What's the difference between divine magic and arcane magic?

its like the difference between oral sex and anal i am told

Mildly amusing as fluff, completely impracticable as crunch.

Wizards - know so much stuff they make bullshit happen (arcane)
Sorcerers - make deals with extra-dimensional beings to make bullshit happen (arcane)
Priests/Paladins/Clerics/etc - believe in their god figure SO HARD that they become conduits for it's will (divine)

Divine magic-users have set miracles they can use more frequently and reliably, based on the thematic of their patron deity, while arcane magic-users have a wider range of less dependable trickery at their disposal.

Jesus, you could bullshit whatever the fuck fluff you WANT and implement whatever mechanics seem fun.

Hell, let's go with...... arcane magic depends on applying rare resources they're always hunting after and the proper application of energy, like fire or falling water or rot. So they take a handful of WEALTH and use some sort of skill to link some power source within a certain distance of the effect they want. They level up by getting more knowledge of exotic combinations of materials and

Sure. Let's go with the bureaucracy system for clerics. They need APPROVAL of every god-damned bit of divine intervention and there's a truely maddening system of regulations and dogma they have to follow to get the big guy's time. They learn the system and/or bribe their way up the beurocratic mess gaining stamps and approvals and exceptions. And, of course, if they're doing something the god ACTUALLY approves of and has a vested interest in, then they're DIVINE AGENTS EMPOWERED BY THE ALMIGHTY. If they ever get audited or caught out bribing and angel or forging a stamp or heaven forbid... sinning... they get cut down in rank and their papers ripped up.

switched sorcerer with warlock you nutjob

Arcane magic is "natural" magic. Some races are more adept at it than others, such as races with "inherent magic." Anyone can learn to harness the magical power literally teeming from the world through study, ie Wizards, but others are born with a magic gift, Warlocks (or form a pact with a magical entity) and yet others get their magic from a direct source. Divine magic channels from a deity, those deities have become so powerful the magical nature of the universe is essentially a ball of yarn that they are master knitters of. Or another angle, the deity is an armorer. They can easily craft weapons out of the natural goods just laying around. Their followers can't make use of any of the natural goods, but they can give their followers their finished weapons. The more powerful and faithful the follower, the better they can wield these weapons crafted by the deity.

Could make it so arcane magic is more taxing on the body so casting it wears the casters mind and body down over time whereas divine magic has no such cost, but the deity doling out the divine only has so much patience and requires frequent sacrifices/rites/prayers/meditation for more uses of their powers. So maybe have some sort of physical cost for the arcane and some sort of time cost for the divine. Maybe the divine caster doesn't just simply attain new powers for getting stronger, but he must appease the god or further prove their own devotion for more power.

I dunno man. All in all there's not too much you can do. Maybe arcane is more free form and the arcane caster can weave different chants and motions together to create different effects and the divine is more set in stone lacking the utility and creativity, but remains reliable and powerful.

Depends.

Arcane is like you picking up a rock and using it as a weapon

Divine is like someone teaching you about rock, and giving you one.

Wizards study raw, unclaimed power, to harness it and use it for their own designs.

Divine power is granted to mortals by deities in order to carry out their dogmas and credos.

In many settings there is also a god who rules over arcane power, though they either don't care who uses said power, or they are merely an entity who brings stability to a universal constant to allow order to what would otherwise be an unstable cosmic clusterfuck, such as Mystra and the Weave.

fits perfectly with skill roll based casting and ritual casting systems. Really chanting nonsense words over a pentagram, or trying to convince an angel that you REALLY need that "walk on water" for 10 minutes is just a matter of fluff.

Arcane spells are precise and exact, while divine spells are somewhat up to interpretation. For instance, arcane declares: "I will make a fireball at this location, of this size," while divine prays: "God of fire, I request aid. Burn my enemies, as you have promised in your holy texts."

>Maybe arcane is more free form and the arcane caster can weave different chants and motions together to create different effects
I like this idea. Let arcane users build spells almost like computer programs, and must be very specific to get the result they want, while divine users don't have as much control, but trust the gods to give them something effect.

>Let arcane users build spells almost like computer programs, and must be very specific to get the result they want,
I'd love to play a game like that, but it's big enough it would basically have to be the focus of the whole system.
Still, if you can assume some kind of technical background from the players it should work.

Have Divine magic based around doing favors in order to summon aid. Pray and do enough good deeds and you build favor to prove you're worthy, and then you can summon in small divine servants which function as the spells. At the basic level, this might be a small mote of light, but further on will involve angels, chariots of fire, all that good stuff. These of course are largely controlled by the GM, the divine mage themselves serving as a guide and general while they're around at most. Rather than a priest casting a cure spell, they would call upon a holy spirit for the one in need of aid, who would then heal and protect them for a certain period of time.

Arcane mages, on the other hand, are entirely reliant on themselves, but are also in complete control due to that. They simply have a pool of internal energy that can be shaped and spent in direct ways, rather than a specific list of creatures with specific costs to them. They're also more likely to be forced into a specialty to achieve true power.

To put into more mechanical terms, Clerics would be calling in various levels of Angels X times per day depending on their standing, while Wizards would have a pool of points to combine into effects that cost different amounts, like ranged, fire, sphere to make a fireball.

Divine magic is given by the gods, arcane magic is given by the writers.

Divine magic- pray and cast.
Arcane magic- cast and pray.

There is no difference

You need to work for one type, while the other is gibmedat. Basically gods are socalists that enforce their ideology through social rights and powers, while those that practice arcane are "do it yourself" guys that attempt to succeed or die horribly because of a miscalculation.

With divine magic you are guiding the energy running through the very fibre of your being that's granted to you by a god.

Arcane is the act of enforcing your desires on the ambient universal energies around you. Either by performing the procedures to cause that energy to warp in a specific way, or by simply exerting such will on the world that the energy turns into the end result.

I think it shouldn't necessarily be different in an active sense (except maybe different spell failure/wild magic effects or something), but the differences should be passive.

You can't "turn off" divine magic. It's a gift and you are a constant conduit through which it passes. It supports you in all things, for your entire life. To have it taken from you would be to have lose a part of yourself.

Arcane casters are never "magic" in and of themselves. The only time an arcane spellcaster is "magic" is when they are actively casting a spell, otherwise they're just like any other person in a robe.

Primal spellcasters "see" the world differently, they can understand the energies of the world around them and take control.

Effectively, the divine gain strength of body through strength of magic. The arcane are inseperable from the common masses until they actively partake in magical acts. And the primal become so in tune with the world around them that their sences are enhanced and they seem to "merge" with the world around them.

Otherwise, spell fluff. Divine casters imbue the body, Arcane casters can't imbue the body, but can imbue objects, and Primal casters copy energy of the world around them and transplant it to other things. So a +Armour spell would be effectively the same, except the divine is visibly magical all the time, the arcane can only enchant objects to be better armour, and the primal take "aspects of stone/wood" and replicate it on a person. Or something like that at least.

From my setting notes.

Ares Magicka nerd

Seems like the same thing except one skips the middle man.

Arcane is from the past. That's why people discussing the past are called "archaneologists".
Divine is from the future. That's why "divination" is code for "knowing the future".

>the same thing except one skips the middle man.

This guy gets it.

>Ares Magicka
Holy shit. Why had I know heard of that before?

Don't play D&D

Arcane: Mana filtered through the mind or will of the user, or filtered through an entity residing in the Inner Planes (any plane where real > faith)
Divine: Mana filtered through the faith of a user, or directly contributed at the behest of an entity originating from the Outer Planes (any plane where spiritual/faith > real).

And then there's Bards. As far as scholars of magic know, Bards are what happens when magic interacts with raw sentience, no filters attached. (Optional rule).

>From a divine point of view:
Divine magic politely petitions the unfathomably great powers that made this whole universe and asks them to lend a hand in return for work done promoting their cause or protecting their work. It is polite, civil and most importantly makes sure that the sun doesn't get angry and decide to kill us all.

Arcane mages are a bunch of thieves who just steal raw magical power without thinking about the consequences and use it to do what ever the hell they feel like.

>From an arcane point of view:
Arcane magic is the pinnacle of individual achievement, pitting your wits, charm and moxie against the so called laws of the universe and finding the loop holes and exploits that allow you as a rugged individual to pull yourself up by your own boot straps and reshape your environment with your own two hands and help out not only yourself but also you fellow man.

On the other hand divine magic is all about being a total beta cuck and asking for a hand out from someone who figured out how to game the system better than you who gives you some power and protection in return for you being their prison bitch.

Basically divine magic is Canadian and arcane magic is American.

This is a good way to put it.

Divine mages hope their sky-daddy will do something and if they've been good boys sky-daddy does it.

Arcane mages do their own damned work.

>Divine mages have someone looking over their shoulder to make sure they don't act like complete cockbags 24/7.

>Arcane mages don't.

Fixed that for you

All magic is just poorly understood technology, using it generally requires various incantations or texts or in reality the right programming code to get the desired end result.
The "Gods" are just very old and very senile A.I.s and divine magic is just asking them nicely to do it for you.
Similarly Sorcerers are individuals who have the right genes to give them the necessary user privileges access the GUI and can thus use "magic" more intuitively but also in a more limited capacity.

I'm not doing D&D here fagoo

one comes from god and the other comes from random bullshit

One is the result of mortals trying to dabble withe fabric of reality itself.

The other is the WILL OF GOD

One's DIY, the other is outsourcing to a professional

I just ripped off of Dark Souls where divine magic users believe the divine tales so hard they actually work. In my headcanon divine magic users in my setting actually have to say a small prayer as they cast and it differs on a god to goddess basis.

>what are warlocks?

In my setting it's a common story where a wizard keeps going on about how divine magic is just a useless fake way of doing proper magic. Then the priest would perform some sort of unexplainable miracle that leaves even the wizard in awe and utterly btfo.

Divine magic is white, and arcane magic is blue.

never played Dark Souls
How's the magic system like?

like everything in dark souls it's mostly pieced together from bits and pieces of lore found in spell and item descriptions.

>To cast a miracle, the caster learns a tale of the Gods, and says a prayer to be blessed by its revelations. Heal is the shortest of such miraculous tales.
>Great Heal is a long tale, only learned by a select few. No caster will be disappointed by the bountiful life that it yields.
>Great Heal Excerpt borrows from only several verses of Great Heal. As a result, it can only be cast a stark few times.
>Wrath of the Gods was an epic tale that tattered over time and devolved into the modern Force. This primal form of Force emits a shockwave that also inflicts damage.

What if there's a god of arcane magic?

I think it's been mentioned before, but I think the best distinction is no distinction- or at least no TRUE distinction. It's truer to real-life magic.

Think about historical magic as you'd like, but the reality about witches and alchemists, priests and nuns is that they're all trying to evoke the presence of a divine... SOMETHING. For alchemists specifically, the "lead to gold" fallacy was either a smokescreen or charlatanism that hid their true purpose of the spiritual magnum opus. Even in the Corpus Hermeticum, essentially their Bible, it makes reference to God

"If you do not liken yourself to God, then you cannot apprehend God- for like is known by like."

So these magicians who practice "arcane arts" were only pagans in the most political of terms. The distinction between their sorcery and the magic present in, say, the Eucharist was ENTIRELY political.

So it you must have a distinction, let it be to occult the true nature of magic.

Or, if you must distinguish between the two, I think Arcane magic as Apollonian and Divine magic as Dionysian works well. The magic present within religion comes from the divining of cultural symbols into universal ones, ergo intuitive. The magic of the archetypal Wizard is very much secular and experiential. We're not talking "wizards as magic scientists," we're talking about pre-scientific rationalism. Think Protestant Reformation and the implications of "you don't need a church to tell you God exists"

I M STOOPID
the post.

>generally
What is reading comprehension?

Generally gods give servants divine magic, while wizards use the inherent magic of the world to cast spells.

Primarily it defines the themes and what sort of theatrics are wound up with the implied and assumed rules for magic, and by association the design of spells.

Arcane Magic was magic from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" book series. This form of magic was done by finding and experimenting with the vestiges of a long lost form of math that was so profoundly 'true' that by holding certain geometries in your head and saying certain words you could cause material change in the world around you.
It's why arcane magic is Int based, and why you can't easily research new spells and the 'real' rules for magic, and why wizards lock themselves away in towers jealously guarding their books of recovered magic words and strange glyphs.

Divine Magic is drawn from real world culture; things like Teutonic myth and post-Christian heroic myth, re-imagining exploits from Charlemagne and his Paladins, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round, polytheistic eddas, cultural mythologies, and the like.

In the traditional/historical definition and idea of "magic" that Eurasian culture has,
with "divine" you ask nicely for something to happen to a deity.
With "arcane" you ask nicely for something to happen to nature itself (divided in the elements or not).

The line blurs if Nature is a deity, which is not literally the case usually in the real world.
To some Christian theologians, all miracles and events that don't come from God's will directly, can't be simply abscibed to "nature" and are diabolical in nature. So following the totalitarian-Christian idea, "arcane" = demonic.

In cultures that identify Nature with divinity (animism and early pagans) magic and miraculous rituals are one, arcane and religious things aren't separated.

You've been reading too much King James, friendo

But one is clearly good and the other clearly evil.

Wearing armor fucks with divine magic but not arcane magic, because Gary Gygax wanted priests to wear armor but not mages.

wait for it

watch me throw a wrench into these group of nerd

god of magic

Hi

Arcane magic is like Japanese elves: they're very close to the original, but utterly lacking in either originality or subtlety. It's an elf, it'll always be a wizard or archer of some kind and have BIG FLOPPY EARS in your face.

Divine magic is like French elves: rather than being their own thing, they're a derivation of the original source. However, there's a lot more subtlety: less emphasis on what's big and flashy (like ears), more emphasis on what's truly important (like hips).

Let's use cooking as an analogy:

Arcanic wizardry : You find a recipe in another langage. You translate it and follow it.

Arcanic sorcery : Free-style cooking. No recipe to follow, it's trial and error learning.

Druidism/primal magic : Your cooking book is "survival in forest 101"

Bard trick : The recipe are songs.

Witchcraft : You ask a better cook how to do it. He tell you a great deal, but you have a few gaps. You rely on what your grandma may have told you to fill them.

Divine magic : You ask nicely and perhaps offer a gift to a chef. He cook what you want for you.

Warlock : You win in a bet with a man-eater chef. Disappointed, he store his knife and lend you his book of recipe and/or his assistant.

monk ki : You convince yourself or other that you have cooked.

Where'd or not I can stick my dick in it.

>Let's use cooking as an analogy:
The best kind of analogy.

Charles de Gaulle used a culinary analogy for his migration policy

he also used to have imaginary conversations with real people

In what sense? Please elaborate (and post sauce if possible).

same end result, entirely different mechanism.

Like the difference between using a turbine to generate electricity to power your machines, or using a turbine to run a clever system of gears to power your machine.

It is important to differentiate, because while the beginning and end of each of the systems is the same, the mechanics of each are spectacularly different, weak to different types of tampering, better at different types of work, and require different types of construction to add on to.

In a setting with dozens or thousands of gods pretty much nothing.

Guys that channel power from the outside and through themselves.

Can't find a source sorry but I remember I read that once when I looking up info about , well, imaginary conversations. basically he will imagine he was talking to some one and imagine what to say and how to organize his arguments

Arcane - adj. : known or knowable only to a few people -
Arcane magic is based on the learning of secret knowledge that can bend the world to your will.

Divine - adj. : of, relating to, or proceeding directly from God
Divine magic is power lent directly from a god or divine source

Basically, Divine magic is being a permitted user on the system, and Arcane magic is being a hacker.

Divine magic users are cucks licking the leftover cum from their deities' balls.
Arcane magic users are people fucking reality in the ass with their mind/will/discipline/muscles.
Honorary mention of psionics able to bend reality like a little bitch with their mind, through not outright fucking it in the ass.

One is sparkly and flashy and the other is radiant and soothing.

One is crunchy, the other is creamy.

Arcane: Derived from Mana, the lifeblood of an entire planetary system and the realms it borders, which is tremendous and well beyond a god's power.

Divine: God strong enough in an aspect of reality that it can offer dial-a-prayer to its followers around that sphere, with their divinity powering it.

I do that all the time without even thinking about it

I don't think it's that weird, as long as you aren't talking out loud

>Arcane: Derived from Mana
Hot garbage.

Sure, whatever you say. It's what I use for my settings. Mana is a cool aesthetic to play with.

Sure it is. It just has nothing to do with the idea of something being arcane. It’s more fitting flavor-wise for druids than for wizards.

Do Druids use arcane or divine magic? What about Witches?

Furfags and whores use sex magic, druids gain spells by fucking repeatedly the corresponding animal/monsters/plants/tree/dragon, witches have free-style spells that can be fueled by anything with a pulse and a lot of things without.

What could arcane magic do that divine magic doesn't other than cast an abortion?

well, there's always the standard healing divide.
It could define what spirits you can summon in a shadowrun.
It could affect your spell listings in a D&D.
Really, it depends on how detailed you want your magic system to be. If it's not "very, very", they usually boil down to being rather samey.

The fundamental concept is still the same though, and can be used to solve any in-universe magical puzzles that come up.

Depends.
Typically, Arcane is aquired due to personnal skill and/or power and is more-or-less self contained.
Divine magic, on the other hand, is typically given to the caster by a powerful patron as both a reward, and a stipend for further work.

Typically, I have the "lesser" casters use a combination, fluff wise. The Ranger has both picked up a few incantations and spells along the way, but has also earned the favor of a minor or distant patron, for example.
Naturally, exceptions exist.

Arcane is powerful generic.
Divine comes from gods.

>arcane casters
>ever putting any actual work in
Spoken like someone who's never been in the same party as an arcane caster. They'll always, ALWAYS try to to solve every problem with the same three spells, and if that doesn't work they'll just stare at the DM like idiots while the martials start trying out practical solutions.

Yeah, no, stop playing with retards.

On the contrary, some gods insist followers be complete cockbags in order to receive their divine favour.
Anyway that user's statement is much more accurate than yours for many if not most settings.

Gods are just beings who have mastered magic to such a degree that we consider them divine in power. The only difference is the level of power.

But generally Divine magic is power that is lent to someone based on the power of their faith in order to use it, while arcane magic is a product of one's own work.

Meanwhile Warlocks sort of work in the same way as Divine magic, except instead of faith it's a pact, and the patrons aren't always divine or benevolent but neither are Gods in some cases.

If I have to hear one more "gods, angels, and devils are just technologically superior aliens/A.I. + look at how rational I am" dual-fedora tipper....
What is the damn point of having gods in your setting if they aren't actual gods?

Magic that comes from the gods will never taint you by use alone, but you need to make sure the god itself favours you.

Magic that comes from within is potentially dangerous to your own being but you'll never run out of it because you forgot to pee on your own shoes as a way to thank a deity.

That's just a basic example, you can get as creative with this as you want.

Arbitrary distinctions.

Druids use primal magic. That's how 4e did it anyway.

Since worship is inherently Evil, all gods are too.
ROW ROW FIGHT THA POWAH

Divine magic is not real magic