[Question] What's your favorite flavor of Magic

What's your favorite type of magic

  • Magic as Science (Mages)

    Votes: 15 40.5%

  • Nature Magic (Druids)

    Votes: 3 8.1%

  • Divine Magic (Clerics/Priests/Paladins)

    Votes: 5 13.5%

  • Slight of Hand (Illusionists)

    Votes: 2 5.4%

  • Magic Genes (Harry Potter)

    Votes: 2 5.4%

  • Names Have Power (Earthsea)

    Votes: 3 8.1%

  • Mystical (Use the Force Luke)

    Votes: 5 13.5%

  • Necromancy (RISE!)

    Votes: 2 5.4%
  • Total voters
    37
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Bowielee

Bowielee

Well, I don't have homework to keep me occupied at work, so subsequently, I'm bored and decided to post another silly question for entertainment purposes.

In the realms of fiction Magic is usually tailor made for the universe it inhabits. Some spell casters rely on their gods to provide them power, others treat magic as if it were an extention of chemistry or science.

What's your preferred type of magic?

For me, personally, it Magic as Science. Not to surprising seeing as I'm pretty much an egghead.

Also, feel free to suggest additional items.
 
phil

phil

I loved playing Clerics in D&D though usually dropping most of the religious aspects. I just liked healing people and the idea of going around and just doing genuine good.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

I voted Necromancy because that's the only form of magic I'll ever be able to do.

Wait, hang on...

But seriously, this is a tough choice for me, but I'd probably go with Nature Magic. I love the idea of having control over the elements.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

I feel there's one missing up there, but I don't have a name for it. Maybe it's not even considered magic. You see it a lot in ghost stories--events or personalities imprinting on a place, item, or person. I recall something where a hairband had the power to make a person happier because it was made by loved ones. I like that sort of stuff, but that may be more magical realism than magic.

Of the ones listed, I've never read the Earthsea books, but ever since The Sandman I've been fascinated with names having power. I liked that even saying Morpheus's name could summon him.
 
Gusto

Gusto

I've always liked something between Nature and Science, as you describe them. The idea that in order to make something burst into flame, you need to magically manipulate the ambient heat in the air around it, and transfer that energy into it. And that it takes a skilled spellcaster to balance the transference of energies properly so as to not cause catastrophes when manipulating minute amounts of energy or atoms out of their natural order.

I've always liked describing my magical effects in, say, Dungeons and Dragons that way.
 
checkeredhat

checkeredhat

I like multiple types of magic to exist in the same universe, a la D&D or the Kingkiller Chronicle, or even to a lesser extent the Lord of the Rings. But for the most part, what Gusto said.

Before coming into the thread and actually seeing the poll, my answer would have been a mix of blue and red.
 
Shegokigo

Shegokigo

1: I've never been a fan of Magic As Genes (No matter how much you study or try, you'll never be as powerful as Golden Boy/Girl)

2: Nature Magic is ridiculously more powerful than people give it credit for. Think Malfurion in War of the Ancients. It's not just about growth and healing, it's about the ability to summon Tornados, Earthquake fissures, etc.

3: Magic as a Science? Depends on how you mean it. The more your study/learn the more powerful you become through more complex spells, understanding their purpose better? Yeah I could get behind that, though usually you're left with the only really powerful Mages being 800yr old decrepit people.

4:I wouldn't touch Divine Magic with a 50ft pole (Even though my WoW character is a PLD, it's purely for the OP in the game aspect of it).

5: Sleight of Hand isn't "Magic" it's visual trickery. There is no power behind it.

6: Names Have Power and Mystical are both a bit iffy for me. NHP would just be about knowing the most powerful words or the most powerful counter to those words. It's more memorization than learned skill and Mystical can be interesting depending on how it's developed. Use the Force Luke counts more as Genes Have Power though.....

7: How is Necromancy it's own magic? Isn't it just a subset of Mages?

With all this being said and done, my all time favorite type of magic (As one could gather from the Skyrim thread) isn't listed here. It's Beguiling magic. The ability to bring others under your sway. It even has some basis in Real Life. Look at cult leaders/politians/celebrities. Their "Silver-Tongues" are able to enrapture thousands on command, literally having them do their bidding on a moments notice. If you don't think that Justin Bieber could literally have a thousand woman harem on command then you haven't been paying attention. Going further into the magical aspect of it I also envy the power of dominating the minds of others on different levels. Making it so that you're invisble to them (You aren't really but they cannot percieve you there), to appear as different things (a huge mythilogical beast, causing an entire city to run in terror), and so forth.

If I would classify this type of magic as any of the above listed, it'd probably be in the Mystical sense, but again, that leaves alot open for interpretation.
 
N

Namesake

Since the Lanterns all have an "Entity" attached to them (ie, Parralax, The Butcher, Ion), would they be considered divine magic? The ring they have amplifies that particular emotion, but the central power batteries are given power by the entities.
 
Officer_Charon

Officer_Charon

If the Lantern's powers are derived from a divine, that would make them Avatars, n'est-ce pas?

And yes, I find the lack of grue option... disturbing.

And in every RPG ever, I have rolled a Paladin, or as close to one as I could get. Like phil, it's not so much the divine aspect as it is the "shining knight" aspect.
 
checkeredhat

checkeredhat

Gusto said:
I've always liked something between Nature and Science, as you describe them. The idea that in order to make something burst into flame, you need to magically manipulate the ambient heat in the air around it, and transfer that energy into it. And that it takes a skilled spellcaster to balance the transference of energies properly so as to not cause catastrophes when manipulating minute amounts of energy or atoms out of their natural order.

I've always liked describing my magical effects in, say, Dungeons and Dragons that way.
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Incidentally, tell me you've been reading the Kingkiller Chronicle. I've only read book one so far, but it seems you'd like it.
 
North_Ranger

North_Ranger

Staff member
It's been a good long while since I've had a chance to play any decent fantasy RPGs (I heavily dislike D&D 4th edition, and my current condition makes it hard to either run or participate in games), but I find something appealing in sorcerers: unlike paladins and clerics who employ divine magic, druids who go with the nature route or mages who are pretty much the bookish, magic-as-science route, the sorcerer's power seems to be more of a mystery in most settings. A kind of primeval magic stemming from the charisma and persona of the sorcerer, rather than meticulous study or asking some Power That Is for a helping hand. There is the element of hereditary magic in it, too - you know, being a descendant of someone who bumped uglies with a dragon or a demon, or who was just a little too friendly with the fae or the horrors from the great beyond - but that's more flavour and dependant on the setting.

And granted, there's something breathtaking in the image of a sorcerer gone nuts with rage or sorrow, essentially being a living conduit of arcane forces at the eye of a storm of eldritch fire. You can't really get that visual with a mage who has to keep a spellbook at hand, or a paladin whose god would probably just go "Nuh, uh".
 
checkeredhat

checkeredhat

Tress said:
It's all about red, green, and white delivering a beatdown before the opponent even knows what's going on. :D
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I actually play like a complete asshole, and don't even really worry about winning. Sometimes it happens, but what's more fun for me is ticking off my friends who take it far more seriously by just counterspelling everything big and devestating they throw at me while I whittle them down slowly. Then eventually they get enough mana to wipe me out completely, but in a group game this invariably leaves them open for the kill to be dealt by someone else.
 
Frank

Frank

My favorite D&D character I've ever played as was a misanthropic, asexual, arrogant dickwad with a heart of gold wizard. He was also, basically, the master of space and time and everything that entails by the end of that campaign.

Ahh, contingency-teleport, how many times you made my wizard the lone survivor of a fight gone wrong.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Lately I've been puzzling the idea that most fictions treat their magic more like science. As in it can be studied and has mostly predictable effects. Magic spells and baubles are often as reliable and safe as a toaster, and whole schools are set up for the study and advancement of magic. When magic becomes just a fantasy version of electricity, it's not fully magic anymore.

Thinking about a dream I had a while back. It struck me as interesting to consider what would happen if someone from such a magic-is-a-science world were to find themselves transported to a world where magic acted more like magic. An enchanted item wouldn't work for everyone, but only an unpredictable group of special people (and not even the same people for every artifact). A spell that works for one wizard won't necessarily work for another because they're different people in a non-quantifiable way. Also, that spell wasn't learned by some variation of the scientific method. Wizards learn magic by trying things, but the knowledge of what to try comes from gnosis, not from being taught or any scientific method-like rigor. The arcane knowledge of magic is revealed by force of will, or destiny, or sheer luck; it is not predictable, cannot be passed on to a class full of students and pays no heed to lineage or social stature (to the point that it will get passed down in one family, but not another, and only for as long as the magic just happens to work that way).

Basically, a magic that cannot be operated like science because the ordered universe that is necessary for the scientific method to apply does not exist or does not apply to magic. There can be no peer-review because a magician has no true peers. There are other magicians, but they are not the same and cannot do the same things and expect the same results because magic simply does not work that way. It is a world very very unlike our own, and goes so completely contrary to the modern, scientific logic that most of us take for granted that I'm not surprised so few fictions deal with magic in that way.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

I think the shift to science-ey magic from , well, magic-ey magic has a lot to do with the decline of faith and the rise of science (which, BTW isn't the first time in history this has happened. During the industrial revolution and in scholarly bastions like Carthage, the same sort of shift happened, but I digress). Storytellers generally work out of the tapestry of life as it's seen in the time that they write. Basically, as we move closer to science, "because a wizard did it" doesn't cut it in setting a believable backdrop for your story.

That's my opinion on why it has shifted.

Oh, and to clarify, Shego, I was really thinking about charm and seduction type of magic when I listed Slight of Hand. I really didn't mean for it to be literally slight if hand, but more deception and misdirection. I probably should have re-thought that one before posting it.
Added at: 16:14
HCGLNS said:
big ass thor picture

NATURE!!!
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Wouldn't that be Divine magic? or would it be elemental because it's a god weilding the elements, not someone calling upon the diety to act.... hmmm...
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Shegokigo said:
6: Names Have Power and Mystical are both a bit iffy for me. NHP would just be about knowing the most powerful words or the most powerful counter to those words. It's more memorization than learned skill and Mystical can be interesting depending on how it's developed.
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Not necessarily. Think about Bleach, which doesn't call Zanpakto "magic" but that's pretty much what they are. A soul reaper gains power by learning the name of their sword, and then they gain more power by learning the name of the techniques they use. The names they learn give them more power, but won't give power to anyone else, and they aren't countered with words.

Now that I think about it, Bleach has a real magical type of knowledge system. For the most part the show treats abilities as something that can't be taught. You throw people into the deep-end and they learn to swim. You can give them pointers, but the real understanding comes from mystical revelation of some sort. What one person learns doesn't necessarily apply to another; each person's individual power is unique and many techniques cannot be learned by anyone else.

Also, I haven't read Earthsea, but I think the use of NHP there isn't just about power words but the idea of each person having a "true name". A wizard who knows a specific individual's true name has power over them, but not just power in general because they know one name.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

checkeredhat said:
Incidentally, tell me you've been reading the Kingkiller Chronicle. I've only read book one so far, but it seems you'd like it.
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I just got the first two books for christmas, I'll be tucking into them after I finish the 2 warcraft books I've been dying to finish.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

Bowielee said:
Basically, as we move closer to science, "because a wizard did it" doesn't cut it in setting a believable backdrop for your story.
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I don't think Pez is talking about it in terms of story weakness a la deus ex machina, but in that magic, when turned into chemical equation, isn't as interesting as when it could be and do anything. It's the same kind of criticism that many fantasy worlds fall under--you're dealing with a genre where you can do anything, and so many only want to repeat Tolken. In the same vein, magic to science because of real life--we already have real life.

I think that's part of what I'm having a problem with concerning this poll. It considers magic in the form of casting spells, not in magical presence/creatures/world, which is what I prefer. I like the idea that someone could be such a shitty king that the land rots around him, or that someone's death could be so traumatic that it leaves echoes that make the death repeat. I like how in Spirited Away, Yu-baba folds up her cloak under her so she's shaped like a bird, and then she can just flap her cloak like wings and it acts like a bird, solely for looking that way.

That shows imagination. I prefer that to, as Pez said, magic as electricity. I picked up some awful novel a few months ago--couldn't make it past the first few pages as the characters went on about stuff that pretty much boiled down to what color of "energy" each wizard could spray from his fingertips.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

I'm not saying that I don't enjoy the traditional Magic as Magic line. In fact, even though I listed my preference as being towards Science-y magic, I like all types. Particularly the way the Earthsea books used the NHP type of magic.

On the other hand, "a wizard did it" is a trope for a reason. Some authors use it as the lazy way out.
 
Gusto

Gusto

I like magic as science the way I described it because it still requires an incredible knowledge of chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, etc. to do properly without blowing yourself up or sucking all the air out of the room or something. But it require an affinity with the elements that are around you anyway (temperature, moisture, static, and so forth) and requires a lot of creativity and skill to use in unpredicatable and exciting ways.

That's why it's fun to describe in a D&D setting - you have your hard casters like wizards with high intelligence who have studied and practiced the elements and systems that hold the universe together for decades and are comfortable with bending those rules to suit their needs, and then you have sorcerers/bards/warlocks, whose magical affinity is more inborn and has less to do with knowledge about how the universe works and more with what they can do just because they've always been doing it.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Bowielee said:
On the other hand, "a wizard did it" is a trope for a reason. Some authors use it as the lazy way out.
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And authors also use meaningless technobabble as just another way to be lazy. Saying that a character invented a quantum framistat (on the spot out of a gum wrapper and an alien crystal) to decouple the tachyon pulse field from the tritanium interlock cage, using "scientific genius!" is just as lazy as having the character suddenly have a magic ability that just happens to solve the problem at hand. It doesn't matter if you replace the science technobabble with magic arcanababble; it's still lazy.

Just because a fictional world has magic that behaves like magic, doesn't mean that the writing is going to be lazy because of that. It's like the scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Roger slips out of the handcuffs for a gag.
Eddie: You mean you could have taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?!
Roger: No, not at any time. Only when it was funny.
Magic as magic follows a similar rule, something like "Only when it suits the story". I don't mean that in a deus ex machina way. I mean as a structured, foreshadowed, cohesive tale that examines human existence. Just because the magic can behave however it wants relative to the world, that doesn't mean it can behave just any old way relative to the story.
 
Bowielee

Bowielee

I think you're selectively reading my post. I didn't say in anyway that traditional magic was always lazy, in fact I believe I said the opposite.
 
Sara_2814

Sara_2814

Don't care where it comes from, as long as I can have fire: the more powerful the better. The last two D&D campaigns I've played in, I've specialized as a fire mage. In Dragon Age, I always go Elementalist, and while ice spells are handy, it's the firestorm that makes me giggle with unholy glee. :D

Out of the list, I find mages the most appealing, perhaps because I love the idea of magical libraries and laboratories to study and experiment in.
 
Wahad

Wahad

I have no particular favor for any sort of magic, as long as it makes sense. When I write, I often get caught up in making the setting work, to the tiniest details down. Consequently, it's kind of what I pay attention to in any series where magic is involved. It's part of why I like the Dresden Files so much - pages of text are devoted to explaining how it works. Now, this might seem that the magic is science, but nothing would be more true. One of the characters, a paladin, carries a magic sword and his faith gives him strength to smite the enemies of God - or so it seems at first. But later, another paladin shows up who carries a similar magic sword, that he received directly from an archangel, but the character is an atheist. It's played for humor, but it works because this character is such a good person that the archangel didn't even care he didn't believe. The swords are powered by literal ''goodness'' (and it doesn't help that the archangels sometimes help out a hand, too) in people. If anyone else that's nto as innately good as these paladins were to pick up the sword, they don't get the smiting powers - they just get a nice, sharp sword. For some, this may seem too much like ''a wizard did it'' but for me it is one of the best explanations divine magic could ever get. The Dresden Files probably has the best system of magic out there in my opinion. Although I should really say ''systems'' since pretty much every example up there gets a pass in the books. And more!

tl;dr: read the Dresden Files.
 
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