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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8828482" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I've never understood this impulse, in actually any context, TTRPG or straight up fiction as a whole, but it keeps coming up in these discussions. Magic is whatever system of rules you can use to supersede default physics; why would anyone with that ability not strive to systematize it? I cannot conceive of having a world with magic and not doing science to it. This keeps coming up in these discussions, the urge to make something &quot;mysterious&quot; that I wonder if we're not expressing deeper aesthetic preferences or orientations to epistemology or some other, deeper orientation than just &quot;what is magic?&quot; I'm worried I'm suffering from some failure of empathy that's necessary for me to grasp why that is compelling to so many people.Magic is the thing that lets you use different rules normal to do something more easily or more effectively than you otherwise could, or achieve something that was otherwise impossible. What's interesting is what that lets you do, or what it says about the world at large. If it's costly but still effective enough to be worth it, then you get an interesting society, if it's easier or more common than doing something manually, no one does the thing manually and a different new world emerges, and if it's something only a single player can do, then that player will be enacting all kinds of unexpected plans to get stuff done, and have some interesting ethical choices to make about what they owe the world.If the story is &quot;you can't know how it's done&quot; instead of &quot;here's what can be done&quot;, then I don't know how to play a person who isn't in open rebellion and working to fix that, or a lost soul in a world that doesn't and can't make sense, which are very specific themes and not broadly applicable to heroic fantasy.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8828482, member: 6690965"] I've never understood this impulse, in actually any context, TTRPG or straight up fiction as a whole, but it keeps coming up in these discussions. Magic is whatever system of rules you can use to supersede default physics; why would anyone with that ability not strive to systematize it? I cannot conceive of having a world with magic and not doing science to it. This keeps coming up in these discussions, the urge to make something "mysterious" that I wonder if we're not expressing deeper aesthetic preferences or orientations to epistemology or some other, deeper orientation than just "what is magic?" I'm worried I'm suffering from some failure of empathy that's necessary for me to grasp why that is compelling to so many people. Magic is the thing that lets you use different rules normal to do something more easily or more effectively than you otherwise could, or achieve something that was otherwise impossible. What's interesting is what that lets you do, or what it says about the world at large. If it's costly but still effective enough to be worth it, then you get an interesting society, if it's easier or more common than doing something manually, no one does the thing manually and a different new world emerges, and if it's something only a single player can do, then that player will be enacting all kinds of unexpected plans to get stuff done, and have some interesting ethical choices to make about what they owe the world. If the story is "you can't know how it's done" instead of "here's what can be done", then I don't know how to play a person who isn't in open rebellion and working to fix that, or a lost soul in a world that doesn't and can't make sense, which are very specific themes and not broadly applicable to heroic fantasy. [/QUOTE]

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