How do you like your magic? Full of scientific rules, or more ambiguous 'you can never understand' type of stuff?

No it isn't.

The more magic can do and does, the more times you use magic, the more scientific it must be. The more rare magic is, the more sparsely used it, the more mysticism you get from it. It is a spectrum between awe and understanding. Your ability to solve problems with magic in a satisfying way is directly proportional to how well the player/reader understands said magic. See Gandalf's magic vs Harry Potter's magic: Awe vs tool.

On the other hand, flaws are more interesting than the powers of magic themselves. The kryptonite that negates powers, the economic cost, the moral cost, the fatigue cost.

Generally, it's better to get deeper than wider.

Whatever you do, always err on the side of what is Awesome!

Mostly the latter. The former is a wizard trying to make sense of something senseless; it works for them, but falls apart when they try to observe it outside of their own practices. The rules of magic and the laws of magical science allow them, who have no latent gift or borrowed power, touch on the powers of the supernatural.

>How do you like your magic?
Every culture has a different way they use magic. They each think theirs is the only true way to magic. They are all right and wrong.

I prefer magic to be a universal and conceptual force that is implicitly tied to the universe, yet notcompletely understandable by modern scientific thought. And each system of magic that exists is a different way of channeling said force that is shaped purely by the cultural and mental expectations and make-up of those people.

So the people who approach their magic like a science? It acts like a science for them. Those that view it as a mystical force they have to coax? It works that way for them too. All that matters is the vague value of might and influence that allows them to force their will on magic in the way they expect.

Magic should never be scientific unless in a setting that is otherwise set at a modern (at least late 17th century) cultural and tech level. Simply because it is downright anachronistic to expect people in an early time period to even think about approaching things that way. The scientific method is a technology that had to be invented, and history shows us that the idea of it is by no means an obvious one to a human culture not already exposed to it.

I treat the introduction of the scientific method into a pre-scientific society as every bit as much metagaming as introducing flintlock pistols into a pre-gunpowder setting. You can't just gloss over centuries of arduous technological development like that.

(That said, while I do at least tolerate scientific magic in a modern or futuristic setting, I still *prefer* it to be on the less "scientific" side, more dependent on qualitative rather than quantitative factors and not cleanly interfacing/interconverting with known principles of modern physics. Consistent enough to be studied methodically, yes, and thus "scientific" in that sense, but quite a different beast entirely from your typical hard sciences.)

A mix of things, the use of magic evolving over time with new discoveries and ideas, but the old ways never disappearing since they end up being equally valid.

The first users of magic would be warlocks and clerics, people who traded for supernatural power from another being, and then druidism and more natural sorts of magic would begin to emerge, prompting an attempt to learn magic with trial and error. Through that you get the shakey foundations for wizardry.

I like it to be scientific, but in the way that what medieval scholars in Europe and the Middle East were scientific - mostly working with old sources, arguing over them constantly, and suffering from confusion and mistranslation and some ideas that are close to right, but will take another few centuries to get correct - two wizards both using about the same techniques might still come from different philosophical schools. And that's not even taking into account cultural values and when technology outpaces magic, putting it on the off foot until tech comes up against something it can't beat. There's some correct way of doing things, but there isn't a complete picture or a strong enough drive that lasts for longer than discovering what seems to work.

Magical libraries are vast, because each wizard is essentially a magical tradition in themselves. They may be grouped into 'schools' of magic based on underlying themes and methods, but magic is something that can be learned but never truly taught. To cast magic requires you to fine tune your mind, body and soul into a magical machine, and no two wizards will ever be exactly alike in how they do what they do. Reading magical texts is more about expanding your horizons and seeking inspiration for new things to try, not all of which will work for you as an individual.

That doesn't mean you can't get useful advice. If, say, the underlying theme of your magical abilities is moving energy from one place to another? The journals of Radther the Balancer can be very enlightening, as that was his specialty as well. But even with your shared school of magic, you can't expect to just pick up Radther's spell and cast it on the spot. That was RADTHER'S spell. Your spell, even if it does the exact same thing, will be different because you are the one casting it.

The scientific method dates back to ancient greece though.
Scientific research in the Middle ages was shunned at because it contradicted the magical/religious beliefs of society, if those beliefs were at least partially real it would only make sense for them to be researched methodically.
Also
Setting with medieval technology =\= Setting with medieval ideology

Fuck, not this one, this one

In my D&D settings:
If I'm playing with a setting that involves wizards, it has rules and literally anyone can learn it with the right schooling/teaching.

If I'm playing with a setting that doesn't involve wizards, it's based on connections to inherently magical forces and as such can function differently based on all sorts of variables.

I like my magic to make as much logical sense as the solution to an old Serra or Lucus Arts puzzle.

A single or few premises that give rise to various interesting effects and abilities.
But not something dumb and vague like Chakra and Nen. "Oh I have chakra that means I can make water and fire. How? hurr durr it's magic!"
Premises more specific like natural environments/phenomenon gives birth to spirits. Shamans can communicate and control these spirits. For example, a shaman might make a deal with a mountain spirit to split the mountain and create a new path or cause local earthquakes and rockslides on their enemies. Or even a simple "I'm looking for something in your domain, can you tell me where it is?." Maybe even kill the spirit and cause that mountain to crumble entirely.

The Greeks practiced empirical inquiry, but not all empirical inquiry is scientific research. Puttering about and just trying out various things with no rigorous application of hypothesizing, experimental controls, or quantification of results is not science.

Furthermore, the notion that scientific research was shunned in the Middle Ages is a complete myth, invented originally as anti-Catholic Protestant propaganda at the time of the Reformation, and later adopted as a more general anti-Christian propaganda bit during the Enlightenment. The Church was the *chief sponsor* of science during the Middle Ages, and it was in fact precisely because Christianity held a view of a consistent cosmos ruled by a rational God that science was able to develop in Europe when it did not anywhere else. The Middle East got a good start on it in the Islamic Golden Age, but that got derailed when occasionalism gained prominence as the main metaphysical view in Islam. Other societies, even ones that were generally very prosperous and advanced (eg, China) never independently invented actual scientific inquiry.

You're projecting modern views anachronistically back onto earlier cultures. The idea of methodical research is not at all as intuitive as you think, as evidenced by the fact that *nobody routinely did it* for the first 3000 years or so of recorded human history. We only find it intuitive today because we've all been born and raised in a scientific society. We take it for granted because we've been immersed in it from day 1.

Ambiguous but still attempted to scientifically research it.
While it pisses at our laws of physics and doesn't even follow any rules of their own mankind is so damn obsessed with patterns and order that they damn well try.

Pic related

>The scientific method dates back to ancient greece though.

Not in a rigorous form. It was messy and often inaccurate. Respected "scientists" of the era like Aristotle (himself one of the main precursors of the scientific method) were often wrong about basic things, like the idea that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones.

>Scientific research in the Middle ages was shunned at because it contradicted the magical/religious beliefs of society, if those beliefs were at least partially real it would only make sense for them to be researched methodically.

The same shit was happening in the Middle Ages as ancient Greece. People were still doing proto-science and it was still messy and inaccurate.

People would study magic, you just can't think of it like modern science. It would be filtered through all kinds of biases and weird beliefs, pseudoscientific mispractices, failures of communication or even deliberate obsfucation (if knowledge is power then you want to keep it away from your enemies). Think about the way people looked at the human body before the 1800s and how completely wrong they got it. That's what people trying to study a complex system looks like, even when it's something physical and tangible.

I like it to be poorly understood science. That way it feels deeper than you could ever realistically make it without autism, and if the players come up with a new exploit it makes it easier to roll with it and just allow it.

It also can frustrate That Guys who don't think about how they play their wizard. Not my fault he cast lightning bolt at a dude in a Faraday cage.

You'd be surprised how much players enjoy small flavor touches like the wizard's hand getting frost on it when he casts fireball.

I like it being something that's based more on belief. Magic permeates the world, and can be manipulated, but one must believe that they can manipulate it, and then that they can use it to temporarily alter reality. The way an individual interfaces with magic is more a placebo, something that they've been taught will allow them to use magic. Lacking faith in yourself and your abilities is what leads to failing to cast or miscasting.

The scientific method is a bit more structured than just logically thinking something out.

Aristoteles did such an amazing job, that indirectly slowed down science by having people afraid of contradicting him and his text centuries later.

This is actually quite common in any scientific field. For example, in Ecology and Botony, Clemmensian Ecology was popular for so long, that people completely ignored thecriticisms by smarter people like Gleason and Tansley who actually knew what they was doing until some time after Frederic Clemmens passed away

That's a lot of words you used just to describe gods.

Depends on setting

Generally fairly structured, with a slight dose of "rules were made to be broken" and "magic can evolve over time, it isn't a static force".

Scientific, with need of knowledge, time, materials and a bit of luck.

Also limited, with magic having its own imposibles things to do.

the extremaly rare but extremaly powerful kind
i like mages being feared and despised and loved in my setting

In a story: Ambigious and abstract.

In a game: Pretty much the same. If magic is available to the PCs, however, I prefer it to be scientific and very clear how and what can be done.

coppermind.net/wiki/Sanderson's_Laws_of_Magic#Sanderson.27s_First_Law
I tend to prefer the more rational variant thanks to ^, but the incomprehensible type can be good if it fits the tone of the setting. If magic is primarily a hindrance to the players, especially in a horror or mythical themed setting, then it's only made better by being a mysterious force.

I prefer not to explain it 90% of the time. I create limitations based on gameplay and build around it.

To writ, my current game and setting features magic users purely as a support role. Magic is all about healing, blessing, counter curses, etc. Good people make good magic, evil people and monsters make bad magic. That's just how it works. If you want to throw fireballs, go find a staff of fireballs.

No magic at all or only villains(npcs) can use magic

>or something that doesn't work the same as the real world at all.
Then you're not going to be able to use magic intentionally.

"you can never understand" type stuff. I love mystery. It's what makes mysticism mystic.

Every reproducible phenomenon can be studied by science. In fact, finding out how to reproduce a phenomenon is already science.

There is no such thing as a pre-scientific view of the world. The fact that science is a modern word doesn't make science a modern concept. All effective experimentation is science, and that's just a small portion of the term.

You're running into what I think is a simple and forgivable mistake. You have some associations with the term "science" that make you feel that it cannot coexist with "interesting" or "fantastical". But science is the most whimsical, interesting, and fantastical part of regular life, in no sense does saying magic is scientific mean that magic is not fantastical. Science is already magic.

This is an intelligent understanding.

>directly proportional to how well the player/reader understands said magic
>Gandalf's magic vs Harry Potter's magic: Awe vs tool
But the reader doesn't understand Harry Potter magic either, since spells and magic items are invented at random and forgotten just as quickly. There's no underlying pattern or reason why anything works, which is why a lot of stuff in HP comes across as a massive ass-pull.

The former in the eyes of Magic-Users.

The latter in the eyes of everyone else.

Kingkiller Chronicles resembles this remark. Naming is extremely rare and requires strange discipline to perform, and is extremely powerful and elegant and beautiful. Every time it shows up, it's a big deal, you're heart speeds up. Sympathy and sygaldry, on the other hand, are so well understood that they're hardly thought of as magic (though we the readers know that it is). The rules are mentioned in adequate but not too much detail, it is made sure that you know that there's a deep body of theorems and formulae that comprise them, so you can be creative but still wonder at them. Then at the bottom of the totem pole is mathematics, physics, chemistry, and medicine demonstrated to be just as magical as the magic.

I'm perfectly fine with either, but if it doesn't have a rigidly defined set of rules I don't like players or protagonists having access to it on a large scale.

Generally speaking, my two favourite forms of magic are Xanth like inherited abilities/traits and potions with side effects beyond the really minor stuff (so, a hair dyeing potion is fine, but a wing growing potion will leave you bedridden for a month and that's if it's well made). This lends itself to a midway between the scientific and ambiguous; the top level rules are easily understood, but the underlying mechanisms become very hard to understand which gives me plenty of wiggle room.

These guys have read Sanderson's First Law.

brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/

I like magic feeling special, romantic, and connected to some greater truth or mythology.

I generally really like the traditional fantasy depiction of alchemist like wizards with spellbooks, reagents, and summoning circles. But I like it, I think, because it touches on the feeling of going to a high level class and seeing things explained at a significant level and knowing there's so much more that's part of this amazing greater body of work that you might never fully grasp in totality. The wizard is this aged specialist that even if he has all these mysterious formula accrued from a lifetime of expertise is still woefully incomplete and unsure. This makes if feel special. If it ever crosses the line where the proto-science feels like changing the oil in a car then I think it's lost its flavor.

I have this weird, super autistic way I like to fluff magic for fantasy novels/not gaming related.

Essentially, it's a combination of your willpower, technique, and creativity. You need a wand to focus it and you just point and will your change, and it happens. The bigger, more long lasting, farther away, and complex the change, the harder it is for you to make it. Experts can make permanent changes and conjure permanent items, but magic from lesser magicians is much more temporary.

It doesn't feel especially scientific, but much of it is divorced from traditional mysticism.

Why not both? There are different kind of magic users in the system I'm playing. Some have formed research guilds and call themselves mages. Others cast by raw emotion and strong traditions - Witches. Druids have a spiritual approach. Kobolds just do it and let the magic take chaotic forms.

I like a scientific approach, though that should not mean that the people in the setting should always understand the rules. I feel like this is what turns people off of "magic as science". Think about how retarded people were with science during the renaissance, "Your foot is rotting? Better do some cocaine & rub some pig shit on it" We still don't understand everything. Embrace the wrong stuff sometimes.

I like Brandon Sanderson's way of doing magic in his books, as an example

I think that is very much a good law, and as a rule I tend to vastly prefer hard magic systems because I find them far more wonderful and easy to work with.

Of course, you can do both by using layers of obscurantism. We don't fully understand how quantum physics works yet, so why should a bunch of monkish wizards in a tower full of nothing more advanced than alembics be able to figure out the very inner workings of magic?

I just really love incredibly complicated machines, especially if those machines involve the most complex things of all - people and sub-atomic physics.

scientific (but still accessible by under-educated but naturally talented individuals)until eldritch magic gets involved and suddenly things are defying common sense and every natural law.

Scientific method =/= science. Scientific method = attempt at codifying the act of Study. Any and all effective study is science. In fact, you could say science is the word for when you study something in a rigorous, logical, ultimately optimally effective way. That's science. The only time something is unscientific is when somebody mistakenly or manipulatively studies poorly and draws fallacious conclusions.

All technology ever was developed by possibly randomly observing something and then adequately scientifically investigating that thing.

I would go so far as to say that anybody who had taught themselves truth or invented something did so well science.

Well, it sure looks like there was such a thing as a Scientific Revolution. The Industrial Revolution is somewhat hard to explain without it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution

Note how scattered and weak the criticisms are.

>The scientific method is a technology that had to be invented, and history shows us that the idea of it is by no means an obvious one to a human culture not already exposed to it.
I don’t see how it can be regarded as anything other than a philosophical revolution, albeit one created and sustained by particular institutions and cultural values.

I generally want a shamanistic feel, a spirit world one enters and negotiates in. Like, I really like Shadowrun's magic system, for instance. I'm not generally as into the pseudoscientific take, although really well done versions of it (Ars Magica, say) still impress. I just don't want it to be technology with a paintjob; that's not particularly wondrous, you know?

The scientific revolution was a philosophical revolution yes, but that doesn't mean science wasn't done before that.

Industry happened before the Industrial revolution; a revolution can take place if a institution is expanded rapidly and with great impact, regardless of how important the institution was prior.

The more rules the better.

I like it to have a legacy, with advancements and discoveries throughout the millennia compounded together. The spells in a wizard's spell book is the result of ages and ages of research, recording, rediscovery, translation, and reinterpretation.

The arcane language and runes is not any true language, but it borrows from nearly all of them.. A spell could have a history as a word of power of a god, transcribed into runes by primordial giants, which is discovered and translated into draconian script in a treatise from the ancient reptilian empire, which later was rediscovered by elfin wrights who translated it into elvish, who then taught it to humans, who have since made their own iterations.

I tend to associate particular schools of magic with certain historical races as they specialized in that type and are largely responsible for the spells in those schools in the current day.

The second one.

A mixture of both.

>How do you like your magic?
Tantric based
:^)

Heavily religious in character. Historically, there was no real difference between fairy-tale, religion and magic.

Ambiguous and more warlock style than wizard style.

What does this even mean? I think people get Science/Engineering/Technology mixed up so much that it hurts.

Are you asking me If I like magic to be:

>Reproducible (Such as in spells/Powers?)
>Tangible (Such as in magic Items)
>Communicable (Able to be taught)
>Finite (There are yes/no fields)

Fucking duh. Otherwise it is just some deus ex machina horse shit. I will use the "Magick" descriptor to differentiate from now on. Outside of contrarians, everyone has wanted magick to work, instead of it just being "magic". Fuck that. If it's just random chance, it's useless to us.

The whole point is to take randomness out of the equation. I like FATE's Reality marble and Marble Phantasm systems as an example. Lets say you have a bag of marbles. You want to draw a white marble, and the bag is 99 black/1 white.

You can control probability and make it so that you always draw that 1 marble, or turn all the black marbles white. That is the Fate setting's way to control probability. But even people doing rain dances, or praying to deities is the attempt to control probability in their favor at least, and at most make an impossibility possible.

Other wise, magic is useless. It's asking, do you prefer car crashes, or technology that helps prevent car crashes?
Why would I want Phenomena without any way to harness, detect or prevent it? It's fucking stupid.

What you want to know is " How do you prefer magic be thematically handled?"
Romantically or Physically?

One is looking for definition, and one spurns it for emotion. Now, the thing is, you can try to quantify those two things with psychology or philosophy (Which is science applied to mind or ideas).

A ritual circle is just as technological as a computer chip array.

It's does it work based on belief/faith/focus (In which case, the ACTUALITY of magic is that it doesn't need any fetters at all. Just raw faith investment)

Or does the magic actually require steps to fulfill a clause (It has MORE limitations)

It depends I do find it enjoyable though when someone spouts of a load of magical babble that actually makes complete sense when you understand the system behinit

*behind it

Magic comes from those of great power like deities or an exceptional group of humans that have managed to amass power.

You sound pretentious as fuck.

Less "pew pew abra kadabra" and more understanding that allows you to manipulate it's effects to your own end.

Rather than going "asldfkj I cast a spell and can see ghost!" your understanding of necromancy allowed you to make a series of special lenses that you used to make a camera obscura to take their pictures. Extrapolate into modern times and now you can made digital camera obscuras and can take videos in real time

You don't cast a spell and cause invisibile things to become visible. You make a special powder that you spray and it undoes or briefly reveals the invisibile object

You don't cast a spell and a hole in reality opens up that allows you to move from one place to another, you have to cut a hole in space with a prepared blade or blade like object and and do so precisely enough so it goes to where you want it to go least you get shunted somewhere and go places you don't want to go.

Fucking this.

I like to think that magic should be some force ingrained into the fabric reality which can be studied and manipulated to change aspects of reality, with Arcane magic being the purest form of this force. Also the boundaries on how powerful a spell can be should only be limited by the level of understanding the caster has on how the spell will affect reality and their will to enact said change. Basically imagine the Force from star wars only without much of a power cap and with a heavier focus upon transmutation of matter and such.

There is a science to my setting's magic, but there are a few exceptions, for example, the God of Magic is an avid fan of dancing, so he will bequeath his powers to those who ask in the form of interpretive dance, as well as enable material, ingredient-based spellcasting. Mind you, botching a dance still casts a spell, just with some unintended side effects given at the God's discretion.