What is arcane magic?

[prosfilaes]

With so many languages in the world what does it mean for something to have "true name"?

It's the name that has power. It's probably be taboo, since you don't want to casually invoke it, and it's probably nontrivial; fire probably wouldn't be faɪɚ, and if it were, faɪə or faɪəɹ wouldn't be good enough. ʙ̤ɴ̥ɶ̃ːʙˤɴ̰ːɶ̃ˑ is more likely and heaven help you if you underround a vowel or slightly palatalize the wrong consonant or hold something for too long or too short.

If you are manipulating things mentally, doesn't that sound like psionics?

But psionics is a fancy 19th/20th century term for magic that sounds more scientific.

 

[Corathon]

IMC, magic is the process of drawing substances, energies, or influences from other planes. In a D&D world the barriers between planes can be (temporarily) opened just by achieving certain mental states. Spells are just recipes for achieving the right mental state. The words, gestures. material components, etc aren't strictly necessary, they are just aids to getting to the right mental state. Wizards don't know this, believing the trappings to be necessities.

 

[Merkuri]

And I know that its a game and all you need to say is "hey its magic!"
I just got to thinking if magic did really work, how would it work?

If magic did work, it would be science.

I'm serious. If you explain magic too much then it just becomes another science like physics or quantum mechanics.

I once tried to come up with a whole explanation of what sort of energy magic was and how it could be channeled through things, and why certain things had certain effects, and I realized that it ceased to be wondrous. It ceased to be magical.

 

[Chrono22]

Okay I can buy that, but then what does the mage do? Is he mentally accessing these forces?

Sort of. Imagine the reality of the multiverse as being a peaceful island in the eye of a massive storm. Causality and the flow of time allow for a sequences of events to transpire, so that paradoxes aren't constantly breaking things. The inner planes provide a tentative balance, so that the prime is composed of somewhat equal quanitities of elements. Some ancient laws afford the gods divine power, by allowing them to tap into the latent and subconcious beliefs of their followers. Primordial gods, by comparison, are able to draw power by epitomizing an element or ideal. But arcane magic... is a force that transcends reality.
Every mind is a gate to the unreal. The power of an idea is immeasurable- ideas can raise up great empires, and cast them into ruin. Thought can give rise to form, and form to function. Anyone can manifest their imaginings in the real world... but arcane casters cheat at it. They don't form their ideas out of existing materials. Instead, they break down the barrier between the real and unreal by bringing their force of will, their conviction, and their belief to bear against the passive laws of reality.

On a fundamental level, the reality of the D&D multiverse is not the same as our own. It does not so solidly rest in the real- that magic exists at all, is proof of that. If its foundations, so to speak, were more secure magic would be weaker, or it might cease to exist altogether.

 

[Dausuul]

If magic did work, it would be science.

I'm serious. If you explain magic too much then it just becomes another science like physics or quantum mechanics.

Y'know, I sort of agree with this and sort of don't. Yes, explaining the magic takes away much of the mystery. But part of the reason it becomes science-like is that the people devising the explanations are steeped in a scientific worldview and bring in all kinds of assumptions from that worldview without realizing it.

Typical science-driven assumptions (all of which can be seen at work in the D&D rules) include:

• Magic is a discrete force (often described as "magical energy"). The world works according to 21st-century scientific principles except where operated on by this force. Accordingly, magic can be dispelled, stored, detected, and so forth.
• Magic is predictable. If you perform a spell the same way, you get the same result every time. It never works in unexpected ways; if you cast Kill Toads 10' Radius, it will not cause a man with the nickname of Toad to drop dead.
• Magic is a passive, neutral tool. It can be used for any purpose with equal ease, and the act of wielding it does not affect the wielder. A necromancer can raise an army of skeletons and use them to till the fields and save puppies from burning buildings, and this will work out just fine--the necromancer will not be slowly twisted toward evil, the skeletons will not spread a pall of death across the land, no dark and malevolent powers will be strengthened by the necromancer's actions... in short, the only reason people don't do this all the time is that undead are yicky.

These assumptions are convenient for an RPG designer, since they make it possible to turn magic into a set of self-contained rules packages that don't have to be integrated with anything else and don't require a lot of DM adjudication. It's hard to imagine D&D without them. But they severely limit how "magical" magic can be.

(See Chrono22's post above for a good example of magic that doesn't turn into "just science" when explained.)

 

[beepeearr]

For my campaign, I tie each of the various magic power sources to different planes.

Shadow magic would tie to the Shadowfell, plane of shadows
Divine to the Astral sea and the Gods who make their home there
Primal to spirits of the World, or prime material plane.
Elemental to the elemental chaos
Arcane is tied to the Feywild, where the Shadowfell is powered by death and shadow (negative energy), Arcane magic is vibrant and full of life positive energy). Arcane casters each find different ways to harness this raw and chaotic energy. Wizards use ancient formulas and rituals. Warlocks make deals with others who can show them the way. sorcerers just have an innate talent for bending it to their will. Bards find tunes and melodies that lead the raw magic to the form they wish it to take (think pied pipers, but magic instead of rats and children).

Oh and Psionics ties into the Far Realm, and the madness therein, using focus and control, and using their own bodies to channel reality altering madness.

 

[prosfilaes]

If magic did work, it would be science.

I'm serious. If you explain magic too much then it just becomes another science like physics or quantum mechanics.

I once tried to come up with a whole explanation of what sort of energy magic was and how it could be channeled through things, and why certain things had certain effects, and I realized that it ceased to be wondrous. It ceased to be magical.

I see the point, but I note that you use the word energy, which is potent with scientific overtones. Part of this is D&D magic. In Diane Duane's "So You Want to be a Wizard" series, the magic varies on this axis, but at some points it's about talking to things; if you want a staircase made out of air, part of it is reminding that air of when it was out in cold space frozen into comets, and encouraging it to revert to that for a moment. If you want to form a gate between your fridge and someone else's to grab lunch, part of it is calming the ruffled feathers of your fridge that's upset because it's empty. You can't effectively use magic against cancer, because cancer is living cells, and life wants to live, and all the power in the world isn't going to talk a bunch of cancer cells down.

Or another example goes back to modern magic theory. If you had to invoke the laws of contagion and similarity, it wouldn't seem as scientific. Instead of pointing your <s>gun</s> wand at someone and <s>pulling the trigger</s> saying the command word to hurt them, if you had to have some piece of them, or something they wore or even just a doll that bore some similarity to them to affect them, it wouldn't feel nearly as magical. The voodoo doll theory, in crude layman's terms.

 

[pawsplay]

In Dragonlance, wizardry is a form of divine magic.
In the Elric stories, arcane magic is raw chaos, shaped by the faintest influence of Order, giving it form.
In Vance's Dying Earth, it is a science of psychicism that bends space and time and reaches out to mysterious entities, and can defy even death simply through the mad convictions of a wizard.
To Shakespeare, it was an act of hubris, using wisdom to command spirits with an authority properly belonging only to God, or best left in the hands of the heaven-forsaken fairies.

 

[Merkuri]

Magic is predictable. If you perform a spell the same way, you get the same result every time. It never works in unexpected ways; if you cast Kill Toads 10' Radius, it will not cause a man with the nickname of Toad to drop dead.

This is when magic turns to science for me. If action A plus words B always equal effect C then it's just another facet of the universe that can be studied using the scientific method. At that point, magic is no longer supernatural, it's just natural.

Don't forget that people used to believe that magic was responsible for a lot of the things we understand today as being the predictable result of physics, or chemistry, or biology. And a lot of what we do today would look like magic to someone from an older time period, or a very isolated part of the world.

Once you understand why something works, the magic is gone.

 

[pawsplay]

If magic did work, it would be science.

Pretty much. Wizardry would be impossible if it didn't have some science to it, some predictability.

"Well, let's see, last week when I did this, I cast a fireball. Yesterday, nothing happened. And just now, I invented Gibralter. Hmm. Magic seems a lot less useful than I thought it would be."