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[Graknorke]

spells burn themselves out of your memory after casting.

Are you thinking of Discworld? Because I know that's a thing in those.

[Rolan7]

Is it?  It didn't seem to work that way in Lords and Ladies, Ridcully had to wait a while before having the energy to teleport again.  Same in Equal Rites, it seemed to be a matter of the wizard getting mentally exhausted from casting a lot.

[NJW2000]

Oh, and in sourcery it's to do with the amount of raw magic in the world, and how much is allocated. Pratchett is a dodgy example as he satires most fantasy. But if it's in Pratchett, especially early Pratchett, then it may well be a bit of  a trope.

[Rolan7]

Actually I guess what I meant is that they recharge their mental energy from the world's magic field?  Because in Sourcery the guy that didn't was... rather unique.
I vaguely remember something about living spells though, kinda like the living spellbooks.  Maybe there are also special spells which require extensive preparations between castings.

[Graknorke]

From 'The Colour of Magic':
"It takes three months to commit even a simple [spell] to memory, and then once you've used it, pouf! It's gone."

[miauw62]

most things in the first few books are retconned, though.

[NJW2000]

Pratchett bothered with character lore, not spell lore. Ridcully uses tons of spells when fighting Granny Weatherwax, who also uses the same sort of magic a bit. He did whatever was funny and convenient after a while.

[Graknorke]

most things in the first few books are retconned, though.

Well they're the only ones I've read so I think in this situation I am completely free of fault.

Also Weatherwax was a witch and that's totally different and therefore not at all comparable, checkmate atheists.

[Tack]

Meanwhile Rincewind is famous for having one spell in his head so terrifying that it scared away all of the other spells.
They keep him on retainer to Not cast it.


However, yeah, in other Discworld novels they've had people throwing around fireballs like nobody's business, and the excuse in some later novels is more like "magic's tricksy stuff, does more harm than good, s'right".

[Jopax]

I think it also might be something tied to a location? Like, the gods did put some tight regulations on magic and it's power because of that big war that messed up a lot of places. But you can still do crazy stuff in certain places where the magic abuse was pretty heavy, like say imagine dragons or something.
Unless he changed it later on, the general thing about magic was that it was a different way of doing things, not a better one. So the amount of effort and work had to be the same, you could just do it over time instead of instantly or something.

[Tack]

That part isn't magic, I think. It's more the purview of witches.

Though I remember Tiffany Aching pulling some serious magic when she goes all Black Aliss.

[TheBiggerFish]

That part isn't magic, I think. It's more the purview of witches.

Though I remember Tiffany Aching pulling some serious magic when she goes all Black Aliss.

Dammit, I'm going to have to start worrying about spoilers now!
Unless you meant the Hiver.


I'm pretty sure that The Colo(u)r Of Magic is kind of...Retconned a Very Lot.  It's the first book and Pratchett did not have any idea that he would be writing like forty books in this universe when he wrote it so I'm more willing to trust the interpretation that it's just mental fatigue of casting that's a cap on magic.

[Harry Baldman]

Spoiler: Magic v. Tech (click to show/hide)

Magic vs. technology bases itself on the difference that magic by its nature isn't understood. People know of causal links between rituals and results, but they have no idea why they translate into those results, and feel they don't need to. Technology is founded upon understanding the fundamental principles of why something works, then applying those principles in creative ways.

The purpose of the conflict is, I would suppose, to prevent the possibility of magitek and to facilitate medieval stasis. Magitek makes a setting all screwy and alien if you go far enough with it, and if technology keeps magic at bay, then powerful magicians influencing society have a reason to halt technological progress. Besides, with magic you can conjure food and water, kill off disease and clean up the neighborhood! Plus you can kill people real easy with it, so why do you need a trebuchet anyway?

It's also sort of a conclusion you can draw from magic going away in the literal sense. Time goes by, and so does technology progress and magic wanes. So technology and magic must be opposed forces. There's even some historical basis - increased travel and information gathering capabilities progressively limit how ridiculous are the things you can present as true and be believed. Though there are still incidents where people try to persecute a visiting football team for obvious witchcraft on the field, magic as a whole is kind of viewed as a ridiculous thing, isn't it?

You can also say that in the world magic is the tool of the gods - trying to understand it angers them, and they take it away as a consequence, rendering it as inscrutable as possible. Or use the Arcanum logic that magic twists the laws of physics (and not only when used, but also in a background way, sort of how wizards live a lot longer than most people) that technology utilizes, and that's why clocks become a bit runny in its presence.

Finally, there's the dumb way, where scientists say that the practice of magic, just like emotions, teddy bears and girly stuff, is unscientific and reject it outright. The situation being that the author misunderstands what science actually is. Although you could make the argument that using reality-altering forces you don't understand is wildly irresponsible, that should just motivate scientists to try and understand why reality is altered by these forces and how to make them understandable, predictable and safe.

It's just like me to finish a ramble when the thread's moved on.

It is a bit weird in Discworld, though, how magic works slightly differently in every installment, and I've only even read the first 5 books.

[sjm9876]

I kind of internally rationalised it as magic being a conversion of energy. The more complex the conversion, the greater the preparation time - for example, the falling of a rock to the rising of a person, can be done fairly instantaneously. A fireball would need to be prepared. Etc...

Course, it's likely just retconned, but I'm sure Pratchett would have appreciated the fact we try to fill in the gaps for him anyway

[NJW2000]

I think he'd have preferred it if we tried to write our own versions of the Hedgehog song, actually

Or maybe not, a lot of people have done that.