Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shadowlord]

My guess would be that Yoda lied (to motivate Luke because he wasn't using his full potential, presumably), but what do I know?

[Neonivek]

The most that happened was Darth Vader who is the second most powerful force user alive at that point...

Nudged a destroyer downward and it crashed because it couldn't course correct.

Ignoring that the Death Star is many MANY times larger then the Destroyer... Vader wouldn't have done anything to it if... it was in space for example.

[itisnotlogical]

My guess would be that Yoda lied (to motivate Luke because he wasn't using his full potential, presumably), but what do I know?

I think "size matters not" was referring to Yoda's size, the idea being that if a tiny old hermit could lift the ship then there was no reason that Luke couldn't do the same. It's been a while though and I don't remember the scene exactly though.

[Jopax]

It's easier if you just consider the FU games non-canon.

They were games which tried to sell by offering full ham potential with force powers, which, as fun as it may be kinda went against everything else in the SW universe and effectively made a lot of things make no sense.

[coolio678]

I have another magic related one!

Only the player is capable of using magic and armor
Sure, most fiction hand waves that away with "mana doesn't like metal" so wizards don't wear platemail. But the player is able to wear the heaviest chunk of metal they can find and not have their spells or mana affected in any noticeable way. Magical knights are cool, so why can't there be more of them? Maybe this could be expanded a bit into "no npcs want to dual-class."

[itisnotlogical]

I have another magic related one!

Only the player is capable of using magic and armor
Sure, most fiction hand waves that away with "mana doesn't like metal" so wizards don't wear platemail. But the player is able to wear the heaviest chunk of metal they can find and not have their spells or mana affected in any noticeable way. Magical knights are cool, so why can't there be more of them? Maybe this could be expanded a bit into "no npcs want to dual-class."

In the Pathfinder rulebook it says that wearing armor restricts all the mystical hand-waving stuff that a spell requires to work, which is why wizards prefer not to wear armor. That is the best explanation I've seen and I don't get why it isn't as widely-used as "magic just doesn't like metal".

NPCs in Morrowind use magic to an absolutely annoying degree. I remember there being plenty of witches and wizards hiding out in caves with nasty stuff like Drain Strength and Paralyze.

[Neonivek]

most fiction hand waves that away with "mana doesn't like metal"

Most fiction is between
1) Wizards are not warriors
and
2) Thick heavy clothing interferes with their movements

[EagleV]

Also, wearing armor for a day's march is not something an archetypical bookworm/wizard could do easily. Of course, this point is moot as soon as they get super strength spells...

[Neonivek]

Also, wearing armor for a day's march is not something an archetypical bookworm/wizard could do easily. Of course, this point is moot as soon as they get super strength spells...

Assuming they last for hours, includes super stamina, and that the Wizard is trained in using armor.

This is why I really love Quest for Glory's Wizards...

They Feel like Wizards rather then walking death machines. Most of the spells in Quest For Glory have a very utilitarian purpose as opposed to just being: Fireball, Lightning, Enhance combat ability, Freeze everything!

[Shadowlord]

This is why the clever wizard turns spells like that into permanent enchantments on clothing or armor (or jewelry).

[Darkmere]

Eh, obligatory arcane/divine spell distinction mention, with the whole clerics vs wizards vs sorcerors and D&D stuff.

[Neonivek]

Eh, obligatory arcane/divine spell distinction mention, with the whole clerics vs wizards vs sorcerors and D&D stuff.

Well in Dungeons and Dragons the Divine and The Arcane are not opposites either. (In fact "Magic" is often a divine domain)

They are different sides of the same coin.

Yet for some reason the Arcane source can do different things then the Divine source... but powerful arcane and divine spells skirt around this limitation.

The reasons for this differ. Often it is because Arcane magic exists beyond reality while Divine magic is an expression of the current metaphysical reality.

As well Wizards and Sorcerers are not opposing forces either. Wizards learn magic through study and Sorcerer's have magic inherent within them and can express magic simply by expressing themselves (There is no spoon so to speak). Divine magic also works both ways with Clerics casting spells by serving as a conduit for the divine or Favored souls casting divine spells through an expression of their own souls. (hence why Wizards are Intelligence, Sorcerers and favored souls are Charisma, and Clerics are Wisdom).

On that note

Characters who feel dumber then you are

A Pen and Paper one. I hate characters who feel less knowledgeable then "I" am even when it is all that they do. Why do characters always have such a narrow focus of interests that they cannot just... I don't know... Read a book.

I am the mightiest warrior on the planet! but I can't jump over a speed bump

Also a Pen and Paper one for games where you level up. Look it is weird to have a character who can fight ancient dragons but is still incompetent at basic tasks.

I know 4.0 of dungeons and dragons went too far with its half competency bonus... but can't we have a compromise other then killing your character's competency?

[Culise]

In the Pathfinder rulebook it says that wearing armor restricts all the mystical hand-waving stuff that a spell requires to work, which is why wizards prefer not to wear armor. That is the best explanation I've seen and I don't get why it isn't as widely-used as "magic just doesn't like metal".

Well, it's worth noting that "magic just doesn't like metal" is typically rooted, explicitly or implicitly, in mythology of cold iron (that is, in its original conception, iron in general said with a poetic turn, though this usually gets reworked a bit in fiction to some particularly-treated subset of iron), as opposed to restricting hand-wavy stuff.  It does not seem all that surprising that the former is more commonly used than something particular to a relatively-modern setting, an explanation that may not even be relevant if your story's particular type of magic doesn't even have those hand-waving bits. 

[alexandertnt]

The whole point to most magic is that there *are* laws and reasons why things work, but there's no point in explaining every single quirk of the system because stories aren't tech manuals. Ask yourself if you would really, truly be interested in a character-driven story that stopped every other chapter to write a pages-long explanation of how finger wiggling works.

It would be like saying "Alice microwaves her coffee" and then breaking down every step of the process, including atomic models, conductivity of the wires, the emitter guns in the microwave, and how the light bulb works. All that was important is her coffee is now hot.

Magic is a means to an end (the end being the story), not some kind of technical manual. There's plenty that goes on in real life that we don't understand at all, but is still considered "science" despite that.

tl;dr for below: I don't want a technical manual on figer-wiggling, I don't want finger-wiggling full stop. I just don't want to read aything which resolves it's plot complications with lame figer-wiggling.

You don't need to tell me how the microwave warmed her coffee, I know what a microwave can do. Or perhaps more importantly, I know what it can't do. I know that she can't use the microwave to unlock that locked door, for example. If a character were to overcome some problem with a microwave in a clever way, I would see that as intelligence, not silly finger-waggling. For example, the protagonist uses the microwave's faraday cage to block a signal to a bomb detonator. That is interesting and fun because the protagonist overcame an obstacle using logic I can follow and understand. I could even be trying to devise a solution to that problem while following along with the story, and I can do that because the world is logically consistant. It's just not fun when the wizard pulls some spell out of his arse to solve the problem.

Magic needs some sort of logical system behind it, or otherwise it's not something smart, it's just a lazy tool the author can use to overcome plot complications. It's just not fun when the wizard comes along and unlocks a locked door (wait, when could magic unlock doors?), and then teleports everyone across a chasm (wut?). At that point, I just assume the wizard can just will their way out of any situation and lose interest.

If magic has some logical system behind it, one in which enables me to understand a characters capabilities and limitations, then I can possibly get behind it. I can possibly see the character as someone who is actually quite intelligent. Without that, IMO it becomes a boring and lame means to an end.

Maybe it's just me, but I like a novel that makes me go "ahhhh, thats clever!". Wiggling a finger to unlock a door doesn't make me do that.

Interestingly, this is something games generally do pretty alright with. The rules of magic are constrained by necessity (it is a game mechanic, so it has to have game rules), and thus become something of a tool that I can use to overcome problems with logically (which is fun), and the stories often reflect that when non-PC characters use it.

I would be totally interested in some sort of fantasy equivelant to hard-scifi. Magic can exist, but it has to play by the rules.

Tech was using the rules to create and work while magic was bending those rules

I personally don't like this explanation. What are these laws of the universe, and why are they so? Are they scientific laws? If a scientific law can be observed to be broken (or bent), then they need to be revisited and revised, because that would mean there is something wrong with those laws. Because of that, it seems tech here is operating under their own self-imposed rules, not any laws of the universe. Why can't tech bend these laws too? It seems like this explanation relies on the reader having a shoddy understanding of what scientific laws are, or that you just accept "universal laws" are some poetic-sounding thing that just works here.

And yeah, I don't like tech vs magic very much either. If magic is supposed to be some sort of scholarary thing, then they just seem like two different specializations. To me, it would be like chemestry and physics going to war with each other, just because they focus on two different areas (and influence each other anyway, because they are both part of the same universe). Why can't mages shoot fireballs with ballistia? Why can't tech use lightning-bolts to generate electricity?

The only explanation I can think of at the moment is these two factions oppose each other ideologically, which actually sounds quite interesting, but that would still mean that tech and magic are not inherently incompatable.

[Darkmere]

I would be totally interested in some sort of fantasy equivelant to hard-scifi. Magic can exist, but it has to play by the rules.

The rest was snipped for length but I wanted to reply to this just because it was something I had typed up earlier but didn't post because I couldn't express myself well. There's a very strong "narrative tendency" that crops up in fiction (games included) a lot. The more powerful magic is, the less it should be used. Take a look at Brandon Sanderson's commentary on it, it's a pretty good encompassing idea about how magic should be used well.