What's your favourite portrayal and handling of magic and magic users?

I too dislike mages wearing robes but only if they are traveling mages.
If the mage is a hermit never leaving home, robes make sense. Comfortable and easy to clean.
But for anyone on the road, they are awful

Not a Veeky Forums related thing, but I loved the way it was handled in Night Watch.

I honestly hate how most games and settings use it. Magic is, at its core, a way to fundamentally break the laws of reality and twist them to your own ends, yet most games just boil it down to 'shoot fire out of your hands and fly' or stuff like that.

Is it weird if I want to say Thaumcraft? I kind of want to say Thaumcraft.

Well, for what it's worth the whole "The Traveller was evil all along" Thing they had going intially is boring. The way they have done the story outside the game rightfully deserves the criticisim levied against it but I feel that they have a chance to do really good things with the sequel.

This is another thing that I take issue with is that magic is always "cheating" in universe. Is it really breaking the laws of the universe when it's something that can be done? Then again you're talking about a movie that is set in the modern day where the magic shit is done in secret away from normies so that makes sense for that sort of thing.

the wizards of unseen university (moving pictures onwards) have always been some of my favorite characters in anything ever.
a bunch of fat crotchety college professors who sleep well, eat big dinners, and wouldnt be caught dead with a student in their university.

This

I never have my casters wear robes either. They're always dressed in whatever the setting-appropriate equivalent to jeans and a tee shirt is.

Wait what? It was supposed to be evil?

Yeah, originally the Traveller was suppose to be evil and using the Guardians to help heal itself. Don't know much about it beyond that but frankly that by itself tells me everything else would have been some dumb shit like the Darkness is truly the Good and the Light is truly evil or something contrived like that.

Obviously it's not a work of literary genius but the way the Darkness is presented and as well as the Hive are really good to me since they arn't just atypical bad-guy race that you just have to deal with especially when you go through the Book of Sorrow

>jeans and a t-shirt
Pleb taste.
Setting equivalent of a good suit at least, come on. They are wielders of the Arcane energies of Creation, not self-inserts for NEETs. At the very least, give them decent trousers and formal shirts.

I'm a fan of the idea that wizard robes are based on what was once fashionable for noblemen, and since being literate and rich is a big party of being a wizard most wizards were also nobles.
Fashions changed but since the archwizard like the robes and kept them they became known as wizardly as others who wanted to emulate him also wore robes. Fast forward a couple centuries and noblemen are wearing massive codpieces and poofy sleeves but wizards continue to wear robes.

>not self-inserts for NEETs
Speak for yourself, NEET-wizard is the best magic user archetype.

One time I played, briefly, as Saitama-Wizard. That is, he was a young prodigy who was so extremely powerful in magic that he did nothing productive with it and just spent his days at home in his tower watching anime on TV.

>not using magic as a metaphor for stagnation
>not dressing magic-users in pajamas

how the fuck is the ability to ALTER REALITY WITH YOUR FUCKING MIND in ANY way related to stagnation?

All human activity is designed to carry out a particular goal.

Once you can carry out all your desires the second you have them, life loses all difficulty, and with that all meaning.

Having absolute power is pretty boring actually.

Wouldnt that mean that technology is also a symbol of stagnation?

Not Saitama-poster, but
>technology is also a symbol of stagnation
Sure, there are interesting ways you could run that.

Alter Reality → Denial of Reality → Escapism → EXTREMELY External Locus of Control

The wizards in the Black Company series are probably my favorite renditions in fiction. They all concentrate on utility spells over most else, such as locating someone through a lock of their hair, or animating a rope, or creating illusory soldiers to fool the enemy into backing off.

And then the *really* powerful assholes can do all kinds of shit. Throwing twisters everywhere, covering a retreating army with a sandstorm, crafting flying carpets, putting dozens of men to sleep all at once. The wizards just under the top tier tend to have special gimmicks which they can't usually be challenged on or which make them immediately identifiable (such as the Howler's penchant for howling all the time, or Soul Catcher's habit of changing his/her voice every time they start a new sentence).

Being a wizard also means being really fucking hard to kill, though it doesn't usually impart any significant physical strength. There's a guy in the beginning of the first book who gets eviscerated and it still takes him something like an hour to die, the top dozen wizards in the world can't even be killed by conventional means and it makes them really fucking scary.

Fuck it, Xanth.

I like the way Brandon Sanderson tends to handle magic. I like a simple set of rules or series of abilities that are let loose into the setting. Magic and technology are essentially synonymous when you get to high enough level tech. So if you get wizards that are able to till a field more efficiently then any peasant then you bet your bottom dollar they are gonna be out in the fields.

Another type I like is the alchemic approach to magic where the magic itself is simplicity itself confined to only a couple actions ie. heating and cooling, telekinesis etc. but all the truly "magical" effects are just clever applications of other present physical laws. So a powerful magician isn't someone who can heat or cool something the most or lift the largest rock but one who can use the expansion and contraction of matter to destroy a castle after removing one keystone.

Ritual magic. Preferably without predefined "spells."

Only the most simple and direct magic can be done without rituals, if any at all.

I'm also a fan of heavily animistic magic, where it all comes from petitioning or controlling/binding spirits.

Mah nigga

Im played a game based in Xanth
Talents are surprisingly hard to make and assign. Do you let the player chose or contribute? GM makes it all up? How do you balance talents among the party. The books have talents that are useless to talents and are op as fuck
Personally I love the clever ones, that require a sharp thinking mind to use well.

Oryx's family is a fucking sitcom.

I love it.

It is surprising. There is a scene in the book where Oryx is walking around teh Dreadnaught and finds both his daughters and their other Deathsingers practicing their Death Song and he goes.

"What are you doing my daughters?"

"We are dying as many times as we can handle"

"How adorably precocious !"

Then there's the fact that Crota is a fuck up who got out skilled by a Wizard who just teleported around him such to the delightment of Oryx that he made her a member of his court for making a fool of Crota.

> “Father’s going to eat our souls,” Halak sighed.

Best sitcom.

The Darkness is just the coolest fucking guy in the world casually talking about commiting genocide against people who can't comprehend the sword logic over a cup of coffee in starbucks

I actually prefer the Mistborn setting(especially the new ones). Magic is more limited in scope, but the versatility is mainly limited by how much component you have and your imagination.

Non tg? The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Having magic doesn't solve humanity's existential problems, and actually makes them worse.

In a game? Probably D&D, either 3.5 or 5. Inb4 muh class balance; I like that wizards can break physical laws and be the baddest fuckers around. I'm a wizard fanboy in basically every RPG vidya and tabletop.

They wanted it to be game that would have something for everyone (rpg-players, fps-players etc.) but ended up being bland for everyone.

It's the tries-so-hard-to-please-everyone-only-ends-up-looking-like-a-try-hard-bitch game

4e's Fighters.