Hydroeccentricity wrote:I don't like the idea of magic having a "cost," when it pops up in fantasy literature. It implies (like the example of Harry Potter, above) that magic is an extra thing laid over top of an already plausible world.
Couldn't agree more. There's this random blogger who has written about
magic systems, and in her post on
the cost of magic she makes the distinction that really captures the problem for me, namely that between internal and external costs. Internal costs are things intrinsic to the magic itself, such as draining life force, sacrificing small children, blah blah blah. As you said, the problem with these is that they seem to just be overlaid on top of the rest of the world and they make magic feel like something separate and different. Now, for many people that's exactly what they want magic to be—mysterious and different—and if that's their preference, then all the power to them. But I prefer magic systems where the magic comes across as a natural part of the character's world. It's magic to us, because it breaks the pesky laws that are killing me in my thermodynamics course right now, but to the characters the "magic"
is the pesky laws that they fail courses over, the physics of their universe, so to speak, although I like to avoid the term "alternate physics" because it suggests realism and deep analysis which is more than necessary. To use TVTropes terminology, I find something appealing in
functional magic: it doesn't matter how plausible the rules are—you can build me an enjoyable story over "clap your hands and time will stop, allowing you to move even though the frozen air molecules have nowhere to be displaced to and should hold you in place, and what's more how are you breathing anyways?—no, it doesn't matter to me, as long as your magic is
consistent and fits in with the other elements of the story, and with the storyworld as a whole.
This is where those external costs come in. Internal costs make it difficult for the magic to fit in because the consequences seem so arbitrary. Why does the magic require you to sacrifice that small child? Why do you need the blood of the fourth son of the fifth house of Doo-Wap? Sure, all magic rules are arbitrary, but some of them just seem to be arbitrary chosen to cause the protagonist pain. Well, of course the protagonists have to face consequences for their actions—that's what makes the story interesting, after all—but that's where external costs come in. As random blogger asks: What about the villagers in the town that you just blocked off with a landslide? What about everybody else in the city that your calling heaven's fire upon? Needed to bend some water on the fly and grabbed it from the nearby plant life? Congrats, you just destroyed the livelihood of the man you were sent to befriend. Nice job breaking it, hero!
Focusing on external rather than internal costs makes the magic fit in more elegantly because, if magic is how your characters manipulate the world around them, external costs better mimic the challenges that we face in real life. The laws of thermodynamics are fundamentally simple. Heat flows from hot to cold. The universe becomes more disordered. Well, work with me here: though these assumptions are still of some debate, particularly the latter, let's assume that we're responsible for global warming, and that global warming is responsible for all sorts of environmental ills. Did thermodynamics declare that the price of our teleportation would be starvation from more severe droughts, billions of dollars in property damage from more severe wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes, or immeasurable loss in human life?
It would be impossible for any storyteller to match the complex interactions that underlie the real world. But the base concept is not: instead of having the All-Truth amulet simply require the sacrifice of a loved one in order to unleash its power, work your plot to be a series of unhappy coincidences, or, better yet, a
thirty gambit pileup, which leads the hero to such an unwelcome choice. A cost as simple as having to rest and recuperate for a day, dismissed by random blogger as too temporary, more closely mimics the result of real-world exertion and, through clever plotting, can be just as devastating and much more satisfying then a more direct but less natural cost. Is it, for example, the magic itself which turns you insane in some mysterious and dangerous way, or the social ostracization that comes with being known and talked to only for what your magic can do, and then, by poor allocation of your limited resources, failing to use that magic effectively when it counted the most? I myself empathize more with the latter.
Hydroeccentricity wrote:A mediocre fantasy author wrote:
A slightly better fantasy author wrote:
Couldn't agree less, because
Hydroeccentricity wrote:This reduces "magic" to a pseudo-science, and its practitioners to technicians. Give CERN a few years and a hundred billion dollars and they'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Gi.
What, exactly, is wrong with this. I mean, of course it's a matter of personal preference, and I for one want to know as much about Gi as I can. Well, not really, actually, but this is where I think
Sanderson's First Law really comes into play: an author's ability to solve conflict satisfactorily with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. Your "slightly better" fantasy author has definitely captured the sense of wonder and mystery that many fantasy readers love, but Melishanda better not start praying to the gods during the climax. That scene would be great for establishing the feel of the world or developing Mel's character, but for "Would they listen to her pleading this time?" to be the resolution of any major plotline would be the definition of deus ex machina.
On the other hand, the "mediocre" fantasy writer has laid the foundations for Mel to use her magic at the moment of truth: we can hinge the resolution on how she manages to sneak the required metallic ore into the villain's all-wood headquarters, and thus give the reader the understanding they need to appreciate your conclusion.
Yng wrote: I was thinking implications for culture, for production, for economics - even at the most obvious level. Why is there no ice cream in the Forgotten Realms? Why has nobody created a police state with divination? Why do conventional armies even exist? Why is political organisation and technology approximately the same as a generic medieval country?
Yes, indeed. These are things which are fun to explore, and I'd love to see more works do so.
WeepingElf wrote: One way to go would be to have a world where magic does the job of modern technology, with people commuting to work on flying carpets and watching news and soap operas on crystal balls.
Ooh, magitek! I like. I love how, in The Last Airbender, the trains in Ba Sing Se are moved through earth bending, and how earth bending is used for the mail in Oma Shu, and how they propel submarines with water bending. I even love the mundane utilities, like how Katara using waterbending to stir soup while cooking. And then Korra started off like it might also look into the social effects of bending but then veered off into a much more boring story. Korra also has the lightningbenders producing electricity, which is great and all, but brings up another one of these "basic societal impact" questions: why are magicians always just throwing fireballs at each other instead of using them to boil water to turn turbines to move electrons?
WeepingElf wrote:But that is IMHO silly, and literally drains the magic out of magic.
Ah, well, mileage may vary and all. I recall that zompist said something similar about
Almea:
zompist wrote:I don't like fantasy magic systems that can be used like technology. Partly this is because I think it misses the point of fantasy— it's not supposed to be read like Popular Mechanics with altered physical laws. And partly it's because magic at the D&D level is just incompatible with a premodern world. You wouldn't have kings and peasants; you'd have essentially our modern world, with light spells in place of light bulbs and teleportation in place of cars.
This does make me wonder why I love functional magic and magitek so much, when by all rights it does render magic much less mysterious and quite similar to technology. But there's still something different between flying by innate ability and flying with an Iron Man suit. I think part of it is that a world with technology carries a lot of baggage about how we expect that technology to behave as an extension of the technology as we know today, whereas magic allows you to discard much of that baggage. I really like the idea of modern fantasy in the sense that magic is used to improve society, where the natural consequence of magic is things such as long-distance travel and communication, but in that I enjoy the opportunity to create and experience settings that still have distinct differences from our world. To go back to WeepingElf's point about commuting to work on flying carpets, I do agree that it's silly when you have essentially the same society as ours except with one-to-one magical replacements. New York with flying carpets and crystal balls instead of taxies and televisions can be a sort of silly fun, but what's really interesting is to stop, really consider the side effects of your magic system, and see where it leads you. In the end, a society where people can create fire on the fly would look no more like modern New York than it would medieval Europe.