Fantasy is full of characters with magic powers ranging from godlike to minor.
My question is considering how useful magic can be at solving conflicts and other problems the characters encounter how do you prefer magic systems work in terms of how long, how much and what kind of magic can be used by individual users?
If a character has a spell that can easily win fights (transmutation, mind control, telekinesis etc) what kind of restrictions should they have to make the story more interesting?
My favorite magic system to use is from Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy series. Almost everyone has some kind of talent, some have a couple. There are mental and physical powers, elemental and mundane. Each magic has an active and a passive field. Passive fields don’t drain the user at all. For example, Nevada, the main female character in the first series, is what’s called a truth seeker. Her passive field allows her to tell when someone is lying. It’s just a small ping. The active field takes the fuel from the magic user’s personal store of energy. So Nevada, whose active is basically letting her crack someone’s mind like an egg to find the truth of she needs to. It’s possible to block most magic users - keeping up mental shields, dowsing a fire kinetic with water, things like that.
I like it because, for all that they’re are some incredibly powerful magic users, they aren’t godlike.
**Comes in assuming the question is ‘What’s your secret formulat for deciding how long leftovers can remain in the refrigerator’ **
… oh. Umm, never mind…
I don’t know that I have a preference, provided the writer has thought it through and plays by his/her own rules, so as to avoid plot holes of the “Why doesn’t that character just do that magical thing that we saw earlier they could do?” sort.
Depending on the type of story, I don’t even have to know the rules. If I have a requirement, it’s that I (the reader or viewer) should know as much about how the magic works and the restrictions on it as the viewpoint character does.
I think of magic a bit like James Bonds gadgets.
Its important to see Q set him up, so you know his watch shoots poison darts. You anticipate him despatching unwary minions with it but expect it will not stop The Villain. If Bond was in peril and he suddenly used a hitherto-unrevealed gadget you’d put your foot through the screen.
A vote for Vance then.
My preferred systems have magic use burn calories just like any other activity, so there are bodily limits to magic use.
But it doesn’t have to be a one-to-one equivalence to the same activity using muscles. My homebrew system, for instance, has magic taking around 10% of the effort, so moving a 1-tonne rock with magic may be as tiring as moving a 100 kg rock with your muscles. Finesse adds to the effort, though, so precisely placing a rock in a wall you’re building takes at least an order of magnitude more effort than just flinging it over a castle wall.
That homebrew system reduces all magic to a kind of TK, so stuff like transmutation or mind control are right out. It works out more like Avatar’s bending, but without the elemental silos.
What I like best is rules that are clearly laid out and quantified. The characters can perhaps come up with clever ways to use their abilities within those limitations, but the limitations are still known and absolute. Many games work this way, and hence also fiction based on those games.
Almost as good is limitations that clearly exist, even if they aren’t made exactly explicit to the reader. Someone like Harry Dresden, we don’t know exactly the full list of spells that he knows, so if he comes up with something new it’s not exactly shocking, but we have a pretty good idea of his overall power level at any given moment (he increases in power significantly over the course of the series), so we can generally say what’s in and out of his league, and when he does come up with something new, it’s generally of a comparable or slightly higher power level to what he’s done before (and when he does get a boost in power, we can usually recognize it).
Magic is a strange weird power that few have ever seen much less can wield. Anything more common and it’s not special, it is then 100’s of Jedi swinging sabers at bugs level silly.
I had never thought about in these terms before, but I’m realizing now that clearly laying out the rules and quantifying them often breaks something for me, specifically because they can be called absolute but they can’t really be absolute, because that would be boring.
Dresden is an example of a system where you might have an explicit statement that X is literally a thousand times more powerful than Y, but depending on where you are in the narrative, you might have X and Y fighting to a standstill or you might have X just waste Y with a flick of a finger. I think it’s too hard to maintain tension when you’ve set the table with an ant fighting against giants; you can only have so many clever tricks or “sheer force of wills” before the conclusion has to be either the ant is not an ant, or these giants aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. In which case why were all these rules laid out.
So for me, leave it ambiguous, and I’ll decide who was powerful afterward. That can lead to some insane deus ex machina surprises, but I think almost all literature ends up doing that one way or another, and I find it easier to suspend disbelief the less concrete it is.
I don’t need to know the precise limits, but i like to know as much as a typical person in the story, and like to have a sense of the general rules (what it can do, who can do it, what it costs) .
I was going to type a detailed essay of how the fantasy magic of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere series efficiently categorizes magic by world, environment, resources, teachings and philosophy, but I’ll just say “Cosmere.”
Otherwise, it depends on timing and if it shows a little bit of thought and some sort of context, and isn’t obviously a deus ex machina moment because the author wrote themselves into a corner.
Case in point: An episode of Warehouse 13 leads the agents to investigate a flurry of incidents where people are bitten and become extremely cold. One such victim is in the hospital, his skin cracked and blue, and Artie pulls out a pair of spectacles from his bag of artifacts and places it on the man’s face. The man starts assuming a flesh color, but is still unconscious. Artie explains the spectacles belonged to Andrew Ure, the inventor of the thermostat.
It didn’t crack the case or magically solve everybody’s problems, but it fit in with the quirky nature of the show and Artie’s tendency to bend the rules in his favor.
I think Jack Vance more or less wrote the manual with the Dying Earth books? A lot of games and other later works seem to derive from the magic system in those.
Yes, Vancian magic works very well in fantasy games.
I hate spell points. Having seen it in use, it is pretty much always “blow it all out in 3 rounds in one battle- then demand the party rest”.
The more “realistic” system,-which is hardly ever used- is that the spellcaster gets more tired and drained.
I like stories that do that, but that’s not really magic, even if it’s called “magic”. Instead, that’s simply science fiction in a different setting.
For me, magic needs to defy rules and quantification. It’s especially hard for authors to write to, because magic still has to mostly make sense, but can’t follow general rules. See a good example in @Knowed_Out post above.
I always like Larry Niven’s take in The Magic Goes Away. It’s a metaphor for the oil crisis. Magic need “mana” to power it. Mana exists just about everywhere in the world, but the more you use it, the faster it disappears. This explains why there was so much magic back in pre-history days, but none now: the mana ran out.
Based in this, there was even one character who created a weapon that was designed to fight magic users: it was a floating spinning disk, that drew on the local mana supplies to spin faster and faster while maintaining its physical integrity. Eventually it would suck up all the mana within a certain range, and so no other magic would work in that spot.
It also explains why we had stories of weird far-off lands where magic still works; places not inhabited by humans didn’t have all the mana depleted, so weird little backwater places became the last haven for the magical community.
There’s the version used on Charmed; magic can do anything, as long as it rhymes.
Well, sort of. In his books, the “ordinary” spellcasters have to “memorize” spells one at a time, and when they cast the spell, the memorization is erased (qualitatively the same system that wizards used in D&D up through 3rd edition). But the spellcasters who do it that way aren’t very powerful: One spellcaster early on in the books considers himself the Big Cheese of wizards because he can hold a whole FIVE spells in his memory at once.
The real magical heavy-hitters, however, are well past that nonsense, and are basically omnipotent, with magical devices that grant wishes at will, and the like.
Ah yes, the Warlock’s Wheel. An interesting extension of this which Niven never explored as far as I know, is that a motor run backwards is a generator. So spin the wheel using an external power source and it should emit mana rather than absorbing it. Hook up a steam engine (Hero’s turbine, perhaps?) and voila! Mana on demand!
If I remember correctly, Phandaal created many if not most of the known spells using mathematics back in the Golden Age. But that knowledge has been lost for a long time now…
Well, if there are no entropic effects in between, which there probably were. Turn an electric motor with an external force, and you can produce electrical energy, but turning a gasoline motor with an external force will not turn carbon dioxide and water vapor back into gasoline.