Home ›
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
I understand what you mean. My uncle died a few months ago and I didn't mention it because I didn't feel it was worth making everyone sad over.
Besides, there are much greater tragedies, like the nine year old girl who was shot with a shotgun after being mistaken for a skunk.
A nine year old was killed in a riot in Colón not many days ago.
This board makes me feel old as fuck, I'm twenty sodding five
Well, we could sell you for a high price, at least.
^^Hey, Captainbrass was like 40. You're still in spring chicken zone as far as I'm concerned.
Really? I didn't know that
Oh you!
Whale - at least you are a year older than me, letting me take comfort in technically not being the oldest member on the forum. Thanks for that.
24 here.
Also, what's that 4chan Autumn Cup? Lurking moar isn't working.
All I know is that it's over and apparently the Wallpaper Board won.
wait i'm actually the youngest here
fuck why am i up so goddamn late
i don't see how that invalidates people we know dying
hey alex
i'm curious
what do you think of magic in sword & sorcery settings
(Oh dear, I have a feeling I'm going to regret this.)
fuckin
thanks a lot man
now there's gonna be like ten extra pages
You know, hence the sorcery bit.
Actually, no.
It's characterized by sword-wielding heroes, typically engaged in personal conflicts. The setting is often quasi-mythical/fantastical, and there's usually an element of romance and an element of magic in there, but magic strangely enough isn't inherent to sword & sorcery.
It's like hack-and-slash not having any hacking and slashing! Instead, relying upon an overabundance of thrusting and chopping.
You fool!
Anyway, swords & sorcery wouldn't be swords & sorcery without magic, would it? Then it'd just be swords, and while I can certainly get behind that, or at least into a sufficient flanking position, it defeats the purpose of the genre. I really have no issue with magic as a thing, but I often have significant issues with how it's handled, especially lately.
And I guess this post could get pretty big. I'll try to keep that in mind, but no promises. Then again, it might not, and I might have a moment of blissful conciseness. Who knows? I'm not coming back to edit these sentences, in any case.
I think we have to begin with defining magic in the first place, and my favoured definition works on the basis of perspective and understanding -- or ignorance. Magic is magic precisely because we don't understand it, or because it's so far outside our understanding that we can only interpret it as a bending or breaking of natural law. From the perspective of someone in the Middle Ages, a flashlight is magic, because it has no explanation. Even if you tried to explain the thing, they'd consider it an object of sorcerous technology, with wires that channel the alchemical mixture in the battery. So magic is an attempt at explaining and rationalising what is unknowable from our perspective, because it at least implies that someone knows how this works, but that the explanation is beyond us currently, permanently or that we shouldn't seek this kind of knowledge in the first place. In some respects, magic isn't too different from science; I'm sure none of us know the precise details of how a space station functions, but we have faith that someone else knows. What makes the difference, I suppose, is that the knowledge of a space station's workings isn't prohibited lore or considered dangerous -- it merely requires significant interest, intellectual investment and a means of acquiring the knowledge. But magic belongs only to the truly enlightened, the mad or the heretical, where science belongs to the studious.
So for us to believe in magic, even within a fictional setting, we have to have some distance between it and ourselves. By rendering it logical, we prevent it from being truly otherworldly, hellish or divine. Video games, I think, do a lot of harm in this respect. Games aren't games without consistent and logical systems, so using magic within a video game ensures that we view magic logically rather than as a factor of something that exists apart from ourselves. If you have 100 MP, and magic missile costs 10 MP and deals 10 damage, you know you're getting one point of damage per a point of MP used. If you have fireball, which might cost 20 MP and deal 35 damage, you get 175 damage to those same 100 MP. So magic can become systemised; we know we're getting more damage per point of MP with fireball, rendering magic missile obsolete. Most games use magic for the same set of purposes, too; damage-dealing, buffing and summoning. So there is no "other" to fear or unexpected effects to deal with. It's merely another technical tool in our arsenals, and when enemies use it, we understand exactly what their capabilities are.
I consider magic to work better, irrespective of medium, when its applications aren't so translucent or obvious. In the poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it turns out that the seemingly immortal Green Knight was a noble who had a spell cast upon him by Morgan La Faye as a means of playing a prank on the knights of the Round Table. And that makes sense. Why wouldn't it? It's magic! It merely is, and exists separately from the factors we consider consistent with the rest of the world. If Morgan wants to enchant a noble to prank some knights, she can. She's a sorceress. We don't know why she can "waste" magic like this when Merlin was comparatively reserved about using his own magical skills, but we don't need to know. Morgan and Merlin are not like us. They wield magic. And neither of them ever casts a fireball.
Of course, this all depends on perspective. Sometimes, a story benefits from its protagonist being a magic wielder. Consider Star Wars, which is swords & sorcery in all but presentation. While Luke has access to the mystical Force, his strength in it is linked to his understanding of the world and himself, so his level of magical power is tied directly to his development as a character. So the magic still has an element of the unknowable, but it has one concession to narrative logic; the greater the spirituality of the character, the greater their capacity to wield this mystical power is.
That said, most swords & sorcery stories are drawn from mythology and folklore, in which a mundane hero usually struggles against a mystical villain, although often with supernatural aid. These stories survive because they are, essentially, about characters that we can understand fighting against conditions they have small understanding of. I think that's a pretty good microcosm of the human condition right there; none of us have a complete understanding of the world, so we act from a perspective of understanding ourselves, trying to deal with a world that we often find opaque. And the otherness of magic fits with the otherness of the world beyond the borders of our understanding.
That means of using magic narratively is so long-lasting, I think, because none of us have magical powers. We can't, by definition, because magic exceeds our understanding; if we achieve the capability to do something amazing, outside the understanding of others, other people might conceivably find us magical. But we'd know that we're not, because we'd be aware of the logic and reason behind that amazing capacity. So a main character so seldom has these abilities in long-lasting stories because we need to step into their shoes, and giving them magical powers that we don't understand makes them the othered character rather than the villain. And giving them magical powers we do understand isn't often interesting to begin with, because it defies the initial appeal of magic.
I guess magic in swords & sorcery settings is pretty okay.
wheee i'm in class but i'm here
technology is awesome
today's class is understanding narrative magic 101, everyone please take good notes and try very hard on the exam!
After seeing this skyscraper of text, I think I'll stick with Roman Law, thank you very much.
It's kinda silly, but whatcha gonna do.
so
you don't resent magic-users for outclassing sword-wielders gameplay-wise
or anything
...phew
@Stormtroper
These links should be enough
http://www.implyingrigged.com
http://www.barrel-ro11.com
Oh, I very much do. Especially since using magic offensively has never seemed that sensible to me; if one wants to destroy things easily, then all things considered, it's probably easier to learn to use weapons well and/or raise an army, especially considering how difficult magic is considered to be in most settings. The theme of offense is already covered by various kinds of warriors, anyway, and magic can do anything. Why relegate it to something like combat?
it depends
like
telekinesis = the manipulation of objects, lifting, pulling, pushing
can be used for building, climbing, forestry, etc. many practical applications
those same applications can be used in combat- lift and throw an enemy, for example, or throw rocks like a catapult
pyrokinesis = the manipulation of heat and flames
this can be used in many things, e.g. cooking, metalworking, hot air ballons. varied applications.
can also be used in combat, e.g. cooking people alive, flamethrowers, lighting oil in moats, etc
healing = manipulation of the body, manipulating flesh, replenishing blood, controlling heart rate, etc
widely used due to people getting sick and injured a lot
but can also heal people involved in combat
and be directly involved in combat by stopping people's hearts, overfilling their veins with blood and causing them to explode, etc
earth manipulation = splitting earth, lifting blocks of stone, etc
can be used for irrigation, splitting earth to make canals, lifting stones for quarry workers
can also be used to split earth beneath armies, crush people under cliffs, etc
manipulation of wind = changing air currents, making it rain, averting tornadoes, etc
can be used to ensure a region is fertile with rain, averting natural disasters, etc
can also whip up storms and tornadoes in middle of forces
that is
many directly practical applications of magic can be molded to suit combat purposes
@Alex: It's strange, but your statement that magic should be fundamentally unknowable or mysterious to be effective as a plot element jibes very nicely with my own feelings on the subject, but coming from an entirely different literary tradition... mostly.
As to the use of magic in combat, what about all the vague and monstrous things that witches and gods do to people in folklore? Different, yes, but still offensive.
This conversation just makes me sad there will never be another Arcanum game. I liked how it explained the magic vs. technology issue as "Whilst machines use physics, magic alters physics, so they don't play together very well."
Seems like your trying to engage in a paradigm shift to make the guy who can swing a sword look cooler than the guy who can teleport people across the world. Or teleport uppity sword users 2 miles up if the need be. Or into the middle of the ocean. Or a volcano. Or just to be cruel a country on the opposite side of the world where nobody speaks their language.