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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5242740" data-attributes="member: 58197">I disagree with the assertion that magic must involve "orderly manufacturing processes" and the like. A magic system I'd like to develop would be what you might call "Heisenbergian magic"--in other words, while magic has laws that govern its operation, any attempt to determine precisely what those laws are is doomed to fail, because the act of discovering such a law causes it to change. When you bring magic into a lab setting and try to formulate hypotheses about how it works--even statistical, probabilistic ones--you keep finding exceptions, and every time you change your hypothesis to accommodate one exception, another pops up.In practical terms, you can predict the result of a spell in a general way with a high probability of success, but the more specific you try to make your prediction, the lower the odds of being correct. If you lay a curse on somebody, it will probably have negative consequences in their life... but whether those consequences will take the form of overtly bad stuff, or good stuff that turns out to be a case of "blessed with suck," there's no way to say. And it's possible that the stuff which seems bad to begin with ends up leading them to a better life. The more you try to nail down the limits and parameters of what's going to happen, the more the spell finds ways to happen otherwise.Of course, translating this concept into workable RPG mechanics is a hell of a challenge. I'm still trying to figure out how to make it work in a novel, let alone a game.</blockquote>

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