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[Tellemurius]

So my mother forgot my birthday yesterday, this is not something that would typically bother me at all, especially since she's been a bit emotional recently on account of a friend of hers dying. All the stuff she's been doing to try to compensate, however, has been a bit overboard.

First she comes up to me at about midnight when I'm about to go to bed, and proclaims that she just realised she forgot my birthday. She then spends about an hour talking with me trying to force me to concede to various things she has to do to make up for it, like she was insisting she should send my brother out to get a cake for me right then, in the middle of the night, but then she came to the decision she should wait until the confectionery was open so she could go get a proper cake today.

Today she came back with:
One (1), large double chocolate cake.
Two (2), eclairs.
Two (2), bomb cakes, one a boston cream bomb, the other apparently being the same thing but with chocolate.
One (1), slice of "death by chocolate" cake.
One (1), box of iced chocolate brownies.

And probably some other stuff I don't know about.

In addition she's insisting she cook me something special tonight, and that we go out eating tomorrow (I managed to convince her to just go with a cheese omelet tonight, and that we can just have chinese takeaway tomorrow)...

I think I'm going to die from all the chocolate and cholesterol she's insisting on feeding me.

hug her damnit

[Lord Shonus]

But why would you go through all that effort just to fry people if you arn't planning to fry anyone?

I mean magic can do other things... Why is the Fireball and Lightning and Make their eyes pop out and explode their brains spells so attractive but the "Improve soil quality" spell so despised?

In most forms of fiction, there is no inherent difference between your ability to cast "fireball" as opposed to "make these crops grow" other than skill. If you know both, and are in a position to cast one, then you can cast the other. This is a stark difference between magical and nonmagical persons, as, for example. I would have to make or obtain a gun before I could shoot someone, regardless of how good I might be with it. Since you cannot disarm a wizard, except (in some settings) by taking all their magic away, then a wizard is never [i[not[/i] a potentially lethal threat. Besides this, most magical settings include some sort of powerful magical creatures, which you are more likely to have to fight than nonmagical predators. Thus, not learning some form of combat magic almost qualifies as suicide.

[Neonivek]

Then why not learn combat?

This isn't Dragon Age where magic can ONLY be applied in Combat and thus if you learn magic you are pretty much learning to kill people with magic.

These are academics who study in a tower to learn magic and the vast majority of their learning involves throwing fireballs, and yet they never plan on using those abilities because they forgo any sort of combat training whatsoever or conditioning.

[ChairmanPoo]

In addition she's insisting she cook me something special tonight, and that we go out eating tomorrow (I managed to convince her to just go with a cheese omelet tonight, and that we can just have chinese takeaway tomorrow)...

Omelette du fromage, omelette du fromage....

[Lord Shonus]

Then why not learn combat?

This isn't Dragon Age where magic can ONLY be applied in Combat and thus if you learn magic you are pretty much learning to kill people with magic.

These are academics who study in a tower to learn magic and the vast majority of their learning involves throwing fireballs, and yet they never plan on using those abilities because they forgo any sort of combat training whatsoever or conditioning.

If magic is in any way systematic (which is admittedly overused, but it's a standard), then learning combat spells still improves your understanding of magic, whereas learnig to swing a sword not only teaches you nothing, but takes valuable time away from your magical study.

[Sirus]

In addition she's insisting she cook me something special tonight, and that we go out eating tomorrow (I managed to convince her to just go with a cheese omelet tonight, and that we can just have chinese takeaway tomorrow)...

Omelette du fromage, omelette du fromage....

According to my French teacher, it actually should have been omelette au fromage...

[Neonivek]

Then why not learn combat?

This isn't Dragon Age where magic can ONLY be applied in Combat and thus if you learn magic you are pretty much learning to kill people with magic.

These are academics who study in a tower to learn magic and the vast majority of their learning involves throwing fireballs, and yet they never plan on using those abilities because they forgo any sort of combat training whatsoever or conditioning.

If magic is in any way systematic (which is admittedly overused, but it's a standard), then learning combat spells still improves your understanding of magic, whereas learnig to swing a sword not only teaches you nothing, but takes valuable time away from your magical study.

So basically this is like being a scientist and the only way to perform science is to fire a gun. Thus marksmenship is a required study.

[Frumple]

Not so much required as still useful. It's more' like learning quantum physics by mastering artillery triangulation. Could still learn quantum physics by just studying quantum physics. But you can learn it by dropping shells on people, too. Or a combination of the two.

So you could get to grandmaster soil growth just learning soil growth, but you could also get there via learning how to demolish the countryside. And being able to the do latter also means that when the Jubjub bird comes calling you can set it on fire and not get eaten. So the magi pick up some muderskill because, well, why not? You still reach point B but something's less likely to be able to eat you on the path there.

[Karnewarrior]

I'd think a more sectional approach would make more sense. If you're a fire mage, even if you're entirely civilian you probably know the theory behind a fireball, the same way a physicist would probably be able to run a neat catapault or calibrate some artillery, with a bit of help. But that same fire mage wouldn't neccessarily know much about Flesh to Stone, just like our physicist wouldn't be very helpful in the medical profession. Some general knowledge might carry over, though.

If we're talking Gandalf and Merlin, they'd be renaissance men, seen just as reverently in the magical world as Leonardo Da Vinci is in ours. Which raises the interesting question of why it seems that old magic is so much better than new magic all the time, despite what must be multiple advances.

[Graknorke]

I just finished Driver: San Fransisco's story.

That escalated quickly.

[Max White]

But you are assuming that the differences between a pyrocrator and a hydrocrator is as different as a man studying quarks and a man firing a catapult, and we have no way to be assured of this.
Take chemistry for example, there are different types of chemistry, but they all have several aspects in common. Study one intensively and although there might still be one or two things to pick up in other fields, you will learn and understand them much more quickly then somebody new to the field.

So, how much synergy is there between the different arcane arts?

[Aklyon]

I like where this is going.

[Max White]

Although it is interesting to note that the different studies of chemistry exist because chemistry is an imperfect model that we use to simplify very complex physics. In the same way, one could assume that the different schools of magic are in fact just facets of a meta-magic that is both significantly more complex and covers all types of magic. Mastery of this sort of knowledge would mean a mastery of all magic, but in a very unpractical form.
If you want to throw a fireball or water your flowers, doing a meta-analysis to determine the structure of magic would take a lot more work than just using applied magic schools.

[Rose]

[...]Which raises the interesting question of why it seems that old magic is so much better than new magic all the time, despite what must be multiple advances.

That's mainly due to drawing parallels with the way things are often perceived in the real world, where, the further back you go, the more people you find that think magic is real.

[Max White]

One of the more fascinating implications of the facet-meta model of the arcane is the presents of wild magics in our world. These magics seem almost alien in contract to our more familiar elemental magics, however, careful analysis has shown that wild magics are in fact composed of elemental magics operating in vastly complex woven spells. The complexity of these spells is suspect to be a cause for inelegance, leading to mistakes, change, mutation and ultimately, evolution.
Recent finds at isolated chrono-distortions seems to validate this hypothesis. Evidence suggests that the common golem, backbone of many guilds, is distantly related to the wild and destructive stone elemental. While skeptics question how the spell for the creation of such an intrinsically destructive construct would suddenly become the useful worker known as the golem, the answer is that small changes to summoning glyphs would over time accumulate into what we recognize today.
These same skeptics will continue to argue that it is improbable that the random mis-copies made by summoners could amount to a more useful version of a construct, but this to can be rationally explained. When a summoner makes a mistake that causes the entity in question to be more violent, the summoned being will likely kill its summoner, thus that summoner does not live on to teach others the used glyphs, but should a summoner make a beneficial mistake then the summoner will often gleefully publish their findings to the wider public, leading to the success of more obidient summons and, over time, turning the violent stone elemental into the quiet golem.