My Changing Thoughts on Science Fantasy Games

[Lategamer]

Magic presupposes a supernatural source generally, science is mundane.

that's not bad, though it depends on perspective. A magical thinker is going to push that perspective.

How does this television work?

] I do not know

Magic then.

 

[dragoner]

This is an interesting suggestion. I'd turn it around and say that science fiction refers to literature limits itself to being motivated and enacted by "natural" forces and agents, while fantasy allows for "unnatural" forces and agents from outside that setting. This leaves aside the question of whether the "unnatural" are supernatural, transcendent, or both.

Games definitely muddy the idea of supernatural, vs traditional, make magic "mechanical" though imo it is anachronism of looking at the scientific world of today, and imagining it of the past. Certainly the idea, is from when people believed magic was real for the most part. I mean today is the government made laws against magic, we'd be like "what?" I guess without Gods, or whatever, there could be a supernatural world, then again that feels like trying to shoehorn in the principles of science again.

In a literary sense, science fiction often satisfies the idea of a "mythic time" changing it to the future, when before it was often the past.

 

[dragoner]

that's not bad, though it depends on perspective. A magical thinker is going to push that perspective.


] I do not know

Sort of, though we generally know a TV doesn't work as magic, it isn't supernatural.

 

[Lategamer]

Sort of, though we generally know a TV doesn't work as magic, it isn't supernatural.

Sure, we may not be magical thinkers. There are plenty of them out there. Those that believe drinking pineapple juice can cure cancer. Or how there are mind-controlling microchips in vaccines.

The point being that if you don’t know exactly how something works, it may as well be magic.

I know the theory of LCDs and CRTs….and a little less of the theory of how signals get turned into images but that’s my limit. For some people, they need that gap filled. I know I could fill that gap at a local library or a YouTube binge.

 

[dragoner]

Sure, we may not be magical thinkers. There are plenty of them out there. Those that believe drinking pineapple juice can cure cancer. Or how there are mind-controlling microchips in vaccines.

The point being that if you don’t know exactly how something works, it may as well be magic.

I know the theory of LCDs and CRTs….and a little less of the theory of how signals get turned into images but that’s my limit. For some people, they need that gap filled. I know I could fill that gap at a local library or a YouTube binge.

Pretty soon we are going to veer right off into religion here, though I will say that I do think people who are superstitious, "magical thinkers" believe in a supernatural world. I mean as an engineer and fixing things people ask how I do it and have jokingly said it is "magic" that of course actually derives from a time people did generally believe in it. We bring those feelings 180° from today, back into the games, and it is humorous to suppose from a scientific standpoint of "how magic works." Even though we know it doesn't. We are going to use our knowledge of how we do things today.

 

[Lategamer]

Pretty soon we are going to veer right off into religion here,...

Kieckhafers "Magic in the Middle Ages" is an interesting read because although we know what is real and whatnot from our enlightened 21st century perspective, back in them olden days they did not. And they didn't have the 'vocabulary' to distinguish things we take for granted (causation, germ theory).

I used to often muse that "wands with charges" were actually technology rather than magic.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Humans love to put labels on things. Academics even get paid to do it. That doesn't mean those labels have any objective truth in them.

I mean, horror is a genre. So is sci fi and sci fantasy. There are lots of different genres that are defined by how they are written or the themes within. It’s just a fact. Just because you don’t think a Stephan King novels are scary doesn’t not make it horror. many of his books tick all the boxes that make his stories fall within the genre.

Case in point. In Starfinder magic is magic, is objectively real, and understood by wizards. The gods are objectively real and have conversations with their clerics, and so on. There is no mystery involved. Mystery is more commonly invoked when science fiction touches on issues of religion and magic.

To clarify: I mean it’s left as a mystery to the reader. Not the characters.

 

[dragoner]

Kieckhafers "Magic in the Middle Ages" is an interesting read because although we know what is real and whatnot from our enlightened 21st century perspective, back in them olden days they did not. And they didn't have the 'vocabulary' to distinguish things we take for granted (causation, germ theory).

I used to often muse that "wands with charges" were actually technology rather than magic.

The scientific world is a late cultural shift, 18th Century in the west, and a lot of other places, only in the 20th Century. Tsarina Alexandra sent Nicholas II a magic apple (blessed by Rasputin) so that he could be a strong father to the Russian people, and give them the knout on their back. Reading that, one has to feel like no wonder things happened the way they did. Maybe as things were disintegrating he retreated into magical thinking. Which is an interesting line of thought in itself.

 

[aramis erak]

The fact that an FTL drive conspicuously moves at the speed of the plot rather than any quantifiable rate doesn't make it magic. The fact that some technobabble isn't consistent doesn't make something fantasy. And when the sci-fi isn't explained, that's just because it's not part of the story. It doesn't change the genre.

That an FTL drive works at all with reasonable power budgets makes it magic.

Kieckhafers "Magic in the Middle Ages" is an interesting read because although we know what is real and whatnot from our enlightened 21st century perspective, back in them olden days they did not. And they didn't have the 'vocabulary' to distinguish things we take for granted (causation, germ theory).

I used to often muse that "wands with charges" were actually technology rather than magic.

Any replicable system of magic is essentially technology.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That an FTL drive works at all with reasonable power budgets makes it magic.

Any replicable system of magic is essentially technology.

Which brings the FTL (generally replicable in most settings) back to technology.