An Issue in 'Realistic' Fantasy Stories

Discussion in 'Author Discussions' started by Scholar of Eclipse, Mar 8, 2021.

  1. AliceShiki

    AliceShiki 『Ms. Tree』『Magical Girl of Love and Justice』

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    I don't get your point. In the first place, when did we even start talking about temperature? And why are you saying that 2*4 = 2^4? This makes 0 sense.

    Also, why would I have to follow this logic if I quite literally just said that Magic doesn't care about Physics? You're basically saying that I can't ignore Physics because if I ignore Physics enough, the laws of Physics will break things, even though those laws were ignored just a second ago... How does that make any sense?
     
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  2. Feng Tian

    Feng Tian Well-Known Member

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    The your magic system is exactly what everyone avoids for a reason. An inconsistent clusterfuck.
     
  3. AliceShiki

    AliceShiki 『Ms. Tree』『Magical Girl of Love and Justice』

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    I don't get how you reached that conclusion. I make sure that the way I use magic in my stories is consistent throughout the story.
     
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  4. Feng Tian

    Feng Tian Well-Known Member

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    The problem is that it interacts inconsistently with the world. If a bullet hits something at mach 10 it should have the impact of a bullet at mach 10. But if that is the case either the spells cost is as exponential as the kinetic energy increase is (meaning your system is physics compliant to a large degree) or its a broken mess, with no inbetween.
     
  5. AliceShiki

    AliceShiki 『Ms. Tree』『Magical Girl of Love and Justice』

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    Costing more mana to make something fly faster makes sense in any given setting... I don't get why you'd assume that making a spell stronger wouldn't make it costlier.
     
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  6. Greater thunder

    Greater thunder Well-Known Member

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    Ah, you are talking with someone unable to turn off their view on the real world when reading a made up one.

    Your simple message of " bruh, it's magic, physics doesn't enter the equation and there is no equation at all there is magic with its own author defined rules" doesn't compute to this guy.
     
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  7. AliceShiki

    AliceShiki 『Ms. Tree』『Magical Girl of Love and Justice』

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    Mmmmmmmm... I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with this kind of point of view... But at the same time I'm just not getting his complaints at all.

    I think he is trying to point out a problem in the way I write, but I can't get what the problem is at all. There seems to be some horrible miscommunication going on here.
     
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  8. Feng Tian

    Feng Tian Well-Known Member

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    It doesnt compute with consistent writing either. But your lack of understanding is of little concern lmao.
     
  9. Greater thunder

    Greater thunder Well-Known Member

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    Why is consistent writing only such when real life laws of nature are obeyed in a fucking fantasy?

    According to that, every author should first reacquaint themselves with plenty of books and studying and only then rigorously write a genre about completely nonexistent possibilities like magic, ESP, cultivation,....

    You know what your definition of consistent writing gets fics? It gets us authors who can write a really tight system and mechanics..... who then give up the fic because they spent all their drive in perfecting said mere piece of worldbuilding and now have no interest or will in actually writing a story.

    Your inability to let go of real life in reading is your own problem. I am completely fine with a book about worlds from an author who doesn't bother with conservation of energy and thermodynamics at all. Because it's way fucking better than 2 chapters and an apology ( or just disappearing ) from an author whose work promised lots of entertainment.
     
  10. Darius Drake

    Darius Drake A poster of verbose posts

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    I suspect that Feng Tian's entire argument reverts back to the following, incorrect, statement:
    Magic does not need to follow the laws of physics. It can, and usually is, treated as a completely separate set of rules, that do not exist in our world, upon which physics MAY have an effect, or that COULD interact with something similar to the world's local Physics. To limit myself, I will also avoid mentioning options where realism is completely disregarded, or options where the matter raised is disregarded (like some worlds just refusing all materialisation).

    Feng Tian initially mentions the creation of matter, specifically solid objects, so let's start with all the ways that can be dealt with, using boulders as an example. There are MANY ways in which this is dealt with:
    - 1. Temporary, or permanent, summoning of matter from another "plane" of existence. Here, you're not "creating" matter, so much as utilising magic to move it for your own convenience.
    - 2. Temporary Materialisation, where you do turn your spell into matter, but it only exists for a set amount of time before reverting back into the energy it was initially formed from.
    - 3. "Solid Illusions", where the boulder never existed, you just made something that simulated the effects of a boulder.
    - 4. Actual, permanent, creation of matter, where the boulder remains behind, one of the rarest (from what I've seen) options, and mostly used in stories where the author is willing to completely disregard any realism in their magic. There are a few exceptions, even if the vast majority of them never look any deeper at their seemingly-permanent-solid-object-creating mages than having them as an enemy for a short period, but still.

    Let's go to what happens to the energy after the spell is gone. This one's actually fairly simple and universal to answer (at least, my personal answer is simple and easily applicable universally), an assumed Magical Potential Energy, which itself may be the source of people being able to cast spells (aka, Mana). Just like how an object that is currently still but has gravity applied to it is assumed to have Potential Kinetic Energy, the energy utilised in Spells tends to revert back to the magical equivalent of potential energy when it is not utilised. There are exceptions, but they are rare, and usually in stories that don't explain their magic system all that well.

    Why does an increase in energy utilised make things slightly more dangerous rather than massively? For the same reason throwing a ball slightly harder doesn't make it massively more dangerous, despite more energy acting on the ball. Feng Tian is just wording their argument in the most complicated method available to add confusion and, possibly, troll this thread. The number of stories with actual acceleration magic, especially ones where it acts as an actual "acceleration multiplier" instead of some sort of "additional force applied" is miniscule. The difference between the two is significant.
    - An Acceleration Multiplier does what it says. It takes an object already in motion, and has the effects of acceleration that has been recently applied to the object multiplied and applied again. This is sometimes created in stories as a weapon of mass destruction, where a recently shot bullet or equivalent is sent through multiple Acceleration Multipliers and gains enough force to demolish a city. In stories where this does not actively happen (almost always at the MC's hand), this type of magic is unlikely to be a part of the story, period, and thus not part of the magic system.
    - Typical "Acceleration" Magic in stories is basically a buff spell applied to people, almost always their legs, though there are numerous types and exceptions. The most common and basic type basically just uses magic to "reinforce" their movements, adding additional Kinetic Energy when desired to their movements, allowing them to move faster or jump further distances. Basically, it effectively allows every movement add the benefits of an explosion to their step, without the detriments.
    - Alternatively, other types of "Acceleration" Magic is, again, a buff spell that seems to only be able to be applied to people, often only the caster, in which their personal perception of time seems to speed up to match their body being able to move at vastly higher speeds. Basically, they're affected by a spell that temporarily simulates them having access to more time than anyone else on the battlefield, though this can happen via spells that literally, temporarily, give them a few more seconds every second than anyone else they're fighting. As these spells seemingly cannot affect the non-living, and, even if they have "additional time", will likely have the opposite effect than what Feng Tian was proposing, I feel like this can be disregarded.

    I think that I've answered all the actually important points that Feng Tian was trying raise and argue on. I could have easily missed something, though. Unless, of course, Feng Tian interprets my words as following what they consider "the laws of physics, allowing for magic", due to me not specifically mentioning anywhere where physics is outright broken (excusing teleportation between realms, which is theoretically faster than the speed of light, despite the things not actively moving, just being moved). I mean, I did avoid bringing up the real potentially physics breaking stuff, like all the ways stories can mess with space and hand-wave it away.
     
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  11. Feng Tian

    Feng Tian Well-Known Member

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    Nice wall of text, even if largely wrong, and borderline troll on the relevant part (doing a bit of projecting here eh). Anyway, Im bored and will take a bite.

    The most common application of acceleration is actually telekinesis, followed by flight (Them being "negative" acceleration makes no difference). But oh well, I won't actually nitpick too much on your elementary school understanding of physics.

    The core problem you completely and utterly missed is the fact that speed (being the result of acceleration) and kinetic energy have an exponential relation. This is also the reason its such a big hassle. A bullet at 20 m/s doesn't possess twice the power of one at 10 m/s, its quadrouple (provided no mass difference or air resistance). At 40 m/s it would be quadrouple that again. And this is where shit gets funky after a few repetitions. If I Icebucket you, on the other hand, it works completely different. At two buckets you aren't suddenly knocked down to the ground. Even at 4 you aren't. With 16 we might get something going but its still unlikely. A bathtub full? Might knock you down and leave you gasping for air. Thats it. We are now multiplying 1/2 m, not v², and voila, the magic system was not broken in half just because we stacked something.

    Either your spell completely ignores physics, and has a roughly linear cost/speed ratio, in which case you just broke your setting harder than the average CN does as acceleration magic can be weaponized to trash anything short of the big 3 (the railgun you just described in type A would be the inevitable result, albeit at a higher number of stacks). Or it has a roughly linear relation between kinetic energy and cost, which is physics compliant and would simply expand the law of energy conservation to now include whatever fuels your magic. Same with the rock actually. What do you chose as author? The latter assuming your neurons weren't fried by reading too many CNs.

    As I stated earlier this is not only not the most common or typical use as described above, but it also fails to get rid of the main detriment (inertia messing you up really good). Might also break some of the users bones if he uses the increased strength to strike his enemy, weapon or not.

    1: Does not violate physics as energy conservation is not broken. The system messes with space though, which is potentially easy to abuse.
    2: Magic energy conservation. Yey.
    3: So it turns into limited acceleration magic. Cool. Beats me why you would waste forcefield and optical manipulation magic on creating the illusion of a rock tho. Sounds like the mage in question knows even less about physics than you do. Colour me impressed.
    4: Energy remains, albeit irreversibly changed to a rock. Much wow. Also turns out your "completely realism disregarding" magic is the only to break physics. Who would have thought... Less broken than your "typical" use of acceleration magic tho.

    Magic energy conservation. Lul. Sounds fairly physics compliant. Just don't go out there creating infinite loops.

    Either it does interact with physics, in which case you affect the world, or you don't either. Thanks for clearing up once again that you either don't know wtf you are talking about or wish to entertain some bored nerds by attempting to troll.

    Tl;dr, please take physics lessons again and only post on the internet after thinking. Thanks for proving a source of general amusement.
     
  12. Darius Drake

    Darius Drake A poster of verbose posts

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    Nope. I raised it as a possibility due to your horrific wording. Who is supposed to decipher "Does acceleration magic scale exponentially with the kinetic energy of the object in question?", we're not physics professors, this line is basically gobblygook.

    Except that isn't an application of acceleration. That's an application of force that ends up providing acceleration. I don't remember if I have EVER seen a story where Levitation is used with a direct application of kinetic energy, it always replicates external force being applied to an object. Also, seriously, your wording basically screams "I want to troll and pick a fight" here. Especially since you are acting obnoxious while being wrong about what I have said.

    First of all, you used horrific wording, and I haven't had a physics class in over a decade, so I haven't cared about those specifics in that decade. Secondly, your initial statement never brought that up, excusing the gobblygook. The way magic applies additional force to an object is typically similar to how a person applies additional force to an object. Where did you start all this mathematical multiplication, and why are you abusing logic by applying it when it isn't applicable? You supply a little bit more magical energy to "empower" the spell, you are effectively throwing an object a little bit harder. The equation you just shoved in there is completely irrelevant.

    Again, your wording here is just picking a fight. You are basically repeating yourself because your main point is a single line you said that nobody cared to decipher your intended meaning from, and applies to the area of physics that are treated most consistently in fiction, including in fantasy. Again, Trollish actions, because you seem to be purposefully starting a fight on something that you can easily word to sound "smart", while disregarding anything else said because of how incredibly narrow the focus of what you are saying is.

    And I have disagreed with you, above, because with Telekinesis, and spells that are effectively Telekinesis, they utilise external force and don't directly interact with acceleration. So unless you consider something like a Brick Wall to be an Acceleration Device (no matter how much it can force things to decelerate, it does not directly interact with acceleration, and thus isn't), your main argument on that is, in my opinion, now non-existent. Additionally, your ending statement here is completely irrelevant. I didn't mention anything about reinforcement of arms, I didn't mention anything about weapons, I mentioned reinforcing the legs to be able to amplify movement when desired.

    So, despite requiring others to read through what you wrote, and somehow utilise that to mind read you, you aren't even willing to properly read what others say, nor attempt to decipher it. At this point, your claim not to be trolling is looking VERY shaky to me.

    1. Is the most commonly used reasoning in stories that actually bother to give a reason.
    2. Relatively common, you don't want someone who's comparatively weak to change the landscape every five minutes just because they need to defend themselves.
    3. Quite the opposite, this is usually used in worlds where the basis of magic is in illusions, and how well the illusion is crafted forms the power. Think of stories where people are able to make an illusion where a literal broom closet can temporarily turn into full ball room, allowing over 100 people inside due to someone making an illusion of a ballroom behind the closet door. A broom closet that, normally, has difficulty holding 2 people.
    4. No, the stories I'm talking about have inconsistent magic systems, OP MC's who are inexplicably more powerful than everyone else despite being less experienced in anything than anyone else, and all that jazz. Number 3 breaks space-time, and thus a fundamental part of physics, you just looked at it wrong. Sure, I didn't mention that earlier, but I was responding to what you said, not mentioning all the ways in which these stories DO break Physics.

    I even brought this up before you responded, because I realised that you were going to interpret my words as the story fitting into your definition of "Physics", without considering anything outside of the narrow focus of what was being discussed. But there is even an innate infinite loop there, Mana is used to simulate energy, energy is utilised, and returns to being Mana. Seriously, the number of stories that, if their worlds had our technology, could easily produce what is effectively a perpetual motion machine is near limitless. And that's ignoring the stories that HAVE magical perpetual motion machines, but little to nothing to utilise it for.

    You're the one who brought up pointless equations with no practical meaning in their presence. You have been actively trolling other people by arguing a very specific point that nobody else mentioned, or cared about, based on one line YOU said and nobody else paid any attention to, or should be expected to have paid any attention to. You need to sign up to English classes more than I need to sign up to Physics classes, particularly since they seem like they would be more beneficial to you than Physics classes would be to me. Because being clear and well understood is a more important life skill than knowing Physics Equations you never have a reason to use.