Fantasy Equivalents of Scientists

I role play my druid partly as an ecologist with a focus on fauna.

A lot of this depends on the nature of the magic system as well as people's otherwise autistic interpretation of science and magic

There are some people who will never accept the idea of Science as magic or Magic as a Science because it scratches their very specific view of it the wrong way.

Frankly looking at a long list of equations and symbols to me is no different than a wizard drawing a magic circle with sacred ruins and shit.

>Frankly looking at a long list of equations and symbols to me is no different than a wizard drawing a magic circle with sacred ruins and shit.
I worked in a field in the military that required understanding how radio frequency signals behave and how equipment uses them, so I know how the cell network infrastructure works and such. My mother insists it's just wizardry... It didn't help that we frequently talked about making sacrifices to the SIGINT gods.

Eactly, working in IT there are some really seemingly esoteric shit when you go to learn about Linux for example that will go WAAAYYY over the head of some people.

Also having been in the military the way you talk and do things don't make sense to people not in the know about it and frankly that's what makes magic so mysterious is that it's weird to people not trained in it.

Unless you're looking to make some super corny piece of kitsch (or something along the lines of Eberron where you start asking questions about what such a thing being a big component of society would be like), I recommend against it.

Historically speaking, the people that thought they could do magic were an equal mix of philosopher, scientist, priest, and crazy person. Look into the various texts about alchemy for an example, it was grounded extensively in metaphysics and mysticism. This isn't to say it can't follow a formal, disciplined approach, but it should be something beyond mere empirical observation and testing (in fact, it may very well defy both, requiring other avenues of attaining knowledge such as logical deduction or divine revelation).

It's not just in your mind. Magic is used as a metaphor for science all the time.

I'll never understand why it's such an anathema of an idea to have a wizard who's also a scientist. This is why i hate class based systems.

I mean, look at this motherfucker here. A military commander who's seen combat, a scientist and wizard who can cast high levels of magic as well as having advanced understanding of the setting's magic.

But hey, in D&D you can't be a fighter who knows how magic works and being a scholar without sacrificing your fighting abilities and you can be a sword wieldinig wizard without sacrificing your magic.

Granted, it depends on the setting and how magic works in the setting but this is why D&D is cancer.

I don't see how it's a bad thing. Having scientist wizards who may also have a religious bent to their studies because they are dealing with some serious esoteric shit.

My favorite way of interpreting it would be like the Hive. The Book of Sorrows Describes it quite well

>AT LAST!

>We knew curiosity would draw you back, Auryx. In their desperation, the Ammonite have begun using paracausal weapons.

>What are these? How do they work? Wouldn’t you like to know. Suffice to say that some powers in this universe are superordinate to mere material physics.

>The source of these weapons is the Traveler, the Sky’s bait star. Their effect is subtle, but devastating.

>But you are armed to respond in kind. Savathûn’s mothers have listened carefully to our teachings. We will not give you the Deep, King Auryx — that power is for us, your gods. But we will teach you to call upon that force with signs and rituals.

>Small minds might call it magic.

What does any of that have to do with class-based systems?

It's not a nitpicking thing really, so much as just answering the question "what is the purpose of magic in your setting?" There are a lot of different valid answers to that question.

In most game settings, magic is just another tool for the players to do stuff, so it's desirable that it be consistent and repeatable effects (and thus science-like). But that sort of magic has a dramatic impact on the tone of the setting and the kind of stories you can tell in it. Its existence gives players a level of control over the environment that is not always desirable, for instance if you're aiming for horror or just a grittier "low" fantasy vibe.

There are plenty of good settings where magic either resists attempts to quantify it because it's unknown, or is driven by some sort of conscious will(s). Most mythic stories have magic with informed abilities that are beyond the understanding of the mortals using them - the effects just happen. A lot of older fantasy (Conan, LotR, Narnia, etc) follows these general patterns. Gandalf is referred to as a powerful wizard, but most of the actual magic you see him do would be considered a cantrip-grade effect in most systems. Even he's wary of using "real" magic without good reason (and even then it's limited).

Hell, one of my favorite all time settings is from Dictionary of Mu, which only allows access to even minor magic by making deals with demons, each of whom have motivations of their own and extremely steep requirements for access to their gifts. That completely defies any attempt at a scientific approach in-setting, except by way of the learning the lore of specific demons.

Because you have a role and to step outside of that role is to deminish your abilities with it. That said, D&D is first and foremost a game designed around Dungeon crawling and not actually roleplaying. A more narrative system would be needed but then when people think of fantasy role-playing 8/10 it's going to be D&D and how it's shaped how fantasy and most of the archetypical classes are portrayed (i.e. noodle armed wizards that can re-write reality and buff chad fighters and every subversion of this trope).

And I'm not saying they are wrong. What you do to tell a story and what you do for a game system are two different things and sometimes they either work really well together and the mechanics follow the lore of the setting or they don't so even though you have spooky mysterious magic for mechanical purposes you know what it does and how it works.

There is not right or wrong answer to this because it's all ultimately subjective and a matter of taste. I personally enjoy science magic because to me science already has a level of mysticm about it and fits in line with how I view magic anyways.

Way to stay on topic, there, guy.

How Dresden Files handles magic is pretty cool. There's a science too it that a non-magical dude starts to understand and even use a bit, as he has a scientific background, but magic also comes largely from an individual users beleifs and emotions, so it's a tad different for everyone. For example, all magic users have to say some sort of word when casting an spell to protect their mind from the magic (can't recall why), and the word has to be in another language than what they use and conceive of(they can't use "fire" for a fire spell) on a daily basis, but the word for evoking does have to be one they beleif will work. The main character mostly uses faux Latin, while the guy who taught him used fake Egyptian.

>so even though you have spooky mysterious magic for mechanical purposes you know what it does and how it works
The metagaming issue is definitely a challenge for having "unknown" magic in an RPG, which is why most games avoid going that route to begin with.

I think it can be done, but it requires finesse on the part of the DM. One way is to just have a high degree of risk inherent in all spellcasting, so that players won't use magic unless it's life-or-death. Another would be to go the route of a lot of narrative systems where the player just declares the intent of the spell, the DM sets a difficulty on the fly and then interprets what happens based on the roll.

>Frankly looking at a long list of equations and symbols to me is no different than a wizard drawing a magic circle with sacred ruins and shit.
I've seen too much of that shit to phase me personally.

Id equate physics wizards to telekinesis and matter alteration. Time magic id argue is a little to strong and specific to be directly equated with physics.
Also, scientific fields are highly interlaced.
The limiter in biology is your chemistry knowledge, in chemistry you are limited by physics and physics knowledge is in turn tied up in math knowledge.
Magic is rarely portrayed as so interwoven. (In games at least)

I have a love/hate with the Dresden Files RPG. There's a ton of cool ideas there, and it's a great jumping off point into Fate for people that are very crunch-oriented. It also has a really solid world-and-character creation system. BUT it's also mechanically probably the clunkiest iteration of the Fate system ever published, and the magic is right at the core of that issue. Having a dozen pages explaining all the little bonuses and penalties and procedures for casting spells completely defeats the purpose of using a narrative system.

The "magic words" thing was actually a fluff bit ripped straight from the novels - wizards in that setting cast spells by way of memorized formulae, and the pseudo-latin words were part of a memory-palace style mneumonic to keep them straight in your head. The actual words were only significant to the caster, since it was a function of how you studied, and had no concrete effect outside of helping concentration.

Look at you, retched Hive, you act as though your worms have saved you from Extinction, have given you power. All those disgusting parasites have done is delayed the inevitable and for every iota of power they give the steal for themselves a a thousand times that. You claim to have a god backing and leading you, but tell me you dedicated and infested thing.

Where is your god now?

Call me a pedantic history-loving faggot, but I'd rather consider mages and their magic to be the equivalent of real-world philosophers of the Islamic world and the Middle Ages.

They aren't really doing their experiments with scientific rigor beyond a few shakily worked out ideas; they're basing their ideas heavily off of older, collected knowledge, but are attempting to innovate and either prove or disprove old theories. There could be mages that consider necromancy to be a subset of conjuration, as per the doctrines of Eltanius, but there could be some newer blood who through discovering the treatises of Necampelo believe that necromancy and conjuration are distinct - one school of thought considering them both to be heretical for their bringing things that should not exist into the realm of mortals, and the other considering conjuration safer than necromancy or vice versa.

It's a running dialogue stretching over thousands of years where nothing has been properly hammered out, let alone how they should properly figure things out. It's odd moments of genius and forward-thinking contrasting with backwardness and conservatism, or even just confusion and misinterpretation - in real world history, two works of Plotinus were somehow attributed to Aristotle, so there were some headaches on trying to reconcile Neoplatonism with Aristotelian worldviews. Imagine that happening with concepts of how magic works. Imagine two schools of magic in a bitter quarrel over something that's essentially splitting hairs, like referring to the source of magic as mana or aethyrial energy. Imagine some schools believing that magic can only be safely channeled through objects like wands or staves, while others consider it a natural energy inherent in the body which causes no harm.

I was strictly talking about the novels, haven't played the RPG but I've heard it has some really cool things. I also thought there was some sort of mental backlash for most users if they don't use some type of word, especially with evocation.

They're Natural Philosophers. Many have become Wizards.

FUCK DESTINY.

or should I say halo 6??

Polite sage for off topic.

The same gods you thought you made extinct Oh Hunter mine.

The worm gods will fertilize the traveling white egg

It's the other way around. The Traveler somehow always creates Ahamkara when it decides to terra form worlds and solar systems to make them livable.

The Worm Gods of the Hive are speculated to be Ahamkara the same as the Leviathan who acted as their jailer and tried , and failed, to keep Auresh and her sisters from contacting them.

In the Book of Sorrows the Hive encounter a race that have a "wish granting Dragon" and they remark how the worm gods should only be for them further reinforcing the idea that Worms are Ahamkara.

Finally, the big and obvious thing is; How the Worms and Ahamkara speak using the Oh [stuff] mine way of talkinig and the fact they can still act and communicate with people even when their dead because they talk to Guardians who wear their bones as armor.

It really depends way more on the magic system, a well crafted and detailed system can make any magic feel like a school of science

Same

Are you suggesting that the Traveler inadvertently created the Darkness (or at least the Ahamkara), leaving humanity to pay for its mistakes?

What? Science isn't replaced by magic. Magic is part of nature, science is a way of methodically explaining things. Magic won't teach you anything like animal husbandry, agriculture, fishing, mathematics, whatever.

Magic is just another thing for science to be applied to.

No, the Darkness is an entity of it's own the same way the Traveler is an entity onto itself.

The Ahamkara can apparently choose to serve the light or the Darkness. The Leviathan was very clearly an alley of the Traveler (even if it did seemingly get wrecked by the Hive the the Worm Gods) But then they've probably been around for a LONG time compared to the Ahamkara who came about in our Solar System.

It depends on the setting

The Dresden Files RPG absolutely has some real cool things, it just a "kitchen sink" approach to design and the end result is a bit disjointed. It's worth a read just to glean ideas from, but for actually playing a fantasy setting in Fate you're probably better off with one of the simpler magic systems from the current Fate Core toolkit.

The two biggest / best ideas that it innovated from earlier Fate-based games were:

(a) integrating character creation and world creation into one process. Takes weight off the GM at startup and makes sure all the characters have shared history and an established stake in the plot. Sets up a lot of great, "hey it's THAT guy" moments even in a first adventure, since there's assumed history.

(b) Using fate point refresh as a counter balance to in-setting character power level. It wasn't perfect, but just the fact that you could theoretically have a party consisting of a 1,000 year old master vampire, a 30 foot tall giant, a plane-hopping wizard, a ghost, and random mortals with no powers whatsoever and have it all be reasonably balanced was pretty great.

Did you really forget about Alchemists OP?

I admit I cribbed a lot of stuff from FMA especially since the magic system I'm trying to create focuses more on Alchemy rather than pew pew fireball wizards

So I guess the best way to describe it would be Berzerk/FMA

Puts biologists in a positive light.

Criminally underrated post

Ugh

Agreed. I used to run Magic = Fantasy Science, but comments from the devs for the system my group plays made it clear that magic is very random, to the point where I wonder how the hell a magical academy or predictable spells are even supposed to work. Now my players just have to remember that casting is more lolrandumb and showy than it used to be.

>magic is very random, to the point where I wonder how the hell a magical academy or predictable spells are even supposed to work
See, that sort of system runs me the wrong way. What's the point of being a wizard if your casting is unreliable and incomprehensible even to an experienced mage?

That's the part that doesn't make sense, you can cast your spells with perfect reliability all day long, but according to the devs the words and gestures are never the same. One wizard might write down some notes for a spell and it looks like mismatched Latin, but when his buddy copies it he just writes "What was a duck?" in glitter ink. And both are the same effect, both reliable no matter which wizard reads which version.

FMA is more like 19th century natural philosophy and mysticism.

Marine Biologist would be an interesting conversion.

let me help you.
class: fighter
subclass: eldritch knight
background: sage

all done.

That really rubbed my autism the wrong way. It might be nice for humor, but it feels so illegitimate, especially for a class that's so powerful. I get that it's all fluff, but fuck.

Kek

Wizards are the fantasy equivalent of computer scientists.

I used to think that comparisons between computing and magic were kind of silly: "Well duh, of course nerds want to think they're wizards! Why do you think Dungeons and Dragons exists?" was the joke I liked to make; it made normies laugh pretty hard.

Then I read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

That's actually an interesting point from a scientific standpoint. We have two mages using different methods to achieve the same result, each being internally consistent but externally inconsistent. Since the world that their magic is manipulating remains the same, and the end result remains the same, the only difference is the person casting the spell.

That means that whatever it is that lets a wizard cast spells is different for each person in how it functions, such that each caster has to essentially make up his own spells even if he knows what the result should be.

>ITT people who don't know anything about science

>anyone can become a mate through experience and study.

This is also true. No need to correct yourself.

Then say something you bitch we're doing some learning here.

>ITT people who don't know anything about magic

agreed

saved

Chemist here, am I a wizard?

Yes, an Alchemist.

Aww man that's the worst kind of wizard

Why? Would you rather be a pew pew fireball wizard?

Yeah or a Necromancer/Summoner

Yes. In fact, it's not even a wizard at all.

To be fair, Chemistry is as close as you can get to slinging fireballs irl.

This

It is the best kind, you aren't limited by silly things like mana or spell slots, but only by your imagination ... and how much stuff you can carry with you.