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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6265827" data-attributes="member: 8461">Off-hand, I'd say that The Dresden Files ranks as so:Magic Power: 7. By the latest books in the series, we're treated to creatures, spells, and effects of incredible power. A necromantic tome that can make someone a demigod; faerie queens that can disrupt the world's weather patterns; spells that can wipe out entire bloodlines.Magic Prevalence: 5. As the series progresses, we can see that supernatural elements are widespread across the world. Wizard societies, vampire courts, and so many more lurk all around humans every day. As it is, this score is as lower than such elements would normally rank because this prevalence is hindered by the fact that these supernatural elements are deliberately trying to avoid becoming common knowledge.Setting: 3. The books are centered on contemporary Earth. While they do acknowledge and venture into other realms, such as the Nevernever and an ill-defined afterlife, the main setting is our own easily-understood world.That's an off-the-cuff set of ratings, but they seem plausible.EDIT: The natural question that follows these scores is what they tell us about whether The Dresden Files (or any other setting that's scored this way) is high, middle, or low fantasy.To that end, I'd suggest the following: simply add the scores up, and rank the total score on the following table:A total score of 0-10 is low fantasy.A total score of 11-20 is middle fantasy.A total score of 21-30 is high fantasy.The main idea here is that this method allows us to take these three disparate elements of magic power, magic prevalence, and setting, and combine them into an overall ranking, something that would otherwise be difficult to do, since (as you noted above) the three of them can have wildly differing scores for a given series. By combining the three scores on a three-rank scale, we're effectively averaging them out for the final determinate as to the question of high-middle-low.This has the added benefit of making it so that some reasonable "drift" in the assigned scores is unlikely to change the rating. For example, using the above listings, The Dresden Files has a total score of 15, making it a solid middle fantasy setting. This is likely to remain true even if you feel that some of the scores need to be tweaked a little, such as if you think that the level of magic power and prevalence should both be a point higher - that'd make the final score 17, which would still be a middle fantasy world.The caveat here, of course, is that this method takes a quantitative approach over a qualitative one. If you feel that high fantasy is defined - as Quickleaf quoted above - by qualities such as an epic clash between objectively good and evil forces, then you probably won't find this metric very useful. Harry Potter arguably lives up to that definition, for example, but on this list it's likely to be classified as a low fantasy (in my opinion, Harry Potter is magic power 3, magic prevalence 2, and setting 1).</blockquote>

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