How would magic be handled in real life? Would it even be legal to use it?

How would magic be handled in real life? Would it even be legal to use it?

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Depends on the magic.

Lexomancer?

It would be treated like any other natural or scientific force because reasons, and only people with high IQs who go to magic college would know it.

Everyone else would go "Hey man I could learn magic if I wanted to" then go back to watching youtube videos of cats jumping in boxes.

It would create a massive power struggle between people who can use magic and those without.

Aint no chance for a revolution either, you try thinking you got an equal chance against a wizard with a peashooter.

could be way too dangerous to use it. for yourself, and for others.

i could see it being banned just how drugs are banned in reality just for the fact that you're risking your own life with it.

Depends on how dangerous it is.

40k Warp Sorcery type stuff, with a significant risk of wiping out cities and such with a miscast, would bee banned bar for a few rare government employees that would be heavily regulated.

D&D style magic, where a miscast is less likely and less dangerous, would be regulated largely the same as guns are. That is to say, you could get an arcane focus if you got a license and proved you were responsible with it, knew how to look after it and had somewhere safe to keep it when not in use.

This is, of course, assuming we were talking about just transposing magic into the modern world. From a sociopolitical standpoint, it'd probably result in a lot of sorcerer kings that claim to be gods.

At lest those monarchs might actually do something

I feel like some spells would be commonplace, like easy healing spells or disease curing spells. Public schools would definitely give you a few cantrips, even if most people don't remember them. Just like how at some point, every person who went through high school could write cursive, even if most everybody forgets it after a decade. I imagine that wards and dispells would be popular too.

this

>Would it even be legal to use it?
Everything that gives power to an average citizen and threatens the authority of the government WILL ALWAYS be regulated by the government.
Case in point: firearms and other weapons. Not like you can buy a nuke in a store, eh?

SHALLNOTBEINFRINGED

So you'll probably only legally be able to get attack spells within level 2 or below.

Nobody -NEEDS- dem assault spells and you don't need staffs that orb thing that goes up.

> From a sociopolitical standpoint, it'd probably result in a lot of sorcerer kings that claim to be gods.

Shinsekai Yori.

Go read GURPS Technomancer. They go all through this shit. Fun game.

>Would it even be legal to use it?
All offensive spells would be treated the same as guns.

SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED

>legal

Fuck are they gonna do about it, I'm a god damn wizard.

>Military taught extensively about combat-related spells (e.g. attacks, major healing, resurrection, detection, etc.)
>Police taught spells used to pacify the population (e.g. Dispel magic, paralysis spells, detect magic, detect evil, knock, etc.)
>All medical practitioners simply become clerics
>All magical focuses are banned on planes, with anti-magic charms being put on all public vehicles as standard
>Science classes are reduced to make way for Magic classes
>Business schools taught how to use and detect Charm spells.
>Necromancy is illegal as all hell (pun intended)
>Demon summoning, shadow magic, and blood magic likewise
>Serious restrictions on when and where you can use any kind of magic
>Science has a new field: mageiology (the study of magic from a scientific perspective)
>Religious leaders can now try to commune with their respective gods. Atheism either disappears completely or adapts its meaning, or grows accordingly

>implying the government doesn't have its own wizards
>implying your thoughts are not constantly being monitored for treasonous thoughts
We Cormyr now.

So Shadowrun?

oh shit
>Clairvoyance is now possible
>can actually arrest criminals before they commit a crime

>Divination is now possible
>Can instantly scry for criminals on the run to find where they are

We going full Minority Report up in here

Except 100% correct

Never played it, so very possibly.

>read minds for intent to commit crimes
>continually improve efficacy at detecting intent
>begin to detect proto-intent and criminal leanings
>figure out who's going to be a criminal and who isn't before they're even in preschool
>free will doesn't exist
>vaporize anyone with state-unapproved cognitive makeup at birth

I'm stealing that for the evil nation in my campaign

lol

The fun thing will be the fact that every citizen within the state will absolutely love it and defend it to the death, because it's impossible for them to disapprove of it and still live.

>implying real wizards wouldn't rek any wizards trying to work for a government against wizards

We killed them all already. Suffer not a witch to live. Now all they can do is bend spoons.

Couldn't the religious bit also have a chance of proving athiests right? Whole 50/50 we don't know type shit. y'know? Or possibly entirely back up one religion who's god actually picks up the phone while the rest don't even get a dial tone.

Oh, please! Real government trained wizards are handpicked for their skill and talent by the toppest of the top. Hand picked elite plucked fron the elitist. Your fucking basement dweller's who taught themselves magic could in no way stand up to the training, discipline, and raw talent these individuals have in their fucking pinkies. Why else would they chosen for the job and not you.

>implying the best of the best would work for governments and not for the secret wizard council or whatever they would hold
Often in fantasy, wizards are crazy dudes who only care about magic. They wouldn't take kindly to gubbernments trying to boss them around, and especially wouldn't take kindly to traitors who would help them to do that.

It doesn't matter we are the most technomagically advanced society on the planet. We can fucking determine what time you shit today 5 years ago you don't think we wouldn't pick the real talent at birth and train them up to be good little doggies? You're the Chaff, its why you're even let out and about in the world because we KNOW you can't do any actual harm.

>believing that a wizard would ever attack another wizard because the government told him to
It's like a soldier being told to fire on the American populace, he's just going to defect and join up with the others and try and take down the gubbermint.

>he hasn't seen the army coming in to stomp out malcontents during the turn over period
>he wasn't alive to see fire mage squads being called in after the water wizards couldn't break the lines using water jets
You can't be this stupid, user. You only think this because we can enforce peace before peace is broken but back then we were kicking in doors raiding illegal cabals fire first magically interrogate later.

Why not just mind-control everyone into productive members of society? Government-sponsored Thrallherds by the thousands.

Usually, soldiers will happily fire on the populace even when told not to.

Because whoever controls the people controls the power. You could have a cabal conglomerate their thralls and now you're facing a small internal militia. Best to set it up so the populace traps themselves using hard to see schemes and longterm plans to keep them thinking they're happy and much better off exactly where they are.

The average soldier is a retard. The average wizard is a genious.

Just think of the bedlam that would result from rampant transmutations, curses and enchantments.

I should think quite naturally that Magicians would represent a ruling elite.

Magic trumps economics y'see.

Wait a sec. Lemme just browse the archives for all the times wizards have done incredibly fucked up and retarded things without thinking of the consequences just because they got bored. This is excluding the pure evil, convoluted you wouldn't understand, i thought it would be funny, why not, and "wizard" labeled ones. Just because they have genius tier intellect soesn't mean they can't lack the wisdom of proper etiquette or just be plain retarded.

Like bored marines except with magic?

>to catch a criminal you have to think like a criminal
>thoughtcrimes are now illegal
>by hypothetical syllogism, it is now impossible to catch criminals without being a criminal yourself.

the government is probably composed of wizards

why are you desperate to believe that every wizard must be an untouchable special snowflake? you'd probably have a handful of powerful wizards on top and the rest would just be normal working people getting shit on like everyone else.

Like spetsnaz who haven't had a terrorist hostage crisis in week.

>half of those in picture are dead
>their replacements sucked and so did the survivors new attitude
God its like SA:O season 2 has somehow turned into a transmittable virus.

youtube.com/watch?v=-2lVi-SeIx0

Much like chemistry or being a medical doctor - the average person doesn't know shit it. It's not particularly hard to learn, but people are stupid lazy fuckers.

For anyone who does learn, they can figure out how to do the dangerous stuff (murder people, make bombs, cook meth etc), though typically the actual dangerous spells are controlled.

Extremely dangerous spells are very secret knowledge, though anyone who devises the magical equivalent to nuclear bombs is very quickly co-opted into government programs.

>white people "rapping"
lol

>Legal
Shall not be infringed, REEEEEEEEEEE!

If magic is a thing that is confirmed to exist, and some people naturally have a talent for it while others do not, you ARE going to end up with a weird sort of mageoclassism.

It doesn't even need to be malevolent in nature. People born with magical ability are simply going to have more options in life than those that are not. There are jobs that only they can do, and those jobs are going to pay VERY well.

Personally, I think that magic in a modern day setting is the sort of thing that you get tested for at an early age, and you would get special classes about magical theory and history in highschool, but isn't ACTUALLY taught until college. Indeed, it may be illegal to practice magic below a certain age.

Why? Because is there ANY 14 year old in the world that you would trust with the ability to shoot flame from their hands? Its not a question of if these kids would do something stupid and dangerous with them, its a question of collateral damage when they do. So keep practical magic out of their hands until they are old enough to use it responsibly.

Probably 75% of magical employment is defensive, aka businesses hiring magicians as consultants to make sure that the opposition isn't using magic to dick them over. Accredited neutral magical institutions will be raking in money hand over fist, and all they have to do is sit at a table and confirm that no one is using a jedi mind trick to get a business edge. The same goes for any kind of major international meeting, only in that case they are warding against spectral assassins and teleportation and shit.

It doesn't even matter if such things are even common, the fact that they CAN happen will scare the shit out of people.

We'd find ways around it.

Then you will have magicians working for hire. You want me to shapeshift you into the little girl? That will be 25,000, as according to union price standards, and your insurance won't cover it. You want me to make it rain on your farm? Better clear that with the world weather conclave, climate changing magic needs to be carefully monitored because secondary effects can snowball into unforeseen consequences. So one and so forth.

Reasonably speaking, not every spellcaster can be equally good at everything. Some people are going to specialize, or naturally have an affinity for, a certain kind of magic. So you either work independently as a licensed pyromancer, or you work for a headhunting agency with a list of applicable skills. Clients contact the agency with their request, not really understanding the finer points of magic, and then the agency sorts through their pool of on-call wizards to find someone who has the spell knowledge to field that request and pings them with a job offer, taking a cut of the commission as a finders fee. This way the clients don't need to first research what kind of wizard they need for their specific problem, and the wizards don't have to market themselves constantly.

Countries WILL have their own private magical task forces, whose goal is the magical defense of the nation and keeping a leg up on the competitors. Magic and science likely work hand in hand, with magic allowing for previously impossible phenomenon and then scientists figuring out how best to exploit that.

This is how you end up with NASA having wizards cast Feather Fall on rockets to flip the table on the fuel efficiency problem. The whole rocket 'weighs' less than pound, how much rocket fuel do you think it needs to reach orbit?

>It would be illegal in the UK and Australia.
>In the U.S., Trump would be trying to make America great again after Obama banned 2nd Level spells and up