I'd encourage aspiring fantasy writers or world-builders to try to get a bit beyond their own modern thinking in order to develop rich worlds - read some ancient literature with as open a mind as possible. Ask, "what is the *most* alien part of this worldview? Focus in on that.
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Comments
Nice thread.
do you really trust the demon to write your spell? ;)
We prescribe plenty of meds of which we don't know exactly how they work, but most of the time they do! Sometimes stronger, or weaker, depending on the individual, resorption rate etc...
(The secret is that they tried concentrating the juice by boiling, and it turns out that vitamin C breaks down extremely quickly under heat.)
And its a perfect example of stacked errors built on incomplete knowledge reinforced by a sort of sunk-cost bias which causes her to discount masses of prophetic material as “static.”
Her God is shouting and pointing, & she’s questioning her interpretations, by ends by doubling down
But other writers will have different objectives of course
This whole ecosystem of shared knowledge and collaboration happened, we just didn’t write much of it down.
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/impact/casestudies/ancientbiotics.aspx
After all, sometimes DM fiat is enough.
But basically *if* magic is a consistent, predictable craft (and OP is 100% correct to point out that’s a big if!) it would be *applied* in a manner similar to comparable technology, even if the practitioners don’t understand why
Engineering isn't physics! It's what you call craft work here, tested and documented to build a useful model. 😁
A lot of gaming-inspired sorceries are "magic is routine, uses easily tracked resources" where you know how many spell slots you have. This is...not how fiction should work, IMHO.
A couple of years later, I tried running the program again and the problem had mysteriously disappeared.
That has weird edge cases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature