Building a Functional Magic System

Ah, I see—thank you for the explanation!

Hmm... Something else that occurs to me: this setting seems unlikely to become a magitek setting: it seems that the creation of magical items is very limited.

... Unless it goes the "slavery" route, of course, keeping a huge number of mages in servitude to power its various magitek wonders...

(Which then prompts the question: since mages have so much power, how would one oppress them in numbers—at least for any length of time?)

My Games & Writing

I had plans for a plotline involving a villain who kidnapped and enslaved mages to make magic items for himself so he could maintain power- torture and starvation can go a long way to make one compliant (though not necessarily effective at making magic items- the bad guy was operating with incorrect/incomplete information)

Basically, yea. The established rules suggest you could have quite a bit of control over mages through starvation, and a guy with a gun could quite reasonably beat a starving mage.

Does this need to be a hard limit though?

There is a hard limit before Power Degeneration and Cast From Hitpoints starts taking effect. So in theory, if you can only cast ten fireballs a day you can go for eleven, but is it worth getting a weeks-long migraine or burning the skin off your hand to do so?

And you could do more to try and expand your natural limit, but your progress is going to be much slower as you try to clear that hump and the channels you've already set up become more ingrained.

Edited by iowaforever on Dec 4th 2023 at 6:21:59 AM

So if you make the fireball half as big but without diluting the power needed to make the ordinary one then does that mean you can make and throw twenty of those instead?

"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."

I think that Devak may be asking whether you, as the one designing this setting, have a reason for placing such a limit on mages. That is, why not have it such that people can hold arbitrary amounts of power?

Interesting—although as you point out, that method of enslaving mages results in their becoming less effective mages.

Hmm... So, with magitek seemingly pretty much out (at least on a large scale), will your setting start developing mundane technology at some point in its future...?

My Games & Writing

Yes, exactly. The nature of the setting means that the exact limits of magic will likely be unexplored. Is this a question you then need to settle now, at the risk of limiting yourself or your story? After all, there are going to be plenty of practical limits.

Because not all men are created equal. Because narratively there are some people, good and bad, that want to be accepted and admired as mages but having a limit makes it a Tragic Dream or encourages improvisation.

Because having no limits or arbitrary limits seems ripe for abuse and would diminish the role and effectiveness of non-magic users. Because I don't want to abuse the Heroic Second Wind trope where people are just pulling more magic out of thin air with no consequences.

That's not unfair. Although I'll note that all of those things might be achieved without setting a hard cap to stored power, I daresay.

But, it sounds like the cap may have bearing on your specific story, and it would achieve your ends, I daresay, so fair enough.

My Games & Writing

It's mostly a rule I've set on myself so I don't contradict or Ass Pull something that shouldn't happen. As I develop things more it may change, but better to set up some ground rules first before getting to the fun stuff

So would the math element factor into this then?

If something normally can be done by ten, then would dividing the pool in half equal twenty or multiplying it by two equal five in terms of magic results?

Example:

Normal: Ten fireballs.

Division: Twenty fireballs, half as big.

Multiplication: Five fireballs, twice as big.

And additionally...

Percentage: One fireball, same size as normal, ten times as hot, also blue.

Would it work within the setting's rules regarding magic?

"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."

Not entirely what i meant. A hard limit is a limit you cannot move past no matter what. A limit that is true for anyone. But once you establish a hard limit, you can't go back without retcons. And i am talking about a magic pool here: various magics may simply never become useful until their magic pool hits a certain level. A fire mage isn't all that useful until you hit cannon fire levels at the least.

You've already established a bunch of soft power limits. Sure theoretically someone may one day figure out a way to break the shit out of it, but i think it's worth asking: will this matter at all to your story? Is it going to cover such a wide reach of time that anyone will ever break through all the various practical limits and ascend to god? Because, judging from your premise, it's going to last a couple of years at most. It's not really worth spending effort thinking about stuff that's never going to be relevant, which incurring the risk that you write yourself into a corner. You can always decide at a later point that whatever current power limit is the hard limit.

Not to mention: Would the people in the story know? Judging from the setting, it would likely be a golden age of magic discovery and it seems incredibly unlikely anyone would discover any hard limit you establish until potentially centuries later. Someone mentioned artificial gems not being a thing for another century, but there could also be someone whose magic is fissioning uranium who never in their lifetime will understand the potential use of it. They would never have any reason or means to establish a greater manapool. In fact this could be a powerful source of tragic figures: mages who nevertheless are never lifted out of squalor because nobody thinks liquid crystal magic or reverse osmosis magic is particularly useful. Or an air mage who never got fed well enough to have a decent manapool and so never can reach any particular threshold to do impressive magic and so gets tossed aside as "broken".

See here's the thing: none of this requires a *hard* limit. Finite time, resources, or just talent are going to be extremely powerful arbiters of magic potential in your story. If magic requires academic study, well not everyone is going to be cut out for that. Lack of scientific underpinning of various magical concepts means you might be a mage of a type simply not recognized as useful. Inequality is absolutely staggering at any pre-industrial society (For most of history there simply was no middle class, until the industrial revolution pretty much) so even if you are somehow a mage that doesn't mean you could have the means to study.

Not to mention that your established mechanism of becoming a mage is already incredibly restrictive: royalty or nobility with access to nigh-infinite resources would already not be capable of being a mage, as one of the things you've established is that it just happens randomly.

So then, does there need to be a hard limit on one's magic reserve? In a world of nigh-infinite scientific potential, where a person may spend their entire life looking for the right type of science to underpin their power and never find it because that subfield simply isn't going to be invented for another century... is it necessary to say "yea the author says no"?

Edited by devak on Dec 6th 2023 at 10:32:44 AM

That's a good way of putting it. I think I'll borrow that.

I don't think I ever said that people are born with natural affinities for one type of magic or another. No one is born a uranium or carbon mage, for example; they get there because they study and practice on rocks and become an earth/rock/metal mage, and one day someone brings in a hunk of uranium and they say "hey, what happens when I hit this with a spell?".

Moreover, the amount of power that is first displayed when someone develops magic is comparatively small but leads to odd circumstances which need further analysis to ascertain if they're magical or not- a person in a populated area might go their entire lives thinking they're just naturally good at guessing games when they actually have immense magical talent because they never talked with a priest or someone else in authority that would be able to test them, while a poor girl that one punches the equivalent of the Beast of Gevaudan would attract attention and probably get swept off to an academy to test and train her up (and her family gets a big payout from the government). No one wakes up one day shooting fireballs or bending metals, but once their potential is realized its up to them to study and work that potential to its limits.

Also for clarification, I wasn't saying that there is a concrete block to how deep the pool can go. It's not "once you hit the capacity to cast 10 spells, that's it- pack it up and go home unless you want to burn your hands off", but rather "Once you hit the capacity to cast 10 spells, you can keep working to get to 11 and build the capacity to do so but it's going to take a longer time than it took you to, say, get from 9 to 10. Be careful not to overdo it and burn your hands off in the process". Will it ever come up within the confines of this story? Probably not; maybe in the P.O.V. Sequel if that ever gets off the ground.

The numbers are just there for explanation, but does this answer some of your concerns? I'll admit, I'm a little confused as to what you are trying to say would look like in more practical terms.

Sure, I understand that.

What I'm saying is that it's not the only rule/set of rules that might achieve that end.

(But also that I have no real argument with your choosing that specific rule; I just get the impression that you think that it's the only way of effectively limiting such a magic system as yours.)

Now I'm imagining a mage who attempted to create an infinite number of infinitesimal fireballs.

He never was certain of whether he had succeeded or not... :P

My Games & Writing

I mean, if there is a way to make it work without a hard cap I'm all ears. My initial plan was to show physical consequences of going overboard on magic (also a somewhat childish desire to have a villain who's a pirate necromancer with a Skull for a Head. How did he get that way? Magic abuse), but if there are better limits that aren't so constraining I'd like to go over them

Edited by iowaforever on Dec 7th 2023 at 10:48:25 AM

"Better" is a tricky word: what's good for one story may be bad for another, and vice versa.

Again, I'm not saying that your "hard cap" idea is bad; I'm just pushing back on the suggestion that it's the only workable idea.

As to other ideas, well, I just recently read a story in which any magician can store... pretty much arbitrary amounts of magic—but people only naturally regenerate magic to a certain level. The only way to gain more is to take it from others.

As a result, the amount of magic that a person has access to in that setting is determined to a large degree by the number of people available to them to drain magic from, and what measures they're willing to take in order to do so.

(Although an alternative that involves more-or-less sharing magic between magicians is discovered partway through the story, allowing for some important changes to tactics.)

As to an idea of my own, let's see...

You could have power be stored in certain types of flower, with the state of the flower affecting the amount of power that it stores—power leaks away as the flower wilts. Further, power can only be stored in a flower raised by the wielder, so it cannot be stolen—and it requires an investment of time, resources, and effort to be able to store magic.

That's just off the top of my head, however; I daresay that there are many other ways to limit the use of magic.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Dec 7th 2023 at 6:13:41 PM

My Games & Writing

How about this?

You mentioned gemstones before, right?

Then how about "When the magic in an magic-user starts getting overworked, gemstone-calluses starts forming from and within the body, what gemstone it is depends on blood-type, and grows bigger and more thorough the further they push their magic to the limits. The gemstone-calluses has to be removed manually in order to heal up and the user gets a magic-infused gem to use from it for later. But since it is part of their body and painful to do so akin of removing gravel from an open wound, it is not recommended. The calluses starts on the skin, goes deeper into the muscles and eventually, start turning the bones into gemstone if pushing it that far, which the option is to either lose the bone or leave it in as a back-up battery and prosthesis since it still can be used as a regular bone and might even be an upgrade depending on the hardness of the gem it turned into. The skin is usually the first thing that starts forming into gemstone, but cases involving hair, nails, teeth and even the eyes are on the table as well for the overcharge-effect. The last thing to turn, usually, is the brain and at that point, you are basically just gemstone that can shatter into magic-infused pieces by a sufficient enough blow."

"The process has become infamous as "Glittering" in the magic community."

The limit being set on how badly the mages wants to push themselves to use magic past the safe limits.

"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."