Sorcerously Advanced - Magic vs Science

Sorcerously Advanced - Magic vs Science

Colin_Fredericks 03 Feb 2018 14:30

What makes magic different from science?

1. Intent matters. Science doesn't care why you're doing something; it'll work regardless. Magic cares. You can't take the earth-moving spell you have for Industry and easily turn it into a moving wall of rocky death for War. The inner intent that says "I want to excavate a foundation to help build this building" does not match the intent for "I want to crush my foes with a wave of earth." You need to do a bunch of extra work to adapt the spell, and possibly reconceptualize it from the beginning. Sometimes you can't do it at all.
2. Science is prosaic. Magic is poetic. Science is only about the story. Magic is also about the embellishments. Magic works through karmic reward, dramatic irony, and archetypes. Both can use formulae (e.g. alchemy, mystic geometry), both have cause-and-effect chains (usually), but science never did something to you just because you deserved it.
3. Form matters as much as function. Science is independent of representation. It might be easier to understand if you present your work in certain ways, but in the end, whether you show your data as a graph or a table of numbers, it means the same thing. Magic, on the other hand, is representation-dependent. If you translate your spell to a new language, it stops working. You need to rewrite it from the ground up.
4. A sentient world. Our universe is dangerous but not malicious. A magical universe has some parts that are malicious. It also has some parts that are benevolent. The vacuum of deep space is dangerous to us, but not because it's angry at us. The Elemental Plane of Fire is similar - it's not mad at you, it just burns everything equally. The Dream World of Khai'gholam, on the other hand, actively wants to kill you. "Sentient" might not be the right world, maybe just "opinionated"?

I'll probably have more to add later.

Note that this is specifically for the world of Sorcerously Advanced. I'm not trying to say that these guidelines are the universal constants separating magic and science in all creative works, just in this one game here.

Note also that I'm not posing this as "magic vs. technology". In this game, magic has been technologized in many ways.

Last edited on 03 Feb 2018 19:22 by Colin_Fredericks Show more

Re: Sorcerously Advanced - Magic vs Science

Colin_Fredericks 13 Feb 2018 18:06

Ooh, another good item:

• The supernatural is distinguishable from the natural. In our world, there is no place where day-to-day experience stops and scientific laws pick up. The laws of gravity apply just the same everywhere. In the Great Basin, there is a bright line separating the magical from the nonmagical.

This is also a good example of a definition that's unique to this world. In other magical settings, one could imagine magic as part of the natural world as opposed to something distinct from it. In some settings there's no difference between natural and supernatural. In the Basin, magic literally flows from outside the world. The world would continue on just fine without magic, and magic is supernatural in a literal sense: something overlaid on top of the natural world.