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[TastyMints]

No I agree multiple sources of magic.

Though the question is... Should Xenogenesis be one unifying source of magic that all others pour into? Or is it one type of magic?

I personally think the entire idea sounds wonderful as a mechanic of magic, spheres, and gods. Growing spheres of influence that change reality as they go. Sounds very cool if implemented tastefully.

Also, as far as armor and magic is concerned, I believe wearing armor should entail something like an inability to conjure solid objects from your hands or project magic effectively. Chainmail and leather armors would could provide a greater chance at backfire/critical failure whereas plate armor completely restricts using one's hands at all. It occurs to me now that sign magic could be different from spoken magic. Incantations could still work whereas projections of "magic" from the hands would not. Wearing a full faced helm could interfere with incantations whereas a cap would not. So depending on what kind of magic you want to use, you may have to go without a gauntlet or helmet. As going without a helmet is more risky, maybe spoken magic should be more powerful yeah?

For more than just weak spells, maybe you can't cover your hands or face with inorganics.

[Neonivek]

Well remember that Dwarf Fortress is indeed a videogame but it is also a simulation and can take what other games would consider "unbalance" for the sake of the living world to certain extents.

So there is no need to balance magic in that way.

Now if you are casting a spell that requires percision movement of the arms and fingers then yeah it would hurt, if it just required the attempt or had a large margin of error it wouldn't.

But this isn't a magic thread and the conversation should be focused on the type of magic kohaku is presenting. While you can compare and contrast ideas of other magic types to hers as well as bring about questions and ideas of how it will interact with those, the conversation should ultimately be about contract magic and Xenosynthesis.

As for what I mean by a "Downgrade" lets say you have a giant, who is big and powerful. Magic goes and so the giant goes because apperantly the giant was powered by magic. Which in many ways kind feels cheapened.

A magic creature in my mind shouldn't nessisarily be a fantastic creature, it should be a magical creature. A Unicorn is a magical creature because it essentially is magic and magic is interwoven with it. A Giant Scorpian isn't, certainly it is fantastical and does not exist (and absolutely cannot exist) in real life, but it isn't magical.

Or rather the test I suggest Kohaku is when you see a creature you should ask yourself: Would I describe this creature as "magical"? and if the answer is no, then it really is a no. Heck I don't even consider dragons to be magical, most legends of dragons absolutely NEVER described their ability to breathe fire as even hinting at magic.

[SirHoneyBadger]

That's a great post, TastyMints. Full of evocative images and deep ponderations.

I do like the idea of magic being in balance--magic is apart and separate from reality, and should follow it's own rules, and the most interesting examples of magic in myth and fantasy tend to be the ones where there's a give-and-take aspect.
Other things can be unbalanced for the sake of reality, and that's fine, but I think magic works well when that aspect of it is maintained.

Plus, if you should add something like that to what's otherwise a simulation, then it may cause magic to seem even more different than reality, which I find appropriate.

I also say multiple sources of magic, and additionally, magic that operates with greater or lesser structure and control,
so that contract magic can operate like "wish magic", and have a lot of freedom to it's effects, but at an uncertain, and
potentially very high cost--contract magic is "deal with the devil" magic, in a literal and scary way.

I like to think of contract magic as possibly framing other magics and technologies in the game. It should never grow or diminish or go away, and remain a constant source of power, but it's always the most risky path to power you can take.
I also think of it as coming from outside the main Dwarf Fortress universe. You make contracts with entities that you can
never fully comprehend, from faeries etc. running on blue-and-orange morality, to downright Eldritch Abominations, and
even beings who are the Personifications of universal concepts, like Time, that are above and apart even from the gods.

Ofcourse, these entities may be the ones demanding worship for the power it grants them, so there can be aspects of one hand washing the other, and the sanctity of the contracts, themselves.


Other sources for magic would wax and wane, but you would have some greater or lesser feeling of control. Ofcourse, that control can always be illusory, and these systems may only be props set up by the contract beings to get what they want through more subtle means.

Xenogenesis would be something you could have an effect on, and it may be an area of magic that deals with the idea that more or less magical beings running around equates to more or less magic in the world. It isn't something you define, though, and while I'd absolutely love to see it in the game (now that I'm slowly starting to grasp the concept of it better), I'm not sure it should ever be something that you can master, or become a "xenogenic wizard" or anything.

At most, you'd become something akin to Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective, where you could analyse the data, and get something from it, and maybe act directly upon very small parts of it, but those direct actions will ripple outward. It's like living on the continent of Magica. Even if you could somehow "conquer" the whole damn thing, from sea to sea, it's always going to be much bigger than any one person.

Unlike contract magic, you'd have some control, but there's still always a balance. There's atleast a give and take, where contract magic can easily become a bottomless pit of take. 

A third source, from TastyMints's post, could be a magic of language and will. This is venturing more into the Vancian territory, where you're speaking a reality-bending formula, that does exactly what you ask of it, but everything depends on your will and knowledge. It's still wish magic, but you're making a contract with yourself, and there are still deep pitfalls. I would suggest that this is a magic of ideas. If you want fire, you demand that the idea of fire comes into being. What you don't get to demand, what isn't automatic, is which idea of fire. Is it a candle, or a holocaust? So you must impose and enforce your idea of what the word "fire" means, at this moment in time, on the very fabric of Reality itself--and your will must be so strong, that Reality can only acquiesce.

This is real wizarding, but you're always taking chances, and it should also make wizard-duels horrendously dangerous.

A fourth source for magic could be the magic of names--or you could call it Rune magic, which is more directly dwarfy. This would be somewhat related to the wizardry above, but here the idea is that you take something that is already in the world--you aren't calling anything into being--but you stamp it with a sigil that further defines it, and the magic is in taking a knife, and stamping it with the idea that knives cut things. You aren't changing the basic nature of the object, but you're making a physical object conform to your idea of what it is, and what it should be able to do, and suddenly you have a copper knife that can split a steel anvil with ease.

The risk here is that the idea can grow from what you originally intended. The runed object might even become alive. Make a knife to cut things, and that knife might eventually cut a hole in reality. Stamp the "rune of weapons" onto a sword, and that sword may begin to crave murder. 

You could maybe build upon rune magic, pseudoscience-like, until you are fully able to define exactly what you want, and get it, but that should be time and resource intensive, and however much you define something, words and meanings can always be twisted, misinterpreted, erased, or even physically altered into other words.

Finally, you could get into clockpunk "girl genius" type magic, where it's science powered by the supernatural, and capable of supernatural feats, but you can still have a fine level of control. What's left unsaid is where this power is coming from, what price it demands, and how illusory that control really is.


Necromancy is one risk, but there could be aspects of magic, where it's being "powered by a forsaken child", and other hidden badnesses.

[stickadtroja]

wow a lot of great post in this thread!

heres my take on it;
magic should be its own thing. if it's possible to use it to do mundane things, it's not really magic anymore, it's basically technology.
and from what i can take from kohaku's contract magic, theres is no stopping it from being a mundane tool. say i have a magic mushroom farming field, and i learned the open contract of tree travel (stepping from one tree to another, kohakus example) there is nothing stopping me from making a magic tree travelling transport system. and this makes magic boring i think. asking the fey creatures for a favor and offering something to magically travel from a tree to another should be a rare thing to happen, not a replacement for a minecart-subway system.

thats why i liked one of the post earlier about risk. there should be some great risks involved. or great penalties.
the vampires are a good example. they can never be mundane beacuse they are not self supportive. they always need others to suck blood from. that makes them rare, and even if you made a whole fort of vampires you have to find a source to get blood from. maybe capturing goblins or using innocent migrants. either way, its makes it much more intresting. image what it would be like if vampires could eat pigs or cows. it would take away the whole charm. same with magic.

magic should be something you do as a gamble. instead of having fireball hurling mages as just another military unit among your sword and marksdwarves, it would be way cooler if you decide that your are fighting a loosing battle and sacrofice your high priest in a ritual that makes all the goblin weapons rust to peices.

so i would want to see more suggestions on the downside of magic. what are the penalties and what risks are there with using it?

[NW_Kohaku]

I have a sort of image in my head of a menu-driven conjuration system that would encompass things from throwing burning hunks of molten iron from your hand to summoning a deity and making a deal with it (or possibly FORCING it to do your bidding if you are powerful enough and have a very high skill, can bind it, and have some sort of outstanding leverage.) With the military/order system as it is now, commanding wizard dwarves to cast a range of spells wouldn't be as difficult as it sounds. A makeshift dwarven wizard militia could drive away the horde of goblins or burn the whole fortress down from the inside, or maybe you conjure your fickle god and he decides to bring steel and fire to everything at the site. Maybe the Goddess of Love shows up and convinces the Goblins to go away, but kills all of your children to attain the power to do so.

Basic conjurations could be one word. Saying "fire" might conjure fire in your hand, but if you're not very good at magic the object you conjure might damage you or explode in your hand. Coating your flesh in ice might work well as armor, or it might freeze you to death. Doing the same thing with stone may not freeze you to death, but it may encase you in stone for eternity. For extra fun, the magic language(s) could be entirely separate, or only certain words in a civilization's vocabulary could hold magical power. Now that I think about it, perhaps the system could work similarly to fighting styles as envisioned in the dev logs. Magical words and skills could be flagged in worldgen in the same way that animal domestication is handled. Cross-cultural magic systems and languages would be possible given the entity system currently being worked on.

The thing about this is that we need to work on having magic at least somewhat controllable before player will ever really start using it...

And asking the AI to try to interpret our intentions from what we type is begging for trouble - keep in mind, this is a game that was infamous for dwarves walling themselves into airtight chambers, (only recently pseudo-fixed,) or running halfway around a fortress to mine away walls from the opposite end of a wall you wanted mined out than they already were. 

That's not even starting to get into "You Can't Get Ye Flask" problems, which will almost definitely be a problem.

Toady may want to make a robust language system in this game, but he has yet to show the expertise in actually creating such a thing, and he also likely won't use the help of any existing libraries or tools for making such a thing.  Hence, don't get your hopes up for an AI capable of natural conversation.

Further, if we're going to have costs (much less negotiation and haggling over costs) for the magic, we need to have a well-defined idea of just how much power/energy any given spell will take up.

Hence, I'd go back to the sort of concept of a "pre-packaged spell" - a spell that does exactly the same thing each time, which you can pre-negotiate prices for, and even pre-pay the spirits whatever they demand to receive whenever you choose.

This would mean that, rather than a "light" spell trying to interpret how much light you want to fill up the room with, it may be a specified number of candlepower radiating out to the same number of tiles every time you cast the spell. 

This sort of mechanic forces the player to play by the rules of the magic system, rather than forcing the computer to try to figure out how the magic system plays by the rules of the player... and really, forcing the player to play by the mechanic's rules (and being able to understand and manipulate those rules) is exactly what DF does best.

Other than that, I worry that you post puts a little too much power in the hands of players to be able to create a god at their own personal whims...

No I agree multiple sources of magic.

Though the question is... Should Xenogenesis be one unifying source of magic that all others pour into? Or is it one type of magic?

Xenosynthesis is meant to be a way of dealing with mundane magical ecosystems, but also a way of handling how "magical" any given environment is. 

Hence, it can tie in well with any sort of magic that relies upon magic "from the environment".  By extending it, you can also say that it works for magic "from inside yourself" by making a character capable of eating/storing up magic/mana for their own purposes later. 

There's still the concept of the "Fairyland" or "Underworld" which stories like Cado describe.  These would seem to naturally be an endless fountain of magical power, but one where you might not have access to their power normally. 

In fact, you might not be able to get access to Fairyland unless you have a biome like a specific variety of forest, and once that type of forest exists, Fairyland's magic pours in, reinforcing that Xenosynthetic concept. 

A necromancer's tower might have some relic that naturally opens a portal to the Underworld, bringing in the magic of the Underworld to the tower.

Even nether-caps, as I've tried rationalizing them before, may well just have small portals to the nether-realm that happens to infinitely absorb the heat of any material near them. 

I think the best way of saying it is that Xenosynthesis is a way of thinking about magic in the "mundane world" as a finite resource, but not "a source of magic", just a system by which you can run out of magic.  It's the system of accounting how much magic power an area has, but not something where you can say "This is xenosynthesis magic" and "That is not xenosynthesis magic".

[NW_Kohaku]

magic should be its own thing. if it's possible to use it to do mundane things, it's not really magic anymore, it's basically technology.
and from what i can take from kohaku's contract magic, theres is no stopping it from being a mundane tool. say i have a magic mushroom farming field, and i learned the open contract of tree travel (stepping from one tree to another, kohakus example) there is nothing stopping me from making a magic tree travelling transport system. and this makes magic boring i think. asking the fey creatures for a favor and offering something to magically travel from a tree to another should be a rare thing to happen, not a replacement for a minecart-subway system.

This is what these magic threads keep coming back to, though...

What, exactly are you actually going to do with magic in this game?  Are you thinking about how the player interacts with it, really, or are you just thinking about some vague concept of how you think magic "feel"?

Because if it's just how magic should "feel", then I hate to break it to you, but nothing that actually gets programmed is ever going to "feel" as wondrous as you might hope when you are capable of seeing it on a regular basis, and understand the quirks of the system.  Again, we have magic in the game already with vampires, dragons, etc.  But they don't feel all that magical when dragons are just really big creatures with a fire breath special ability that can be hacked down by just a few dwarves with shields.

And you're not going to make anything "more wondrous" again by just making magic random, either.  Random events don't inspire wonder, they inspire save-scumming and frustration.  They tell players not to bother with the mechanic at all. (How often do you use a Rod of Wonder in D&D when you're not just trying to be an asshole and wreck your friend's game?)

The rules you set guide how the player sees and thinks about the game.  Again, I would point to how games like Portal radically change how you see or think about a FPS type of game by simply changing the way your powers work.

So... Why shouldn't magic be mundane? 

According to the Threetoe stories, magic is mundane, especially for elves and wizards. 

Threetoe stories pretty much confirm that elves get their wood for trading from singing to the forest to produce wood for them.  They use it as a trade good.  That's pretty mundane. 

The plants that grow underground aren't all mushrooms by any stretch - quarry bushes have leaves and nuts like plants, which really don't sound like mushrooms.  Cave wheat is just albino wheat that grows without the sun.  That's magic.  As is the nether-cap mushroom that magically stays at 0 degrees Celsius at all times.  You can make objects from nether-cap wood that maintain that magical property (giving rise to jokes of nether-cap wood boxes being dwarven refrigerators).

That's not even starting with tamable dragons, and having nests of jabberers, and you know those are magic...

Mundane magic isn't just coming, it's already here.

You have to come up with a serious argument for why mundane magic would break down how the player experiences the game to come up with reasons that mundane magic shouldn't be in the game. 

Oh, and by the way, if magic isn't mundane, you lose all underground farming that isn't based upon constantly throwing logs/sawdust on wet ground, because anything that isn't a mushroom is magic, and farming is mundane.  (Which, again, kind of proves it's all in your head about whether you even recognize something as magic or not...)

Rather than rejecting mundane magic, I think it's better to embrace it. 

Elves manufacture all their wooden goods for common trade by using their magic in an industrial manner.  The reason they live as they do, so ardently protect their woods the way they do, is because it is the source of their magic, their equivalent of technology.  The more pristine and Fairyland-connected their woods are, the more magic floods their woods, and the more that they can use understood, predictable magic to create things of wonder for their daily lives. 

They use wood swords because they're magic wood swords, and the power of the spell on those swords is based upon the power of the link to the faerie realm.  They eschew metals because it might damage their link to the fae powers they base their culture upon. 

Dwarven moods are magic, and produce magic artifacts. Since we farm magic plants, with the proper system in place, you might even have potion-brewing of magic plants, like liquid sunshine from the magical sun berries is right now, or the golden salve...

There's no real way to introduce a wizard's tower eventually without mundanely-used magic like in Cado, where Cado basically used the light-producing staff that traced how much magic was in the area back to the points that were projecting that magic to produce mundane light whenever he felt like it.

The thing about declaring magic should always be a "gamble" is that any time I hear it, I always wonder if the person saying it doesn't actually mean, "I don't want to use magic, so there should be some reason nobody else does, either." 

If dragons have a 1/3 chance of exploding or turning into a fluffy wambler each time they breathe fire, though, how, exactly, will that make them an appropriate challenge?  It wouldn't, so you don't want magic random when it's used against the player, and you don't want random magic when it's just mundane magic mushrooms underground.  You only want random magic when it's something the player gets, and you want to keep the game to one where you don't have magic powers at your disposal, (except the ones you already have, like moods and trances and farming underground, because you don't consider those magic, even though they are, just because you already have them,) and that's mostly to keep it out of player hands.

What we really need to do is help blur the lines between what is magic and what is not in this world, so that what we're really dealing with is "this takes up a specific type of energy" and "this works on its own, regardless of the magic field it's in."

Vampires needing a specified amount of blood whose ritual act creates magic for themselves at specific periods of time because they have a magic energy metric that gets depleted (in this case, hijacking the old thirst meter) just by existing, but also allowing for casting magic from this magic energy pool (functionally meaning that they get more thirsty the more they cast magic) allows for this sort of measurable, mundane magic. 

You can have semi-White Wolf vampires that can use "Celerity" or something in combat to defeat a siege on their own while at the same time knowing that it will cost you two whole dwarves worth of blood to pay for that.  (Where's those haulers that are always on break?...)

In fact, random magic really cheapens the whole core theme of DF.  Magic should serve in the greater purpose of what sort of experience DF as a whole offers players, and as such, shouldn't be something huge and loud and completely overturning everything else that goes on in the game because magic has to be so special.  If that means "cheapening magic" in your eyes to keep magic from cheapening the whole game, then it's really worth it, because its the Gestalt of the systems that create the game.

Magic should have at least somewhat predictable effects, or else it ruins the entire play style whereby DF players are forced to be highly cautious and thoughtful, and really understand what it is they are dealing with, unless they want to have some Fun.

That sounds like a great concept for magic in general, all by itself, but it's not going to happen with random magic, because random magic can't be understood, and being careful doesn't matter.

Instead, you need to have a complex system of costs.

That's what this thread's suggestions try to do - set up the accounting of costs, so that magic can be predictable, but at the same time, cost something significant enough that it isn't just easy power. 

If casting a fireball takes growing a field of magma blooms that require months of tilling and the labor of a dozen dwarves, then even if it's "mundane" and predictable what a fireball will do, it will nevertheless be a rare sight unless you are willing to put up with the costs of doing it. 

If those magma blooms don't grow at all without living your life in a specific prescribed way, then it's even more constraining.  Consider that the elves live their incredibly restricted lives specifically because of their Nature Spirit - they have to give up metal and stone and anything obtained by killing animals that didn't die natural deaths just to get their magic.  That's a significant cost.

[Neonivek]

Dwarven moods are magic, and produce magic artifacts

It could just be that they are so perfect that they just become magical or that their powers are beyond even magic and are part of the worlds "Laws of physics".

Or to make it more simple: If there was an antimagic field in dwarf fortress... Moods and artifacts should still happen.

[NW_Kohaku]

Dwarven moods are magic, and produce magic artifacts

It could just be that they are so perfect that they just become magical or that their powers are beyond even magic and are part of the worlds "Laws of physics".

Or to make it more simple: If there was an antimagic field in dwarf fortress... Moods and artifacts should still happen.

Why? Artifacts are supposed to have explicitly magical effects in the future. 

(I.E. the cat bone floodgate shoots fireballs.)

Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons that random magic is so contemptible - it just produces stupid and useless (if not outright self-destructive) things if it isn't guided to sanity by procedural rulesets. 

Sure, it's funny that magically a rabbit skull can make a whole door, or crap like planepacked can exist, but it also just makes the whole concept obviously gamey.

And really, considering as it's you who created the artifact list threads from a while ago, you of all people should realize how magical artifacts may well be.

Making everything play by the same rules helps players to get into the sense of it being a world where there are rules and there is a logic that matters beyond just being a video game with an arbitrary set of rules.  Rather than having a random forced event that causes random things to happen because it was your regularly scheduled random event time, having the magic things happen organically, and in a way that players can interact with it, helps to create the sense that there really is some living, breathing system down there with its own logic that go beyond it being the event phase of a game.

If, for example, magic-dead lands bar use of trances and prevent all artifacts, then you know that there is a cost for isolating yourself from magic.  If you go to a land full of artifice magic or the like, you might get artifacts far more regularly, meanwhile.  And if you can manipulate the magic in the region, then you allow for a player-controlled toggle of how the magic in their chunk of the world works.

[NW_Kohaku]

A magic creature in my mind shouldn't nessisarily be a fantastic creature, it should be a magical creature. A Unicorn is a magical creature because it essentially is magic and magic is interwoven with it. A Giant Scorpian isn't, certainly it is fantastical and does not exist (and absolutely cannot exist) in real life, but it isn't magical.

Or rather the test I suggest Kohaku is when you see a creature you should ask yourself: Would I describe this creature as "magical"? and if the answer is no, then it really is a no. Heck I don't even consider dragons to be magical, most legends of dragons absolutely NEVER described their ability to breathe fire as even hinting at magic.

They don't need to describe such creatures as magical for the same reason giant robot animes don't need to bother explaining that they aren't "real science" - they're just not possible without magic.

(I.E. Tenga Toppa Gurren Lugan's machine that is capable of picking up and throwing galaxies like shurikens, and whose mass was calculated to have to be several times greater than all the total mass of the universe - the authors of the series were quite clearly stating that they simply didn't give a flying rats' ass about physics at that point.)

25-ton flying creatures have been proven to be impossible without explaining away with magic by numerous people trying to talk about how much food such a creature would need to consume.  (Remember, in this game, elephants die from starvation from overgrazing at just 5 tons...) That's even before you get into the obviously magical fire-breathing capabilities where that fire breath is more hot than even magma (which goes beyond any standard chemical projectile) and the fact that they can swim in magma. 

Oh, and that goes for the Roc, too.  It's clearly magical because it's scientifically impossible.

The same goes for the Giant Desert Scorpion and Giant Cave Spider - they're magic because they still have physiologies of their non-giant kin in spite of creatures without a developed central respiratory system being incapable of growing larger than the "air holes" in their exoskeletons will allow air in to operate their bodies.  A warm-blooded lizard/mammal-like creature with an exoskeleton that looks like a spider might possibly be non-magical, but these are just giant spiders made giant by magic.

In fact, most "giant" anythings are magic and only appear in regions that have high degrees of Savagry magic, indicating their reliance upon that magic, as well as how that Savagry magic is the cause of their existence.  (Like with the story Root, and the Forest Spirit transforming mundane creatures into animal-people, the leftover magic may also create giant versions of those creatures, as well...)

I also say multiple sources of magic, and additionally, magic that operates with greater or lesser structure and control,
so that contract magic can operate like "wish magic", and have a lot of freedom to it's effects, but at an uncertain, and
potentially very high cost--contract magic is "deal with the devil" magic, in a literal and scary way.

I like to think of contract magic as possibly framing other magics and technologies in the game. It should never grow or diminish or go away, and remain a constant source of power, but it's always the most risky path to power you can take.
I also think of it as coming from outside the main Dwarf Fortress universe. You make contracts with entities that you can
never fully comprehend, from faeries etc. running on blue-and-orange morality, to downright Eldritch Abominations, and
even beings who are the Personifications of universal concepts, like Time, that are above and apart even from the gods.

Well, part of what I was talking about was that there would be different kinds of contracts.

Some contracts are involved, deal with the devil types of contracts, and those are very powerful.

But there's also the Open Contract, the kind that just about anyone can try to participate in.  This is the more mundane kind of contract, and the sort of thing that the typical wizard will traffic in far more often, and doesn't require you to constantly re-negotiate your powers, because the costs of that type of magic are set in stone.  (And if the contract is learned from a slab, that might be literal...)

Open Contracts let just about anyone with the training to perform the rituals be capable of balancing the costs, (Cado described wizardry as something akin to accounting - balancing out the costs for the magic he wanted through "calculations" in order to effectively budget out his magic from the cosmic check book,) with what they are capable of gathering to pay. 

Hence, some simple magics can be obtained through a set-in-stone open contract like having a light spell that is capable of being cast by anyone trained enough in magical arts, and who is willing to sacrifice a specific gift to the spirits of light.  A fortress might magically light its whole streetways by constantly paying glowweed in tribute to the light spirits, for example.

[Helari]

I'm rather against restricting magic because when I'm the wizard king I want to do anything.

[Neonivek]

It's clearly magical because it's scientifically impossible

It is scientifically impossible... HERE!

Not in dwarf fortress but here.

Just because something is clearly impossible in real life it doesn't mean it "runs on magic" in dwarf fortress.

Hense why I created the "would you describe that creature as magical" test. A Roc isn't magical because nothing about it screams magic within a medieval or mythological mindset and thus it fits the setting and how it understands physics.

Or rather: It doesn't break the laws of physics because you do not know what the laws of physics are.

That's even before you get into the obviously magical fire-breathing capabilities where that fire breath is more hot than even magma (which goes beyond any standard chemical projectile) and the fact that they can swim in magma

The first can be described as there simply being chemical processes that dwarf fortress has, or biomechanical ones, that we don't have in real life. The second is that, well, Magma is hot water in Dwarf Fortress.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm rather against restricting magic because when I'm the wizard king I want to do anything.

And there's the other side of the coin...

Well, to go back to this part:

Well remember that Dwarf Fortress is indeed a videogame but it is also a simulation and can take what other games would consider "unbalance" for the sake of the living world to certain extents.

So there is no need to balance magic in that way.

When it comes to the notion of how helmets prevent magic, it wasn't there just as "game balance" alone to make some video gamey sense, it was there for a specific reason of how it makes players play the game.

That is, right now, everyone goes for plate mail in Adventure Mode.  There's no reason not to.

If you take up necromancy, there's no reason to stop playing like an armored knight.

If you play as an armored knight, there's no reason not to take up necromancy.

The reason why the old D&D games included "No armor for wizards" was not just to weaken wizards so that they weren't too powerful compared to fighters, it was also because the whole point of how the game was set up was to create a situation where different players needed to rely upon other players, and their specializations in order to survive.

Wizards can't wear armor and wield powerful weapons because otherwise, why would anyone play a Fighter?

Everything about how magic worked in that world was just backfilled as excuses for the system that would create that game that the developers wanted.

In a sense, I think this is why so many people are coming in here talking about how magic is supposed to be unreliable - they want to play a fighter, and don't want heavily-armored wizards to be better than them in every way.  They also don't want fighters to be nothing more than meat-shields to the wizards who do all the heavy lifting. 

The thing is, that just ruins the magic system for the people who do want to play as wizards, and makes everyone else hide from using magic ever, which is a total waste of a whole system.

Instead of that, we have to talk about reasonable limitations that describe why using magic has some sort of cost that is actually a solid reason not to always go for all the magic you can grab. 

The current system with necromancy and thralls having essentially all the power you want infinitely with no particular drawbacks is exactly the sort of problem we will keep having for as long as we don't introduce real costs on the magic system.

That is, everyone will be a necromancer in full plate mail because there's no reason not to be a wizard when you can still have all the powers of a knight. 

A "you can't wear armor" system is pretty arbitrary and cliche, but it has existed in virtually every RPG ever created for a reason. It is necessary for magic to have costs and limitations to prevent everyone from just automatically going for the magic option.

And yes, this exists even in a simulation, because it creates serious flaws in the simulation if there is some sort of power that is obvious and readily available, but the simulation never uses it for no good reason.  (Think magma forges, artifacts/moods, and cotton candy not being used by fortresses from worldgen.  Every player will use them, but the computer will not - why?)  If you have magic that makes everything faster and easier than the way that the simulation people work, why bother working that way at all?

The proper question is, as SirHoneyBadger asked over in the other thread, why use doctors and medicine at all if magic is easy?  And conversely, the question becomes why use healing magic at all if doctors are always better?

The proper magic system is the one that threads the needle between too powerful and useful and not powerful or useful enough to be worth investing in, and then you can backfill the justifications for why it works the way it does afterwards.  The "feel" of the magic will always be in relation to the rest of the way that the game works, not as a matter of just how magic works as a standalone system.

In many games where you play from the perspective of a single character, for example, playing the wizard class generally is like playing as a sniper or other type of class where the "feel" of it isn't that you're strictly some arcane master so much as that you are a small, frail thing that must sneak and crawl around to take the greatest advantage of your massive firepower and hide from the return fire.  That has little to do with the magic system itself, however. 

To finally get back to responding to the statement first quoted in this post...

We can currently do just about anything with water, pumps, pressure plates, and mechanisms in general. 

But those have restraints. 

It's simply that they have very logical, ordered restraints with logical outcomes to inputs that can be controlled that produce nearly anything.

Why not make magic like dwarfputing - something that has some inherent logic you can discover if you completely, totally devote yourself to exploiting it, but where the restraints upon it make the actual taking those ideas to fruition require a great deal of effort and study into the ramifications of the actions you are taking.

Because the physics model and spacial simulation are DF's greatest asset towards it - finding a way to blend magic into the spacial simulation (as well as possibly the relationship system that is planned to eventually come into play when we talk about contract magic,) is the way to make everything in the game interact with one-another emergently, and that emergent behavior is everything that makes DF such a fantastic game.

[NW_Kohaku]

It's clearly magical because it's scientifically impossible

It is scientifically impossible... HERE!

Not in dwarf fortress but here.

Just because something is clearly impossible in real life it doesn't mean it "runs on magic" in dwarf fortress.

Yes it does.

Exactly what do you think the word "Magic" means?

It's not impossible in DF's world because DF has magical physics.  That's why I'm talking about having ways to make magic physics be rational and predictable.

Hense why I created the "would you describe that creature as magical" test. A Roc isn't magical because nothing about it screams magic within a medieval or mythological mindset and thus it fits the setting and how it understands physics.

Or rather: It doesn't break the laws of physics because you do not know what the laws of physics are.

[...]

The first can be described as there simply being chemical processes that dwarf fortress has, or biomechanical ones, that we don't have in real life. The second is that, well, Magma is hot water in Dwarf Fortress.

Because you're talking about a force that rewrites physics...

And this isn't magic how?

[Neonivek]

Because you're talking about a force that rewrites physics...

And this isn't magic how?

I am not sure if I can come up with an example that would explain the differences between other dimensions and the one we live in if it isn't immediately evident to the one I am speaking to.

However I will just say it.

Dwarf Fortress is an entirely different universe, an ENTIRELY different dimension from real life. While there are similarities between the two the elements from the fantastical to the mundane are different.

So while in real life the only way a Scorpian the size of a cow would work is by magic or "Science"... in Dwarf Fortress, because it is an entirely different dimension with entirely different rules, it occurs because the universe allows it OR because of underlying effects we cannot see, all of which may not nessisarily be magic.

[NW_Kohaku]

I am not sure if I can come up with an example that would explain the differences between other dimensions and the one we live in if it isn't immediately evident to the one I am speaking to.

However I will just say it.

Dwarf Fortress is an entirely different universe, an ENTIRELY different dimension from real life. While there are similarities between the two the elements from the fantastical to the mundane are different.

So while in real life the only way a Scorpian the size of a cow would work is by magic or "Science"... in Dwarf Fortress, because it is an entirely different dimension with entirely different rules, it occurs because the universe allows it OR because of underlying effects we cannot see, all of which may not nessisarily be magic.

But that difference is magic.  I'm saying this is a definitional thing - "magic" is just a term for those things impossible by ordinary physics where there is no full accounting of how everything in the universe operates by standard, rational physics. 

The same goes for a story with impossibly giant robots doing impossible things on a regular basis - that's just magic physics. 

Dragons and rocs and giant web-spitting spiders can exist because magic. 

The thing is, that magic can be just plain arbitrary, or it can follow rules, and I'm trying to describe a system of rules that make all the different magical concepts that exist in this game actually play by the same rules.

What makes DF such a fantastic game is that it allows for emergent behaviors.  Emergent behaviors exist because everything operates in the same "space", everything's rules can mix up and interact with one another.

Right now, a dragon just plain exists.  It breathes fire just because it has a fire breathing token.

Compare this to the rules for how creatures pathfind - those rules intersect with the rules for how players can redesign the layout of the terrain.  Because spacial simulation forces everything to operate in the same space using the same set of rules, you can use fortress layout techniques to change how invaders path towards your dwarves so that you can set up defenses to stop them. 

You can build dwarfputers because of the emergent effects of how liquid physics operates in space and obeys its physics, as well as the physics of how mechanisms and pumps work.  Because it is a spacial simulation, where players can alter the space, nearly anything is possible.

Magic needs to stop playing by its own rules to become something worthy of DF.  It needs to operate in the same space as the "normal physics".  When that happens, we can create emergent behaviors, such as dragons exuding a magical aura that means that where they make their lairs, it causes plants that can only grow near magical things to start growing, and you can then start tracking where a dragon's lair might be by looking for the magic flowers that only grow near dragons.

Then, we can start treating these magic physics or mundane physics as separate, and instead as "the physics of DF", which seems to be what you want to have, anyway.