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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8152872" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As C.S. Lewis put it, science and magic were twins, born at the same time and of the same impulse, to control the world around you. Magic doesn't strictly require mystery, what it requires is the direct connection between the will of the user and the physical reality that manifests. Magic MAKES the world behave the way you want it to behave.Likewise, technology does not require us to know HOW it works in order to know THAT it works. It is of course helpful to know the how. But we knew nothing of how gunpowder worked, yet the Chinese invented fireworks long before the advent of chemistry; we knew nothing of Snell's Law and yet could make refractive lenses for centuries; we knew nothing of quantum mechanics and yet benefited from things like the compass, which depends critically on the fact that electrons are fermions (and thus their wave functions cannot stack together in the same state).Fundamentally, technology takes what is practical and finds an application for it. Magic, in the fictional settings where it exists, starts from an intended application and finds a means to produce that effect. They are mirror images of each other in this sense. This is why technology works in the real world and magic doesn't; you cannot simply make reality be what you want it to be, no secret rules or hidden passages exist. But if you take known physical effects and look for ways they can be used, you can find them.This, incidentally, is why it is totally possible to have "magic technology" or "industrial magic" or the like. Once magic has produced a consistent, reproducible method by which an intent is forced upon reality, it thus becomes a part of that reality, and can be viewed from the technological perspective, turning it into an applicable tool rather than an intent made manifest. Magitech is thus technology that has incorporated established magic into itself, while D&D Wizard-style spellcasting takes a technological approach to developing new means of forcing the world to obey your will.The two methods OFTEN don't work together, and have a lot of thematic and historical baggage that can keep them apart, but fundamentally they are not contradictory. Had real arcane rules existed IRL, we would use them right alongside using "technology."</blockquote>

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