CCC game - now Magic and genre discussion

[communistplot]

I think Kath's idea is ballin'.

As for kind of setting, I'd prefer anyone where hominids predominate, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter that much.

[KathTheDragon]

I think Kath's idea is ballin'.

I would feel so much better if I understood what that means.

[Salmoneus]

I think he means 'good', though I wouldn't bet on it.

Personally, I'm not sure what your idea means beyond 'some things/people have more magic than others', which is almost a universal of magic systems.

[There's a point - why IS that? Are there any everyone-is-equally-powerful settings?]

[KathTheDragon]

Well, everyone could be equally powerful. I guess it depends on what you want. But, my system still restricts what you can actually do with magic. All most people will ever see are people doing stage magic and hard labour without actually breaking their back over it.

[ol bofosh]

I like Kath's system, that if there's magic, then each species

Though I imagine that though most individuals of a species average "6" (for example), there mayt not be anything stopping one individual going higher, say to "8".

edit: I'm working on an humanoid amphibian species. Got a basic description, reproduction and still need to work on vocalisation and magic abilities (dependent on magic-quality of world).

edit 2: I'm thinking about pre-sapient social models from which might be adapted a variety of possible societies and civilisations.

edit 3: there's an entire life cycle too.

[communistplot]

I think Kath's idea is ballin'.

I would feel so much better if I understood what that means.

Sal's right, it's good. Sorry, sometimes I write in local forms and I forget not everyone is from NY, or an AAVE speaker.

[KathTheDragon]

Though I imagine that though most individuals of a species average "6" (for example), there mayt not be anything stopping one individual going higher, say to "8".

The fairly arbitrary 'limits' I gave were intended to prevent any one individual from being too OP. Also, you can get points on the scale like 4.67. It's continuous.

[Pressed Bunson]

Every single thing has a magical 'aptitude', ranging between 0 and 10. Non-living things have an aptitude of 0. Plants and simple organisms have aptitudes ranging from 0 to 1. More complex animals have aptitudes ranging from 1 to 3. Intelligent animals have aptitudes ranging from 3 to 4.

Um, why are there separate levels for these if A) they can't use magic anyhow and B) even if they could, most of them wouldn't be able too?

Wait, I think I might have an idea for how levels lower than 5 affect things. Are there, like, potions and eye-of-newt type stuff that you can use to enhance your magic, and the higher the aptitude of the materials the bigger the effect of the object?

[KathTheDragon]

Maybe. Tbh, I really didn't think it through. I was half-asleep. However, I think we'll let Newt keep his eye. For now.

[Pressed Bunson]

However, I think we'll let Newt keep his eye. For now.

*wree wree wree wree _{wree wree wree wree} ^{wree wree wree wree*}

[Ars Lande]

* How much magic is allowed?

None to weaksauce. Or perhaps more, if that's the consensus; but I'd like for people - such as myself or Torco - to be able to leave out magic without too much consequence or a lack of coherence.

* What genre are we aiming at?
.

No strong opinion.

[ol bofosh]

Though I imagine that though most individuals of a species average "6" (for example), there mayt not be anything stopping one individual going higher, say to "8".

The fairly arbitrary 'limits' I gave were intended to prevent any one individual from being too OP. Also, you can get points on the scale like 4.67. It's continuous.

Oh, okay. So the difference between 6 and 8 is bigger than I thought. What I was thinking is that the magic average won't always be uniform. It might be good to have in mind upper and lower limits, as well as the average.
Not including individuals that discover an ancient tome that turns them into gods and take them off the face of the earth into dimensions beyond ours.

I've created a "magic capacity" for my amphibimorphs. Just as an option in case of magic. Even if there is no magic, or low amounts, it can be turned into a "natural ability".

[KathTheDragon]

If you like, replace the scale with a logarithmic one. That's more or less how I envisioned it.

@Ars Lande: My magic system allows for 0 magic in a population.

[Torco]

Kath's idea is basically harry potter and D&D and every other ladle it on magic system ever. No, actually, its even bigger: it is the system with the most magic imaginable: that is to say, a system where everything is the result of an omnipotent wizard <described here as level 9 or 10> and there are also some non-magical things, as there are in all magical settings. I can imagine no system that is more towards "lade it on" and less towards "there is no magic", the variance being merely how concentrated this ultimate godlike all-encompassing magical power is.

Are there any everyone-is-equally-powerful settings?

If they are I don't know them... because unequal godlikeness is at the core of magic: Its a variation, or perhaps a radicalization, or the traditional problem of hero power inflation treadmill; you know, the reason for this: there are powerful people who are basically the characters in the story, and there are irrelevant people, the extras in the movie, who are preternatually inept at everything so as to provide a foil for the character's competent heroicism and the nemesis's evil powers.

Torco's Tirade on Magic
In a story the hero needs to be fluidly powered: on the one hand, he needs to be vulnerable because if he's not then no threat is real, and thus there's no tension, but at the same time he needs to be godlike, or at least superman-like, because how else is he going to perform those epic feats like defeating the entire legion of baddies in a single, dramatic battle sequence? Magic is the solution to this tension: its not that he's the hulk with armor, he's got some "magic" <which is a shorthand for improbable or impossible things happen whenever the plot demands it, most of the time> which allows him to be godlike when the plot demands it, but remain vulnerable when the plot needs a threat to be established so the audience feels cathartic when he escapes it. Also, magic is cosmetically appealing: I mean, what else are we going to spend the visual effects budget?

I think that outside Magic-As-Plot-Device, even the most subtle magic, if taken to its logical conclussion, will take over a world completely and make it as much a world about magic as ours is a world about technology: furthermore, since magic has some essential differences from technology the resulting state of things ends up not being about the functional interplay of complex dynamics, not a real thing that is emergent and feels like it organically follows out of understandable mechanics, surprising and complex and shaped by dynamics that are almost understandable but not quite... its about the Will of the Overmage and the smaller mages who struggle with him. It makes people irrelevant, since nonmages are basically ants in a world where mages can do magic, insects amongts gods. In most stories set in places with magic, however, the narrator realizes that he still wants his world to look like, you know, a world, and so he either comes up with artificial and contrived limitations to what magic can do that explain why there still exist other people and why they have anything to do at all, or he just ignores it, making the world feel as disjointed as the flintsones 1960ies america with dinosaurs inside the technology:... I mean, a single powerful mage in D&D, for example, could keep a small town fed permanently, so it would logically follow that the most efficient use of one's time in such a village is to make sure the Mage likes you, right? [wrong: in actual settings with magic there is either some contrived reason why this doesn't work, or mages are conveniently retards, or the things they make are "not really real"]. Or take Harry Potter, is there any reason mages don't want to be caught by muggles, besides the author still wanting her setting to look recognizable? Same with Vampire the Masquerade, where a single powerful vampire could easily take over the world: but they don't, because they need the whole thing to look like the modern world so as to keep the cool factor.

I know I sound a bit extreme, and maybe I am. But it seems transparent to me that -without such contrivances as I mention above to the contrary- even very modest magical powers held by even a tiny minority of people would transform the world completely in such a way that the existence of those powers would affect every other sphere of culture, economics, politics and everyday life. For example, lets take even modest healing powers held by something like 1% of the population of our nice medieval setting: Let's limit this even further: healing powers can't immediately heal wounds, for example, nor can they bring the dead back to life or do anything that looks even remotely fantastic: a blessing from a healer can mend things like the flu and bronchitis, and an even stronger healer, say one in a thousand, can heal most non-viral infections. Sounds pretty mild, doesn't it? I mean its not like we're having clerics chanting something and the the guy who almost lost a limb is now walking around, wielding his sword again. Soo, this would be more or less mild, right? I'm sorry, but we've just thrown the entire cosmos into disarray.

For one thing, about 30% of infant mortality <which is one of the biggest differences between premodern and modern worlds> is caused by stuff like the flu and bronchitis. This means that in anythin but the smallest hamlets infant mortality is down 30%, which is pretty amazing. Furthermore, and perhaps most amazingly, you've just cured sexually transmitted diseases. Well, not AIDS, but most STDs are now just a matter of going to the mage and have them woosh it away. Even further, you now have a class which holds incredible political power, basically an entire 0,1% of the local populations are rasputin. If you eliminate bacterial infections and STDs you would have a very different social structure indeed: strong restrictions on sexual behavior become less and less relevant, kind of the way they did with our pills and antibiotics, and look what that did to us <I love it, but its deep change>. Depending on how you do the math, something like one fifth of deaths by diease in our modern world is due to bacterial infection. You've basically given a premodern culture antibiotics. And this is one extremely limited, very specific form of magic you've given them. Take climate control and suddenly the most valuable thing for any feudal lord is a slave mage. Take kinesis and you've basically brought about the industrial revolution. A single diviner in the world would, depending on the circumstances, either be the most powerful entity in a setting or its most powerful slave, and any sort of leader with a reliable diviner is basically unbeatable: so the world hangs on whether that diviner lies to the emperor.

This is a fine aesthetic choice for stories, I guess [it's basically that movie with The Rock and that hot chick, the Scorpion King was it?], but deletes the whole delightful complexity that I so like about conworlding. Conworlds with enough magic [and it takes very little to be enough] become, to my eyes, rather like bags where stuff the author thinks is cool have been thrown: why is anything in a world with magic the way it is? because a wizard did it. or forgot to do it, or wants *you* to do it, or not do it. Maybe its got to do with my new atheist leanings, since this is basically the world of theism, if you substitute wizard with god [the ultimate wizard]... Christopher Hitchens used to describe the world i theistic worldviews as a kind of cosmological north korea, where the Dearest Leader actually *does* hold total power. I can't help but imagine that if any sort of magic that's beyond irrelevant were in existence, the world where that magic exists would indeed become such that the guy with the most magic is the dearest leader, simply because magic is, in sociological terms, an infinite source of capital on the one hand, and and infinitely convertible form of capital on the other. Anything beyond pretty weaksauce magic [or incredibly hard to use magic, I suppose.... the kind where you might as well not use it at all except when the risk factor is reduced to zero because the plot demands it] would yield, without contrivances specifically designed so that it doesn't, an world irrecognizably different from ours. a world where labour is pointless and doesn't generate value or is ground into irrelevance by magic's competition... where the only people who are even remotely relevant are The Chosen and where the Great Man Interpretation of History is actually true: where the only motor of history <and geography, and ecology, and EVERYTHING> is A Wizard Did It. Where nothing matters but the Will of the Mages.

Alternatively, the breach between magic-as-intended and magic-as-non-intended is never adressed, and leaves the world feeling like its made of cardboard cutouts: like when in an RPG the mage casts "gale winds" sixty-three times in the fight against the kobolds that besiege the port only to then board a galleon to the evil lich's den and get stranded on the ocean when the winds cease to blow, or the pokemon master who is suffering from thirst with a Blastoise who only throws water during battles in his pokebackpack. Or the cleric who mends seventy-nine hitpoints off the dragon-chewed barbarian but is powerless against the King's
Pneumonia.

I say Lovecraft got it right: magic that is nor cardobard is obscene, and alien, and any world where it reigns is irreconizably, mind-bendingly alien. The point of magic is that it is irreconcilable with the mundane world... and come to think of it, <oh, how anticlimatic>, I *do* like those worlds: the full of magic, but where magic is something dark and world-warping, something which makes it entirely impossible for life to be anything but subservient to it, or destroyed by it. you know, Warhammer 40k, that old SNES game Blackthorne, Lovecraft's Mythos, Borges' Work, you know... even Arcanepunk! Its just... "a normal world that has magic in it but other than that its a completely normal world" is just... what? 0_o

/rant

So needless to say I'd go with none, then next to none, then next to next to none, all the way into weaksauce.

As for species... I'd prefer primates. That being said, if we go with fantasy I much prefer something weird that makes sense [such as, say, swamp semiarboreal cuttlefish who have evolved language and civilization alongside people, or highly intelligent birds] than something inexplicably anthropomorphic frogs, teenage mutant ninja turtles or furries.

formally: vote, then, is none for magic, and... either fantasy or primates/hominids for species.

[KathTheDragon]

Um, what, Torco? I think you've got it all wrong. I explicitly said there should only be a handful of individuals throughout history who are even at 7. That's far from all-powerful.

Also, I do not see the likeness with Harry Potter or D&D. There is no magical healing, no magical 'repair this, fix that', no 'haha magical lightning bolt out of my hands!'. None of that nonsense. The majority of any magic-using population would literally only be able to make hard labour easier, or entertain the non-magical masses.

[Torco]

Well, that's just a matter of concentration of magicness, or Population Median Magical Power, I feel: the system, way I read it, is such that magic is an all-powerful force, even if only one or two guys actually have all-powerful magic. I mean, 8 is controlling *space and time* [basically professor Xavier's son], and there's a couple of levels above that!.

The degrees of magicness, as Sal points out, is pretty much a feature of all systems of magic <including D&D and Harry Potter> so all that I had left to individualize the system itself is that a) the highest levels of magical power are godlike [this is basically what you said] and b) there doesn't seem to be any natural limit to the *ways* that godlike power can be exerted other than how strong the force is with this or that person <what level of magicness do they have, or where they are in the god-protagonist-stormtrooper-villager continuum they find themselves in>. That is, to my eyes, a pretty unlimited system. <which maybe think was kind of your point?, a conciliatory "if someone wants magic, let them have magic, if someone doesn't want magic, then they can not have magic?>

[edit: "the majority of people can make hard labour easier through magic" sounds pretty... ladle it on, if you ask me]

[KathTheDragon]

There's only one level above controlling space-time, since 10 is the upper bound. The levels are actually between the numbers.

I still need to work out the details, but on the whole, I don't want it to be limitless. With magic users between 5 and 6, I've already decided that they should be limited to whatever they could do without magic. So, you can't lift a mountain, for example. Or even a giant boulder. I'm not sure yet how users between 6 and 7 should be limited, and I'm going to ignore 7 and above, since there really shouldn't be anyone there (all I need to know is that such levels exist to complete the scale)

But yes, I guess the way I did it was primarily to make something workable, whilst still allowing those such as yourself to not use it. All you have to do is decree that no-one in your species can be above 5.

[Torco]

See but that's where it gets disjointed and cardoboardy, because we want this conworld to a rather cohesive thing, not a wikimap where each person has their Thing that are causally isolated from all other Things [this is what we want, is it not?]: even if I were to say that "my guys" don't have magical powers they're not retarded, magic *is a thing in their world*, even if its forever banned to them: it'd be pretty dumb of them, for example, *not* to capture and enslave [or coopt or something] a foreign wizard and put him to work at, I don't know, conjuring up rain for the drought or whatever else it is wizards *do* at such incredibly above-human levels of ability. It'd be like some earth-culture oddly ignoring the effects of the moon because the author didn't quite like the idea of a large satellite in such close proximity.

A world with magic is a world with magic, is my point, and that fact ["this world this much magic"] has consequences deep and wide-ranging for everything in that world: what you're suggesting [that unlike in our world, in CCC there's godlike magical powers available to <some> people but in some places of the world that doesn't happen to have any visible effects] is, well... it feels all cosmetic and shallow, like magic is something simply sprinkled on the cake after baking to make it shinier. Its like if we decided that this world's sun outputs six times less light but that anyone who doesn't want to deal with the repercussions of that can have their sentient species have eyes that are six times more sensitive.

[ol bofosh]

Now I'm thinking that I should have invented a race completely incapable of using magic, yet also completely immune to its effects. The would be surrounded by an "anti-magic aura", which neutralises magic directly. The more auras together in an area of space, the more powerful the anti-magic auras become, amplifying each other.
Maybe for another time!

In fact, that's what's happening on earth, and why there is "no such thing as magic". The collective power of our auras on the earth neutralises all magic, but magic still exists in other parts of the universe. The moon is just on the periphery of humanity's anti-magic aura's influence, which is why armstrong could turn half invisible (but not fully invisible).

All magical races from myths did exist, but were driven off by the power of our aura, perhaps just before the first written records of human history were written (but don't tell the scientists that). There are magical humans (a secret sub-race that do live among us, but don't and can't interbreed with us), but they cannot use their powers at all. They'd have to leave the planet, but they can't because they can't use their magic. The majority of the remaining magical creatures ended up in Australia, but are left without powers. Don't tell me the platypus is for real!!!

[Torco]

xD I love that!
Incidentally, I think there have been stories told in modern times that have that exact approach to magic, except that its not that humans have an anti-magic field, but that our cultural disbelief in magic actively dampens it; which explains why its only those who believe in magic that, within the context of the story, experience it. And also, why its in stories but not in the actual world as is appears to us here and now.

[Salmoneus]

Torco: so your argument is, 'magic sucks because authors who write about magic are all idiots', and your evidence for this is a game mechanic and a series of popular children's novels?

I'm not sure why you fixate on 'visual effects budget' - most genre works are never filmed. Are you really just bitter about the LotR films? Because I don't think much of their visual effects budget actually went on the magic in that.

Yes, you're right that the idea of magic is to enable people to do certain things while still leaving them unable to do other things. But I don't feel you adequately explain what's meant to be bad about that - after all, that's also true of plumbing, and allen keys.

Who said anything about defeating legions of baddies, or indeed battle scenes? And if you do have such a scene, a machine gun, or indeed a well-placed couple of bowmen, would likewise be able to mow down legions of badguys, while being amply vulnerable at other times. So what is the specific problem with mages?

Our world isn't a world about technology. At least, the world I see isn't. Maybe that's how you see your life, but myself, and so far as I can see most of those I know, our world is about the things it was always about (human relationships, truth, beauty, goodness, duty, whimsy, whatever), only with fewer distractions. Just because the world has a lot of technology in it doesn't make everything ABOUT technology. And likewise with magic.

Magic has no essential differences from technology, because magic has no essence. Magic is not one thing, it's a catch-all category for a whole load of things defined primarily through negation. 'Magic' varies from being indistinguishable from technology through to be entirely unlike technology in every way. Forgotten Realms novels and Harry Potter aren't the only books in the world!

No, people are not ants in a world with magic. That's like saying people are ants in a world where people have invented fire, because nuclear holocaust can obliterate them all. You can, if you want, make a world where people are ants beneath the heels of the great overmage, but you don't have to - just as not all worlds with technology in them have nuclear holocaust, or world-destroying nanobots, or or cameras in your retinas that send feeds to be processed by the omnicomputer.

I don't see why it's bad to have limitations on what mages can do. There are also limitations on what fire-wielding cavemen can do. True, the second set can be based on history to some extent, whereas the former limitations have to be made up - but making stuff up is kind of the point of fiction, and of fantasy in particular. All aspects of conworlds, or alternate histories, or even characters in books set in Chile in 2014, are ultimately arbitrary, because none of these things are real.

No, a single powerful mage probably couldn't keep a village fed permanently in D&D. And there'd only be two or three of him in the world, so that's only two or three mage-run villages, and they'd have to be so busy feeding people that they'd be quite easy to kill (D&D wizards, remember, can only cast a limited number of spells before having to rest and study. D&D magic is essentially specialised ammunition - it sounds like you're saying that bullets mean that the whole world must be run by the man with the biggest machinegun, and that suggesting a man can only carry so much ammunition is an intolerably arbitrary limitation). [But yes, even then, lots of parts of D&D settings ARE ruled over by mages and everybody has to be nice to them. Dark Sun, for instance, is about primitive and brutal slave cities in thrall to their draconic god-kings, and the rebels who hide out in the barely-habitable desert]
Similarly, in V:TM, even the most powerful vampire is fairly helpless against enough people with enough weapons, not to mention that taking on humanity, even if you won, would mean being weakened enough to be killed by your rivals or subordinates.


Yes, being able to lower infant mortality would make a bit of a difference, but you're vastly overstating how much. You're talking about reducing the infant mortality rate from, say, 300 to about 200. That's nice - it's not any larger than pre-modern differences in hygeine, climate etc already made (infant mortality probably varied from about 200 to 400 through most of history, depending on the time and the place). But it doesn't even begin to come close to modernity, because in most of the developed world the infant mortality rate is less than 1. A 30% decline is all well and good, but the transformation into modernity involved a 99.7% decline. So in other words, yes, in your model magic would affect the society... but probably less than soap, a good gynaecology textbook, a more reliable staple crop or a bigger granary might.

And your model, by the way, bear little relation to most fantasy settings. A magical healer in every village? A magical healer who can almost always eradicate any non-viral infection? Yeah, and if every single person in society is a 9th-level mage, then things would be very different, but almost always, they're not.

[Incidentally, regrowing a missing leg would be far easier than curing infections. Missing legs are conceptually pretty simple, we just don't have the tools atm to activate the cells in that way. Infections are ferociously difficult, and each one is different. Even in the 21st century, we still can't cure all bacteriological diseases, and when we can it's only because we've followed the principle of "let's put this random natural substance in there and see what happens".]

No, 0.1% of the population isn't Rasputin... they're doctors. Who, yes, are powerful people. But they're not god-emperors.

Of course reducing the rate of minor STDs won't have any substantial consequences for social structure. What economic fundamentals are altered by reducing the rate of chlamydia in the population? Societal regulation of sex isn't about crabs, it's about lineage and affiliation and property rights. Only two STDs have maybe had the power to have a significant influence on society, syphillis and AIDS, and even syphillis didn't have a big impact (AIDS might have had some influence on sexual mores, but to be honest I'm somewhat skeptical, at least in terms of the mainstream). And both of those are modern.

Similarly with other magics, you assume that every magic user is a god. As opposed to, in most settings, none of them. [The kinesis one in particular is just silly. Being able to lift rocks a little more easily (at usually considerable cost) does not make an industrial revolution. Having steam engines for two thousand years didn't make an industrial revolution. Having wholly mechanised factories didn't make an industrial revolution (have you SEEN the power and complexity of mediaeval mills?). One guy who can briefly put out two horsepower and then needs to go lie down for the afternoon does not an industrial revolution make - put that mage down in the mediaeval rhineland and they wouldn't even notice him over the sound of the buzzsaws.]

If you can't see any middle ground between nothing and everything, that's not the fault of literature, that's a problem with your own reasoning and imagination.

Yes, some D&D DMs aren't very good. But if your argument relies not just on assuming all fantasy is D&D, but also on assuming all D&D is D&D with a terrible DM, that's really on you.

[zompist]

I've tried to summarize the preferences expressed so far:

Ars Lande - no magic, or if it's there, "constrained, either by limited scale, or by unreliability, or whatever"
Torco - no magic; settle for "tiny weaksauce magic" - "divination, techniques to enhance health, intuition and mental peace"
Salmoneus - "lots of magic"
Civil War Bugle - "minimal or no magic"
Lyhoko Leaci - "lots of magic"
alassion - "prefer either more or weaksauce over none. "
Ahzoh - "limited magic, more than weaksauce "
olf bofosh - "weaksauce" > "more"
KathAveara - telekinesis common, "more complex kineses" rare
Vidurnaktis - agrees with Kath

OK, this is pretty hard to harmonize. However, I think "no magic" is a minority preference, and shouldn't be imposed on the majority who want to explore the use of magic.

Here's what I'd suggest as ground rules:

1. Magic exists, but it correlates with species. That means:

1a. You can declare your species non-magical.

1b. Your species definition should suggest what magical abilities your people have. This gets away from the requirement that everyone agree on a single magical system.

2. Magic resists cross-species use. In general your magic can't affect another species. If it involves control over nature, it fades out or fails in territories with a large concentration of another species.

3. Magic should not give its species a consistent competitive edge. This is partly taken care of by (2), but as with any striking power, it should either be limited, or come with disadvantages, so it doesn't take over the world.

4. Just as on Earth, people can claim magical powers they don't really have, and this can get mixed up with stimulant and hallucinogens, mesmerism, ecstatic states, etc.

(If it helps to swallow all this, maybe think of magic not like gravity, which is universal and omnipresent, but like radioactivity, which is concentrated in certain elements or procedures, and thus can be present in some places or creatures and not others.)

(Note-- I talk about "your species" for convenience, as we're designing species right now. When we get to cultures, you can use any species-- you aren't limited to using the one you submitted.)

[KathTheDragon]

May I suggest an amendment to 2? Namely that it it can't be used in another species' territory. If they come and invade, you ought to get your full arsenal.

[ol bofosh]

I like the guidlines, Zompist. I think water divining humanoid frogs can cope with that.

Kath, that seems a bit weird to me, then we're not talking about constucting one world but worlds that somehow fit together. The limit of not using magic directly on another race seems reasonable enough. And not using magic in a "large concentration" of another species seems good too, instead of being dependent on specific geographical territories.

And "territories" might break down at a later date. We could become cosmopolitan.

Edit: following this rule strictly would mean that Matrix's golem would stop functioning around other species (they are magical, not just "users of"). I propose an exception in this case. Amphibimorphs losing water divining skills (sensing presence, quality and movement of water) isn't such a biggy. Some of it is natural ability anyway, not just magic/psychic.

[Torco]

Torco: so your argument is, 'magic sucks because authors who write about magic are all idiots'

not really, no. I don't even dislike the idea of magic, in *theory*. I make no secret that I generally don't like magic, <though I do when done right>, but that's not my point here, though.
I'm basically saying -or trying to say- two things.

a) magic, when included for cool factor without consideration to how it would affect the world, or designing such magic's limitations explicitly as to have no significant impact on economics, politics, culture, society and so on as to make it basically a normal world that is the way it would be if no magic existed, except it also has magic is, in my opinion, pretty shallow and has a cardboard feel to it.
b) if not constrained by said sanitizing, it doesn't take very powerful magic for it to impact the world in ways about as deep as fire or domestication has affected ours. And that's rarely taken into account in magic systems.

Its kind of how zompist says it: Okay, sure, magic is more like radioactivity than like gravity: why not. Still, radioactivity <or, indeed, radioactive elements> profoundly impacted the world. Magic should too. I fixate on special effects budgets as an illustration of precisely that: included because its pretty with little consideration to how it would impact the world. I have no problem with magic being not omnipotent [allows you to do some things but not other things]; but some of the limitations imposed on it are silly and transparently made to keep the impressive fireballs but keep the world otherwise unchanged.

Also, what I mean by *about* technology is that it is more or less absolutely permeated by it. Most aspects of your life are influenced or made possible by modern technology, even if not about them phenomenically. You make a good comparison that fire doesn't mean cavemen are perpetually under the shadow of nuclear holocaust [and yeah, I was exaggerating a bit with the whole ants thing]... but I'm quite sure you know that caveman society was pretty deeply affected by fire. I feel its all too easy to make a system of magic that is effectively "there exists fire, but it doesn't affect anything about the society, culture or economy of these people except they can scare wolves with it".

Zompist's ground rules, I think, don't really address the problem of how magical the world is, its merely Kath Aveara's 'everyone has a different amount of magical power' plus qualitative differences <every species has its own way it does magic as well, which is inborn and not cultural and thus probably stems from biology>.

This focus on competitive edges and balancing strikes me as odd: its not like we're playing civilization; some species are going to become extinct <or marginalized> and one or two will become dominant, were those not the parameters of the game? since what species wins and which ones lose is going to be determined by people voting on which ones they prefer it doesn't matter how strongly magical, or how strongly anything they are: voting's our source of balance.

Also, when people keep to their own kind and don't mix up with other races, magic happens. but when different kids mix then the magic is gone. Mages can only operate, thus, in racially pure environments =/
Why not just have magic, if we have magic? there's nothing wrong with different kinds using magic in conflicts with each other, way I see it, plus magic is not the only ability these guys are going to differ: If I get around to it I'm submitting 3,5 metre-tall hominids, whom even without magic would be pretty scary people. Someone might as well submit a dragon: I think that the choice of how much magic and what kind of magic should be more about the kind of setting do we want, as opposed to making sure no species uses their magic to dominate the entire world: after all, one species using their magic to dominate the entire world is a perfectly valid choice, isn't it [considering that we seem to be not bent towards godlike magic anyway] ? I mean I don't fancy the notion of a world dominated by magic, but I certainly prefer it to one where magic is just cosmetic.

Edit: following this rule strictly would mean that Matrix's golem would stop functioning around other species (they are magical, not just "users of"). I propose an exception in this case.

If we do stay with the 'magic only works when there's no miscegenation' thing I suppose their magic power might be immunity to magic-dampening fields or something. I mean they pretty much couldn't exist otherwise.