If D&D magic were real, andyou had to explain it...

[RUMBLETiGER]

I wrote a piece of fiction for fun that touched upon this. I had a Factotum character that I as able to take in game up to level 6, however I wrote a story about his year in semi-hermitude sabbatical using magic to construct a fortress in the wilderness. The story was his diary day by day or that year.

I described magic a few times in the story. He explained that the details were perceived differently by different casters, and since the Factotum class performs more approximations of spells than actual casters, he saw perceived the differences in schools of magic as "textures", crosshatching if lines of arcane power. He manipulated these textures and patterns when he used the "Craft Wondrous Item" feat, being the son of an Artificer. He was the student of both a Druid and an Archivist, and so would use Detect Magic to watch the energies of Divine magic flow in spellcasting: Druid magic was more like liquid lightning that discharged and flowed around from the material world, Clerical magic came from different beams of light originating from impossible horizons.

At one point a village girl who was making ongoing trouble had slipped away from the village to his fortress, he needed to bring her back because the village had already disliked him and now believed he had kidnapped her. She wanted to learn magic and he was generally unwilling to teach her, but on this day he sat her down and talked her thru how he was preparing spells for the day, describing the process. Once ready he polymorphed into a Gryphon and returned her to the outskirts of the village.

He used threads of fabric as an illustration for the girl, and described "weaving" as the way it was done. He described what it was like to see the strands of arcane magic, tug on them and set them in nearly-complete patterns to be finished when he needed them. As he got more effective at wielding Arcane magic, knowing more-in-number and more-in-power spells (leveling up), he could prepare more and complex patterns in advance. The strands or arcane magic are elastic, once the final lines are placed, which is done by uttering the last component, or gesturing, or placing a material spell component to complete the last lines, the pattern "Snapped" loose, discharging the strands and creating the spell.

So, in summary: Arcane magic is the preparation of a nearly complete weave of elastic magic strands, forming a pattern that represents the spell effect. casting the spell is the completion of the last piece of the pattern. The more experienced one is with magic, the more-number and more-in-complexity of patterns you can hold together at the start of the day.

 

[Balesir]

Yep. As a physicist, I'd need to actually know something about how it manages to apparently break most of the laws that otherwise govern the universe before I'd try to explain it. The energy to do these things has to come from somewhere. There must be some way that energy is controlled, and so on.

Actually I would not even assume that the laws that (apparently) govern the universe we inhabit apply to D&D worlds. Assuming that the scientific method (which seems pretty robust) remains valid, we must rely on experiment. If a repeatable experiment shows a discrepancy with theory, then it's not the experiment that's wrong - it's the theory. Thus the universal applicability of thermodynamic laws, for example, seems to be false in a D&D world. So does the ubiquity of gravity (which definitely doesn't fit with general relativity) and the nature of things like fire and air seem to be, at best, suspect. It's possible that biology appears to work in ways quite alien to those understood by terran scientists and physicians, too. Little if any evidence of the most basic physical laws we generally assume seems to exist.

In short, I think science would have to be rediscovered from scratch for a D&D world. For most gaming purposes I am far from convinced that this is worth doing.