Ugh

B-b-but muh limited view of science I learn from the internet?!?!

Used to be that the best gear was actually strictly limited to Warrior classes only.

>mfw Veeky Forums does or talks about fucking anything ever

Which is stupid.

>mfw summer pretends to be old

>mfw people won't put points into glorious crafting and enchanting skills.

>his magic is internally consistent.

Shit taste faggot.

Veeky Forums seems to be extra shirt right now

>mfw antirealismfags shot themselves when we apply it's magic bullshit rules to martials too
>mfw they cry "REEEEE you can't do that with a sword!" despite wanting to throw fire out of their hands

I'm pretty sure the anti-realism people are different from the caster supremacists

>third post is off-topic /pol/shit

Ugh.

Stop false flagging Wizardfag, we know about your cancerous autism that you spread to all the little girls and boys.

>mfw people don't strictly enforce the material components needed by their casters.

This is honestly a big pet peeve for me too. Magic needs some manner of limits and internal logic, but there's no reason at all that such needs to be based on real world science as opposed to some other paradigm (such as one of the various pre- or pseudo-scientific frameworks people have come with over the millennia).

It's the end of summer. They're getting that last spawning frenzy in before they head down stream.

The consistent part is that it'll fuck you up.

Nothing is wrong with martials

magic isn't real! stop believvin in it

>Playing an RPG with magic
why would you do this to yourself?

>mfw someone doesn't give their spellcasters small and reasonable abilities to make them more comparable to martials

Let's take something basic like super-speed. Sure reaction time is a problem, whatever. To be as fast as the Flash, you'd need to deal with friction not burning up your clothing, friction not destroying the road, the fact that you couldn't displace air that fast without igniting nuclear reactions, the fact that slight perturbations in the ground would launch you into outer space, the fact that you'd inevitably hit outer space anyway because gravity isn't high enough to keep you on the ground and you would just fly off into a tangent, the fact that he wouldn't be able to even see moving at relativistic speeds, how durable do his legs have to be, to survive his speed? The repeated impacts, at a high enough frequency, would simply destroy his legs. And that's not talking about any of the problems the Flash would have trying to interact with the world while moving at super-speed. Even if he's not blowing people up by causing nuclear reaction in the air, or blowing holes through people because of the ridiculous sonic booms that would occur around him, how is he even touching people let alone picking up without utterly destroying them? And then there's the fact that The Flash routinely moves faster than light. This necessitates that the Flash must use physics that are strictly different from our own, because although it's not outside of our current model of physics to have a particle moving faster than light, it is impossible for a particle to accelerate to faster than light speeds. And I don't mean impossible in a practical sense, I mean that yothey are hitting with a force which is completely imaginary.

>Fiction is dumb.

I dunno man, it doesn't seem like a bad universal process for gaining knowledge.
Notice how nothing is setting specific.

>apply real life science to magic
>>Fiction is dumb.
No, user is dumb.

Fiction presents a premise.
The writer and readers must accept and carry that premise.

Everything you said about the Flash sounds accurate.
And yet, if presented with a world where the Flash exists, something must give.
You can cay, "Well, it's dumb, that's it.", but that is lazy rejection of presented facts.
When presented with apparently contradictory facts, you must either find a theory to reconcile them or, at least, accept them.

I'll leave you with this:
>Sikozu Svala Shanti Sugaysi Shanu: Don't you see? No. No! This isn't happening because it is not possible.
>Dominar Rygel XVI: Your brain isn't functioning. Do you think this is all just a hallucination? Do you like that explanation better, hmm?
>Sikozu: No, but I simply cannot comprehend...
>Rygel: Neither can I. Who cares? We're here, they did it, and that's that. You consider yourself intelligent?
>Sikozu: Yes, I do.
>Rygel: Then stop behaving like a child.
>Sikozu: I am not a child!
>Rygel: No, you're an infant! You've studied but you haven't experienced. You know nothing of life!
>Sikozu: And you do?
>Rygel: I've been around long enough to know how ignorant I am. I don't assume the universe obeys my preconceptions. Huh! But I know a frelling fact when it hits me in the face!

This is a good point though.
OP should have said "Applying real world general scientific theories and principles to magic" or some such.
Applying real life science is always good.

>meta gamers

ftfy

"science" commonly refers to a body of knowledge gathered by the scientific method and not just the method itself. when someone says "climate science" for instance, they're often not talking about the process of studying the climate, but what we actually know about the climate, which is specific to the real world. you should be able to figure out which the OP is talking about.

The answer to all that is Speed Force.

Which is a specific flavor of "Wizarddidit."

Butthurt because science kills magic?

Everybody's going mfw but nobody is posting their faces. Where are all your faces?!

Seeing how magic bends the laws of reality while science must obey them so...

>fishing for yous this hard

Science is observation, and observations can change if data is discovered that alters the way we see things.

Ergo, magic bends laws and science explains why those laws were bent, killing magic in the process because it becomes science.

Can you speak to spirits and exorcize demons with science?

That's not how it works, science sees magic as irrelevant.

We technically have machines that can detect spirits as an electromagnetic frequency and demons are also affected by salt, iron, and prayer.

With enough research, both of those things would be possible to perform utilizing science.
Magic works because it can't be explained, science works because it explains how things work, ergo, science kills magic because it explains how things work, which means that it can be experimented upon and go through trials until we're able to replicate the results.

It's like how magicians are impressive until you learn how they perform their card tricks, then it just becomes legerdemain, not dissimilar to that of a pickpocket.

You generally can't observe most of magic.
Some old guy with a beard wiggles his fingers and says a word that matches no known language and something across the room moves. There is nothing else observable in this situation except for the end result. Make a hypothesis all you want, but you have to reconcile it with a witch who can make magic potions by mixing leaves and frog legs and stirring it in a specific pattern, and a shaman who can see the future just by getting high as fuck. None of them have other observable effects and cannot be reproduced by other individuals.

>Some old guy with a beard wiggles his fingers and says a word that matches no known language and something across the room moves.
He is simply using Extra-Sensory Perception to affect the magnetic field around an object, allowing him to move the object from afar without actually touching it.

We technically have machines that can replicate the process, though their accuracy would probably be comparable to that of an acolyte until we perform enough trials to utilize fine motor functions.

It depends on the magic system but the examples you just offered are definitely scienceable, if the wizard can consistently pull off magic then you can probably analyze it

you can analyze it, you just might not get useful results.

Every scientific theory in the world started out as a hypothesis user. If the results can be replicated and analyzed, we can eventually reach a breakthrough.

I mean it depends on the specifics but you could at least learn magic with the scientific method if it's a thing that humans can consistently use

Except he isn't. The machine might be comparable in effect, but the phenomena he uses is not detectable by any technological method. There's an observable kinetic force, but no observable source of that force.

Only if you can find something beyond the most immediate situation. Some guy wiggles his fingers and says a word and a thing happens. You wiggle your fingers and say a word and nothing happens. The missing link is not observable, because it relies on something beyond the senses of any person or machine you could make, and probably not replicable.

I mean we're talking about fiction so it depends on how you set up your setting but I would say that if magic sees consistent use by humans though that it's reliable enough to be scienced, theoretically though you could have a magic system that defys observation

We have many ways of detecting ESP using our modern technology user, it's an effect that projects brainwaves to manipulate the state of matter around the user.

Sometimes it can be used to allow the user to meld through solid objects by manipulating a substance's density, sometimes it can be used to affect the energy level of an area to produce fire, sometimes it can be used to project thoughts into others, etc. the point is that ESP is an observable trait that some people have access to, and if it's an ability that can be learned, it's an ability that can be replicated.

If something defies observation, obviously that means that our observations were incorrect and must be altered to account for this new data.

It's why most of us no longer believe that the earth is flat or that cancer is caused by evil spirits, as opposed to pathogens in the air and the things that we ingest.

You don't understand, you see magic as non-existent, you want science to make magic look like nonsense. You sound like you're butthurt or something.

Eh, since we're talking fantasy and anything gos it would be easy to come up with a system of magic you couldn't use the scientific method to understand

Magic doesn't exist irl though, it is a bit autistic to insist that magic in a fictional setting is understandable though, then again you would have to be very careful about how you designed your magic system if you wanted it to be unknowable

This. I don't understand why the fuck do these people need to put too much science in a fucking fantasy setting.

I mean if your players have access to magic that probably implies it's logically consistent, also physics is just easier to world build around in depth since it's a lot more detailed than what you can probably come up with

Depends what you mean by science. If they assume real-life scientific theories apply to the setting when there is evidence to the contrary, then they might be stupid. If you think the scientific method can't be applied to a setting just because of magic, then you're definitely stupid.

>mfw people do that but then you realize feats that let you ignore that and spells that are verbal and somatic only while being uberpowerful still exist

Holy fucking shit user, nice job of you stating the fucking obvious. That's why I'm wondering why the fuck are you inserting too much real life shit in a fucking fantasy setting.

You know there are multiple people in this thread right? I'm not the same user. Also there's nothing wrong with realism in fantasy

>you see magic as non-existent
Magic is not non-existent, it's merely phenomenon that we are not technologically advanced enough to explain in practical terms.

For example, the ability to converse with another person from across long distances would be considered a third level spell in the Forgotten Realms, yet with our current technology, we can theoretically converse with anyone we want, assuming we know their contact information.
There is no fantasy setting where "anything goes" because that would imply that magic within that setting is so inconsistent that nobody is able to use it.

When you cast a fireball, you will always gather heat energy into a very focused point that will detonate and damage anything within a certain radius from its point of origin.

If magic is so unknown that a fireball could be anything from a spark to a meteor, magic-users wouldn't be possible because everyone who uses it would be dead before they would learn how to utilize it.

The real reason magic should follow rules, "be a science", is so that people can work with it. By establishing limits and logics, it gives credit to the audience, readers or players, letting them speculate on what can happen and immersing them into the work through interaction.

>If magic is so unknown that a fireball could be anything from a spark to a meteor, magic-users wouldn't be possible because everyone who uses it would be dead before they would learn how to utilize it.

right, but the underlying process could still remain a mystery regardless of how much you study it, and you would have no way of harnessing it with technology. you wouldn't *understand* it.

You're right that if magic wasn't scienceable then magic users wouldn't exist, that doesn't mean you couldn't theoretically write a setting like that though, you would just have to keep magic out of the player's hands

Logically consistent within itself doesn't mean that it's in any way observable or reproducible outside of its own established methods.
If there's literally no physical difference between a magic user and a mundane person, and no observable source of magic, how the fuck are you going to observe it and reproduce it?

>mfw players gripe about introducing black powder in a late medieval setting

THEY HAD BOMBARD CANNONS DURING THAT TIME FUCKERS

There are settings where magic use is directly tied to bloodline. You have to literally have the blood of Satan himself to use magic. Sometimes there are other physical differences between people with that bloodline(s) and people without, but often, magic is the only observable difference.

>powergamer tries to bring his bullshit down to a molecular level so he can metagame while he powergames

Depends on the rules of the magic system, if we're talking DnD magic you can science the shit out of it, of course we're talking fiction so it all depends on the setting

By experimenting with various methods of observation until we find one that can tell us something about it. Stick the wizard in an MRI scanner while they cast, point a Geiger counter at them, bring in some psuedoscience detection methods, keep on going until we figure out something that can tell us more about these invisible forces.

>right, but the underlying process could still remain a mystery regardless of how much you study it, and you would have no way of harnessing it with technology. you wouldn't *understand* it.
> that doesn't mean you couldn't theoretically write a setting like that though, you would just have to keep magic out of the player's hands
You cannot use something without understanding how it works in some capacity user. You could theorhetically know how to start a car and get it to move from one area to another, but if you don't understand how to operate the vehicle effectively, you'll most likely kill yourself or others the longer you use it for transportation.

We as a species have evolved to the point where we can observe and utilize our environment. It wouldn't make sense if magic could exist without anyone within the setting being able to explain how it works in some capacity, especially when we can replicate common magical effects using modern day technology.

The same way that we learned how to detect everything else that we couldn't detect at first, experimentation until we produce a working magic radar device.

I mean, how long do you think it took us to detect radio waves before we learned how to utilize them to play music over your car's FM stereo.

Not to mention the Chinese have had gunpowder for what, 1000 years or something? It's not a new technology, it's literally older than soap by three centuries!

The MRI scanner finds exactly the same thing as when a mundane person performs the same hand wiggling and vocal noises. The geiger counter finds nothing. Psuedoscience methods might find *something*, but it's unlikely to be useful.

That might not be doable depending on how the magic works in the setting, of course as magic is traditionally depicted you could probably do it

I like settings where magic only comes from deities. Where all magic are incantations that simply means that you're asking permission from a certain deity to have a portion of that power(and there's a chance that they won't like you because of what you did). A high risk-low reward kind of thing, where the magical power is something science can always disregard as "comic-book sci-fi nonsense"

>You cannot use something without understanding how it works in some capacity user.

maybe we have a different idea of "understanding". if you're born with the ability to wiggle your fingers and shoot fireballs, maybe you could say you understand what you're doing on a superficial level (you're wiggling your fingers), but you have no guarantee of understanding anything on a deeper level (why is this causing a fireball to appear?) even with all the analysis in the world.

If magic is able to produce the same effect each time it's used, it's more than doable.

Only if there is some kind of technology that can actually interact with it.
If there's no way to produce a "magic wave" or whatever you want to call it other than being born with the ability, then that's it. You can't build a machine to do it.
Magic is, by definition, outside of normal physics. Its existence in no way means that it can be reproduced outside of its own internal methods.

In order to use the fireball effectively, you must know a) how to utilize it consistently, b) how far it can be fired before detonation, and c) how far the area of effect extends.

If you don't understand these three factors, you're more likely to kill yourself and others from the first time you cast than you are to utilize it during an actual combat scenario.

If magic is complete undetectable except for in its effects you might run into a wall where the farthest you're able to get is which rituals produce which effects and which groups of people can perform magic, of course that would assume the absence of anything like limited casting, anti magic materials, and meta magic spells that allow you to interact with the magic itself

you're still just describing the effect, not the mechanism.

and the definition of "science" is being stretched a bit at this point. cavemen knew how to walk around without falling over and breaking their neck but i wouldn't call that science.

>Only if there is some kind of technology that can actually interact with it.
Which is possible once we gain a proper understanding of how that works.
>If there's no way to produce a "magic wave" or whatever you want to call it other than being born with the ability, then that's it.
All forms of energy produce some sort of effect in its environment, whether it's heat burning flammable objects, vibrations causing sound, static electricity causing your hair to stand on end, etc.

You can't cast spells infinitely, which means that it runs off some form of energy. If it runs off of energy, it means that you can detect how much is required to cast a spell. If you can detect quantities, then that means that you are only a few steps away from being able to detect and categorize different levels of magic power and at that point it comes down to finding something that reacts strongly enough to magical power to detect a level 1 spell from a level 9 spell.

>setting where a mage uses science to get away with everything he has done because people would rather listen to a scientific explanation rather than the actual truth that a forbidden spell was used, because afterall, nobody believes in magic.
>setting where science is a puppet that mages/witches use to cover their tracks

>cavemen knew how to walk around without falling over and breaking their neck but i wouldn't call that science.
That's because all organisms are equipped with knowledge on the most basic of functions in order to survive.

It's also why you automatically know how to breathe without having to consciously breathe.

And then you keep on trying more detection methods until you find something that does work and gives useful information. Or do you really expect people to try one or two things and then give up? Really it seems like you're arguing for a very specific setting.

And that is technically no different than our understanding that running an electrical current through a wire that has been looped around an iron nail 6+ times will create a magnet.

>Which is possible once we gain a proper understanding of how that works.
How do you gain a proper understanding of how that works if you can't make a machine that can observe it?
That's circular logic. You need a machine that is capable of interacting with it to make a machine that is capable of interacting with it.

As for the rest of your points, you're assuming that the effects cut both ways. Being able to measure the kinetic momentum of a magic push doesn't mean you can push backwards and make magic. Same with the energy requirement. The mage runs out of mana. You can only tell how much mana he has when he runs out of it, because we're back to that whole "can't make a machine that interacts with it" thing. Even if you extrapolate how much he starts with by measuring a bunch of different spells and their different drains, that doesn't help you, because you have no way of interacting with that energy. You can't increase it or decrease it outside of casting spells. You can't transfer it. You can't even directly observe it.

Look just stop trying to use science on magic the two are fundamentally incompatible ok

There's no such thing as useful information, because you cannot interact with it, reproduce it, or transfer it, and technology can't observe it.

/thread

>How do you gain a proper understanding of how that works if you can't make a machine that can observe it?
The same way that we went from computers that were the size of atriums to smartphones that can access the internet while still being small enough to fit into most pockets.

Experimentation, Observation, and Implementation.
>Being able to measure the kinetic momentum of a magic push doesn't mean you can push
backwards and make magic.
>You can't increase it or decrease it outside of casting spells.
>You can't even directly observe it.
>You can't transfer it.
Not yet anyways.

Y'know back then, people probably said the same thing about gravity.

Sure but in that case your magic system would look radically different than what you find in most fantasy settings

The only reason you believe them to be incompatible is because you lack the understanding to note the similarities between them.