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Comments
I think that makes it incredibly stupid.
In a world where magic really existed in a concrete and irrefutable way, it would eventually be studied like the natural forces of our own world and like them, harvested.
Now there would obviously be your mysteries--your analogs to dark matter and whatnot--but most settings cover those (D&D has Wild Magic as its own separate thing. It's not recommended you play with it because you get stuff like it raining coins made of fruit happen if your spell goes wonky). What you're describing as "magic" is in fact, spiritualism. Which has its place certainly--in the real world even, one could argue, but it's not in any fantasy I want to read or play in.
It implies a certain antiscientific attitude really. Which is why in my opinion, the best magic is treated much like science. You even have things like the Eberon setting's Artificers, which are basically magical robotocists.
There are bigger issues I have with D&D, even as a fan of it. The whole idea of "Always [Alignment]" being chief among them.
Very few creatures are "Always [Alignment]", actually.
Demons are Always Chaotic Evil, but they... are Demons. Things like Assassin Vines are Always Neutral, but they're plants- they can't be Evil or Good.
Things like Naga, Kobolds and Ogres, though, are "Usually [Alignment]"- usually Chaotic Evil, or usually Lawful Evil, but not always.
I kind of have problems with "Usually [Alignment]" too, honestly. It's just easier to point out with "Always".
I don't think the idea is deliberately racist, but it certainly comes across as unintentionally so.
I do believe there's a difference, in worlds where alignments have actual power (and deities have alignments, too, and tend to get pissed if you don't follow them).
I also have problems with that.
Let's just say that Alignments are easily my least favorite part of D&D and call it a day. Because we'll be here all night if I go through everything I dislike about them.
(One of the things I like about Eberron, incidentally, is that it's a good more agnostic than most D&D settings. The power of the gods is significantly more ambiguous to whether or not it's actually such, and the gods don't definately-in-stone exist. Though that last part seems to wiff-waff a lot.)
This is the core of the matter. We have science. It can do amazing things. But magic that is so concrete and understood as to be comparable to science is just that -- science. You're just replacing the established rules of our reality with new ones, and often for much the same results. This has the benefit of resetting everyone's knowledge of how the setting works is set to the same standard, which is desirable in a game, but it fails to address the point.
Not necessarily. Partially, perhaps. Spiritualism is a matter of faith, religion, those kinds of things. But magic is perhaps more universal than spiritualism, because it doesn't work on the basis of belief, but on the basis of the observed bending or exceeding other observed phenomena. All that said, D&D and similar games seldom separate their magic from some form of spiritualism. You have any number of spells derived from some god or godess or deity or whatnot.
In essence, though, a magical spell tells a story in itself when properly used. There's at least two characters relevant to the spell, motives, desires, things like that. It's more than a rote tool for the characters in the story itself -- when properly used, magic is a tool for a storyteller to express something in abstract. And it's this kind of narrative hook that allows magic to take hook amongst the widest audience for the longest time. Because Average Joe and Jane don't give a damn about how to cast magic missile in D&D, but they might have enjoyed the character of Gandalf immensely while watching The Lord of the Rings. It's only adherents of game systems that demand a systemisation of magic, and I think that robs lots of people of understanding what magic is on its most fundamental level. And that's a factor of fiction, which can be abstracted to aid in telling a story. And a story has characters, relationships, a plot, twists. So magic has to work with that; it has to be similarly visceral and expressive to have an impact on a significant audience.
Not to appeal to popularity here, but I think I have a point, given that magic has worked this way in fiction for thousands of years and many of those stories are still well-loved today. I mean, no-one is going to give a damn about Dragonlance in a hundred years, but the tales of King Arthur will probably be with the world until the death of literature.
The thing about that, is that when magic is used that way, it's a shortcut.
It's cheap. It's a get-out-of-this-writing-corner free card. It's a deus ex machina. In the same category as literal divine intervention or the softest of soft science fiction.
Magic needs to have rules for it to not be that. It does not need to have a lot of them, they do not need to be explained in-depth, but they need to be there.
If you don't want to call magic with rules "magic" than, well, that is your decision.
Also what you're really objecting to at this point I think is the idea of explained magic. Which I've pointed out before I don't have the same problems with as you do.
I don't really think you're qualified to say what's to be important in the long run of human culture and what is not.
Also the more medieval D&D settings (such as Dragonlance) are easily the worst.
See the problem with saying magic with rules is a way to avoid the dreaded Deus Ex Machina, well that's not true at all. All a decent rule system requires is that you set up the information and rules in advance before you pull the solution out your ass. It's the old writer joke - how do you keep a plot resolution that came out of nowhere from being an asspull? Go back in and edit some hints and bread crumbs about it earlier in the story.
Only if you consider magic only in terms of plot. As I pointed out above, though, it's actually primarily a means of expression, characterisation and thematics. And usually, in the well-remembered stories, it's far outside the hands of the main characters. In fact, the protagonists are usually struggling against factors beyond their control by way of magic, which I think is a reasonably strong parallel for a very universal struggle -- fighting for stability in a world we don't fully understand. We all go through this, and so the mundane-hero-fights-magical-bastards premise has a kind of universal appeal. Everyone knows what it's like to suffer for things that are beyond their ability to deal with.
Even in the common hero's journey variation, the magical or mystical progression of the main character is tied to their character development. Rather than having a rote system of dealing with things, their power is tied in some way to their place along the path of their development, which, again, is a means of making the mysticism relevant to the audience. Like I said, your average punter doesn't care about what's required of a wizard to cast fireball, but if Luke Skywalker can only defeat the evil Empire and become a Jedi through understanding, compassion and forgiveness, then that says something about actual living, because those moral principles are relevant to all of us.
I can tell you this based on what data I have:
The broader part of any audience asks for their fiction to be relevant to them and to make raw, emotional, narrative sense moreso than anything else. Various premodern mythologies have survived hundreds or thousands of years based on this, and I daresay they'll be more survivable than the haphazard scribblings of most of today's fantasy authors. After all, they've already survived long past their point of origin and still form a basis of cultural mythology. Everyone knows who Robin Hood is, who Sir Lancelot is, who Jason is, and so on and so forth. And they'll continue to know, because those stories speak of relevant factors of human life, irrespective of the era one comes from. Robin Hood's stories are based around economic equivalence; Lancelot struggles with two responsibilities that contradict one-another; Jason and the Argonauts is a tale that argues against hubris.
Most fantasy stories that arise from D&D and its ilk, however, aren't in the same league of human relevance. After all, they weren't written and then organically consumed by a wide audience that naturally ensured their continuation and adaption. Stories drawn from the D&D standard of fantasy are written specifically to fill a niche audience and a niche need, and this usually means fanservice in the traditional sense, which means to have lots of nods towards an audience's existing knowledge or understanding of a situation, setting, characters or whatnot. These are stories written around the limitations of consistency with a set of game mechanics, and having to adhere to concepts constructed in order to provide a gameplay experience.
It's difficult to express how wide the rift between D&D-influenced fantasy and more organic fantasy often is. But the stories that come out of situations like this, including, often, the EU of established franchises, are unlikely to last. They fulfill specific market needs rather than existing, in their own right, as organic stories. So while I can't foresee the exact shape of literature in the year 2112, I can at least use the past to extrapolate patterns of the future. And I don't see a broad future for the kind of fantasy that has arisen from D&D, because it has none of the fundamental elements that ensure something lasts. There's a fair chance it'll survive in the form of niche entertainment, but it simply doesn't have a broad enough appeal or pull to be relevant to a wide range of people.
Okay I've totally lost interest in this conversation.
I don't really think we were going to reach a consensus anyway, so I'll let y'all be. It doesn't really matter to me.
it is futile to argue with the alex
for he will drown you in words. and swords
and swords made of words
and words made of swords
Yeah admittedly at a certain point I hit a wall where I can't read posts after they're so long unless I'm really into the subject.
alex is just mad because there aren't any swordliches
Sure there are. They're called Death Knights.
Reasons exist that there's no Death Knight template, I assume.
There is.
Well fuck me running.
....wait this is a class. Isn't Lich a template much like "zombie" and so on?
Also this seems to be homebrew, either that or it's just formatted poorly here.
It's just formatted badly- there's an entire section on the site devoted to homebrew, and this isn't in it.
Lich is indeed a template, and a Deathknight is not one. You could, however, add the Lich template to a Fighter or Barbarian.
I suppose this is true.
Liches are kind of strange in general. I like them, but as far as phylactery-having undead go, I prefer the more obscure um.....
well they're so obscure I've evidently forgotten their name. The things that look like mummies covered in spell scrolls. Those are pretty rad.
See here's the thing.
Just because the writer knows the rules doesn't mean the reader has to know.
It can be internally consistent and have boundaries, you just have to make it seem like there aren't. Alex is not talking about whether magic should have rules or not; that is not disputed.
He's saying that people don't tell stories with the proper mystique and shadow and vagueness. And for the most part, I agree with him; there just aren't enough fantasies where the fictional worlds are shaped to mirror particular aspects of humanity.
Could you give some examples of this?
To be the fantasy wank, I'm going to up and say Lord of the Rings. In that world, everyone knows that they're in a heroic saga, whose rules function not unlike an opera. People have heard all the right stories, have seen the right things, and they always, always know when and who is doing what and going where, so they can chorus at just the right times.
For a more recent work, there's Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. It doesn't become apparent at first, but for metamultiverse reasons, their entire world and culture is built around the concept of "honor". People define their personalities by it or by the lack of it, there is a civilization-building text on its merits, and even some of the magic is linked to honor.
Only Alethkar.
The most obvious one is Terry Pratchett's Discworld setting, where belief is what shapes the world, empowers gods and validates sprites like the Tooth Fairy and the Hogfather (Father Christmas, essentially). Wizards attempt to measure the world's magic via the theoretical "narrativium" chemical element, but witches just use headology, which seems to work better. But the line between the world being shaped by belief and belief causing a string of self-fulfilling prophecies is not always quite clear; if you're convinced cause A will have effect B, and act according to that belief, it's more likely to actually happen in many cases in our own real world. Thus what gives the Discworld it's relevance; it's really just an exaggerated version of our world, where all the "rules" are the same insofar as human behaviour and outcomes are concerned. It's just the the Discworld is a place where belief has literal effects that phase through human psychology.
That's a good example, really. Forgot about that.
The thing is that fantasy worlds are not our world. But it can mirror it, and to mold that fictional world to focus us and the things we do is a truly wondrous thing.
Games are one thing. Movies, television, and books are quite another.
So, honor, belief, those kinds of things.
Could it be something more physical? Material? Like a resource? Or is that not thematic enough?
There could conceivably be a fantasy world entirely about oil.
But for it to resonate, it would have to be about our dependence on such a thing.
^^ Not thematic enough, really. If it's too physical and material, you run into the problem of highly systemised magic where said magic is merely window-dressing and lacks any kind of raw, fundamental relevance. In most real world cultures, magic is linked to some kind of internal force rather than anything that can be effectively quantified. One example might be the quasi-magic of chivalric romances, themed around implicit divine intervention: basically, knights in those stories draw power from their virtue; when they are true to their virtues, things work out really nicely and they can overcome stupid odds. Failing those virtues often takes them down the path of ruin.
Similar is the Asian concept of "mana". In games, this is generally thought of as being a limited resource. Under actual the actual spiritual theory of its origins, though, mana is not something that depletes, but ebbs and flows with the person who harnesses it. Doing something amazing isn't thought to deplete mana, but to be evidence that someone has a lot of it.
So throughout the bulk of human history, in both culture and in narrative, magic has been thought to be linked to emotions and actions above all else. In addition, magic wasn't always thought to be intentional; someone could accidentally cast a spell, without anyone knowing including themselves, in a fit of emotion. Thus the term "wizard" in Old English, which translates as "wise man". Because to harness magic wasn't a matter of necessarily knowing the secret words (although it could be!) but of the application of insight above all else. Then there are objectively proven "magics" that lost their definition as magic via scientific advancements. One example might be the forging of a sword; in Viking culture, the capacity to work metal was considered a kind of magic, and it was the only form of magic that men were allowed to harness. So having a pattern-welded sword was to have an object believed to be magical, inspiring fear in one's adversaries. If the sword broke, that didn't mean it wasn't magical -- it just meant the spell of its binding was broken. Obviously!
^ That's more like it.
Mana is actually Pacific-Islander; not really Asia at all.
My mistake, then. That said, my other information should be correct.