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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nightwyrm" data-source="post: 5028411" data-attributes="member: 75542">There are plenty of ways for things to fail with modern technology that doesn't imply sudden destruction. I use the example of a computer blowing up because I thought it was a funny way to carry my point across. Prolong exposure to radiation, dangerous chemicals, pathogens, carcinogens etc. can all be analogous to your examples of corruptive effect of magic. A computer that slowly gives you cancer over 10 years would still be chucked.  If doing something via method A is so unreliable and dangerous that its cost-benefit ratio is lower than doing the same thing via method B, then method A would be abandoned in favour of method B. If magic is so dangerous that it almost always gives you magic cancer, people would either a) develop some way of preventing that or b) abandon magic in favour of doing things mundanely. This may not happen for many years, but over time, a society would slowly tend towards abandoning unreliable and dangerous methods in favour of safer and more reliable ones. That doesn't mean that any particular individual wouldn't be stupid enough to use the dangerous method (afterall, we have tons of smokers in our society). They would just think that the bad things won't happen to them. But this type of situation argues for a setting where magic is rare and frowned upon (if not persecuted) by society. Any type of setting where magic is commonly accepted and looked upon as a useful solution by society at large is incompatible with a magic system that fails often and gives people magic cancer.</blockquote>

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