers. It makes no sense.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 10:25 AM
Even Tolkien who was a big hater of analogy on his work admitted that he only has control on what he wrote not on what people see and read on it. so you can say that you rite without thinking about symbols and stuff but that won't prevent me from identifying such symbols in your narrative.

You're not identifying them.

You're adding them.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 10:27 AM
Yeah, if magic is free and no drawbacks why won't everyone use the damn thing? Why have warriors if you can stop time and shoot fire out of your eyes or something?

Just look at Marvel and Dc, we have magic users with a lot of power and no costs, why don't batman just learn magic? Then he will be able to do all the things he already does plus powers. It makes no sense.

This would appear to presume that "magic" is just something you can simply learn, and that anyone can learn to the highest levels.

Perch
2018-04-24, 10:30 AM
This would appear to presume that "magic" is just something you can simply learn, and that anyone can learn to the highest levels.

That seems to be the premise of most rpg settings. Magic is just another academic field, just like reading, writting, drawing, playign a musical instrument, all it takes is dedication and perseverance. Also, look out for double posts.

Amaril
2018-04-24, 10:39 AM
This would appear to presume that "magic" is just something you can simply learn, and that anyone can learn to the highest levels.

So, now I'm thinking about what it means if this isn't the case. Can I assume you're suggesting a system in which some people are born with magical ability, and others aren't? Because that also mimics real life. In real life, people are born with all kinds of natural talents and gifts, some of them impossible for others to duplicate. So, here's the issue: let's say your magic behaves, for the most part, like technology, with predictable inputs and outcomes and no inherent drawbacks, except that only these specific people can do it. That doesn't sound much like real technology, does it? After all, one of the main advantages of technology is that pretty much anyone can use it with minimal training, which is how it can change society on such a sweeping scale. So that immediately feels inconsistent to me, because it's setting up conflicting expectations.

However, I imagine another writer who takes the same concept, with only certain specific people having innate magical power, and instead builds their magic system and setting entirely around that. Now, that can be much more coherent, and launches a whole other set of interesting questions to explore. If these people exist, and have useful powers, how does everyone else treat them? Do they climb to the top of the social hierarchy, or are they exploited and used as a resource by others? If they have the potential to take control, but don't, why? Does the gap in personal power leave non-magicals jealous and fearful, or awed and admiring? Does the existence of more powerful people necessarily make the less powerful less valuable? Tons of stories have explored these exact issues to great success, from a similar starting point, because they're issues we face in real life too--we have real people born with extraordinary gifts others lack, and how they use those gifts, and how they affect their relationships with others, have direct relevance to us.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 10:44 AM
That seems to be the premise of most rpg settings. Magic is just another academic field, just like reading, writting, drawing, playign a musical instrument, all it takes is dedication and perseverance.


There are settings and systems that require a special talent of some kind be taken before someone can use magic.

There are settings and systems that presume the PCs have a special and rare talent (WoD Mage, for example.)

D&D doesn't really say either way, outside of some editions or settings that note an INT minimum to learn wizard spells. Most of the settings depict a situation where for some reason, the vast majority of people don't have any ability to use magic, learned or inherent.




Also, look out for double posts.


Fix your giant signature image. Or maybe just stop playing amateur forum cop.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-24, 10:49 AM
I just hate the idea of super power lottery becuase I know that if I was in setting like that i would end up without powers, or with the luck I have with some really lame and terrible powers.

If I was in the Lotr universe I would probably end up a hobbit.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-24, 10:50 AM
That seems to be the premise of most rpg settings. Magic is just another academic field, just like reading, writting, drawing, playign a musical instrument, all it takes is dedication and perseverance. Also, look out for double posts.

That's only a premise of one particular (unnatural) reading of 3.5e D&D (assuming that the game rules are the physics of the setting). There's no assumption of that in the vast majority of settings I'm aware of.


So, now I'm thinking about what it means if this isn't the case. Can I assume you're suggesting a system in which some people are born with magical ability, and others aren't? Because that also mimics real life. In real life, people are born with all kinds of natural talents and gifts, some of them impossible for others to duplicate. So, here's the issue: let's say your magic behaves, for the most part, like technology, with predictable inputs and outcomes and no inherent drawbacks, except that only these specific people can do it. That doesn't sound much like real technology, does it? After all, one of the main advantages of technology is that pretty much anyone can use it with minimal training, which is how it can change society on such a sweeping scale. So that immediately feels inconsistent to me, because it's setting up conflicting expectations.

However, I imagine another writer who takes the same concept, with only certain specific people having innate magical power, and instead builds their magic system and setting entirely around that. Now, that can be much more coherent, and launches a whole other set of interesting questions to explore. If these people exist, and have useful powers, how does everyone else treat them? Do they climb to the top of the social hierarchy, or are they exploited and used as a resource by others? If they have the potential to take control, but don't, why? Does the gap in personal power leave non-magicals jealous and fearful, or awed and admiring? Does the existence of more powerful people necessarily make the less powerful less valuable? Tons of stories have explored these exact issues to great success, from a similar starting point, because they're issues we face in real life too--we have real people born with extraordinary gifts others lack, and how they use those gifts, and how they affect their relationships with others, have direct relevance to us.

I agree with this (in principle). I tend to run "everyone has some potential for non-Earth-possible feats, some just have more and some just have spell-casting potential" as the premise. So "non-earth-possibilities" (I really need a better word than that here, but magic isn't it) are widespread, but spells (especially higher level spells) are rare.

For example, high elves basically threw out everyone who can't cast simple wizard spells centuries ago. Those descendants became the wood elves. High elven society (in one particular area) is based around spell-casting ability--those that lack it, though highborn, are dropped lower or passed over for jobs/marriage/inheritance, while lower-born ones with high giftedness can be adopted into high society.

Other cultures are much less focused on that--humans and halflings have the most clerical bent, orcs and wood elves tend toward shamanism/communion with spirits.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-24, 10:52 AM
I hate that idea becuase it implies that some people are unable to get some skills and I don't belive that's the case irl, I think that anyone cna learn anything as long as they try hard enough.

So if your setting only blue eyed people can learn magic we start to get in some weird connotations.

Amaril
2018-04-24, 11:01 AM
Personally, I tend not to like superpower lottery settings either, but I've seen exceptions. Mob Psycho 100, for example, is one of my favorites, because it's all about the idea that a) superpowers don't make you special in any way, because they're just another talent, and everyone has different talents, and b) having superpowers (or any other talent) doesn't mean you have any responsibility to use them.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 11:06 AM
I hate that idea becuase it implies that some people are unable to get some skills and I don't belive that's the case irl, I think that anyone cna learn anything as long as they try hard enough.

So if your setting only blue eyed people can learn magic we start to get in some weird connotations.


IRL, no amount of "trying hard enough" would have made me (or most people) a top-tier professional athlete. No amount of training or effort would have made me fast enough, or strong enough, or quick enough, or tall/big enough, or...

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-24, 11:06 AM
Wizards also do things in those settings that are impossible in the real world. Also, "constant between D&D settings" is kind of a stupid point to make in a thread that is not system specific. Of course the way things work within the same game is going to be similar.

Okay. So go ahead and list settings from all of fiction where wizards use none of spells, chants, rituals and charms. Then make a contrasting list of all of fiction where they do. See which one's longer.


Well it's a good thing we're having this discussion on these boards and not somewhere else, now isn't it?

It's not. I made the point specifically to show that the problems in "magic = impossible" do not exist with the common definition, to show that the problem is self-created. Why should these boards insist on a definition that has problems the common definition has not?


fireball in D&D is explicitly called "magic". It doesn't work in an antimagic field, it is countered by dispel magic, and it is stopped by immunity to magic. It is a magic effect, regardless of what jokes may have been made about it forty years ago.

Missing the point here. You were asking me whether the in-universe wizard calls what they do magic. You were asking me whether them knowing how the fireball works would make them not call it magic.

My answer was that it follows Clarke's third law: wizards call what they do magic because they don't understand it, because magic consists of functional black boxes which are inexplicable to them. Fireball is called magic because it is a result of the art and practice of using spells, chants, rituals and charms to create a supernatural effect. This makes as much sense within the setting as put of it, as that is literally what the wizards do!


Again, the test here is simple: have you ever seem someone call ordering takeout "magic"? If the answer to that question is not yes (and please, give me an example), then your definition is failing to capture what people use the word to describe.

You've seen me use the phrase "cargo cult" numerous times now, how about looking it up in Wikipedia while at it?


Dictionary definitions almost never capture the totality of the way a word is used...

Which I pointed out myself several posts ago. You're not disagreeing with me, you're confused to what my claim even was.


You could argue that the correct definition is the intersection -- rituals that do impossible things -- but that still makes "magic" a term that is not meaningful internal to the setting.

However, "rituals which do things inexclicable to science" is meaningfull both in-setting and out. The wizard rubs guano and sulphur together and spells the name of the Living Flame, and this creates the fireball. The wizard has no scientific understanding of how and why this specific combination of actions does so, so he calls it magic. Even if we know how and why it works, we can still look at what the wizard does and recognize it as magic, even if it does not feel magical to us.

That's what you reduced Google's definition of magic to, "the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces", when you went and defined supernatural as something "attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature".

So again: why insist on baking "impossible" and the trouble it causes in the definition, when there's a common definition which lacks the trouble?

Cosi
2018-04-24, 01:12 PM
It's not. I made the point specifically to show that the problems in "magic = impossible" do not exist with the common definition, to show that the problem is self-created. Why should these boards insist on a definition that has problems the common definition has not?

Because, apparently unlike you, they are smart enough to realize that ordering takeout isn't magic. I'm done arguing with you about this, because for all your babble, you have yet to provide any reason why we should use a definition that includes things that are so obviously not magic.

Cluedrew
2018-04-24, 01:13 PM
Fix your giant signature image.That might be a browser issue. It looks fine to me, it doesn't seem to be large, scaled or cropped in any way I can tell. Hey Perch have you checked the default/true size of the image? Is my browser auto-scaling?

Perch
2018-04-24, 01:31 PM
That might be a browser issue. It looks fine to me, it doesn't seem to be large, scaled or cropped in any way I can tell. Hey Perch have you checked the default/true size of the image? Is my browser auto-scaling?

It looks fine to me, I think he just wanted to be rude. I was only trying to help. :<

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 01:40 PM
Using a perfectly normal browser.

The image doesn't even fit in the browser window on my laptop's screen, and is almost 8" in height.

Perch
2018-04-24, 01:43 PM
Using a perfectly normal browser.

The image doesn't even fit on my laptop's screen.

Hmmm.. Weird. Thanks for letting me know.

2D8HP
2018-04-24, 01:49 PM
One could deliberately want to build or explore a magic-based post-scarcity setting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy


Oh yeah, when I was in grade school I read about that from a book in the school library that predicted what life would be like in the far future of the year 2000.

Any minute now.

Florian
2018-04-24, 02:28 PM
Yeah, if magic is free and no drawbacks why won't everyone use the damn thing? Why have warriors if you can stop time and shoot fire out of your eyes or something?

Splittermond handles this quite well. Generally speaking, it´s a skill-based system and "schools" of magic are a skill each. Second, creatures have a rather low capacity for storing the necessary power for their spells, but a very high recharge rate. Third, continuous or long-time effects are a heavy drain on your power reservoir, like you have to permanently reserve some of your pool to power the effects.

So, unlike D&D-type magic, a "universalist" spell caster has to invest way more into being able to have that broad access to magic (there're 20 schools of magic in total, each with a skill, and you have to buy spells with xp, so go figure). So instead of training of "full-blown D&D cleric", it´s more feasible to train some regular soldiers to self-enchant their equipment and learn some healing and buff spells.

Edit: Unlike the typical Tippyverse cornerstones, magic effects need to be powered constantly, else they vanish. A Wall of Stone simple makes *poof* once you cease pouring in power, same with enhanced items, buffs and debuffs. So you can use something like Fabricate when you need something, like, say, a ladder right now, but that's far from permanent solution.

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-24, 03:37 PM
Because, apparently unlike you, they are smart enough to realize that ordering takeout isn't magic. I'm done arguing with you about this, because for all your babble, you have yet to provide any reason why we should use a definition that includes things that are so obviously not magic.

*sigh*

Here, a funny tidbit from the Wikipedia article concerning Clarke's third law:


Clarke gave an example of the third law when he said that while he "would have believed anyone who told him back in 1962 that there would one day exist a book-sized object capable of holding the content of an entire library, he would never have accepted that the same device could find a page or word in a second and then convert it into any typeface and size from Albertus Extra Bold to Zurich Calligraphic", referring to his memory of "seeing and hearing Linotype machines which slowly converted ‘molten lead into front pages that required two men to lift them’"

The guy who codified and popularized the idea that "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinquishable from magic" would've considered modern computers, modern smartsphones included, "magic"... only 56 years ago.

That's how "obviously" not magic a modern phone is.

It's funny how rapidly people take fruits of modern science as granted and fail to consider how those things would've looked to people of the past.

Zurvan
2018-04-24, 03:49 PM
IRL, no amount of "trying hard enough" would have made me (or most people) a top-tier professional athlete. No amount of training or effort would have made me fast enough, or strong enough, or quick enough, or tall/big enough, or...

Have you tried?

Or do you think top-tier professional athletes are born like that, rather than achieve that level by hardworking, training and dedication.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 04:24 PM
Have you tried?

Or do you think top-tier professional athletes are born like that, rather than achieve that level by hardworking, training and dedication.


They're born with the potential. Most people are not. The training and work are also required to reach that potential, but these are two entirely different questions at hand.

No matter how hard most people train, they'll never be 6-6, or run a sub 4.5 second 40-yd dash, or bench-press 225lbs 20+ times in a row, or have the reflexes to grab a hockey puck moving 100 mph out of midair with a heavily gloved hand, or jump 40+ inches straight up from a standing start, or...

Physical potential and capability are not egalitarian.

And while Usain Bolt holds the current world record of 9.58 seconds in the 100 meter dash... no amount of training or hard work or dedication would have allowed him to run the 100 in 5 seconds.

Physical potential and capability are not limitless.


"Just work harder" is a trite platitude, and nothing more. Arguing that anyone can achieve anything in sports/athletics if they "just train hard enough" is arguing against all of the facts.

~~~~

Now, to tie this into magic -- a setting may well set the potential to work magic along the same sort of scale. Two characters can study and train and research and practice 8+ hours a day, with the best teachers available, pushing themselves to each of their respective limits and indeed pushing those limits... but one might top out at "competent enchanter of everyday magic items" while the other might top out at "legendary maker of singular artifacts that influence the world for endless generations to come".

Frozen_Feet
2018-04-24, 04:42 PM
@Zurvan: It's both.

All skills have hard physiological requirements you must pass to do them. However, for most skills, athletics included, these are fairly trivial. Additionally, dedicated practice, nourishment etc. are more influential than differences in inborn qualities. Hence the optimistic notion that "anyone could do it if they try hard enough".

But, when you get to the very top of any competitive field, the situation is reversed. Why? Because everyone at the top has dedicated practice, good nourishment etc. so those factors cancel out. Suddenly, minor inborn advantages and disadvantages create disproportionate differences in success.

So training will decide if you run 100 meters in 11 seconds instead of 20, but genetics will decide if you run it in 10 instead of 11.

For some settings, the physiological barrier for magical ability is very high, sometimes insurmountable: you have to be of specific bloodline, or you have to have gone through a specific event, to even start. The difference between magicians and muggles is as severe as between those born with tetrachromia and those born without eyes.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-04-24, 06:41 PM
Well, you sure won't be able to be an olympic athlete but nothing is stoping you from becoming a serius competive athlete.

Just as you won't be ale to be a top physicist, but nothing prevents you to have a good uderstending physics.

Cosi
2018-04-24, 09:18 PM
The guy who codified and popularized the idea that "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinquishable from magic" would've considered modern computers, modern smartsphones included, "magic"... only 56 years ago.

Yes, a guy without smartphones didn't know how they work. But today? Similarly, the people who use magic understand how it works. As evidenced by the existence of schools that teach people how to do magic. And before you start going "black box! cargo cult! magical thinking!", it's not like the level of understanding that a Hogwarts student has of lumos is really all that much less than the average person has of smarthphones today.

NichG
2018-04-24, 09:41 PM
Athletics and magical study are a bad comparison as the former has very precisely defined bounds and is basically designed to collapse down to a single terminal variable in things like the 100m dash, whereas fields of study are advanced more by the efficiency of a researcher's search for novelty than the alignment of a number of performance factors.

That is to say, if we want to advance the 100m dash, you would need a singular runner better than Usain Bolt. But if we want to advance the field of relativistic physics, we wouldn't need a singular physicist smarter than Einstein. Someone less qualified than Einstein but who directs their efforts in a direction that has yet to be fully explored can still make discoveries that change the field.

The reason why PC magical researchers in campaigns that allow such things are able to do transformative work is more often because of a high degree of exposure to the anomalous through adventure than because of the perfectly aligned effort and suitability of a top athlete. An utterly mediocre scientist given access to real working examples of Lovecraftian tomes would have more opportunity to turn everything on its head than the smartest, best trained, and highly funded one who lacked such a thing. Of course, that sort of thing doesn't happen in reality (though there are analogous discovery stories for real phenomena), but it's quite common in tabletop campaigns.

Amaril
2018-04-24, 09:56 PM
Athletics and magical study are a bad comparison as the former has very precisely defined bounds and is basically designed to collapse down to a single terminal variable in things like the 100m dash, whereas fields of study are advanced more by the efficiency of a researcher's search for novelty than the alignment of a number of performance factors.

That is to say, if we want to advance the 100m dash, you would need a singular runner better than Usain Bolt. But if we want to advance the field of relativistic physics, we wouldn't need a singular physicist smarter than Einstein. Someone less qualified than Einstein but who directs their efforts in a direction that has yet to be fully explored can still make discoveries that change the field.

That's what I mean about mixing allegories, though. If you have magic as an innate talent possessed by a rare few, you are necessarily saying that it doesn't behave like technology, and wouldn't advance the same way technology does. Trying to combine the two sets of assumptions without really careful thought to how they interact results in so much inconsistency that it's a far safer bet to stick to one allegory or the other--either magic behaves like technology, and you build your setting and story around those limitations and questions, or it behaves like athletics, and you run with those limitations and questions instead. Each naturally results in a different type of story about different things.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-24, 10:06 PM
That's what I mean about mixing allegories, though. If you have magic as an innate talent possessed by a rare few, you are necessarily saying that it doesn't behave like technology, and wouldn't advance the same way technology does. Trying to combine the two sets of assumptions without really careful thought to how they interact results in so much inconsistency that it's a far safer bet to stick to one allegory or the other--either magic behaves like technology, and you build your setting and story around those limitations and questions, or it behaves like athletics, and you run with those limitations and questions instead. Each naturally results in a different type of story about different things.

Doesn't that presume that every person has the same actual or at least potential ability to work with "technology"?

As the person most of my friends and family and co-workers call for help with their computers and phones... I find this a bit dubious.

NichG
2018-04-24, 10:39 PM
That's what I mean about mixing allegories, though. If you have magic as an innate talent possessed by a rare few, you are necessarily saying that it doesn't behave like technology, and wouldn't advance the same way technology does. Trying to combine the two sets of assumptions without really careful thought to how they interact results in so much inconsistency that it's a far safer bet to stick to one allegory or the other--either magic behaves like technology, and you build your setting and story around those limitations and questions, or it behaves like athletics, and you run with those limitations and questions instead. Each naturally results in a different type of story about different things.

Maybe warfare is a better example. You could have a society that tries to raise up its best warriors, in an athletics sense. Or you could have a society that studies war itself - strategies, the effectiveness of different regimens, etc. Both coexist and to some extent synergize in the same setting.

In the long run though, the society which only raises up its singular talents will not increase in effectiveness over time, whereas the society that develops in both directions will.

So ultimately, even things requiring rare innate talent can become knowledge-driven fields of study. You can't just study to be Usain Bolt, but you can study how future Usain Bolts could best be trained.

Amaril
2018-04-24, 11:11 PM
Doesn't that presume that every person has the same actual or at least potential ability to work with "technology"?

As the person most of my friends and family and co-workers call for help with their computers and phones... I find this a bit dubious.

True, but the point is that magic that behaves like technology has the potential to affect sweeping societal change in ways that magic that works like...you know what, I'm just gonna compare it to X-Men mutations because that's what it reminds me of, doesn't. As long as magic remains fundamentally tied to individual people's capabilities, and those people can't be produced reliably in numbers, it'll continue to play a certain role and have certain implications for the setting that change when that's no longer the case.


Maybe warfare is a better example. You could have a society that tries to raise up its best warriors, in an athletics sense. Or you could have a society that studies war itself - strategies, the effectiveness of different regimens, etc. Both coexist and to some extent synergize in the same setting.

In the long run though, the society which only raises up its singular talents will not increase in effectiveness over time, whereas the society that develops in both directions will.

So ultimately, even things requiring rare innate talent can become knowledge-driven fields of study. You can't just study to be Usain Bolt, but you can study how future Usain Bolts could best be trained.

What you're describing makes me think of the Circle of Magi in Dragon Age. Which, incidentally, is one of the rare settings I've seen that manages to combine magic-as-technology, magic-as-athletics, and magic-as-sociopathy while still sticking to its consistent themes and implications. Magic at its most basic level is an inherent property of specific rare individuals; society responds to these people by gathering them together to exploit them as a source of institutional power through magic items and deployment of mages in war, while also monitoring them closely and keeping them under strict control. Mages who dislike this system have an easy way out in blood magic, but the cost of that is paid in sanity and human lives.

Anyway, even the warfare comparison breaks down when you add in the fact that in a world where mages are a rare and unpredictable occurrence, there's no guarantee any society will actually have the opportunity to study magic in enough quantity to squeeze noticeably more out of its mages. There's only so much a single mage can learn to improve without help from peers, and only so much a group of mages can learn in the course of one lifetime. When you start increasing the number of mages to the point that these stop being limiting factors, you start to get magic behaving more like technology again in terms of implications for the world. And then you soon get to the point where not everyone with magical ability is actually needed to use it to its full potential, and then the social implications of inborn magic start to shift because it's so common, and before long you have a world where magical talent is little more than a quirk, not something that'll have any serious impact on a person's life.

Which, y'know, has been done, and can even lead into the concept of the character without magic being the weird one. But by then your allegory has shifted again, and you're once again writing a very different kind of story.

2D8HP
2018-04-24, 11:43 PM
*sigh*
...The guy who codified and popularized the idea that "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinquishable from magic" would've considered modern computers, modern smartsphones included, "magic"... only 56 years ago.

That's how "obviously" not magic a modern phone is.

It's funny how rapidly people take fruits of modern science as granted and fail to consider how those things would've looked to people of the past.


56 years ago?

Dude that's 1962, Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn had already orbited the earth, and The Mariner 2 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_2) had done a fly-by of Venus.

Now maybe I have a skewed view because my grandfather was an aerospace engineer who mused that "things didn't go as far as I thought they would", but as a child in the 1970's, having read The Martian Chronicles (published 1950, takes place 1999 to 2026) (http://www.timetoast.com/timelines/the-martian-chronicles--10), and "non-fiction" books speculating on "The Year 2000", and detailing NASA's plans "for the next ten years", and watching Lost in Space (broadcast 1965 to 1968, takes place 1997), and 2001 a Space Odyssey, I could already tell in 1979 that the "future" was behind schedule.

The future is still behind schedule!

All those works I cited predicted artificial intelligence, as well as lunar and martian colonies, Lost in Space even had a family travel to another star in 1997!

While I've known and still know many who do, I don't remember 1962, but I do remember 1972, and besides HAL 9000 from 2001 there was another computer in another movie from 1970 that was broadcast on television many times during my childhood in the 1970's:


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iRq7Muf6CKg
(Some scenes were filmed near my house!)

The "magic" surprise of 2018 is that we escaped being bathed in atomic fire, and that computers could get so small, but that they could do what they do?

We imagined that and more.

Florian
2018-04-25, 12:59 AM
@Max_Killjoy/2D8HP:

Guys, that is exactly besides the point. The thing with Magic equals "spells, charms and rituals" is quite easy to explain: Grab a random child off the street, hand it an iPhone, show it how the interface and some apps work. It now can use an iPhone like a pro, without knowing the underlying principles of how the individual components of the phone itself work or needing any programming skills. What clarks law says is that the technology we can use (by interface) will advance faster than the common knowledge and learned understanding how it actually works.

"Knock three times on wood for good luck" _is_ a spell and would, in D&D-terms, translate to something like a first level buff that gives a +1 luck bonus on your next save or something like that.
It might be repeatable, a quality we see as been a hallmark of technology, but it´s still just the interface for the underlying effect, the understandable top level of it, nothing more at the moment (Is it a quality of the wood? Does it matter how fast or with what hand I do the knocking? What is solid luck?).

Dalinale
2018-04-25, 02:11 AM
Magic in the current world I'm designing mostly works on arbitrary principals for all intents and purposes, which has been a limiter on any particularly powerful institutions from developing. The default arcane-magic institution have a very good grasp on the secrets of the universe, according to their charts and graphs and even in terms of observable behavior, but it's still very limited and what works on their formulas might be much different for how the local sorcerers preform their acts and might have no correlation with how the local druidic circles preform it.

A orc shaman and a elf druid might be able to create the same result through entirely different and conflicting methodologies that, according to each other's magical methods, the other shouldn't be able to do. This very 'unscientific' way of approaching magic has been rejected by many who have attempted to create schools and places of learning, but all mortal theories in regards to coming to a better understanding of magic (which is generally understood to vaguely come from specific sites on the planet as well as from astral bodies, some of which have been hypothesized as being the dwelling places of the gods) have hit roadblocks when they cannot properly explain how another magical system functions whatsoever.

This chaotic situation is mostly due to the setting's ancient precursor species having been influenced by the local variety of CN extraplanar entities who specifically meddled with mortal affairs to prevent them from achieving proper understanding of cosmic forces that only got forced out after being visited by a force of Inevitables. The end result is a patchwork of many unique 'places of power' (your typical fantasy magical lakes, forest clearings, caverns, occasional person, ect) that interact and have interacted with the local races in very odd ways over the last few thousand years.

Tvtyrant
2018-04-25, 04:32 AM
My preference is for spells to be alive and require each individual to make deals with them. Based on what deals they have and how much they like an individual the deal terms could be better or worse.

So Fireball really liked Sandy and had an opening. Fireball had previously had a mage who gave it their sensation and memories of eating cherries, but that mage died. Sandy grew up on a cherry farm and ate a lot of cherries growing up, so Fireball made a pact for those memories and all ongoing cherries (at least a thousand a year), in return for which Sandy can cast three fireballs a day.

Doug approaches Fireball the next week, but Doug seems boring to Fireball. He doesn't get out much, and is kind of smelly. Fireball graciously offers Doug a fireball casting a day in return for Doug's eyesight. Doug declines, and counters with offering the feeling of wind on your face on a sunny day while at the beach. Doug has rarely been to the beach, and Fireball decides the offer is in bad faith and cuts off bargaining.

Impossible to implement well in RPGs, but makes magic very unscientific and fairy taleish while making perfect sense.

Florian
2018-04-25, 06:35 AM
@TvTyrant:

Why can´t you?

Take a look at how L5R handles the whole matter: The elemental Kami are the spiritual "Atoms" of the whole universe, the elemental Dragon (and by extension, Oracles) are the direct representation of the thing as a whole.

Shugenja are "blessed" with the ability that the Kami listen to them and take an interest in what they do. Now that is represented as three distinct abilities, Commune, Sense and Summon. Everything else builds upon that.

Now, a "Prayer" is the accumulated knowledge of generations of shugenja on how to talk with the Kami to get them to perform a certain action and affect the physical world by it, aka a "spell". You can get there by trial and error using the three basic building blocks mentioned above, but that is somewhat like reinventing the wheel when other have already done the heavy lifting and you can use an existing instruction manual. (Unlike standard D&D-style spells, a Prayer looks more like 3E Psi powers in that it can have variables and be more tailored to taste and effect, but you have to deal with an increased casting roll check to see whether the Kami understood what you want from them).

Below that rank Kiho and Kata, in Tome of Battle parlance "maneuvers" and "stances", something that people figured out can be done without being able to speak to the Kami and still will trigger some effects, above it are multi-element prayers and channeling the Dragons directly, but that're non-issues here.

Ok, long build-up, but much of it depends on how the Kami, Fortunes, Oracles or Dragons love/hate you and how your relationship to them is and why this is so. There's always a story behind why you have Bentens Blessing or Curse or why some Oracle favors you or condemn you.

Segev
2018-04-25, 01:20 PM
The best depictions of magic being an inborn trait I've seen ultimately describe it as having another sense and some sort of metaphysical "musculature" that can be used to manipulate what that sense...senses. For all its faults, Wheel of Time at least does a very good job of that. (And I like the series, but it has some flaws, especially towards the middle.)

PhoenixPhyre
2018-04-25, 01:24 PM
(And I like the series, but it has some flaws, especially towards the middle.)

One of which is just the sheer prolixity of the narrative. He makes me look like a person of few words. And that takes doing.

Edit: I say that as one who also likes the series overall. I've read parts of it a bunch of times.

martixy
2018-04-28, 08:43 AM
The guy who codified and popularized the idea that "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinquishable from magic" would've considered modern computers, modern smartsphones included, "magic"... only 56 years ago.

That's how "obviously" not magic a modern phone is.

It's funny how rapidly people take fruits of modern science as granted and fail to consider how those things would've looked to people of the past.

The fruits of modern sciences aren't as modern as you imagine them to be.

Your first statement is blatantly wrong. Clarke was a smart guy. And the fundamentals that make modern computing technology possible had already been known at that time. The basics of information theory had already been rigorously established in the 1930s and 40s by people such as Turing and Neumann and Godel. And the hardware to implement it came soon after, with the invention of the transistor.

So no, he would not have considered it magic by far.

Currently we are on the road to self-driving cars. We're not there yet, there are tons of engineering hurdles to overcome, but one can see the road ahead clearly. And could for the last decade. The concepts of machine learning and neural networks aren't new. They are merely now entering the public consciousness because only recently has it become economical for commercial entities to utilize these techniques on global market scales within their services. AI has begun advancing rapidly because the enabling technologies and computing capacity have finally gotten cheap enough to make the application of the resources demanded by AI economical on large scale.

But I digress.

In my setting magic works in a way that serves what I want it to do.

E.g. be somewhat rare, wondrous and powerful, but without devolving into a gritty, low-magic setting(shudder), which I consider to be the D&D equivalent of the annoyingly pervasive grey-brown modern-day military shooter.

So in my setting even wizards need an innate "magical spark" to be able to make magic happen, and it's rare and expensive.

Additionally I specifically sought to curb Tippyverse tendencies by restricting creation and teleportation effects.

And so there remain reason to build castles, fight giant battles with sword-wielding armies, ride on horses, have villages outside a bunch of huge metropolitan areas, travel by ship and all the other basic assumptions we're used to, that otherwise break down in the presence of widespread magic.

Max_Killjoy
2018-04-28, 12:03 PM
The fruits of modern sciences aren't as modern as you imagine them to be.

Your first statement is blatantly wrong. Clarke was a smart guy. And the fundamentals that make modern computing technology possible had already been known at that time. The basics of information theory had already been rigorously established in the 1930s and 40s by people such as Turing and Neumann and Godel. And the hardware to implement it came soon after, with the invention of the transistor.

So no, he would not have considered it magic by far.


Well said.

The concepts of the telephone and of radio transceivers were both public knowledge by WW1... many people from 1920 would understand at least the idea of a "radio phone" without any "magic" or "magic thinking" being involved.

Corneel
2018-04-28, 04:28 PM
In the setting I have under development magic is going against the natural order. You can't do it unless you're blessed by (one of) the Gods or corrupted by the Beyond.

Being blessed by the Gods gives you a kind of license to use magic, a bit like an officer of the law is given a lot more leeway to use violence than an average citizen. However in exchange there are commandments and prohibitions to be followed. A person blessed by the god of fire might have to follow a prohibition against putting out fires. Any fires. Even if they are burning down his hometown. The higher the magical power one is allowed to wield the more stringent and numerous the commandments and prohibitions to follow become.

The other way is being tainted. A stain from one of the strains of corruption of the Beyond taints you (which by and of itself is already against the natural order). The more corrupted you become, the stronger the magic is you can access. In this case casting magic on a regular basis will further corrupt you, with the risk of losing your humanity altogether.

Segev
2018-04-30, 11:16 AM
In the setting I have under development magic is going against the natural order. You can't do it unless you're blessed by (one of) the Gods or corrupted by the Beyond.

Being blessed by the Gods gives you a kind of license to use magic, a bit like an officer of the law is given a lot more leeway to use violence than an average citizen. However in exchange there are commandments and prohibitions to be followed. A person blessed by the god of fire might have to follow a prohibition against putting out fires. Any fires. Even if they are burning down his hometown. The higher the magical power one is allowed to wield the more stringent and numerous the commandments and prohibitions to follow become.

The other way is being tainted. A stain from one of the strains of corruption of the Beyond taints you (which by and of itself is already against the natural order). The more corrupted you become, the stronger the magic is you can access. In this case casting magic on a regular basis will further corrupt you, with the risk of losing your humanity altogether.

So, two questions: Could the sufficiently-powerful fire mage who is forbidden to put out fires cause the fires to fail to consume, making them a magical wonder that lets his hometown dwell, unharmed, in the midst of an eternal flame? Or render his townsfolk and their constructions invulnerable to flame, still also allowing the fire to burn?

Second, what is the price of the corruption of the Beyond? Physical deformity or infirmity? Loss of mental faculty, or loss of ability to perceive reality, or loss of emotional stability? What form does "losing your humanity" take? How much control can one exert over what one sacrifices for the corrupting power?

I ask because designing corruption systems that are usable in a game and which make the player complicit via choices is one of my favorite parts of RPG theory. It's easy, and common, for "corruption" to amount to a number of set of numbers against which the player must roll to keep control of his character, which doesn't really feel - in most cases - like the player is experiencing anything other than a character with a random "loss of control" element. Designing the system to engage the player in making choices that "feel" like the same flavor of choices facing the character intrigues me.

As a really simplistic example, if you have a form of Beyond Creature which has to feed on the sanity of living minds to fuel its survival, you could have it have a pool of "sanity points" it harvests from victims, with a cap to regulate how much it can store, and which it uses to fuel its magical powers and which drains naturally at 1 point per day or so of existing in the harsh cause-follows-effect Euclidean universe. To simulate its epic and insatiable hunger, you could then require it to roll a Willpower check to stop itself from gorging beyond that cap.

This would be unsatisfying to me, however.

Instead, you could have it have thresholds of drain rates. Perhaps, for every 10 in its pool, it must consume twice as much to add another point, and it loses 1 point per 10 in the pool per day. So if it has 100-110 points in its pool, it loses 10 points every day and it takes 10 points for it to garner even one more.

Perhaps, too, its magic follows the same thresholds. Not only does it cost points to cast its powers, but for every 10 points in the pool, it has another "level" of powers open to it. It is actively stronger when its pool is more filled.


Now, a player of such a creature has temptation and incentive to gorge more and more on the sanity of mortals. More power, but keeping that power up gets more and more costly.



Not saying "sanity-vore" is the approach to take with your corruption, but designing a system around what your corruption works like would be an amusing hobby activity. But first, I need to know what form that corruption takes.

Corneel
2018-05-03, 03:15 PM
So, two questions: Could the sufficiently-powerful fire mage who is forbidden to put out fires cause the fires to fail to consume, making them a magical wonder that lets his hometown dwell, unharmed, in the midst of an eternal flame? Or render his townsfolk and their constructions invulnerable to flame, still also allowing the fire to burn?
No, either one of those options would be too permanent. It might be possible to grant at least a number of people some temporary protection, but that would require some knowledge of protective magic and not just fire magics. It might also mean that some blood sacrifices are in order to compensate for the lives otherwise consumed by the fire (a few brown haired oxen should do the trick).


Second, what is the price of the corruption of the Beyond? Physical deformity or infirmity? Loss of mental faculty, or loss of ability to perceive reality, or loss of emotional stability?
Yes.


What form does "losing your humanity" take? How much control can one exert over what one sacrifices for the corrupting power?
It depends. First of all, there are different strains of taints and the basic signs of corruption are different for each of them. They are summarised in this earlier post (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=18940694&postcount=5), but this is still under construction.

Magical corruption is intertwined with moral corruption in several ways: casting/using magic feels like cheating. For minor magics it's like cheating in a card game, for more important magics it feels like cheating on your spouse. Any act that would reasonably cause some feelings of guilt or revulsion (with oneself) in a person, even if done with the best of intentions, will increase the character's Turpitude. Turpitude will decrease over time as a character learns to cope and this process can be speeded up by offerings at the relevant temples. But the use of Magic will increase Turpitude. If Turpitude reaches a critical mass, then a person who is already tainted will have to make some kind of saving roll or their taint level will increase. At the same time they're also subject to the general effects of an increasing Turpitude level and a different saving roll (but slightly related) will have to be made to avoid decreasing your moral aptitude. So while in principle it's possible to increase your taint, while remaining morally OK, it will be difficult. Again, this is a general idea and I'm working out the specifics. And once your taint increases beyond a certain level, you basically become a representation of that taint (Eg. if your tainted with the Crimson Shadow and it becomes too strong you will turn into a Dhampyr, a kind of not-undead Vampire).

Segev
2018-05-03, 03:44 PM
Hm. If you don't mind and I remember when I have more time this weekend, I will attempt to come up with mechanical temptations/banes to encourage players to make the choices in line with their taint. I enjoy coming up with such systems. (I don't mind if you reject them once made, but I don't want to make them if I would offend in so doing.)

Corneel
2018-05-03, 03:57 PM
I'm not going to stop you, au contraire. Just keep in mind I'm very much moving away from D&D as a system for this, and working on my own system for this.

ETA:
The general idea is:
If you do things that are physically exhausting, you gain Fatigue.
If you do things that are mentally exhausting, you gain Stress.
If you do things that are morally exhausting, you gain Turpitude.

Segev
2018-05-03, 05:09 PM
I'm not going to stop you, au contraire. Just keep in mind I'm very much moving away from D&D as a system for this, and working on my own system for this.

ETA:
The general idea is:
If you do things that are physically exhausting, you gain Fatigue.
If you do things that are mentally exhausting, you gain Stress.
If you do things that are morally exhausting, you gain Turpitude.

I was assuming that it was your own system, actually. Can you go into more detail on what Turpitude...does? I get that Fatigue makes you tired, and probably entails penalties to physical tasks, and Stress presumably makes you more impulsive or otherwise penalizes mental tasks. I am having a hard time envisioning "moral tasks," though, so am not sure what Turpitude does in practice.

Corneel
2018-05-03, 05:42 PM
I was assuming that it was your own system, actually. Can you go into more detail on what Turpitude...does? I get that Fatigue makes you tired, and probably entails penalties to physical tasks, and Stress presumably makes you more impulsive or otherwise penalizes mental tasks. I am having a hard time envisioning "moral tasks," though, so am not sure what Turpitude does in practice.
It saps your morale and motivation and makes social interactions more difficult (because of the impact on self worth). In game terms, relatively minor but broad penalties (All actions become just a little bit more difficult, with social ones the most affected). And as Turpitude increases, any actions that would increase it even further become subject to penalties. So high Turpitude: penalty on casting magic and doing things the "easy" way.

The idea is then if Turpitude becomes too high, and you don't take measures to diminish it, you risk "snapping" and decreasing your moral aptitude and sensitivity (the same kind of activities won't bother you as much as they did before, so you will less easily gain Turpitude, on the other hand, you will detect as at least somewhat morally corrupt by some of the Gods' servants).

Segev
2018-05-04, 10:01 AM
It saps your morale and motivation and makes social interactions more difficult (because of the impact on self worth). In game terms, relatively minor but broad penalties (All actions become just a little bit more difficult, with social ones the most affected). And as Turpitude increases, any actions that would increase it even further become subject to penalties. So high Turpitude: penalty on casting magic and doing things the "easy" way.

The idea is then if Turpitude becomes too high, and you don't take measures to diminish it, you risk "snapping" and decreasing your moral aptitude and sensitivity (the same kind of activities won't bother you as much as they did before, so you will less easily gain Turpitude, on the other hand, you will detect as at least somewhat morally corrupt by some of the Gods' servants).

So morality in this system is restrictive, with primary reward for adhering to the taboos being that you don't detect as a "sinner" to sin-detecting magics?

Corneel
2018-05-04, 03:19 PM
So morality in this system is restrictive, with primary reward for adhering to the taboos being that you don't detect as a "sinner" to sin-detecting magics?
Not quite.
You gain turpitude for "morally exhausting" deeds. These can be perfectly justifiable acts but that make you feel bad or horrible, like having to kill someone to save other people ("Trolley problems") or even killing someone in self defense. But also of course for evil deeds. Of course you can become inured to certain types of moral exhaustion, either at the price of your moral aptitude, or by gaining a perk (through experience). A soldier can remain morally OK, but still become somewhat inured to killing people in legitimate combat.

However, it's letting Turpitude accumulate and not doing something about it that it will become a problem. As long as your moral aptitude is still OK, you'll still be able to get your Turpitude down, not least by going to see a priest or temple and make appropriate sacrifices. Some of it will simply decrease over time, some of it can be lost through meditation and/or prayer. But if you don't deal with the issues, the issues will deal with you and moral corruption will get you. Apart from what was already mentioned, as you come to have less problems with certain morally exhausting deeds, you also become more disconnected from humanity and lose empathy. And while you will less easily gain Turpitude, you will also have more difficulty getting rid of it (at a certain point Temples and Priest will not want to help you anymore, and other methods might not be as effective anymore). How exactly to work this out is something I'm still working on, but that is the general idea.

Note that the basic game is supposed to be more socially and politically oriented than D&D and less Hack & Slash, so penalties on social interactions have more effect.

S@tanicoaldo
2018-05-04, 06:55 PM
In the setting I’m working right now, there are two groups of gods the old and the new,.

The new gods killed the ones and left to some other multiverse not before creating a large group of weird and abhorrent alien species.

One of these alien species was obsessed with creating life themselves and found the main planet of the setting, there the discovered inter dimensional travel with the use of technology.

In the astral sea they found the corpses of the old gods and decided to use their smiling limitless source of energy to power their whole civilization, little did they knew that echoes of the dead gods still linger in their forces.
Fast forward and the alien race is slowly driven insane by their own power source not before creating the humans with a combination of all the old gods energy as a slave race.

As the original aliens are wiped out the humans slowly begging to create their own civilization not remembering anything about their creators from beyond the stars.

The veil between the dimensions is very thin and soon some of the old god’s energy starts to leek in some places creating and mutating the fauna and flora around it. Humans who enter in contact with these energies are forcer changed.

The empires and kingdoms start fighting the monsters and seeking an end to this extra dimensional threat. Little did they know that the old gods influence is sealed deep in their essential core.

Magic user are people, most of the time weird and socially awkward who enjoy the presence of silence, soon they start to hear the whisper of the old gods from beyond the veil and from within their own souls and hearths. This whispers teach them spells to control energies and change the world around them, the more power they have the louder the old gods’ voices are and the closer the magic user is to total insanity.

Sources of Magical Power

Personal Energies – Since humans were created using the old gods energy, the magical forces flow in their blood, flesh, brain, mind and spirit, The mental and spiritual powers that mystics and sorcerers develop for themselves (psionic energy, chi manipulation, astral projection, thought-casting, etc.) all come from the use of this internal energy connected with the gods stored in their body, the effects are small, most come from their extremities and it’s often the first source to be mastered.

Ambient Magical Energy of the Universe – Because the fabric between realities is quite thin the energy emanating from the old gods’ cadavers is constantly leaking intro the material realm magicians can tap this power for many effects, such as teleportation and energy bolts. These effects are normally far greater than what a magic user could do with their own personal energies.

Extradimensional Magical Energy - Powers gained through the tapping of extra-dimensional energy directly from the carcass,of the dead ones and by invoking entities or objects of power existing in mystical dimensions, with different physical and magical laws, tangential to our own. Unlike the first two, the entities invoked generally have a say in how or if the power is used and the remaining of the old gods memories may try to possess the caster making this a powerful yet dangerous form of magic.

Items - Magic may also come in the form of items imbued with power.
There are other non-magic gods who use the power of faith in this setting and most don’t even realize the power of the old god’s remains.

There are also creatures called abysmals who feed on magical energy keeping it on balance in an alternative universe the faith gods and the the abysmals were constantly fighting each other until the gods were able to drive the abysmals away, without anyone to eat the excess of energy coming from the corpses of the old ones, this great quantity of magic energy made the wizards extremely powerful who then killed almost all the gods, making the abysmals return lead by a powerful and influential former cleric seeking revenge.

The new abysmals devoured all form of magical energy leaving the wizards powerless, forcing them to escape to another realm where the old ones never influenced making it magic free and consequently free of abysmals, these mundane world looks like modern earth and the wizards called “Singularities” by the government are stuck with using their personal energies only.

From almost omnipotent beings they were reduce to surviving using parlor tricks on a mundane magicless world. It was quite a tragic but fun game to play, dimensional travel is always welcomed. ^_^