The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[CleverNickName]

Even in the SciFi games that I occasionally run, that have no defined magic system, that "sufficiently advanced technology" that Clarke was talking about effectively is magic. Why bother with anything else?

I get that, and completely agree. The part that hurts my engineer brain is the assumption that it can do the impossible. Like FTL travel: somehow we will just figure out that the laws of physics weren't laws after all. Magic can do the impossible, because it's not real. Technology is real, and is therefore bound to possibility.

(deep breaths)

I'm usually pretty good at turning off my Engineer Brain in order to play video games, watch movies, and enjoy some D&D and Stars Without Number. But every now and then, the switch fails and I get hung up on it.

 

[J.Quondam]

I wonder if a certain strain of Fantasy fiction that tends to focus on the idea that magic has rules, and those rules can be understood, maybe shares some of the blame with D&D-type magic.

I wouldn't doubt it. It's not an especially new idea, is it? Pursuits like alchemy, numerology, astrology, traditional medicine, and so on are all about trying to explain or justify often fantastical things in codified, science-ish ways.
People LOVE picking out patterns in things.

 

[Ryujin]

I get that, and completely agree. The part that hurts my engineer brain is the assumption that it can do the impossible. Like FTL travel: somehow we will just figure out that the laws of physics weren't laws after all. Magic can do the impossible, because it's not real. Technology is real, and is therefore bound to possibility.

(deep breaths)

I'm usually pretty good at turning off my Engineer Brain in order to play video games, watch movies, and enjoy some D&D and Stars Without Number. But every now and then, the switch fails and I get hung up on it.

Some things you can hand-wave pretty effectively. We need faster than light travel? We'll use gravity to shorten the distance (wormholes, 'jump drives', artificial black holes...), rather than exceeding the hard speed limit. Star Trek technobabble.

I've mentioned the RPG Space Opera before. They had a psionics system that included teleportation, which wasn't part of the technological world of the game. (I added it to a limited extent with a singular Forerunner artifact.) They thought to include potential energy in the rules. You could teleport freely in open space or around the curvature of a planet, for example, but climbing out of a gravity well to any extend heated or cooled the psi who was teleporting. If you didn't have the telekinetic ability that permitted pyro/cryokenisis, then it could kill you just changing elevation.

Some things you don't really want science used for, even in your sciency game.

 

[Mannahnin]

In D&D in particular, magic is quantized into levels and spell slots, and quantified into damage or healing dice. It's categorized into schools and domains, taxonomized by "source." It's justified as emanating from vibrations in "the Weave" or some other aether-like substance that permeates everything like quantum foam or magnetic fields. The practitioners of D&D magic are ordered into a hierarchy of power, tapping into this background force, like batteries of different voltages. When you recall that so many gamers are techies or come from hard science or engineering backgrounds, you see that D&D magic is practically begging them to be picked apart pseudo-scientifically.

That's just a quality of highly-structured, D&D-like magic systems, imo. If it was less "designed" and more mystical, it wouldn't lend itself quite so readily to those sorts of discussions, I don't think.

* I say this because I'm guilty, too, as one who had many "conservation of energy", etc, discussions with fellow physics nerd gamers in college 30+ years ago.

I wonder if a certain strain of Fantasy fiction that tends to focus on the idea that magic has rules, and those rules can be understood, maybe shares some of the blame with D&D-type magic.

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth:

In this fashion did Turjan enter his apprenticeship to Pandelume. Day and far into the opalescent Embelyon night he worked under Pandelume's unseen tutelage. He learned the secret of renewed youth, many spells of the ancients, and a strange abstract lore that Pandelume termed "Mathematics."

"Within this instrument," said Pandelume, "resides the Universe. Passive in itself and not of sorcery, it elucidates every problem, each phase of existence, all the secrets of time and space. Your spells and runes are built upon its power and codified according to a great underlying mosaic of magic. The design of this mosaic we cannot surmise; our knowledge is didactic, empirical, arbitrary. Phandaal glimpsed the pattern and so was able to formulate many of the spells which bear his name. I have endeavored through the ages to break the clouded glass, but so far my research has failed. He who discovers the pattern will know all of sorcery and be a man powerful beyond comprehension."

So Turjan applied himself to the study and learned many of the simpler routines.

"I find herein a wonderful beauty," he told Pandelume. "This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity."

 

[prabe]

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth:

There are times when I kinda regret not reading Vance when I was younger. I suspect his fiction wouldn't work anything like as well for me now, for reasons that are mostly about me--not like a dig on Vance.

 

[J.Quondam]

There are times when I kinda regret not reading Vance when I was younger. I suspect his fiction wouldn't work anything like as well for me now, for reasons that are mostly about me--not like a dig on Vance.

Me, too. I've never read Vance, and often tell myself I should one day. But I imagine the me of "now" wouldn't read it like the me of "then" would have. But still, I probably should read it. One day.

 

[Mezuka]

Me, too. I've never read Vance, and often tell myself I should one day. But I imagine the me of "now" wouldn't read it like the me of "then" would have. But still, I probably should read it. One day.

First time I read Vance I was in my mid-late-40s. Read Big Planet, it's fun. A quick summer read, full of ideas. I read it every few years.

"According to science fiction scholar Nick Gevers, Big Planet

was instrumental in the development of the planetary romance form...perhaps the first attempt at a convincingly complete imaginary world in genre s-f....[T]he conviction persists that it is not the characters who serve as the book's protagonists, but rather Big Planet itself.

Big Planet

The objective of the mission from to stop the ruthless…

www.goodreads.com

 

[J.Quondam]

First time I read Vance I was in my mid-late-40s. Read Big Planet, it's fun. A quick summer read, full of ideas. I read it every few years.

"According to science fiction scholar Nick Gevers, Big Planet

Big Planet

The objective of the mission from to stop the ruthless…

www.goodreads.com

Awesome! Thanks for the recommendation. It's helpful to know of a good place to start.

 

[trappedslider]

I'm usually pretty good at turning off my Engineer Brain in order to play video games, watch movies, and enjoy some D&D and Stars Without Number. But every now and then, the switch fails and I get hung up on it.

In some ways, I'm glad that I'm not as smart as others.

 

[Mannahnin]

I first encountered Vance at 17; Cugel's Saga and the first volume of Lyonesse in my then-local library. He has a few foibles and points that haven't aged well, but he's mostly a lot of fun.

I still think Lyonesse is tied for me with LotR for my favorite fantasy series ever. Though they're VERY different. Vance is much earthier and funnier and more sarcastic and cynical, even though that's interspersed with lots of lovely fairy magic and derring-do.