P.S. I know Dr. Who is not a book, but it was the first thing that came to mind. And I’m referring to the newer Dr. Who series, I’m not going to apologize for being born in the late 80’s. I also google searched Gandalf to make sure I spelled it right, for fear of the wrath that would come if I made a typo.

In the Anita Blake series, for instance, Laurell K. Hamilton spends a lot of time clearly defining the “magic” that the vampires, werewolves, and necromancers are capable of. She adheres to them very closely. Then without warning she’ll totally break those rules. The result of this is both the reader and characters going “No way!!”

It’s an odd but really powerful effect. When you place rules on magic to the point at which they become totally explainable and commonplace, much like the rules of gravity or physics, breaking them makes the magic *really* feel like magic. Unexplainable magic.

Of course, she is always sure to explain exactly what happened after the fact, and those rules *do* carry on to each subsequent book, thus making even that “magic” commonplace. Only to break it again in a further book, etc. In becomes a bit redundant after a bit, but the initial effect is very powerful.

As a side note, I call this the “Dragon Ball Z magic system”. Those familiar with the anime probably know what I’m talking about.

How does the rss feed work so I can get updated on your blog?

Karl notes the Deryni novels as an example of a Hard magic system. It’s indicated, however, that the “hard” magic of the deryni needn’t follow the fairly “psionic” rules that it does. In particular, there are magic artifacts of past ages, which seem to follow a much more “sorcerous” paradigm, particularly the cubes and the altar. There’s lingering wonder working in from the fact that there are rules, and they are followed…but it’s pretty clear that they’re incomplete, just one way of making the “magic” work.

I recommend the reading of the comics “The Books of Magic,” and its three sequels that bear the same title, with “Summonings,” “Bindings,” and “Reckonings.” Some information on them can be found a this wikipedia article.

Sadly, my copies are in new jersey, or I’d be able to reference them more directly.

The particular feature I want to call to attention is that the primary PoV character, Timothy Hunter, is a mage in what I think would be classified as a “soft” magic system. It’s unclear what he can do, and what the limits of his power are — and even to those who “know” how magic works in the world, he has a distressing tendency to break the rules (From “Reckonings,” paraphrasing Leah: You can’t do that. You can make golems, and you can unmake them, but nobody’s ever remade a golem before.)

One of the latter three actually lists the “rule of magic” that dominates the Books of Magic explicitly: for every external change, there is an equivalent internal change. This is probably another view on your statement about the costs of limitations of magic. I think you might view this as the engine that fuels the conflict.

The series follows, in it’s magic, my own pet definition of what makes Fantasy Fantasy: internal, emotional, and metaphorical truths are transformed into external, physical, and literal truths. Tim’s relationship to his father, to Molly, to the strange people he encounters, and to himself change and grow, and his magic changes and grows with and because of them.

In an odd twist, I might state that, although there aren’t any hard and fast rules limiting what Tim can do (and there are often very interesting ways in which he screws up) the reader still has a sense of the sort of places where magic will work, and what sorts of effects it will have, intuitively — through emotional identification with Tim, and observing the personalities of the characters. Magic is an outflow of meaning, and follows the narrative of the story in intuitive ways.

I’d also like to point out the RPG system Nobilis, ref here, which has limited, very general rules, with an endless outlay of specifics to combine the effects of “Rules” and “Wonder” — there are five different type of miracles that can be performed (Divinations, Preservations, Creations, Destructions, Transformations) and a Greater and Lesser varriant of each, but each noble has their own Estate, which they can (preserve/create/destroy/transform/divine from), meaning that each Noble has a distinct set of powers all their own. It’s a playstyle that favor success strongly, focusing not on the difficulty of actions, but on the ramifications of different ways of solving them — a nice example of a mostly soft system in an RPG.

http://mbarker.livejournal.com/70426.html

And one more to go.

In the case of Aslan (note: it’s been a while since I read the books…) we don’t know the Deep Magic rules that he does (not until after the fact), but we do trust him IMPLICITLY. We believe him to be as close to all-knowing and all-powerful as characters come in Narnia. When he agrees to exchange himself for Peter, we don’t know how he will make this come out for the best, but we believe that it will because Aslan=Always Right is one rule we know.

For all that, Aslan isn’t a perspective character, so he’s ALLOWED to break Sanderson’s first law.

One of the things I always liked about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (of all books) was Aslan’s description of the “Deep Magic” which the Witch didn’t fully understand, and which prevented Aslan from STAYING DEAD (because he was making a sacrifice for someone else) — sure, in terms of the book it was all analogous for a Judeo-Christian Theological concept, but in terms of a story it hinted at rules that governed very powerful events and something like that could conceivably allow an author to have the best of both worlds…

I should also point out to those who feel that a tech/engineering/mechanic type magic system lacks will, personality and character, that anyone who has worked for a long time with any given result of advanced sciene (be it automatic transmission or A.I.) will begin to speak of these simple results of methodical tinkering as though they do have a distinct personality or will of their own.

Now, just so it is out there, I saw this podcast and it immediately appealed to me for a unique reason – I run a Star Wars/DnD Crossover game at the moment, and have seen firsthand what technology and magic have for parallels. They may not be the same, but it is a way of introducing something different into a medium (whether it be book, game or story) without making it unbelievable. For those that are looking for perfect examples of this? I shudder to think of how much flaming is going to go into this one, but look at the Die Hard trilogy. The technology in that is used to perform things that normally could not be done. Rational or not – it is a power that the character uses as a tool. Which brings me to a point that was not brought up in the podcast, and surprised me as such… In any situation, giving a character magic in any foundation is like giving a set of tools to someone – with the right working, those tools can do anything. If you have a rule-based magic system (DnD is my example of choice), then you need to figure out either combinations of spells or other uses of said spells within the rules. If you have an open system (nods to the Tolkien reference – great point, one of which I shall use now.) then you will have established either a cost to the person, or some sort of balance as to why the characters have that power. Limiting the tools so you do not gain Superman Syndrome is important in most cases – the perfect example of this is the Sword of Truth series…the main character has magic, but regularly is not using it for fear of the magic getting away. Just a geek thing I noticed while listening to the podcast.

Look forward to more!

…

Right. Do I get a Level 10 dork, anyone?

D

The difference lies in what you consider a “rule.”

Sanderson’s 1st Law is, as Martin stated above, easily understood in the context of Chekov’s Law. If you pull a gun in the third act, you have to show it in the first.

If the wizard needs to turn a bad guy into a frog in the third act, he needs to be experimenting with amphibious transmogrifications in the first.

Schmendrick, the bumbling magician, tries to use magic on several occasions to solve problems. We don’t understand what he’s doing, and for the most part he doesn’t either. He complicates things more often than not because most of the time, when he does get magic to work, it’s by pulling a “magic, do as you will” sort of attitude. But even when he finally does understand how to use magic, he only solves one plot problem: the unicorn being stuck in a human body (which was *caused* by his magical incompetence). That is the only problem he can solve with it. The greater problem, the one of the unicorn’s imminent imprisonment/death-like occurence, is solved through completely unmagical means.

But in the end, even Schmendrick’s mistakes (turning the unicorn into a human) are found to help the characters go through their character arcs and brings the story to a fully satisfying close.

This doens’t violate what these three are trying to say. Schmendrick doesn’t solve plot problems with his magic. The podcast focused more on rule-based magic than on non-rule-based magic, but they fully acknowledged that both sorts exist, and that both have their merits. I love both sorts, but for different reasons. It seems that you prefer a magic system that isn’t rule-based, but that probably just means you like magic for different reasons than some other people might. That doesn’t make them wrong and you right, or them right and you wrong. It just means you have different tastes.

Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien
The Bible, by various

I guess I’m saying that I think magic should work more like prayer. I don’t like magic as a new science because I feel like it’s a cop out. You take science, change a few details, and call it magic. That’s not a new system, that’s a new paint job on an old system.

I see Clarke being quoted as saying:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Later, Barry Gehm said:

“Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

Logical, but I don’t agree

Florence Ambrose/Mark Stanley finally said:

“Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it.”

That seems to sum up a lot of this podcast. If your reader doesn’t understand the system, or doesn’t -think- they understand the system, then it’s just Deep and Ancient Magic, not the ‘technology’ style of magic where you can reproduce results by reproducing conditions, or can plan out ahead of time what will happen if you do things just so . .

If magic is just another set of deterministic physical rules, then all your doing is introducing a new physics (quantum mechanics aside) to your universe. Very few authors take this to its logical conclusion of university systems and entire levels of academia devoted to magic research. This entire view of magic strikes me as very limited.

I think magic should be something entirely other. Unlike science, it shouldn’t be reproducible or systematizable. It shouldn’t be describable with a set of mathematical laws.

Magic should have a will and a personality. It should depend on who and where and when you are, what you want, what you lack, what you’re striving toward, and it should do all of that in a way that’s not fundamentally mathematical. It should be driven by the hands of the fates or the gods or the cosmos.

As such, magic shouldn’t merely be a “tool” used to resolve a plot. It should be a wild, dynamic plot device, perhaps even a character in itself. If you want to solve problems, don’t bring in the magicians, bring in the engineers.

Instances where I perceive that this is being done:
-The Circular Ruins, by Jorge Luis Borges
-Professor Trelawney in Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

And if I recall correctly, most of the rules laid out in the beginning had already been broken in the fourth book, but only for the powerful ones, not for the norms.

And with that, the main characters had many tricks up their sleeves if they had to go against regular magic users.

“I’ll just use that trick I learned from Gandalf and combine it with the one I learned from Sauron, then I can solve this.”

Somehow this feels terribly like “use fork with doorknob” right now *gg*
But that’s fun, too.

The basics of WoT magic are very clear, but what exactly they can do with it, the patterns they can paint with their four elements, aren’t that easy to fix.

But while reading the books I got a feeling for it and for what it can do, and that goes well as far as saying the reader can understand it.

“If it feels right, then it’s right.” In the words of the Cast: I don’t feel cheated, when what happens in the book feels right. the question which still remains is: How do writers manage to make the magic feel right?

Normally it’s important for me, that a magic system feels “real” but stronger (yes, that’s really as wacky as it sounds, but many writers do seem to have a very strong grasp on it), and WoT didn’t quite get that.

But with its simple basic rules, it still was a lot of fun to read.

And I think at least the elemental magic of teh Aes Sedai (And Rand and …) is very easy to understand for readers. In short:

* There are five elements, four physical and one magical.

* Mages can manipulate them.

* Men are better with fire and earth (iirc), women are better with water and air. More exactly: In the beginning they can only grasp their respective elements, not the others.

* You can only change what you can sense.

* Stronger mages can weave more magic without tiring than weaker mages (in fact it scales massively upwards).

* There are some exceptions and extras which make it more interesting – and which allow for Rand learning it.

* Somehow artifacts where created and exist now, which can do about anything but are rare (I assume there are rules about them, but I didn’t get to the point where they get explained).

I tried for years to put it into well working RPG rules, and I think I succeeded with finding a working base only about two months ago.

The “cost goes down as you get stronger” prompted me to create too complex systems at first.

So I think, that the books might not explain everything, but they hint at very many things, and readers can get a deep understanding of the basics of the system.

And I think much works simply because of one well established assumption: “Rand is stronger than anyone else.”

With that he can break down barriers without making the reader feel cheated.

So, the famous scene where Indy is confronted by the swordsman. If I remember correctly, the swordsman practiced for weeks, and the scene was supposed to be a prolonged fight. However, something wouldn’t work right, or they couldn’t film it as planned, and we ended up with Indy taking care of the situation just as he should. Personally, I think any other way would have been Indy forgetting his “laser eyes,” and it wouldn’t have been the same.

Which leaves me still wondering about the magic in tWoT, because it certainly seems to me to defy that rule, but I still ove the books, and I think that Jordan has made it work, leaving me to try to analyze why it works.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_the_nick_of_time

Consider a mystery novel, where the detective says “we know that Mr. Billingsworth is the killer because of this deposit in his swiss bank account,” except that the reader had no idea that anybody had a swiss bank account, or that it was important to the story. Within the world of the novel, that solution works because it is very strict and very simple and follows very clear rules, but from the reader’s perspective it’s a big fat cheat because the swiss bank account seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

Now, on the other hand, rule-based magic that follows its own rules but never gets explained to us can still work if used properly. If one guy can shoot fireballs out of his hands, and does so throughout the book, and then uses those fireballs to solve the problem at the end, that’s fine–we don’t need to know how he does it, as long as we accept that he can. Guns are the same way: you point at something, pull the trigger, and the something dies; we don’t need to know how, we just need to know that it happens consistently. Now, if sometimes you pull the trigger and the target gets healed, or gets painted blue, or changes gender, then we’re going to get confused. If our fireball-shooting hero solves the final problem by shooting ice, that doesn’t work–we don’t know what rules your magic follows, but we know that our understanding of those rules has just been broken.

In answer to your first, and much bigger, question, I’ll tell you right now that I don’t dare discuss WoT online. I get raked across the coals when I discuss Tolkien, despite knowing his work really well and usually being quite complimentary of it; Wheel of Time, which I don’t know very well at all and which has an even more rabid fanbase, I wisely stay away from.

Just one small (personal) nit I’d like to pick: It may be a good idea to define what you guys are talking about a little sooner than halfway into the discussion. The “oh, hey, and what we mean by rule-based magic is….” moment came rather late.

I find I think tWoT books are somewhere inbetween rule-based and no-rules systems. Saidar is very rule based, the rules are fleshed out well, and explained mostly to the reader, mostly because the Aes Sedai have been using and studying it throughout the age. However, there are Ter’Angreal that they don’t understand. There seem to be rules for them, but they haven’t figured them out, and we don’t know them. Until the end of the series there are a lot of other rules that aren’t revealed to the reader, as well (making of Angeal, the real nature of ’stilling’ and what can be done about it, the nature of healing, etc).

Saidin, however, is much more an unknown quantity. Obviously some of the rules are shared, but Jordan makes the point that not all of them are (the way Rand puts out fire would be deadly to a Saidar user because of the nature of the different halves, and the way in which the source is accessed and managed are two examples of stark differences).

Rand is another great example in that the readers *don’t* know what he can do. Heck, *Rand* doesn’t know what he can do, he’s constantly doing things that surprise him and others around him (usually with the help of Lews Therin: The swirling death gates and many other things used in that scene, the dark-friend-seeking lightning in the stone of Tear, etc). We also find places in the books where known “rules” are shown to be false (unreversible stilling, the taint on the male half of the source) or are changed by the users of the magic. This was one of the most interesting things to me, that the users of the magic seemed able to change some of the rules. For Rand there are many circumstances where hard rules may exist, but they haven’t been revealed to either the reader or the character.

So, I guess what it boils down to: Is it enough to have rules that you follow in writing without revealing them to the readers or even to the characters to satisfy Sanderson’s first law?

Anyway, got some great ideas for my own magic system, especially with the link to Sanderson’s Law. The superhero system being explained as hard magic made total sense and was ultimately helpful.

Thanks for the great casts!