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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanveen" data-source="post: 7785452" data-attributes="member: 6874262">One issue with RPG magic is that most "spells" are simply scientific/mechanical processes. I'm not sure when the fireball was invented, culturally, but it predates Gygax. Comics? Howard in the 1930s? Tracking that down would be really interesting; fantasy before about 1930 has a much different conception of magic, usually involving charms, "glamors", and the like, as well as some summoning and necromancy (although that, in the best traditional manner, is about talking to dead people, not making animated skeletons out of them). Most medieval and Renaissance magic is very personal in focus. It's about bending people to your will, asking weird beings where treasure is buried, predicting the future, making pacts with devils for worldly gain, etc. In fact, a modern non-scholar's *conception* of "magic" is very, very different from what medievals believed it to be, and in fact I think is rooted very strongly in a positivist, empirical worldview that has soaked into everything we do nowadays.So the problem is that if your "magic" is just a scientific process, yes, of course it's going to technologize and destroy your "fantasy" world. This must never be allowed to happen. Houses cannot be lit by Light spells. Cure Disease cannot be at every storefront clinic. If so, you are playing a game of technology, and a rather dreary one at that. You might as well play The Sims. So you have to come up with compelling reasons why not.I think mastery is the real issue. First off, mages are vanishingly rare..so are the people who can be cured by Cure Disease. Everyone else gets a nice prayer and then their nose falls off from the leprosy. In fact, the "heroic" nature of the PCs, and of course a few people like the Big Evil Overlord, is what moves the gods/makes the magic work. And you're one of those special people if your Cure Disease prayer ever actually, you know, cured a disease. But mastery goes beyond that. Simply put, real magicians don't do interior lighting. It's not "beneath" them, per se, it's just a terrible waste of time. It's like a Navy SEAL hired to move furniture for $12 an hour. There are always better options, even if those options involve looking at spell notes for the millionth time or trying to imagine a triune concatenation prolapsed through Andaal's Lesser Conjunct. Given enough time and effort, they'll get to the real knowledge. The very fabric of reality, the very power that runs the universe. Not even to use. Just learning about it would be enough. Even looking at it. So use a torch, peasant. I'm busy. You literally cannot understand how hard this is. As time passes and you learn more and more, a whole bunch of stuff starts to seem irrelevant. You don't have to be a magician, actual or notional, to experience this. You just need to be a little thoughtful and middle-aged. For a being like an elf, I imagine this would be true, only more so, as the scale of possible mastery would only increase. It's important to adventure in your youth, as that will provide the perspective and insight you'll draw on when you spend 417 years forging a sword. And after that you can start thinking about making a real sword.</blockquote>

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