>hard magic system
>magic A is magic B
Okay so your “fantasy” setting is in reality just science-fiction given a “fantasy” coat of paint, and your magic system is closer to a machine
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>hard magic system. >magic A is magic B
How do you suggest implementing a soft magic system within a tabletop RPG, where the game needs actual mechanics for how to resolve things?
They can just play Mage the Ascension and set it in a fantasy world. That's as soft as it gets and still have structure. Or Ares Magica. Either way this isn't about that. It's content farming for some noobtube channel so they can try and sound smart without having anything concrete to work with.
'Idea guys' are the most useless people. They'll have their great idea and zero way to implement it. It'll all sound great to someone who's never built or tinkered with a system and that's their audience.
Noobtubers aren't even that creative, so they farm content from places like this and spew it out to the masses.
Ars Magica is pretty hard magic. Like Magi are unironic magical scientists in terms how they operate.
Mage on the other hand is shit at handling magic in an intuitive way:
ars magica is pretty hard magic. Hermeticism is after all where hard magic comes from it's just that wod writers completly failed at understanding the order of hermes when they made their own second mage game
i guess however you could use the magic system from montes d20 wod book if you are playing 3.5 or pathfinder and want mages to be even more overpowered for some reason
You have to come up with a short rhyme to cast a spell and you only have 10 seconds irl, with mishaps occuring based on double meanings, literalisms, or homophones that were unintended
Okay
>Burn that guy, make him die
Now, what happens to the guy I was pointing at, and what happens if I point at his friend and say the same rhyme again?
>Implement this system
>Immediately solve every encounter with 'Skidaddle skidoodle, your dick is now a noodle'
10/10, would play again.
You jest, but this is actually how Grimoire plays. It’s basically Ars Magica’s verb-noun system but more complex, linguistically. Try enunciating zona verteri arcana suppremere, without practice. Shit ain’t easy.
Every player gets a random assortment of Scrabble tiles and whenever they cast a spell they have to spell a word. That word, and it's score, influences both the effects of the spell and how powerful it is.
That's a hard magic system. Spelling out "Inferno" is going to lead to the same results every time, because the Scrabble score is the same.
At most you have scholars debating as to why the use of magic involves plucking random runes from thin air and assembling them in one's mind, but the effects themselves are consistent.
All you've done is turn the dictionary into a spell list. Having 700,000 spells doesn't make a magic system soft, it just makes it large.
Magic
When you chant, gesticulate, and shape the world to your will, describe to the DM what you want your spell to do and roll 2d6. Add +1 if you wave around an appropriate rod or staff. Add +1 if you chant and gesticulate for at least ten minutes. Add +1 if the magic falls under your specialty.
On a 7+, your desired spell comes to pass. Your DM may tell you that the spell doesn't do everything you wanted it to do, or describe the components of an extra ritual needed to complete the spell.
On a 9-, your spell comes with a significant complication. The DM will describe it.
On a 6-, your spell goes awry. The DM will describe how.
A half-assed dice roll capped off with "The DM decides" is not an actual mechanic. It is merely kicking the can down the road for somebody else to come up with the rules.
I use something similar to this and it works just fine. Granted I run games that lean into LKR territory.
Only npcs get magic and they just do whatever the GM feels like.
Now that is a good idea that few would dare to implement.
Ah, the merlin method
something that helps is turning spells into broad ability checks (how you handle STR or DEX) instead of specific single effects. like instead of casting fireball and dealing X damage you cast "fire" and do whatever you want with it as long as it is under the parameters of what the spell can do and you beat the DC, with your associated ability score being the modifier for damage and so on. kinda like how you would handle a Avatar TLA bending system, it mostly depends on your creativity.
Being able to reliably cast "fire" and then do X fire damage to me sounds like the sort of hard magic system OP is complaining about.
Avatar TLA explicitly says that bending isn't considered magic, so the people within the setting certainly consider it closer to a machine. And bending is reliable enough to fuel machines.
A construction vehicle that can dig, lift, push things around, or travel at high speeds doesn't stop being a machine just because it can do a variety of tasks.
>Avatar TLA explicitly says that bending isn't considered magic
The same way the elves in lord of the rings do not believe in (elven) magic, since it's so natural to them. It's just arts and crafts. Magic is a bar. It isn't the same for all.
Conversely, the black machines of Mordor are associated with black magic, sorcery and witchcraft. The folk of middle-earth just aren't used to that level of infrastructural horror.
Sure, but OP is complaining about magic systems that are closer to machinery. Firebenders being consistent enough to function as tank turrets or ship artillery seems to me like it isn't the sort of thing he's looking for.
To us, the viewer, it's obviously supernatural, but the rules are clearly understood well enough within the universe that they put it towards labor and industrial purposes. At most, there's some vagueness as to what being a 'strong bender' means, but that vagueness gets removed once players can look at their sheet and see they've got a +2 to Earthbending checks just like any other skill.
By keeping the in-setting separate from the out-of-setting? It's that simple.
Probably via some kind of Aspect mechanic, like in Fate Core/Condensed/Accelerated.
"Soft magic" sounds like it would be governed, directly, by Mother-may-I game logic (which is used in every game, really).
That's called techno babble. It's also known as writer's fiat, and should never be used in any thing resembling a "game." And, in fact, should be ignored by most competent writers whenever possible.
>he hasn't delved into the mysteries of the multiverse
Soft magic is just hard magic minus time, work and awareness.
moronic. Plenty of things irl are provably unknowable, 0 reason magic couldn't contain similar things with completely irrational or seemingly random interfaces. Something like neural networks is already almost literally magic: we make some incantations in pï'þôn to construct an esoteric graph with billions of lines then invoke the power of the quantum gods to bless it in an extremely expensive and length ritual using networks of trillions of micro runes magically engraved onto slabs of purified ur-stone. And we basically don't understand how any of it (the resulting electronic genie invoked into the esoteric graph specifically) works in detail.
>pï'þôn
That’s not how i-umlaut works. You’d more usually want “ai”
Literally arguing in favor of his point, doofus.
A neural network also isn't going to turn the device it's running on into a chicken that lays chocolate eggs. It's not random, it works by rules.
reddit moment
>Plenty of things irl are provably unknowable
Bullshit, given enough time we'll know everything there is to know.
Nice cave you got there
The person that is anti-science is calling the person that is pro-science, a caveman
What makes you assume I’m “anti-science”?
Hard magic doesn't need to be mechanistic, it can operate on very different logical paradigms from science or engineering. Building the game mechanics around formal logic interactions, for example. Or even working fine on approximations of results like engineering but forever resisting scientific causal explanations to derive novel applications, where you can build a steam engine around fireball-spamming but can't ever figure out where the frick the fire is coming from to make an efficient heat engine.
Certainly in-depth examinations of the consequences of hard magic quickly become a variant of science fiction, but simply having it work on a hard system of rules does not.
Because you are utterly clueless about a large body of important realizations in the underlying philosophical work that denote the utter inability to reach completeness. Very few scientists ever consider this underlying philosophy, but it results in a rather sizable list of axioms that science itself is fundamentally incapable of reducing.
My mistake, by
I thought you were saying that we’d be able to learn anything at all. Hence the cave comment, not as a caveman allusion, but as one to Plato’s allegory.
Sadly, there's a few things which we can only discover if the universe happens to be in specific arrangements.
As well as quite a few things which are fundamentally untestable.
>he doesn't know
Gödel says hi.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem means there are things we can't prove, which doesn't mean we can't know them. Quine would tell that knowing some set of axioms for maths is ‘true’ can only mean, if it means anything, that it'sthe one that helps us make good predictions in physics.
You can’t make good predictions in physics.
Anon, does a set of all sets that contain no sets contain itself?
Consider that we wrote those runes intentionally to perform very specific precise and reliable functions. Complexity is not invomprehensibility
>Something like neural networks is already almost literally magic
They're really not. I'd normally be flattered to be compared to a wizard but you're making this comparison not out of awe but out of ignorance. Neural networks are really fascinating. But they're not magic.
ancient engineers and masons used the rules of physics without understanding the underlying mechanics. They achieved reproducible results and that's what counts.
A magic system can be just that: using the unknown to your advantage.
If saying certain words and waving your wand in a specific way produces a fireball then this doesn't mean that magic is science, just because the wizards know how to throw a fireball reliably. Because he doesn't understand why it happens and THAT'S the magic.
Just like in everyday cooking tons of biology and chemistry happens but we've been cooking probably since we invented fire, doesn't mean we've always been biochemists, just that we made use of biochemic reactions and processes.
modern material science is still sometimes like that. In some lab we create some random alloys and test its properties and sometimes they're extremely desirable for certain applications but we have no idea why. There's stuff we've been using on a large industrial scale for a century but don't exactly know why it works.
Fun fact: Python means snake, as in, the snake that was used by a spirit to introduce magick to humankind.
Pre-Christian worldviews considered the world magical and the use of the world to get an advantage was magic in and of itself. Nearly always the smith god was also the god of magic.
Then Christians appeared and discovered it was a contamination. Since then it's normal world with magic dirt.
>makes thread just to out himself a brainlet
How do you prove something is unknowable? I can imagine arguing it persuasively (‘we can never know for sure if atoms are conscious’, whatever), but proving it?
Also neural networks aren't ‘literally magic’ in the soft sense, you don't know how it works but you assume it works in a perfectly cognizable way given infinite time. Which is nothing unique about neural networks, that's all modern science. The last guy who was an actual universal mind was maybe Kant, ever since science has gotten way too complex for anyone to have a grasp on everything.
So true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
>soft magic system
>it's so mysterious no one has it figured out
>what's a sorcerer, we don't have those
There is more wonder and fantasy in one AD&D spell description than in a thousand soft magic systems.
before 4e and 5e sure.
>AD&D
>before 4e and 5e sure
You're incredibly moronic
It's not science fiction if the things that happen in it are impossible and it's not trying to make you think about societal consequences of particular things in real life.
Hard magic is just hard magic. It's still fantasy.
Next question.
>It's not science fiction if the things that happen in it are impossible
>by his bootstraps isn’t sci fi
>Time travel is impossible, haha.
According to general relativity time travel is theoretically possible a few ways, none of which we're currently able to accomplish. Even if it does turn out to be impossible, in 1941 they did not know that.
Genetically engineering docility us very possible. We've accomplished it via selective breeding more than once.
Have a Sabine Hossenfelder video discussing the topic.
But you're right, that lots of sci-fi I would not consider fantasy gets the science wrong, or has minor details that are impossible. In fiction, I think, "It's the thought that counts". They're trying to be realistic, even if they don't get there, and the focus is on unproved theoretical science and societal implications.
Stargate is *almost* sci-fi rather than sci-fantasy, but I would still call it sci-fantasy.
Farscape is more sci-fi.
By his bootstraps, I would consider sci-fi.
Star Wars is just fantasy in space.
Sabine is discussing time travel, not genetic engineering. That was an editing snafu. Paragraph 2 should be a line lower.
it’s not time travel, you low iq monkey
Not that time travel is the issue with BHB/AYZ, but backwards time travel necessitates creation of matter in the past, doubly so in the above examples. Hawking had a hardon for time travel and no matter how hard he tried to make it sound plausible, he’d always circle back to it being impossible under known laws of physics.
Did he let the midgets have a crack at it?
We are all traveling through time, anon. One day at a time.
I don't know why this argument keeps getting pushed, even the softest of magical settings pretend to have rules. I've seen this same thread like a dozen times in the last 4 weeks.
Historically what was perceived as magic was thought of something that could be studied like a science by learned men, only the illiterate and ignorant considered magic to just be something completely random and unexplainable, in the same way they considered the weather to be so. Why should fictionalized settings where magic is real be different?
I feel like this issue stems from a lack of actual knowledge into the history of esoterism and wider occultism and how it was viewed in history. Granted I think this happens with a number of things where people just make assumptions about how people thought in the past instead of actually reading.
See, now if a hermetic alchemist in the 1600s wrote a sci-fi based on their now debunked scientific ideas, and how they would affect society, I would still call that a sci-fi.
To the average moron on the street is there really any difference between science and magic?
The average modern day peasant knows the same amount of how a robot works, that a fantasy peasant would about a golem
Eh, it's different flavours of fiction.
Sure sci-fi can often have fantastical elements. (the force, psionics, hive-minds etc.)
But still most of the "magic" comes from (probably fictional) technology or biology.
It's performative grog behavior at work. OP wants you to know he's so wise and definitely not like those Twitter people with their tieflings and their combat wheelchairs and their fake fantasy settings etc. The only real TRVE SOVL fantasy settings are based on "real history" aka the kind of history misremembered by people who assume everyone was a shit drenched peasant until 1960.
Because one of the favorite tactics of culture war grifters is to hearken back to a past golden age that never actually existed.
It's an easy troll subject / way to get replies and arguments. You demand that magic in your games / settings have some impossible-to-meet or contradictory characteristics and voila, endless replies.
>just science-fiction given a “fantasy” coat of paint
Yes. And Gandalf is an alien. You fail to see the magic in the mundane, and for that I pity you.
Yes magic is just high tech that ancient people described in funny ways because they barely or didn't understand
Also what said
Reality is already very magical and fascinating
>Reality is already very magical and fascinating
I’m of this opinion, and have been for a while now, but, to the vast, VAST majority of the human race, nothing is magical or fascinating anymore. We are living in a practically Atlantean world, of practically Atlantean hubris, where everything is magic, and yet none of it is. It’s almost as though people are just not satisfied with the wonders of the world, and get deeply offended when you try to subscribe wonder (magic) to something. Anything. “No, it’s not magic, it’s technology”. “No, it’s not magic, it’s chemistry”. Do any of them truly fathom just what the hell their technology is doing? And how far it has come? That fields like chemistry and metallurgy were once associated with wizardry? They take everything for granted. Absolutely. They don’t even know how their cellphones work, only how to use them, and yet it’s still not magic. They think magic is Doctor Strange, and nothing else. “It’s the impossible bro.” But do they not realize that we’re already living in an age of impossibilities made possible? Science makes magic real. What’s more magical than the thing that makes magic? They don’t see the actual possibility angle of it all. A lack of true appreciation. True wonder.
People trying to separate magic from art, religion and science have always been the most misguided. You cannot do it.
It’s been like that since the industrial revolution (or even earlier in fact). Common tools are seen as mundane, and metalwork/drugs/computers are common tools. You can see a sense of wonder in the emerging field of AI (the deluge of threads shitting out images are example enough), but in time neural networks will become mundane. Basic chatgpt is already there. Maybe that’ll be the death of our wonder, but I doubt we’re quite done dreaming yet.
The difference is that the information behind "magic" is priviledged in some way, while the modern expectation is that anything one may wish to know is just a Google search away. There isn't "magic" anymore because there are no Magi, there's no wizardry because there are no Wizards, the experts may know a great deal more than you but the only barrier people EXPECT is the time to learn it instead of seeing that knowledge as "special".
A more pithy way of putting the issue is "we have a little bit of everything, all of the time". The layman's understanding is often wrong, but contains enough of the critical premises for nearly everything in our lives that few foundational concepts come across as "magical", and thus the entire field doesn't.
The human race deserves nothing.
Bro. That’s just physics.
Nothing can exist without being physics of some sort, moron. If it exists, there is objective information to it, always.
Not necessarily, black-box qualia is quite annoying for materialist frickwits but entirely logically valid.
Nope. Even a nothing is a something. Holes exist by way of an absence. Even a zero is a one. Math will exist regardless of anything you say or do or think.
>Materialism
You say materialism, I say existentialism. Something has to first exist, in order to exist. There is always a background to the foreground. No ifs, no buts.
Even space is an oversimplified non-“fabric” we are “embedded” in.
Don’t bother with that one. These people seriously think that a magic missile can exist without having essential particles to it. What the frick.
The point is that the black-box interpretation of qualia is definitionally subjective information, and inaccessible to an outside observer. Your math cannot accurately describe the sensation I receive looking at my screen to read your post, nor the sound of my internal narration. We know far too little to confirm the information content cleanly follows the causation of the sensory apparatus, meaning the materialists' emergent property interpretation is just another baseless hypothesis.
>You say materialism, I say existentialism. Something has to first exist, in order to exist. There is always a background to the foreground. No ifs, no buts.
Materialism is a form of monism where matter is held primary. It entails that there is only one meaningful layer to reality and all things arise from matter in that single layer. Materialism becomes false when matter is contingent, when there are properties independent of matter, and when there is more than one layer. Black-box qualia are definitionally outside this and your insistence on all things having objective information, no matter the screeching of you or materialists, and there's too little known about the reality of the matter to deem it illogical.
You can certainly define "physics" and "objective information" in a way where no matter how many layers into fuzzy bullshit of literal Gods a setting goes or how much inherently irreversible loss of information occurs it still counts, but that's you being a sophist steadfastly refusing to accept any alternative and merely moving your own definitions so your terms are still met.
Why can't a magic missile be comprised of pure waveforms, lacking discrete force carriers? We continuously hit brick walls trying to quantize gravity and intrinsic quantization of motion is also contentious, what's constraining wholly fictional things to ALWAYS being yet more particles?
>all this text just to justify your moronation
...And this somehow isn't?
>Even a zero is a one.
Overall, the point is that modern science is not an ironclad "Thing MUST Be This Way", it's simply the most useful framework we've yet discovered for understanding OUR reality. Elfgame can wipe its ass with thermodynamics as it pleases and ignore the consequences.
You’re critically lacking.
You’re an a embarrassment to objectivist science, and I say this as someone who ascribes to that model
>The point is that the black-box interpretation of qualia is definitionally subjective information, and inaccessible to an outside observer.
Within the black box, there is still objectivity, regardless. I don’t care what it is. There is -still- something there. I don’t give a flying frick if it’s impossible to assess. It is -still- fricking there, waiting, for all time.
It’s just a no brainer. If someone sincerely denies the universal fact that “science is everywhere and everything”, I usually just laugh at them and blow them off.
When someone asks “what’s the science behind the erection?”, they’re going to be given an explanation behind the biological processes of the penis. Blood flow, sponginess, etc, and all that. Science is a process pursuing processes.
>Black-box qualia are definitionally outside this and your insistence on all things having objective information,
Nope. Full-stop. No ifs, no buts. There is something there making it a black box. There is something inside the box. Deal with it.
> no matter the screeching of you or materialists, and there's too little known about the reality of the matter to deem it illogical.
Okay. You’re starting to come across as rather insane.
>Why can't a magic missile be comprised of pure waveforms, lacking discrete force carriers?
Nothing wrong with that either. As long as there’s something *there*.
>Within the black box, there is still objectivity, regardless.
...There has to be the ability to retrieve the information for others to observe it for objectivity to exist. If there is only one possible observer, then it is subjective. That is what these words MEAN, unless you aggressively move the goalposts by redefining common vocabulary AND the academic jargon.
>If someone sincerely denies the universal fact that “science is everywhere and everything”, I usually just laugh at them and blow them off.
Science is not all knowledge. To bloat it out like this is to render it so uselessly broad as to INSULT the discipline and ignore the centuries spent going through what people already knew by other means to put numbers to it so that people could actually derive new applications from old information.
Much more importantly, as is my point in bringing this up, it's not a LOGICAL REQUIREMENT for those methodologies to function. That they happen to work so far down in our reality does not mean Elfgame material is enslaved to the same. There are coherent logical systems other than math for things to be described with and work off of.
You are a scientism cultist, plain and simple. The words you use do not mean what you use them for according to the people actually making discoveries. You insist that it is the only perspective that COULD be true, on a board dominated by fantasy discussion about settings where massive contradictions to our known physics are in many daily routines.
It triggers me because I have dealt with b***hing about the buttholes who drag the square-cube law into sessions to complain about the giant spiders being "unrealistic". When their character is currently flying because of precise babbling and gang-signs of exotic potency.
>There has to be the ability to retrieve the information for others to observe it for objectivity to exist.
l o l
The interior of that black box versus its exterior is what the objective/subjective distinction was invented to describe. If qualia cannot be subjective by your worldview, then it is catastrophically malformed because the philosophical issues qualia pose are what subjectivity is FOR.
Yeah you’re not seeing it. You don’t even know what objectivity means or denotes. It doesn’t care about human subjectivity, you nonce. Existence existed before humans did.
You’re hopeless. Many such cases on this board. Stay triggered I suppose.
...Yeah, this is malformed nonsense. I am trying to get across that your position actually has logical dependencies that are not certainties, and you're just repeatedly asserting your position anew as if the entirety of it is sensible axioms.
Objectivity is explicitly defined in contrast to subjectivity, external things that can be observed by multiple people as contrasted against internal things that can only be observed by what they are within. By insisting that objectivity exists within the black box the qualia are in, you are defining the internal as the external.
This means that your statements ultimately define the human mind as an existence unto itself. THAT is how catastrophically wrong you are.
Imagine being this ass blasted over material logic.
>this coward shit again
Fricking gaylord. You wouldn’t know an axiom if it fricked you with one of those penises you’re constantly on about.
>By insisting that objectivity exists within the black box the qualia are in, you are defining the internal as the external.
Yes. Science is an external matter. Eat a dick, seriously. You are warped. Just because we don’t see something, doesn’t mean nothing is there.
...In case this stems from not knowing what "qualia" are, they're the DEFINITIONALLY subjective perception of things. You do in fact have to see something for there to be qualia of it, because the qualia is STRICTLY your internal perception of the thing.
…..
Must have a wiener stuck in his throat
Your idea of objective is pure ass
>Existence existed before humans did.
How about you stop being such an arrogant toad? You’re making assumptions like a petulant child. According to the law of irony, you’re the fricking Boltzmann brain. Would be pretty fricking poetic.
>he’s still going
Thank you for being the only other person in this thread who has read a book.
>Materialism becomes false when matter is contingent, when there are properties independent of matter
If something is real, it is a 'matter' of a sort, is the problem. You can't really decry materialism in that sense.
>Materialism becomes false when matter is contingent
Materialism works even with space. Is space matter? It is certainly a something. That's good enough for materialists. It is there. If it wasn't there, it wouldn't be real, or 'material'.
>Black-box qualia are definitionally outside this
It's not.
>If something is real, it is a 'matter' of a sort, is the problem.
Again, you're altering the definition to move the goalposts to stubbornly cling to your malformed premise.
>Materialism works even with space. Is space matter? It is certainly a something. That's good enough for materialists.
No, space is not a material, nor is it contingent on material. What you're referring to is physicalism, the metaphysical framework that science has moved on to because the first two mentioned points you quoted have become untenable. It very much holds mathematics as physically real, unlike materialism which needs an object to point at to call "math".
>It's not.
Again, the consequence of this, in the philosophical meanings of the words I've been using since the start of this shitshow, is that the human mind is an existence unto itself. You're not even properly rejecting the position with emergent consciousness, you're so up your own ass with scientism that you are asserting that a construction specifically designed to be one thing is actually that thing's opposite.
No, I'm saying that the QUALIA of the moon did not exist before something saw it, because that qualia only exists in the observer's mind. What you subjectively see is not the same information as the objective breakdown of the electromagnetic radiation coming from the Earth's primary natural satellite. Even in the materialist and physicalist interpretations of emergent consciousness, our eyes have fidelity limits, our optic nerve has limited transmission capabilities, and our visual cortex discards stimulus to accommodate its limited processing ability, rendering the sight of the moon distinct information from the light itself.
>you're altering the definition to move the goalposts
Court cases have meetings before court cases can even begin, to settle on the meaning of words, because of people like yourself, lmfao.
>space is not a material
It still exists. It is still present. :^)
Spacetime bends. Gravity affects time.
It’s all 100% real.
(At this point I’m just fricking with you)
Ah, but does anon interpret his own internal perception of the statements you make as him being fricked with? That's the riddle
>because that qualia only exists in the observer's mind
lol
>our eyes have fidelity limits, our optic nerve has limited transmission capabilities, and our visual cortex discards stimulus to accommodate its limited processing ability, rendering the sight of the moon distinct information from the light itself.
Hmm.
Approximately 5 percent of the universe is normal, observable matter. Within this small fraction, the human eye can only perceive matter that emits light within a certain frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. We are surprisingly blind to phenomenon.
That said, said invisibles are still out there, regardless of observability. We could be surrounded in higher dimensions and never know it; those dimensions are still there, however.
There is also a biological precedence leading up conscious awareness, meaning non-awareness is required for awareness to exist. Everything starts from something.
leading up to*
So the Moon didn't exist before humans, or any sentient form of life for that matter, looked at it, eh?
This is why Einstein fricking hated you people.
Versus what? What examples fit this criteria that you are imposing?
For all it sounds and its worth it sounds like the PC has to ask every time they jerk themselves off and stimulate their prostate with their wand what kind of magical effect happens every time to maintain
>mystery
The separation of sci-fi from fantasy has been a disaster for the genre.
Once again, Tolkien was the worst thing to happen to fantasy
Yes.
If one of my players wants to play a non-religious magic user, then they have to figure out their own magic system, or be taught a magic system by one of the other players.
Magic is defined as things that are magical, which is a quality unto itself. It’s this way because it’s objectively the most interesting and because I said so and I decide. Eat me.
You've been spamming this idiocy for literal years.
God I hate Sanderson for inflicting us with this autistic dichotomy.
he's just the embodiment of a kind of nerd that's been around forever. Everyone on this board has been the Sanderson-brained autist at one timer or another
It's not really Sanderson's fault if people want to force a false dichotomy about a thing he wrote. It wasn't one or the other until people wanted something to fight about.
>dichotomy.
The frick you talking about? He described it as a spectral range with examples of Tolkein at the Soft end, his own work into the Hard, and Harry Potter as an example set right in the middle.
Which is categorically wrong. If anything Harry Potter belongs on the soft end with Tolkein in the middle. Even if Tolkein's magic is vague it's at least an answer for where it comes from, why people can use it, and how it suffuses day to day stuff. HP is just "magic is cuz it ain't not" with the only laws and functions to it coming up far too late to be interesting or far too late to not be clear deus ex machina.
Ah, so you're a contrarian. Sanderson's classification is determined more by how the author can use it than the weird way you're defining it.
Tolkien's magic is never explained, is of no direct use to the characters (and often causes bigger problems when they interact with it) and as a tool of the author generally isn't used to solve any problems. This is a soft system.
Cosmere magic has clear rules of how they're fueled, how to use it in specific ways, and thus gives the writer a foundation to let the characters solve problems with it and be creative with the powers.
Potter sits in the middle, where everyday magic is clearly defined, learned by rote and practice and talent built by expert schooling, that the writer can use to set up problems that can be solved by its use, particularly by building up training But there's still deep magic that can't be explained, has its own ineffable rules and unsolvable mysteries that affect the plot as well.
Maybe actually read the articles he wrote.
My favorite explanation is TSR Forgotten Realms.
You are a generic Wizard and cast Fireball by waving your hand clockwise, holding a cup of alcohol, saying "unga bunga". Your buddy is an Evoker specialist, does the wave, holds a lemon peel, and say "pik pak", but your area of study is similar, so you can learn from each other.
You have a Fire Elementalist. He can cast Fireball, but his way of studying is different. So you and your busy can't learn from him.
You go to Zakhara and meet a Flame Wizard, who finds your buddy's usage of Air and Earth disturbing. But they can exchange Fireball knowledge, but you can't. Same with another who uses all four elements, which blows your Elementalist friend's mind. How can he retain all those diverse energies without literally exploding, and still cast Fireball just as effectively? And he can STILL learn from him, but you can't.
All of you go to Kara-Tur to meet a Wu Jen. Your elemental friends can learn Fireball from him, but you can't. Wait. What are Metal and Wood? Your friends can't learn THOSE elements. And you can't. But the Wu Jen can't learn Air spells.
Finally you all go to Maztica to meet a Pluma and Hushna. The Pluma can't cast Fireball, but can cast Fly, and the Hishna can't cast Fly, but can cast Fireball, and they can't believe you can cast both. That makes people explode! But none of you can learn from them, nor they from you.
And this is just Wizards.
All of you can cast the mechanically same Fireball. But how you get there, the theory, movements, materials, are different. Sometimes so slightly that you can learn, sometimes so vastly that you can't. But mechanically they're the same Fireball. Why? Because the eight schools, different elements, Pluma, Hishna, are all boxes that PEOPLE put magic into. Magic isn't any of that and yet all of that. It's infinite.
The system wants Fireball to be Fireball mechanically, and narrative is separate from that. And you can't learn spells from them.
>hard homosexual thread
>no games in sight
All science-fiction is fantasy, all of it.
I like Orion's Arm.
>All science-fiction is fantasy, all of it.
Only because all fiction is fantasy.
All science in science-fiction is magic.
All technology in real life is magic.
Not to zoomers.
>stop liking what i don't like
The distinction between "hard" and "soft" magic is moronic and I hate it.
They're terms for fantasy writers who can't decide if they want to explore magic in their stories or not, I have never in my life read a book and say, "huh, this magic is quite soft." or "Yeah, this magic is +3 hard, could be better." that's nonsense, even stories that pretend to be "hard" is all just smoke and mirrors and bullshit
It kinda sounds like you don't know what any one means by those terms though
I understand it's about how much you as a reader understand the magic and how well it follows its own rules and that there's generally a gradient between something like harry potter and factorio or whatever, it's all just a bunch of nonsensical bullshit at the end of the day and the people who are really invested on the divide are morons.
>I understand it's about how much you as a reader understand the magic
It's not though
Define it then
https://www.brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/
This is just what I said but with fancier words, maybe try to read moron.
But it's not what you said. It might have been what you meant but it's not what you said and it's also at odds with all the other moronic shit you said to start with. You've read it now which is all I was angling for anyway so the conversation has reach its conclusion.
I guess, cheers then.
That's literally what that anon said, you snobby autist
To appease both sides of this argument, don't include magic at all, hard or soft. Then there's nothing to complain about
All magic has to come from *somewhere*, ergo, it's all physics, and the "unexplainable" or the "unknowable", AKA "magic", is merely a matter of nuance. A gap, a veil, etc.
Magic ("magic") is a proxy/placeholder. It is a black box. Sometimes those who pursue the unknown inevitably put themselves into black boxes by knowing things others do not.
If an artsy, hocus-pocus spell actually works, when it just shouldn't, then you can only assume there is something intelligent behind-the-scenes entertaining it. But what?
>But what?
Magic itself. Its sentient
>Magic is Alive
I've always been partial to this myself. Magic behaves too conveniently for it not to be.
Sometimes, just referring to something as "magic", is enough.
>Okay so your “fantasy” setting is in reality just science-fiction given a “fantasy” coat of paint, and your magic system is closer to a machine
You know nothing about historic magical traditions is what you're telling me
Past attempts at magic were bat shit insane, as well as painfully ironic, or just overly artsy, and nobody knew what the frick they were doing, even if they genuinely thought that they did. Magic is another form of religion.
The same way a hedge witch knew how to grow magic mushrooms without knowing why/how they work the way they do. “It’s because of the earth spirits” the old hag says, lmao.
Even the most brilliant and sagely/wizardly of past natural philosophers were lacing their limited (for the time) understanding with the arrogance of the imagination to fill in the gaps of nature’s mysteries. Artistic ignorance.
The Hermetic alchemist, and the top physician of his day, Paracelsus, thought jerking off into chicken eggs would produce a slave creation, or familiar of sorts—the homunculus. What the frick.
Ignorance goes hand-in-hand with magic, however brilliant. Smart and stupid go together like peanut butter and jam. How much of a ritual is truly required? Does it matter? Two magicians bickering over it just adds to the mystery. Magic is an inherently disagreeable matter. Who are you to question the wizard, the mad genius?
The modern sorcerer is just the mad scientist, arrogantly (often hubristically) hanging off the edges of understanding.
>The Hermetic alchemist, and the top physician of his day, Paracelsus, thought jerking off into chicken eggs would produce a slave creation, or familiar of sorts—the homunculus. What the frick.
One of the original coomers.
Magic is a flat circle.
>Magic is a flat circle.
All circles are flat by definition. If they weren't, they would be spheroids.
No. Magic is a square.
Who cares?
What is most fun and appropriate for the game is all that matters. It's really not hard, if you're going to give magic to players though, outside strange rituals, it needs to be hard and defined or they're going to be miffed since they're playing a roleplaying GAME.
Anyway, this a no games thread anyway
Magic is like an erection?
Magic is phallic, yes. It’s why wizards wear pointy hats and live in towers.
All scifi is fantasy. It's just a setting.
The reason people keep b***hing about this is because they don’t understand a distinction articulated by C. S. Lewis:
>Only an obstinate prejudice about this period could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. In medieval stories there is, in one sense, plenty of “magic”. Merlin does this or that “by his subtilty”, Bercilak resumes his severed head. But all these passages have unmistakably the note of “faerie” about them. But in Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare the subject is treated quite differently. “He to his studie goes”; books are opened, terrible words pronounced, souls imperiled. The medieval author seems to write for a public to whom magic, like knight-errantry, is part of the furniture of romance: the Elizabethan, for a public who feel that it might be going on in the next street. [...] Neglect of this point has produced strange readings of The Tempest, which is in reality [...] Shakespeare’s play on magia as Macbeth is his play on goeteia.[25]
The issue is the misunderstanding that by magic we necessarily mean more or less magia and not understanding that goeteia is also magic.
sigh
More like a lot of sci-fi is fantasy with a sci-fi coat of paint. Sci-fi as a genre is consistently parasitic, always aping from other genres with the “but future and space” gimmick. It is a self hating genre that believes it has to be like other genres to have anyone give a shit.
Man didn’t invent math. It was discovered. Much like everything else.
Why does basic science/physics trigger /tg/ so badly? Is this board mostly /misc/ now?
Forgive them. They’ve been assaulted by the “science” for so long, that they’re now unable to distinguish it from the true science.
>
That's not what triggers /tg/, /tg/ is triggered by fiction itself. It's why we constantly have these unbelievably vapid Ganker threads where people shriek about pointless semantics and authors they don't read- it all feels like butthurt projecting from people who don't play RPGs.
If you hate mechanics this is not a board for you, try Ganker
Just don't have a structured magic system. All magic becomes the purview of NPC wizards, magical items, or unique magical powers possessed by the PCs.
>reee