In my spare time I’m working on a fantasy story (not the novel I used to post about at length) which iincludes a wizard as a supportint character. Several times in the story the wizard, when asked why he doesn’t simply use magic to solve a mundane problem, replies, basically, that one of his rules is that he should only use magic when no mundane solution will do. Part of the reason is practical: he avoids magical healing, for instance, because each time he does it, it makes the patient’s body a little more dependent on magic for healing, so that if he does it too often he will eventually deprive the patient of the ability to heal himself. If he needs food or lodging, he tries to pay for it in an ordinary way, because he needs to stay connected to everyday economics; if he’s forever whipping up necessities in defiance of the laws of thermodynamics and economics, he risks losing sight of how ordinary people have to live, which may cause him to become detached and unrealistic and to think that a mithril shirt could actually be more valuable than the entire Shire.
Anywhistle…I’m looking for examples of other characters who restrict themsleves in similar ways. Any thoughts?
In the Justice League animated series, Superman (who may as well be “magical” for all practical purposes) faces Darkseid for the umpteenth time. Darkseid says something about how he’s beaten Superman before. Superman says how he’s held back every time in the past because he feels like the entire world is made of cardboard. But this time is different, the gloves are off, and he’s going to enjoy it.
It implies that Superman, to a certain degree, ALLOWS himself to get beat up by his opponent, because he is attempting to hold himself back so as not to cause excessive damage to the world around himself. That he fears the collateral damage that might occur if he went straight to using everything he’s got.
In the Potterverse, the Wizarding community isn’t supposed to use magic in front of muggles (normal people) because they’ll be exposed. However, given their power over muggles, it may well be that it is more to contain the ethics of their members (which seems to be demonstrated by the problems with the Death Eaters and the “old ways” crowd).
I might point out that an alternate Universe Superman, in one episode, was one of the rulers of the Earth. When he came through to this world, one of his first acts was to lobotomize, with his heat vision, a seriously powerful foe.
That’s one obvious way that the ‘This Universe’ Superman constrains himself for ethical reasons.
Samantha Stevens. She (mostly) accepts her husband’s demands not to use magic in order to retain normalcy in their lives. Of course, while I’m sure you can write a mean story, this and similar “restrictions” are pretty tough devices to pull off, given that they are transparently designed to deflect the howlingly obvious solution to every plot conflict which could ever possibly arise, once you accept the premise of magic.
Firestorm (DC Comics) and the Molecule Man (Marvel) have or had a limitation to their impressive abilities to transform matter - they couldn’t affect organic materials. Why this limitation existed is unclear, beyond making it impossible for them to just instantly disintegrate people and bring battles to a quick end.
In the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, Eric the cavalier somehow is given the powers of a wizard. He creates a fountain of water so he can have a drink, but the Dungeon Master points out that he shouldn’t do that because when he creates a fountain like that, it means that water is taken away from somewhere else.
Or something to that effect. It’s been a LOOONG time since I saw that show.
As I recall, with Firestorm it was some sort of feedback effect; he couldn’t affect organics because he was organic. With the Molecule Man it was a mental block, and he because much more powerful when it was removed.
In Niven’s The Magic Goes Away stories, the limit on magic is that it’s a nonrenewable resource. Use it up, and spells stop working; awkward if you need magic to live, or need it to run your civilization, or keep your continent from sinking ( what really happened to Atlantis ! ). The Warlock and others who know this use as little magic as they can, to hold off the end as long as they can.
In the Belgariad/Mallorean novels by David Eddings, some of the limits on what they did seem to fit what you want. Durnik mentioned that he couldn’t go around making things into gold, because if he did gold wouldn’t be worth anything anymore. Also, a major limit is that other sorcerers can hear sorcery, so if you have enemies you risk drawing them down on you if you use it. All of the hero-sorcerers worry a lot about that, which tends to restrict what they can do.
In David Weber’s Norfressa books, back when there were white wizards, they followed the Strictures of Ottavar, which limited what they could do ( like not attacking non-wizards save in direct self defense ) and how they could get magic ( no sacrificing people ). They followed the rules because the only penalty for breaking them was death.
The warlocks in Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Legends of Ethshar novels draw their powers from a Source that they hear as an inhuman, hypnotically whispering voice. The more power they use, the louder the Voice and the more power they can access - but eventually they are drawn to the Voice and never return. So warlocks that want to avoid vanishing are sparing in the use of their powers.
Those are post-hoc justifications for the limitations, they don’t explain the limitations themselves. Firestorm and the Molecule Man could affect, say, carbon when it came time to alter an object made of steel. Why they couldn’t affect the carbon that partly comprised a DNA molecule is less clear. In the case of the Molecule Man, the “mental block” explanation came years after the chracter’s first appearance.
Another Marvel character, a minor villain named Avalanche, has a similar limitation:
I read a series of books called The Last of the Renshai, where the Renshai were proud warriors who despised cowardice in any form. They met every battle head on, without hesitation. The Renshai were thrilled to fight fair battles without hiding behind armor or long range weapons, and were completely devoted to a warrior lifestyle in which every member of the tribe spent his/her entire lifetime developing their combat skill. They did not care for battle tactics or strategy, and they made war only for the sake of testing their skill against an enemy. They did not care to subjugate people, steal from them, or rule over them, but they were ruthless in battle and devloped a reputation as devils.
The greatest among the Renshai was the most skilled warrior in the tribe. During the course of the story, this man developed something like psychic ability after battling demons in his head and driving them out. Afterwards, he found that his mind had become powerful enough from this experience that he could actually project his mind into someone else’s, read their thoughts, or even attack them mentally. He never used this power, because he could not reconcile a psychic attack with his code of honor, which prohibited cowardly attacks such as ambushes or arrow shots.
Eventually he realized that his psychic power was not magical, and the power itself was not cowardly, just as a knife is not a cowardly weapon just because a coward assassin used it for murder. His reasoning was that he developed the skill through his own force of will and determination, and that anyone who chose to devote the time and energy toward developing that psychic power that he had would have had that same results. He killed an enemy with a psychic attack, but did not ambush him. He entered the man’s mind, mentally communicated to him “I am here, and I am your enemy!” and then killed him. He reasoned that if he had not first announced his intent to attack, it would have been no different from an ambush, and against his code of morality.
Many of the ethical constraints for magic conjure up images of hand wavium to me. These restrictions are typically used to explain away the reasons why magic can exist in a world that is seemingly close to a distorted view of the middle ages or renaissance of our world without radically changing the political, social, or technological foundations of those societies. Why is there mass combat when low level magic people can cast fireballs or other area of effect spells that would be sure to take out many people in one attack? Who needs castle walls when they can be knocked down by spell casters easily?
I think the social restrictions make more sense than anything else. Though restrictions on the use of gold in order to maintain a connection to the common people seems unlikely to me. I think the three oaths of the Aes Sedai from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series are pretty good. Basically they take three oaths and are magically bound to obey. They are physically unable to violate the tenants of these oaths.
[list=a]
[li]Cannot lie.[/li][li]Can only harm others in self-defense, defense of another Aes Sedai, or in defense of her warder (bodyguard). Shadowspan (bad guys) are fair game though.[/li][li]Can not use their powers to create a weapon for one man to kill another.[/li][/list]
Every society has institutions to control behavior and magic people would be no different. Odds are magic people would be at the top social ladder though.
I dont know if this will jive with the whole magical universe you’ve got going on, but I remember reading in some book (or maybe I just thought this up, I hardly read fantasy) an explanation of magic that I really like. The premise was that using any kind magic drained your energy (real physical caloric energy, not some magical currency) an appropriate amount and that amount was–if you did the magic right–exactly the same as the most expedient way you could have done it the normal way. If you were inexperienced you were even more inefficient. In other words, using magic was convenient, time conserving, and showy, but otherwise not all that different for mundane things like baking cookies.
edited to add: maybe its hardly worth mentioning, but it would follow naturally that mages in this universe spent as much time working out their bodies as they did their minds
Jesse Custer in the Preacher comics had the voice of command which could make anyone obey him. But he preferred not to use it and relied on his fighting skills instead.
Mithril mailshirts are worth whatever anyone’s prepared to pay for them, unless you’re conflating “worth” in this context with some kind of moral “right to exist”, since I strongly doubt old Olorin would value a cartload of Moria-silverware over the life of one hobbit baby. But when you’re an incarnate angel with an age’s worth of practical experience of how the economy works East of the Sea, I’m sure you can do a few sums as to the market value of a few hundred square miles of well-tilled farmland, plus the cottages, barns, fixtures and fittings therein, and several thousand agricultural implements, utensils and fungibles, and compare it to what you’d have to offer the nearest Dwarf king in exchange for an irreplacable unobtainium antique of Dwarven mastercraftsmanship.
As to the question, there were the wizards in Dragonlance, who for whatever reason went around in white, red or black robes to indicate which moon they were aligned with (the Sun-moon, the Moon-moon or the Night-moon) and strictly limited their practice of magic according to a compact forced on them by the Muggles “'cos otherwise, like, we’ll bang pots and pans outside your window like, all night, to stop you resting and getting back your spells, and stuff”. Just one reason why I found the half-dozen books I read completely irredeemable hackwork, but maybe an instance of what you were asking about.