Science of magic

Sounds like a few basic laws on the science of energy at large.

I'd like magic to be a sort of science. Not everything or anything should be doable with magic. No-one should be able to do something completely retarded and then blame it on "y u so mad it's magic lol?" or "It's fantasy. Anything's possible. It doesn't have to make sense". Lore-wise I'd like Elemental to really aim for internal realism. Everything should make sense within the context of it's own universe, i.e. the Elemental universe.

That said, I'd love to hear something official from Froggy.

I would think the laws of magic for Elemental would be something like.

1. You need mana of the right type to cast a spell. e.g Life for a healing spell, fire for a fire ball.

2. The amount of mana spent per turn is the magnitude of the spell

3. Possibly you can make a spell permanent by spending a point of essence instead of a point of mana of the same type.

4. Some spells might need multiple types of mana e.g. summon burning skeletal soldiers e.g. 1 fire mana and 1 death mana per soldier per turn, or 1 Death essence + 1 Life essence to summon them as permanent minions with no up keep.

Yes I imagine very like that the question is will you be able to mix your own spells by combining different magical effects you researched?

How will enchanting weapons and armour work also?

Magic is magic. There is no reconciling it with science. You can create rules to artificially restrict magic, but that is not science.

Skip the science, it's the worst thing that ever happened to Star Wars.  It already sucks the fun out of life, lets keep magic free from it.

That being said, this thread is not about putting in science or technology: it's about the way magic could work in the game.

If you could fly under your own power, and shoot bolts of lighting out your ass, would this forum be fun?

Yes. What about flying or shooting lightning bolts would make a forum not fun?

Besides that, I do not think science sucks the fun out of everything. The Star Wars example had little to do with science and more to do with bad writing and retconning than anything else.

A better example of where science is fun can be found in the SciFi, Cyberpunk and Steampunk genres.

While yes i'll agree my title "science of magic" is a complete oxymoron. But magic as a plot device needs restrictions or otherwise any problem could be easily resolved with a snap of the fingers (which ironically would be a challenge for me since i can't snap my fingers). these are just common laws in most fantasy novels that i have read, albiet not said so bluntly.

There's some truth to you say, ChongLi. But i'm in the mindset that it would be quite a farce to go into a philosophical debate whether magic can be or, more amply, should be annylized in a psuedo-scientific way. So i'll let you win ChongLi  

Now discussing our opinions about the six laws (and maybe adding a few) I'm all for.

Why would Magic contradict Science? Why can't there be a science of magic?
There is simply no truth to such a statement. In most settings, there is a definite science to magic. It's limitations. What it can and cannot do. How do you research new spells? Is magic a fundamental part of the universe or not?

Everything I've seen on Elemental tells me that magic is a fundamental part of the natural order, meant to flow freely around and through everything, hence the catastrophy when they sucked it out of the land and crystallized it. All natural science in the world of elemental would invariably lead to "magic science" sooner or later since it matters in that world.

Internal realism in context, people. In context.

Personally, i would like to see magic more appoached as art form than as cookbook where you only need the right ingredients.  I would personally like to see EWoM use something different, maybe where spells give you a little tweaking room or there's a small random factor in using magic, not necessarily bad, but simply different.  Maybe your channeler can have his or her own flavor or style of doing things, like you can opt to switch spell elements on the fly, or add an additional effect.  This is probably a half-baked idea at best, but I'd like to see magic move in thise direction more at least.

Anyways, I think your laws above are interesting, although I would like to see some late game armageddon magic allowing a channeler to literally annihilate things like map tiles.  So, maybe if you have a strong enough channeler, or have enough research, you could try and defy the "laws" of magic, maybe being able to break them or change them?  Dang, another un-realistic idea at best, oh well, my two cents.

One of the great things about magic is, although it should be internally consistent to it's world or universe, there really are not and should not be any ground rules. Creating that "plausible structure" is half the fun of creating a magic system or writing a fantasy novel or making a magic computer game - or at least that is what I would enjoy!

So unless I missunderstood, we're in agreeance.

:p

Law # 1.) Energy is energy

while a bit vague, the law is simple. everything takes energy. Potential energy, kinetic energy, thermal energy, arcanic energy are all energy no matter the source.

I'm not interested in inventing a particle called the magiton, or arcaton in order to make magic a type of energy that we can observe in the world...

Don't need to, but making magic a quantifiable entity is especially important in a computer game setting, since if it isn't quantifiable for the computer it might as well not exist. Internal consistency is also quite important just so it makes sense. If magic follows set laws, it makes the handwave of 'researching' spells go down much more easily in addition to making extrapolating the effects of unknown spells possible. What can be quantified can be analyzed, and what can be analyzed can be planned for, and if plans can't be based on knowledge, even extreme extrapolation, then it is hard to call a strategy. Magic that can be analyzed in a scientific manner is essential, even if the underlying science is not explained.

However, I must note that if any of those rules were violated (except for the matter in two places one), the system would be horribly imbalanced for game use, so.

Agreed, it's the analysis of magic that is science, and I think pretty much everybody here wants a system that allows analysis based on some fundamental rules that allow further investigation, and I think that that is what really matters to the game.

The rules about energy bother me.

Why should magic follow our laws of conservation? or Friction etc..

In a world where magic did exist it would be very unlikely for it not to be classified as a recognized field of scientific study. Magic can be whatever you want since it isn't real. If you want to pretend there is another world where magic exists and it follows para-scientific rules I see no problem with that.

It as already 'invented'. Its called a Taum.

Magic is a science that applies its laws only to itself and supersedes the laws of other sciences.

I'm not entirely sure if I like the "magic as manupulation of energy" approach. Even though I've only actually seen it used in one place, it seems..... overdone somehow. I was thinking of something more like this:

• All inanimate matter is composed of four elements in various combinations: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
• In order of inanimite matter to become animate, it must recieve the fifth Element, Essance.
• Essance is broken down into two distinct polarities, Life and Death.
• Magic is the manipulation of those elements, ether adding them or taking them away (by cancelling them out with another element).
• The Shards are actually the purest, most concentrated form of each element: they give the channeler a supply of that element (mana) to manipulate and perform spells with.
• There are no life/death shards, so the channeler must gain those from the ambiant environment (life and death are very hard to convert from one to the other).

Photos are(were) considered Magic by some people. Yet, we know they are not. Why? Because we know how it works. Knowledge is power and ignorance creates fears, insecurities, religions, magics...

The magic system in this game should have some rules and altough for the expert Channeler it could be considered Science, for the common folk it would be Magic. In the end, there is no difference between any of them. In both cases, it works.