>magic is a list of random ass arbitrarily defined spells
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>magic is a list of random ass arbitrarily defined spells
>magic is a list of random ass arbitrarily defined spells
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Magic is arbitrary. Sometimes doing certain things causes certain effects, but it's hard to predict what things and what effects.
So magic ends up being basically a list of random ass arbitrarily defined spells that have been previously discovered and codified, whether by accident, or trial and error, or painstaking study, or whatever.
It's honestly not even a particularly big stretch.
Also This.
Plenty of npc casters in many games can do things that the PCs cannot learn because they have their own implied spells that don't match the predefined "known" spells.
>Magic is arbitrary.
Okay sure, but that implies something made it that way. Why does the spell last ten seconds? Why does it only have five charges? Why not twenty seconds? Why not ten charges? Why not sixty-nine for each?
because that is the typical limit of a human of a PC's mastery over the arcane
if you want to run an especially powerful NPC who can make something last longer or affect more targets because he's uncovered the secrets of that spell, then so be it
the rules exist to smooth gameplay out and provide a stable base of consistency so that players can know what to expect when they attempt a given action
play a game
Okay sure, but that just comes across as conveniently (suspiciously) artificial, and thus moronic.
alright then play a game where you just have to make magic effects up on the fly and see how much you actually enjoy GMing it long-term
especially long-term. if you're just running short adventures and oneshots or whatever then who cares, but if you actually find yourself in a situation where consistency is important, you will understand why magic is typically represented via bespoke and specific spell effects
See
Personally, I think it's a ton of fun, as long as you define when and where players are allowed to research magic, and disjoint the magical effects from the mechanics. (I offer my players advantage or a bonus if the magic they use is pertinent to what they're trying to do, and force them to "Train" magics to use them in combat, so they have to invest their character development to unlock the magics they invent)
>alright then play a game where you just have to make magic effects up on the fly and see how much you actually enjoy GMing it long-term
This is literaly Mage game from WoD and CofD.
You could say the same about the laws of physics that somehow came together in such a way to allow humanity to exist and live on this planet. It's all arbitrary. Shit just happens in life and certain inputs beget certain outputs. Put these spell components with these magic words and these gestures and produces an effect of this size, this description, and this duration. Change something slightly and it doesn't work? That's just like physics.
Nahhhh, shooting fire from your fingertips and having floating runic letters appear over your head is far too constructed for nature to naturally entertain, certainly not without some sort of intelligence entertaining it, kek.
Not in a world where literal magic exists. Shooting fire from your fingertips by reproducing a circumstance that someone work on through presumably much trial and error isn't hard to believe. Runes are a codified form of magic that is even more structured, which is essentially a science within magic.
No that’s very hard to believe. It’s more or less simulation logic.
Nature doesn’t just conveniently evolve/progress up to the point where it will conveniently entertain your gay superpower logic. Electric eels can only shock the way nature afforded them. Fire from the fingers? Humans wouldn’t look human for that. Why the fingertips? Why not the forehead? Why not the tip of the penis? Jesus.
You HAVE to assume something intelligent made it this conveniently. It’s more or less GAME logic. These are all games.
>You HAVE to assume something intelligent made it this conveniently. It’s more or less GAME logic. These are all games.
What's wrong with that?
There are plenty of settings where magic isn't intentionally created by anyone but specific words and gestures are still a part of it. Sometime it's the language used for magic that has the power, as some kind of an original language that's on some level understood and responded to by various forces, phenomena and materials. Sometimes the words and gestures aren't in themselves the point, but they serve to help the magic user focus and remind him of the correct thought patterns or whatever needed to cause a specific effect. Sometimes magic's a mysterious power that just happens to respond to specific words and circumstances despite no one making it like that, and you'll just have to deal with it.
>There are plenty of settings where magic isn't intentionally created
No there isn’t. Are you five? All fictions are intelligent creations period. The more you analyze a fiction the more it breaks down. Star Trek isn’t science-fiction to the sufficiently educated physicist; it’s just not. It’s fantasy.
Inability to engage with a fictitious setting from an in-setting perspective rather than a meta perspective is a failure of imagination and intellect, not something to be proud about.
Actually, it’s your inability to mesh the two that’s the issue here.
Pretending not to understand what a conversation is about doesn't make you look smart, quite the opposite.
You’re right that Star Trek isn’t science fiction - to Kirk and Spock, it’s just science.
>You HAVE to assume something intelligent made it this conveniently.
So literally God?
Magic is just humans messing around and figuring out how to manipulate the occult laws of the universe. Either through specific formulaic practices or the invocation of spirits
There's no reason to think you couldn't shoot fire from wherever you want with the right spell; it's just that most people aren't moronic, and are used to using their hands to manipulate things, and whose hands are by far the most dexterous parts of their bodyies so they naturally have a tendency to design spells whose gestures use their hands.
That’s it, you’re getting a wedgie
Everything that exists in real life is entertained by nature. Where is the threshold that determines what's too constructed?
Imagine if gunpowder ONLY functioned in a specific barrel size/shape of a penis, one engraved with ‘peepee’ in Latin, and ONLY if you spoke ‘cum diablo!’ before pulling the trigger.
I think that’s the kind of “conveniently constructed” he’s referring to, anon.
And gunpowder produces a more broad range of effects. You're confusing the means with the outcome. The specific magical phenomena associated with those acts uses a fuel that is poorly understood by the layperson, but to a wizard probably makes complete sense.
>Fire from the fingers? Humans wouldn’t look human for that. Why the fingertips? Why not the forehead? Why not the tip of the penis?
Random chance. It just didn't turn out that way.
>You HAVE to assume something intelligent made it this conveniently.
No, you really don't. It's a world of magic. Weird things occurring with weird triggers is perfectly fine. Some random hedge mage figured out how to transform into a bear? Then it's perfectly fine to say people just wrote down his method and didn't bother searching for an alternative. You seem to be under the impression that highly coincidental or highly specific things can only be the work of intelligent design when that's simply not the case. There are strange oddities in physics that take very specific circumstances to observe or exploit. Those are physical, concrete laws. Magic isn't behold to those same laws, but the fact that a certain input produces a certain output means there's some logic to it even if it's seemingly strange or improbable. It doesn't matter how specific the trigger is. Some dickhead wizard somewhere tried something, possibly through trial and error, and got a certain result, so it was written down as a spell because it could be reproduced. That's no weirder than needing specific tools or methods to interact with some of the more high-concept laws of physics in our world.
>No, you really don't. It's a world of magic.
The very idea of magic requires there to be an intelligence to even consider it as such. The way magic functions in 99.99% of fantasy fiction is too conveniently constructed. Because again, these are works devised by intelligent creators/authors on the meta field.
>The way magic functions in 99.99% of fantasy fiction is too conveniently constructed
And the laws of phyics conspiring to make it possible for humanity to exist on this planet with its exact composition of atmosphere, elements, flora, and fauna doesn't sound at all convenient to you? You're not thinking on the macro scale here.
It quite literally is. The laws of physics just happened to come into being the way they did to allow our planet to flourish in the way it does. The fact there is order is random itself. Everything, from the beginning of the universe, could have turned out differently. But it didn't, because that's the lot this world drew. It just happened to end up this way. The universe could have theoretically came into being as a place where humanity and everything we know could never exist, but it didn't by sheer chance. Infinite possibility means infinite chances for things to happen differently.
>and the in-setting lore more or less WANTS you to use its artificially enforced physics
Just like us being able to breathe is the world wanting us to engage with the "artificially enforced" physics of Earth. You're failing to look at fiction for what it is.
>even punishing those who try to improvise it, as with the Harpers, and you land on Satan’s wiener for trying to produce a goddamned typewriter, or just a gun
Clearly they fricked up in their trial and error. Magic being a more volatile force that is generally poorly understood doesn't mean that it is impossible to workshop it. The fact that reproducible spells exist is proof that someone figured out some workable knowledge.
>To a wizard, a slightly different amount of bat poop, in a different shape, and saying words in Chinese refuses to have the spell take effect
Yes, because the balance of that particular spell effect is precise and tenuous. We know that there are several ways to produce a blast of force in RPGs, but different methods can get there in different ways.
Lol. Lmao even. Sorry. If you actually think there’s a hypothetical timeline/universe where humans evolved up to a point where they can shoot fire from their hands, or lightning from their eyes, WITHOUT some guiding intelligence making it so. Lol. Doubtful it would even be called magic after a point look at moronic children’s cartoons like Avatar where the protagonists humorously clarify to the audience that bending isn’t magic, which is hilarious to the viewer, since it would be as common as breathing. All electric eels do their thing. Or Pixar’s The Incredibles. “When everyone’s super, no one will be”. Now replace super with magic.
See, nature doesn’t give a flying frick about the human imagination. It goes one way, and one way only. It’s unintelligent and overly pragmatic to the point where it is more or less cosmically moronic. The laryngeal nerve is a classic example of the one-way pragmatism of nature’s hyper-sophisticated moronation. It just runs.
There are no 2d anime universes or dungeons & dragons universes. Jesus Christ. Not unless some godlike pizza faced Weeaboo AI made a planet or pocket dimension that way.
Humans wouldn’t look or even be human for nature to afford conveniently shaped/evolved superpowers. Not for the sake of some game or story. But an intelligence of some kind to artificially enforce that angle? Sure. Why not. It can actually hypothetically entertain that imaginative crap. Look at real life magic and tell me it’s not a game run by something. Be it the gods or aliens or demons or the-powers-that-be or whatever.
Maybe humans can one day give electric eels the ability to shoot lightning bolts. Because why the frick not. Nature is gay and unimaginative. Derp. Maybe that’s why “”demons”” (aliens) hand out “”magic”” (alien toys) to lesser minded monkeys (humans). For fun.
It’s all materialistic. Detached. Magic is fundamentally evil/deceitful.
>There are no 2d anime universes or dungeons & dragons universes.
Are you trying to make fights with this lonely ass website
>Jesus Christ
Don’t use the lords name in vein
>lords name
>in vein
Imagine frontloading a bender by pouring a drink, cutting some lines and lighting a cigarette, then dropping all three of those and shooting up. That's ambition if I've ever seen it.
It's good to be prepared before you really jump in. You should see my buddy try to roll a joint while he's peaking on mushrooms, takes him like 20 minutes.
>Don’t use the lords name in vein
I can use Jesus however I want to. You don't get to dictate my relationship with my imaginary friend.
>t. brainlet who thinks detached materialism and panpsychic multiverse bullshit aren't compatible
I’m sorry nature isn’t random the way you think it is.
>There are no 2d anime universes or dungeons & dragons universes.
But.. there are, though. You just mentioned them.
No hypothetical Big Bang would ever be gay enough to allow your cringe weeaboo dick and escapist fantasies to be satiated, freakazoid.
And yet you created one, curious. Is proving yourself wrong a hobby, or can you just not help yourself?
You don’t deserve those sevens.
Living in two dimensions would have you be pancaked anon
Yeah, and living in four dimensions would get you immediately killed by a creature outside your slice of perception. What’s your point?
Cope, seethe, etcetera
>living in four dimensions would get you immediately killed by a creature outside your slice of perception
Your insides would spill out in impossible directions, in-fact.
Good point, yeah
>be called
Doesn't change what something is.
Magic doesn’t work as an honest, scientific name for anything. There’s too much semantic baggage.
—“I don’t understand it, and it scares me, therefore witchcraft”
—“I don’t understand it, he drank a potion and saw something, therefore sorcery”
—“I don’t understand it, it is too damn mysterious, therefore magic”
—“I don’t understand it, they refuse to initiate me, therefore wizardry”
—“That’s not magic, THIS is Magic”
Christ.
But we can go even further into horribly annoying territories.
—“What foul sorcery is this?”
—“Um, ackchyually, the enemy identifies as a Wizard, so it would be ‘What WIZARDRY is this’, you bigot. Respect their profession.”
—“What the frick. It’s evil and heretical and demonic and I don’t like it. Therefore witchcraft.”
—“Ackchyually, a Witch is a female Warlock who makes Pacts with-“
—“Please shut up…”
Please don’t do this.
>Magic doesn’t work as an honest, scientific name for anything
Good thing it isn't scientific and doesn't pertain to science at all, then.
Good thing it's something that someone making a fantasy game can make removed from nature with whatever behaviors and mechanics they want, real world physics and perceptions be damned.
>But we can go even further into horribly annoying territories.
You mean "fringe morons who refuse to learn the terms established by their game"? Yeah, frick them.
When you're playing a game, learn the terms pertaining to the mechanics, because in that game, that's what those things are.
It doesn't matter so much in a !game like D&D where every magic runs off of spell slots, in spite of whatever fluff for a power's source is insisted.
So, how about you don't do this, and remember to separate perception from state of being when it comes to games with aspects that don't even exist in our world.
>Good thing it isn't scientific and doesn't pertain to science at all, then.
Stopped reading here. If it works, it is science, to some shade or degree.
“Science is magic that works” — Kurt Vonnegut
Don't talk about fantasy until you know what it is, moron.
You want to talk about the real world? Plenty of other boards for that.
Frick off.
I kind of just embraced it. In my setting, the astrologers of Greco-romania don't like to be compared to the witch-doctors of Mudhuttistan, but in mechanical terms, they're both the same.
Yes, miracles are just a pretentious way of referring to magic.
To a wizard, a slightly different amount of bat poop, in a different shape, and saying words in Chinese refuses to have the spell take effect.
Congratulations. Your magic is literally an invisible machine, and its buttons are arbitrary as frick “”chemical reactions””.
But this makes sense. Since, y’know, shit like Dungeons & Dragons is a GAME, and the in-setting lore more or less WANTS you to use its artificially enforced physics—even punishing those who try to improvise it, as with the Harpers, and you land on Satan’s wiener for trying to produce a goddamned typewriter, or just a gun.
>Random chance. It just didn't turn out that way.
Nature isn’t random the way you think it is.
>cum
Why is Latin so gay bros
Depends entirely on the laws of physics and the universal constants. Physical reality is under no obligation to make sense to an animal that happens to evolve in it.
How, exactly, would you prefer doing it, keeping in mind that you'll have to do it in a way that can be codified in a game's rules?
Why is it moronic? Would you use a tool if you had no way of reliably predicting whether it would actually function correctly from one minute to the next?
>Okay sure, but that implies something made it that way. Why does the spell last ten seconds? Why does it only have five charges? Why not twenty seconds? Why not ten charges? Why not sixty-nine for each?
Because that's what fricking Brigid the Unseen figured out when she was freestyling and came up with this spell.
It's magic, don't look for sense.
Couldln't you just do that with meta magic talents? Change the way your spell worked to reflect how you cast it differently?
>Okay sure, but that implies something made it that way. Why does the spell last ten seconds? Why does it only have five charges? Why not twenty seconds? Why not ten charges? Why not sixty-nine for each?
A wizard did it
Because it's a game. There need to be limits to the power of magic that are generous enough for players to actually want to play a magic user, and restrained enough to not have magic users BTFOing every other class straight out of the gate.
You'd understand this if you ever actually played games.
If you codify magic into a psuedo-modern field of study then it stops feeling like magic.
It's the difference between modern biology and Greek natural philosophy.
How does a list of reliably predictable spells that have exact effects every time not cross this supposedly important line in the sand between magic and science?
It's the difference between know what works and knowing why it works.
Gunpowder is alchemy (magic) until you have properly figured out chemistry.
Alchemy is chemistry. A wizard knows that an exact combination of words, gestures, and sometimes ingredients under specific conditions reliably produces a "magical" effect. Somehow this is still magical and fantastical, and not jus science with a pointy hat. Alchemists couldn't tell you what atomic elements were bonding together when they reproduced the recipe for gunpowder, but they knew what would happen when they mixed things the way they did.
There's a sacred cow in your mind shitting all over the place. Kill it.
The problem is even past natural philosophers who didn’t know what the hell they were doing hated the notion that it was all ‘magic’, or ‘natural magic’, as other natural philosophers called it. Opposing perceptions of nature.
You also had scholarly, intellectual individuals who disbelieved in magic but for some reason believed in God and miracles. You had people who considered math to be a legit magical field, all the way in Pythagoras’ time, to the Renaissance and post-Renaissance over a millennia later, and even bloody Isaac ‘the last magician’ Newton, who was positively obsessed with the supposedly sacred geometries of Solomon’s temple.
Magic is just a way of looking at things. It isn’t anything, but can certainly be anything. It transcends the concrete.
Magic is something to describe, not to define. Define magic at your own peril, to the detriment of everything else out there that can be described as magical.
>Alchemy is chemistry.
Alchemy was also philosophy. It was never just hard science with focus-pocus aesthetics.
Alchemy was spiritual quackery. “Hey, if we can transmute and perfect substances, why not the human soul?”. Lol. Chemistry laced with imaginative arrogance.
You have to remember that persons like Paracelsus existed. Jerking off into chicken eggs thinking it would produce a homunculus. Wow.
>“Hey, if we can transmute and perfect substances, why not the human soul?”
Other way around. It started as a spiritual thing and later had its principles applied to a concrete "science"
Sure, if you take the proto-alchemists as just priests of their respective crafts. Zosimos of Panopolis postulated that the earliest chemists/alchemists were Egyptian priests, seeing as they were the ones who used dyes and incense and blue lotus, etc. They didn’t bother to think any further than that.
You had alchemists who refused to believe any such hocus pocus, but for some reason still believed in God and attributed alchemy to spirituality, and their practices were in fact indistinguishable from hocus pocus, ironically enough, even for their time.
“No this is totally fine and not weird at all” *proceeds to jerk off into a chicken egg*
Look at Humorism and tell me that wasn’t fricking hilarious.
“—According to humoralism, four bodily fluids—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—determined a person's temperament and an imbalance led to certain sicknesses dependent upon which humors were in excess or deficit.”
Lol.
No. Both major alchemical traditions in the east and west developed around the same time some 2K to 2.5K years ago as esoteric subsets of Chinese Buddhism and Egyptian Hermeticism. The idea of transplanting the core principles of Alchemy to more "mundane" pursuits like proto-chemistry would start around the year 1000, but even then the core idea was still to produce a spiritual effect, just through experimentation with mundane actions. The general idea is that the same principles that guide the spirit also guide matter, so you could experiment with matter to troubleshoot spiritual solutions more safely.
An example if the classic lead to gold transmutation. Lead is just codespeak for a material existence tried to the cycles of reincarnation acknowledged by both traditions, while Gold is similarly a code for a fully spiritualized existence in which you're free from death and rebirth.
>No
Yes. You’re just repeating what I already know like a pretentious twat.
Zosimos is one of the oldest sources of alchemical knowledge in the world. The only alchemists older were people like Mary the israeliteess.
> The treatises of Zosimos of Panopolis, the earliest historically attested author (fl. c. 300 AD),[17] can help in situating the other authors. Zosimus based his work on that of older alchemical authors, such as Mary the israeliteess,[18] Pseudo-Democritus,[19] and Agathodaimon, but very little is known about any of these authors. The most complete of their works, The Four Books of Pseudo-Democritus, were probably written in the first century AD.[19]
> Recent scholarship tends to emphasize the testimony of Zosimus, who traced the alchemical arts back to Egyptian metallurgical and ceremonial practices.[20][21][22] It has also been argued that early alchemical writers borrowed the vocabulary of Greek philosophical schools but did not implement any of its doctrines in a systematic way.[23] Zosimos of Panopolis wrote in the Final Abstinence (also known as the "Final Count").[24] Zosimos explains that the ancient practice of "tinctures" (the technical Greek name for the alchemical arts) had been taken over by certain "demons" who taught the art only to those who offered them sacrifices. Since Zosimos also called the demons "the guardians of places" (οἱ κατὰ τόπον ἔφοροι, hoi katà tópon éphoroi) and those who offered them sacrifices "priests" (ἱερέα, hieréa), it is fairly clear that he was referring to the gods of Egypt and their priests. While critical of the kind of alchemy he associated with the Egyptian priests and their followers, Zosimos nonetheless saw the tradition's recent past as rooted in the rites of the Egyptian temples.[25]
Alchemy is, just like magic and religion, a way of looking at things/nature. They try to justify nature in a way they’re satisfied with. Imaginative arrogance.
Now frick off.
Anon, what I'm saying is that the root concern of Alchemy isn't to explain nature, like an alternative to science. At all. It's a spiritual practice first and foremost, closer to what a Buddhist monk does than a chemist.
>Now frick off.
Rude and unnecessary, I did noth to offend you.
>Anon, what I'm saying is that the root concern of Alchemy isn't to explain nature, like an alternative to science.
That’s a disingenuous way of putting it, like the natural philosopher was somehow mutually exclusive from the alchemist. I get that’s not what you’re getting at, but I suggest more tact with your words.
>It's a spiritual practice first and foremost, closer to what a Buddhist monk does than a chemist.
Yeah, that’s just wrong. It very much went both ways, hand-in-hand, like peanut butter and jam. and is an inseparable, complimentary matter. Alchemists were some of the first to build and produce and practically purpose distillation tools, and even bother to try to understand the meanings and workings of natural substances. Whether they attributed religious spirituality to it, or other such hocus pocus, or indistinguishable techniques, I do not care. It was still furthering along natural understanding. It very much was a precursor to chemistry, spirituality and illumination simply had to be repudiated. It was much the same with Hermeticism, which attracted natural philosophers and Gnostics alike.
Isaac Newton was more so esotericist than proto-scientist. He’s still counted as one of the scientific greats. Science is itself constructed from magical thinking of the past.
>Rude and unnecessary, I did noth to offend you.
Yeah, no, frick off. I know what you’re doing, and I’m doing it back, lmao.
>Yeah, no, frick off. I know what you’re doing, and I’m doing it back, lmao.
Well, congratulations then, because I don't know whatever you're talking about.
I dont understand, where is the white humor?
That’s not the other way around when the other way around is just as moronic.
>yes, this makes sense, it affirms my beliefs
>yes, this makes sense, but only because of my beliefs
Either direction is dumb if you apply your imagination to it like a moron.
As the earliest example, the ancients looked to the stars and considered them gods.
“Those bright dots in the sky? They HAVE to be gods. There is no other alternative…”
Are you seriously shitting your britches about people calling it "magic" instead of "science"? Is that what's got you so assmad here? Have you tried experimenting with the magic of a noose, I hear it'll cure what's wrong with you.
You're projecting a little too hard. The distinction is unimportant, but morons, like you, need to realize that the arbitrary, asinine explanations you've convinced yourself makes perfect sense, are fricking stupid and should be questioned, and if possible, replaced. It doesn't make any sense for D&D and D&D-adjacent games to have spell lists of highly specific, reliable, consistent magic, because that's fricking stupid and boring about about as un-magical as you can get.
Brings up a very vital question: What keeps the magic?
Exposure, or just familiarity, is the key answer here. What is magic to one is not magic to another. Why ask a magician for his secrets? It may not even be magic to the magician. Tolkien’s elves don’t even believe in (elven) magic. They’re too used to it. There are only a small number of wizardly sages. That sort of thing.
It’s why objective wonder and fear of the unknown goes together hand-in-hand with magic like peanut butter and jam.
Alchemy/chemistry, and its mysteries, was indeed a big one before the advent of property and scrutinized chemistry, and drugs were once magic to the masses. The word for pharmacy is itself derived from an old Greek word that originally meant poison/sorcery.
Magic and science are two sides of the same coin. Truly. The coin being information. If mystery makes magic, then ignorance is the greatest magic of all—everything you don’t know is everything else out there, and there is nothing more occult than the deep black abyss of space. The more alien, the less familiar, the better.
Mad science is indistinguishable from sorcery, and the more you look at science today, the more it comes across as wizardry in methodology.
>all progress requires sacrifice
>no sense of right and wrong
>it’s not a matter of could, but should
>so we smashed a monkey’s balls
>sweet, man-made horrors beyond my comprehension
etc
The magic doesn’t go away, it becomes something else.
Also—and this is a big one people keep glossing over—what does the physicist say when they confront something new and/or bewildering? “Hmm. That’s weird. I wonder how that works…”.
Existence is a magician. Magic is a magician. Magic must remain a magician.
I like how, in settings like Dungeons & Dragons, the scholarly wizard type is the Wizard, while the innate magic type is the Sorcerer. And then you have Conan the Barbarian were the wizard types are all mostly sorcerer-priests and other evils. Actual vile ass sacrificial sorcery. AND THEN you have other settings like Dark Souls, or Elden Ring, where the scholarly wizard type is the Sorcerer, despite the word itself denoting heresy and other bad shit. Some miracles/incantations are also considered heretical, but they’re still called miracles/incantations. Some sorceries are considered heretical too, but the word is still used to refer to proper and refined academia. Bizarre. The word ‘witch’ in the Souls games has also been used to refer to pyromancers like the Witch of Izalith, miracle-workers like the witch-goddess Velka, and unrefined (womanly) sorcerers like witch Beatrice. So is it all witchcraft?
I think it’s an issue with semantic sense/tact.
there are dozens of theories, at most seven of which could be true simultaneously. every magic school has at least one crank theorist who is certain that his account of the fundamental laws of magic is correct, none of whom can agree with each other on anything. the majority of wizards are technicians. they do not bother trying to come up with general theories, they just memorize massive lookup tables of apparently arbitrary correspondences of microgestures and syllables to outputs. if they're very lucky and very clever they might notice a couple of new arbitrary correspondences that allow them to squeeze a few more hundredths of percentage points of efficiency out of an established spell.
Magic is indistinguishable from religion in many, many ways, such as both not requiring truth or honesty as a rule, as that defeats the purpose of faith, and thus the magic. You never ask a magician for his secrets.
Much the same, nobody can agree on magic, just like nobody can agree on religion. “That’s not a god, THIS is a God!”.
See
for more.
Nobody can agree on anything.
Yes.
>nobody can agree on religion
>Zeus was a knobhead
>yes
Come on, now
He was just misunderstood.
>Why is the atomic number of Neon 10? Why not 20? Why not 69?
Because then it would be something else.
Spells aren't atomic elements.
And 10 isn't 20. Glad you've put it together.
You've completely missed the point while thinking that you've made a very clever assertion. Bravo.
Yes they are, effectively
Elaborate, moron. I dare you.
The periodic table categorises a bunch of chemical “objects” by their composition and effect. These objects define the rules of our existence - too much Fe in your blood, and you get haemochromatosis. Too little O in your lungs, and you start to asphyxiate. Spells work the same way: they’re simply what the world runs on. When a warrior swings a sword, the world is “casting the spell” that allows him do that. This isn’t the same as a wizard’s spell, which is a crude shortcut to a specific effect.
You failed basic chemistry and it shows.
Incorrect. You are wrong. Look at this moron, everyone.
I never took chemistry in the first place.
The table of the elements is magic. There. Your moronation has been contained.
Its possible it could just be abusing mechanical glitches in reality like video game glitches. People found a glitch and wrote it down and boom you got a spell.
Inventing spells is hard because getting the variables wrong could cause you great and immediate harm in all sorts of ways. Wizards, like philosophers or scientists, can get too caught up in praising the works of the big smart guy in the field. These two factors combine to make the creation and refinement of spells rather slow.
Bigby came up with the spell that lasts for ten seconds and that's the best version around. Bigby was way smarter than you, if there were a better version he'd have invented it. It's the one that's in the magic book, it's the one your mentor taught you, it's what you've got, and it works well enough that there's no great impetus to improve on it.
Refinement. That's the optimal output of the spell wizards have figured out over the course of millennia. You can still change the effects of the spell depending on the setting/system (higher Mana/Spell Slot or metamagic), but the spellcasters are learning an already-optimized version.
In order to cast my favorite spell "bullet" I require the arcane focus "gun" and numerous material components. The bullet spell is extremely arbitrary, however, as it requires a very precise amount of very specific elements all mingled in a certain way to then be placed into a metal shell of a certain kind and particular shape and to then be activated with a spark of flame (this is why the "gun" is merely a focus, albeit one which itself requires extremely specific form and which can only produce a proper casting of the spell when arcane rules such as "rifling" are used). The spell itself is Instantaneous, it has a set range, and the range of potential damage falls within its own set range.
All of this is completely "arbitrary" but works because that's how the universe is constructed. In D&D, a spell is actually preconstructed before casting much like a bullet in the chamber of a gun, except the gun is the wizard's brain, thus why they have to "prepare" what spells they "know" ahead of time (the actual arbitrary thing in-setting is actually the fact that you can't take X amount of time to refill spell slots, rather than the spells themselves). The second half of the Amber series of books do a great job explaining it, in that the spells are partially cast and lefting "hanging", waiting for a particular triggering action to complete them and set them off, much as the bullet is merely waiting for the hammer of the gun to strike so that the potential reaction within it can occur. And yes, gun/bullet is probably not the best possible explanation, but I don't feel like thinking up a better one so you'll just have to cope with my arbitrary comparison.
>why is the acceleration caused by gravity 9,81 m/s and not 9,82 m/s
>m/s
Because we made it that way
There’s arbitrary and then there’s arbitrary.
>We've made this car in the following colors: Shit brown, piss yellow, and puke green
>why did you do that any not any other colors?
>WHY'S THE SKY BLUE HUH????
Spells are not equivalent the universal forces governed by the stars and planets. They're a sacred cow legacy mechanic that is governed more by WotC's warped brand identity than any real internal logic.
Spells are equivalent to universal forces, and are the natural result of them, in a fantasy setting where the universal forces are different from ours.
You're pre-supposing that magic is like the car, rather than the sky, and then drawing a conclusion that requires that supposition to be true. How do you know magic isn't like the sky?
Stop being willfully moronic. We're talking about RPGs with spell lists, where spells are effectively the only form of magic that exists for the players to engage with. Spells are specifically constructed, arbitrarily limited things that adhere to a meta-logic that is meant to be balanced and fair, but actually isn't, and still makes little sense. Spells are so formulaic that you can find them pre-written in scrolls and books and wizards can copy them down. They're more code or pre-packaged product than a universal force. The only way you arrive at the conclusion that a spell is some fundamental force like gravity or light waves is if you work backwards like a moron from the conclusion that Spells are an unimpeachable concept and thus all things in the fiction must adhere to the idea that the fictional reality must be bent in a way so that spells naturally make sense.
Yes, spells are constructed. Magic isn't. Try to keep up.
Okay. How about this.
WHY is there a floating runic alphabet spinning around my hands when I cast [Fireball]? WHY are they Norse in origin? WHY is it always Norse runes, no matter where or who on the planet uses it? WHO made it this way? WHO? No one has figured out WHY [Fireball] incorporates some letters from some specific region of the globe. WHO made it this way? WHY is it the hands too? Why not my head? Why not my penis? It is too damn constructed. It’s almost like an artifact.
Defining why in totality would require your fantasy setting to become science fiction involving the creation of physical laws of the universe which explain it.
A man who has faith in himself (or a god) is able to manifest light as a shield. Why? Perhaps that faith manifests in another dimension and allows his being (atoms, ect) to pull light waves to him and then be projected. But doing such a thing is in itself a bit shit because it kills the mystery of magic.
> WHY is there a floating runic alphabet spinning around my hands when I cast [Fireball]?
Because that’s the language you’re using the interface with the magic, you wizard plebeian, move the frick over and let the psions do it all mentally without having to use your clunky alphabet (jk, I love my arcane homies)
> WHY are they Norse in origin?
What the frick is a Norse
> WHY is it always Norse runes, no matter where or who on the planet uses it?
It’s not (as shown above), but it’s the most common. Kinda like how your Arabic and Greek numerals are the most common way of presenting mathematical shit.
> WHO made it this way?
A wizard did it. No, really.
>the globe
Get a load of this jester
> WHY is it the hands too? Why not my head? Why not my penis?
There actually was a Flaming Penis spell, but they won’t tell you about it because wizards have spent centuries fostering an image of wisdom and superiority. And because miscasts and natural selection are a thing.
> It is too damn constructed
*Because it is*. Why does 2 plus 2 conveniently equal 4? Why not 5, or 6? Why do all your keyboards have the same numerals on them? Why do all the sides on your d20s add up to 21? Why can you fit an octahedron inside a cube so that its vertices perfectly touch the middle faces, and vice versa? It’s all to convenient, it has to be constructed... right??
>Why does 2 plus 2 conveniently equal 4? Why not 5, or 6?
I read your post thinking you were smart until you typed this. God I hate this feeling. Trust ruined.
So no rebuttal, then?
I mean, that’s kind of the point. I’m being as deliberately obtuse as the anon I was replying to.
You do realize that you're talking about fantasy settings which frequently ARE constructed right? Where something like elves function the way they do because some god thought it'd be cool to have elves.
And that's just for the settings where magic isn't explicitly written down in books and therefore does function like a science. In those it's entirely possible that a spell only functions the way it does because a mage within the setting wrote it that way.
Obviously, the non-diagetic answer to your question is that it is a game with rules, and rather than create 50 different regional variations of Fireball with slight tweaks, the designers made one version of it and called it a day.
The main alternative to such a system is one that instead expects you to use a pile of points to build spells from scratch, but then you could just as easily ask why it takes 35 magic points to get a rank 3 fire spell with the range, area, and damage you want instead of 10 points or 100.
The main alternative to that would be to have no system at all, and just have the GM make up what the effects of a wizard's hand-waving, reagents, and magic words are on the fly, but then you're still getting an arbitrary result, it's just an improvised arbitrary result.
>You do realize that you're talking about fantasy settings which frequently ARE constructed right?
>frequently
Um, ALL fictions, be they game or book or show, are inherently constructed simulations of some kind. The more you analyze them, the more they break down. Sophisticated dreams.
Sorry. Star Trek to the sufficiently educated physicist is not science-fiction, it is fantasy proper. Not that both fields arent indistinguishable after a point.
What is constructed about it? Electrons are always and only attracted to protons, and never neutrons. Are electrons constructed?
The difference is runes are a human invention. Math and physics, nature/existence as it is, precedes human existence.
To say some human art form (language—in this case runes) is integral to physics (in this case “magic”) is too suspicious. Runes were made up. So who or what made up / shaped physics (a fireball in anon’s example) in such a way? It denotes an intelligence behind its appearance, these floating runes. They do. I guess you could attribute it to the gods; Odin and Mimir’s Well and such.
I think you're confusing spells with magic. Runes and whatever other systems are involved are just the method that people use to interface with magic. Math isn't reality, it's just a model we use to help us understand reality, make predictions, and build useful things.
>I think you're confusing spells with magic
You are being pedantic as hell, splitting hairs like that.
>Math isn't reality, it's just a model we use to help us understand reality, make predictions, and build useful things.
It absolutely is reality. If it exists, there will be quantification to it. Prime numerology exists with or without our existence; the language of the universe. Even in an abject nothing, you would still count it as a one.
Tough. You can’t actually write out any fiction without 1s and 0s in some way, as it is fundamentally an impossibility in the simplest sense.
It's not pedantic at all, it's the core distinction that you're confused about, and math isn't reality. It's not the language of the universe, it's the best method we have of understanding how things interact.
>It's not the language of the universe
Of course it is. Any sufficiently intelligent sapient in the universe will have the capacity to recognize and use it to communicate. It’s why we put it on the golden disc. It is very literally a universal language! This is basic and classic information.
It's universal, but it's not the language of the universe. Atoms don't have to do any calculations when they bump into each other. They just do.
Of course it’s universal, silly. Math works no matter how you are doing it. You can change the words but the concept of a2+b2=c2 is going to be the same, pi will always be the same. Languages have different words, different meanings but you could get across math terms just by showing the work, so to speak.
>It's universal, but it's not the language of the universe.
I want you to reread what you typed very carefully.
What I said is correct. I'm sorry you don't understand the difference between a language that beings use to communicate, and a literal physical system. If you disagree, please find me the actual number 2 using a microscope.
> You can’t actually write out any fiction without 1s and 0s in some way, as it is fundamentally an impossibility in the simplest sense.
Yes you can. Your inability to recognise a lack of enumeration doesn’t make a world’s lack of enumeration somehow enumerated. Skill issue.
>Yes you can.
No, you can’t.
>this setting doesn’t have any 1s or 0s in it
Boom, done. Get güd.
>even an absolute nothing isn’t a one
anon…
t. had breakfast
Sorry I’m not black
>Magic is arbitrary
whatever your magicks system is fricking dogshit don't post
Magic is essentially like coding, and spells are programs
A spell lasts 10 seconds because it's creator "coded" in for it to last 10 seconds
Why 10 seconds? Because the creator likely tested it at various lengths and found 10 seconds was the best balance between effect and resource use
That said the best systems are ones where players can create their own spells in addition to premade spells
Because TTRPGs are games with rules that have to be easily referenced in play.
Cool, customizable magic is a fun concept that gets bogged down in actual play where it has to run smoothly and not require a bunch of extra reasoning or rules cross-referencing.
In short, it's practical if not fantastical.
Came here to say this. Weird magic is fine in stories. Harry Potter has complete BS magic. Or Eragon. Weirdly Skyrim does it better. But in a system with dice or cards or even a resource system this doesn't work.
Now you COULD create an RPG where the players work together to create new spells and alchemy. But then that would be the focus of the RPG. And even THEN you'd need to have rules and limits.
Unironically, TSRs Forgotten Realms (not Greenwood's, since he doesn't like or made anything beyond the Sword Coast) magic is the best of both.
I, a Wizard, can cast Fireball. I move my hands clockwise, hold a lemon peel, and utter ooga-booga. You, an Evocation specialist, wave them counter clockwise, say bingo-bongo, and hold bat guano. Our buddy, a Wizard like me, uses an arcane focus. But what works for the three of us are the details we need to figure out. The theory principle is the same.
But wait! The Elementalist doesn't do that. And learning from him is impossible (unless multiclassing) for us because the theory is so different, even if the effect is the same. Our Fireball is Evocation, his is Fire element. And he has an opposite element he can't use. But the Zakharan Elementalist can use all four. That blows his mind. How can he keep all these different energies? But the Zakharan Fire mage can only use Fire magic, the loser. But they sure can learn Fireball from each other.
And all of them can learn Fireball from the Kara-Tur Wu Jen. But all of them have Fire, Water, and Earth, despite what each calls it. But the Wu Jen doesn't have Air and has Metal and Wood instead? And they can't learn those (unless multiclassing).
Then we head to Maztica and their two dudes have their minds blown. I can cast Fireball, a Hishna (harmful), and Fly, a Pluma (helpful), spell (yes it's more complicated, go with it). No one can hold THAT much power!
But mechanically it's all the same because we don't want to be bogged down.
At last, I see. The key to keeping arbitrary magic magical is to lean in to the arbitrariness. Design it so that it makes so little sense the strict guidlelines recurve back to utter lunacy. Anyone who tries to see the whole picture will go insane.
Just Like in real life.
As always, the trick is not to overthink it.
>magic has no rules for it in the book, only very rough guidelines and you just kind of have to make shit up and hope you're being consistent in the eyes of your capital P Players, the true goes of this realm that you run for their exclusive entertainment, who judge your every action and will grind gameplay to a halt if something is perceived as unfair or inconsistent
They are the known spells, the ones you may find in dungeons. You can try and create new ones, you know that, right?
Practical spell creation is gay since it forces everyone to be an overly pragmatic dickhead like in real life, and then suddenly nothing is magic.
ALL right, then you the DM can add certain leveless spells, found only in the dangerous depths of the underworld, as a way of escaping the pragmatism of spell creation
It doesn't force anyone to be anything.
Shut up kid, go home
I accept your concession.
Underage nerds shouldn’t talk
I accept your concession.
>combat is a list of random-ass arbitrarily defined "feats"
Yes.
>combat includes a freeform mechanic for doing awesome feats of martial prowess like swinging from a chandelier into a jump kick lkke this is some kind of fantasy John Woo movie.
this is why I play DCC.
>Jumping over a fence is a skill, not an action
What the frick.
What would you fricking prefer? Is there even a possible alternative other than DM may I shit?
points-based mega customizable super powers but you call them spells
autists will find a way to complain about anything
There's actual rules in the DMG for making custom spells. They're not especially good, but "DM may I?" play is a problem caused by vague rules and lack of transparency with the underlying mechanics, putting . They could have easily overhauled the entire system, reduced the Wizard, Warlock, and Sorc to one class, and dumped the spells list in favor of a more flexible system of lego-esque spell features that you snap together to determine damage, range, effect, and cost, for instance... But Magic Missile, Fireball, and all the legacy spells they mostly copy-pasted from 3.5 are part of the brand identity and WotC fears what might happen if they botch the formula again.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xBymSuMF-Z_jxDQcEhJJonFb1KAZx7fSHW0u1S3coGU/edit?usp=sharing
Magic is a list of every possible permutation and combination of every known substance, molecule, verbal phonem, shape, series of movements, and musical tone. (This doc is still a WIP, though)
>OP is a random ass arbitrarily definied complain
I mean, literally all of this is explained by magic being influenced by preconceived notions. Why does fire come from the fingertips? Because the Caveman Wizards used their bare hands to shoot fire, and all the other Cavemen went "Oh, that's how the fire shoots"
Magic didn't alter how people evolved, people altered how magic evolved. This is why Magic has so many hard numbers and statistics surrounding it. Magic grew numbers around the same time people did.
I can get behind it since it's easy to implement on the GM's side and I like the arcade-y feeling, but sometimes I like something a bit more open. In those cases I usually write my own systems; the latest I did features a kind of skill tree for each specific school of magic, depending on the setting, and players can advance in it with EXP point-buy and having fulfilled the necessary plot conditions (e.g. to learn fire magic you need a fire wizard to teach you). For example:
> Fire magic I -- 2 EXP -- control over small fires
> Fire magic II -- 4 EXP -- control over large fires
> Fire magic III -- 8 EXP -- ability to create fire
> etc. etc.
Then, when a player who has some points in Fire magic wants to do something with that I first check if it's within his level's reach, and then assign the task an appropriate difficulty. The player then rolls (I like roll-under systems, so the target would be something like level + proficiency - difficulty) and I describe the outcome.
I understand it's not for everyone, but sometimes the recipe book and the numbers feel a bit limiting.
play mage and make whatever spells you want
What qualifies as "arbitrarily defined" to you, OP?
While you think about the answer to that, I'd first like to know if you think established measurements are arbitrary; if you do, we can't have a discussion, because people like you are impossible to talk to.
He means why magic is retricted to a list of pre-established spells he justnhas to accept instead of being something he can tinker with himself, like in oldschool Elder Scrolls' spellcrafting.
>the standard model of physics is a list of random ass arbitrarily defined particles
>arbitrarily defined
Magic doesn't exist in our world, so that automatically forces any game writer to come up with how it works based on their whims. A game writer who actually cares about their craft, however, will still have their magic function in accordance to an established, consistent logic, thereby establishing the system for it.
>Y tho
Have you ever played oWOD Mage? If you have, or even just read the book you know exactly why basically every other game with magic uses spell lists and spell slots.
Players prefer it that way. Whenever I run a system with magic that isn't like that, they still invariably stick closely to the example spells.
Magic is better when it does something different every time
It derived from defined religious ritualistic practices like:
>has internets
>asks stupids questions hes coulds finds bys himselfs
>magic is a list of divinely dictated spells
Not sure if that helps.
What if magic is a living thing?
Because otherwise it'd be something like Dresden Files RPG where it's an just an elemental tag and an effect tag combined and you freeball what it does.
what about just making arcana an attribute like strength or dex, and maybe having specific skills under that attribute you can specialize in, like slight-of-hand or stealth for dex, and then when you want to do something magical the dm just sets a dc based on how powerful of an effect you’re going for. and if you succeed, your arcana stat determines how much damage you do (or how long the spell lasts, etc) the same way str and dex determine how much damage you do when you hit an enemy.
Arcana just denotes secret information.
and your arcana attribute reflects how much you know. the schools of magic would be the skills in which you can gain proficiency; abjuration, illusion, etc.
and the various caster classes would give you special abilities just like the martial classes do for fighters, barbarians, rogues and so on. some would probably be things you can do once per day, or your arcana stat times per day, or they give advantage on certain rolls, or let you make multiple arcana attacks per round, etc. That would basically be a “magic system” that isn’t just a list of specific spells.
Because it’s the source code of the universe, and only a few commands produce useful, tangible effects.
>magic has to be a certain way because IT JUST DOES OKAY
>otherwise it will be like science which is boring and we can't ever have that!
>...except for the times where it's exactly like science, but you replace some words with "mana" or "arcane secrets" and pretend that it's different and not boring!
There was a period a few months ago where some gay was making some magic vs science threads over and over and I still don't think anyone actually reached any conclusion for what D&D's magic has to be the way it is, beyond being a brand identity legacy mechanic.
The gods made it that way. There. Solved. Moving on.
the pee pee poo poos made it that way baseding on
Are you 5
Magic doesn’t always answer when you want it to. There. Another solution. End thread.
the way you want it to*
>has clearly never played a game or wizard character
>I cast burning hands, which ejects fire from each finger, making FIVE streams of fire, totalling ten if I use both hands.
Okay but what if he uses the tip of his penis as an eleventh ‘finger’?
You can ram as many atoms as you want into each other and hope it works out. The tested and true methods are termed "spells", and if you manipulate the aether in the correct way, you get an almost reliable reaction. That's why 'spells' are defined. Wild magic is another category of just "random bullshit".
No
Barbarians of Lemuria - or at least older editions, haven't even read new ones - magic is cool, the system just gives you a general limitations of spells of certain magnitudes (first magnitude spells can be utility/offense aided by sorcery but which one person could pull off on his own, second magnitude can dominate people and perform feats beyond human capability, third magnitude is demigod shit) and a list of drawbacks attached to casting spells of each magnitude. Spells themselves are left at will of player and GM.
"You make it, butthole" is never good game design.
I think it works for BoL since magic is supposed to be rare in the setting.
Have you tried Whitehack's magic system? You triangulate magic effects and costs (from HP pool) based on vocation, miracle wording, and magnitude of effect. So for instance a wizard might have "Fireball" as their miracle wording. They would be able to cast fireballs for cheaper than average, but they might be reluctant to make small fires to light campfires or cigarettes for instance due to it being a bit expensive. Meanwhile someone who had "Flames," or even better "Fire-starter" as their miracle wording would be able to start a lot of small fires extremely cheaply but would find it more expensive to engulf a group of enemies in fire than the guy with the dedicated miracle wording.
But anyway, I find this system to be more evocative of what magic is like in literature. Obviously it requires players that will negotiate with you in good faith and not argue with you when you come to a ruling though
Stolas a cute!
I hate you OP
Fricking moron, these are GAMES
Any ruleset that has magic like in Outward?
>no actual spells, just a bunch of magic effects with associated resource costs
>You have to come up with your own magic effect combinations in the correct order to do actual spells
Even if it's not too autistic I like the idea of having some freedom to break from the mold and do alternative spells I came up with if the situation calls for it.
>HERO
Variable Power Pool, X active points, Incantations, Gestures
>Can be attached to
Endurance Reserve, X value, Y recovery for a mana pool that isn't attached to your normal endurance. If this pool empties you can start using your Stun stat to fuel your spells, physically exhausting you.
>Alternatively
X Charges for slots per day
>Can be modified with
Slots can only be changed with study (should you want magic spellbooks instead of a green lantern ring/sorcery)
>Additionally
Multipower, X active points, gestures, Incantations for specific spells you don't prepare or have memorized at all times that won't interfere with the VPP.
You can now build any effect in the game you like, on the fly if you choose, up to a certain limit which can upped on a per session basis. Remove "gestures" for still spells, remove "Incantations" for silent spells, add "obvious inaccessible focus" for a lantern ring or staff or book or whatever.
Behold, magic.
And science is a list of random arbitrary defined laws.
>this random particle's speed is top, no one can go faster
>literally introduce absurd bullshit like warping space and time to uphold one stupid rule
Magic is logical and realistic in comparison
I think you might have the order wrong: c was derived from the theory of spacetime, not vice-versa.
>And science is a list of random arbitrary defined laws.
No? Science works a point of causality. One way. The end result may appear arbitrary, like the distance of the laryngeal nerve in some animals.
There are so many malding Vancian troons in this thread. The simple answer is that you just don't play DnD. Most systems do not have magic as this immutable moronic Vancian trash. Actually most systems make magic inherently flexible and have spellcrafting as a core feature. DnDogshit is the odd man out there, it's just archaic, frankly obsolete and bad game design.
Whether you go into the more simulationist GURPS or stick with d20 trash like WWN, you won't have to put up with the brain damaged alignment/Vancian cancer.
>DnDogshit is the odd man out there
>this handful of non-sapient idiotic robots that crudely mimic humans is great
>humans (all 8 billion of them) are the odd ones out!
Your brain is totally fried you creepy pedo groomer.
Because the alternative is something like Mage, which is actually tedious to play.
Because it's easier to write that way. I'm trying very hard to write a magic system with dynamic and intuitive spell effects, but I'm finding it extremely difficult. Even when I succeed in creating an effect that's mechanically elegant and easy to remember, actually making people understand what it does in the first place often turns out to be prohibitively difficult.
op is still a gay
prestidigitation. there, thread over.
seriously, what 'magic' did gandalf ever use in the books/films?
>spontaneously light fireworks
>light up a staff
>bubble shield
>break stone
>amplify sunlight
seems pretty limited to me. just buy a supplement book with like 600 spells and your players will think your magic is fricking bonkers.