The Magic of Magicbuilding: Supply and Demand
Welcome to the Magic of Magicbuilding, our little spinoff feature that focuses specifically on building a magical system for a fantasy setting. This week, we're attempting to balance an economic structure without knowing what it looks like, which is precisely as difficult as it sounds.
The Target
Today, we're looking at the last "F" of the basic magical framework: the Fee, or cost, of magic. It answers a very important question, namely, "Why aren't we using magic for everything?" It also answers other, equally important questions, such as "What's to stop someone from using magic to destroy the world," and "What are the upper and lower limits for magical use?" In turn, we can expect to create brand new questions, which will start the process of tweaking our framework until everything hangs together.
To help explain what we mean and why this is important, we want you to imagine a three-legged stool.
Like so.
Each leg is one aspect of our three F's, and the stool as a whole serves as the framework for our magical system. The goal is to eventually set our magic system atop the stool and have nothing slide off, crashing to the ground catastrophically and bringing everything we know and love to ruin. At present, we have two problems:
- We've only made two legs so far. This framework can't stand on its own yet, but by the time we're done today, we'll have the third leg. However,
- We have no way of measuring how long each leg is against the other. With experience, you can roughly eyeball each of the legs, but the odds are good that, even with the third leg, this stool will be a bit of a wobbly mess.
We'll worry about the wobbling later, but we can save ourselves a bit of work by attempting to "eyeball" the third leg now. Let's look at what we already know about our magical system:
Dimensional Magic. "Magic" is simply the access, shaping, and control of energy from other dimensions. Each dimension has its own energy, which can be used to perform a variety of related feats; tapping into the Dimension of Fire, for example, lets you generate heat and flame out of seemingly thin air.
Less is More. Tapping into dimensional energy is less of a "trying to draw out enough energy to pull something off" situation and more of a "trying to carefully divert part of a full-blast firehose to delicately water a flower" situation. Generally speaking, the more gentle and precisely focused the magic, the more difficult it is.
Discrete vs. Continuous. It takes more effort to perform multiple spells with a combined effect than it does to simply make a larger spell that has the same effect. If it didn't, we would need to regularly recast spells to keep vehicles moving.
Sympathetic Control. Magic is controlled and shaped using motions, words, objects, and figures that evoke the desired effect. We haven't gotten too far into this aspect yet, but we do know that if you want to, say, summon a fireball, you won't be using a water balloon to do it.
Learned and Intentional. This part hasn't been stressed so much as it's been implied, but magic is something that can be performed in a rote fashion. You don't need to creatively come up with a new spell every time you want to start your car; everyone can use the same "spell" to activate a vehicle. At the same time, magic is difficult (if not impossible) to do accidentally; conscious intent is involved in pulling off a spell successfully.
To these, we can add a couple of implied features of magic, just based on the fact that you can use magic to power a vehicle:
Basic Spells Are Inexpensive. Consider our primary use case: starting a car and driving it from location A to location B. If we're using a pair of spells to do this, as mentioned last week, the cost of doing so will need to be low enough to justify the decision to use magic. For example, it wouldn't make sense to drive a magical car from A to B if doing so required the blood sacrifice of three virgins, unless the drive was that important or virgins were that cheap. While our current setup does imply that, mile for mile, longer trips in a car are "cheaper" than shorter trips, the cost of starting and maintaining two spells is at least low enough that a typical driver can easily afford to pay it.
Magical Energy Can Be Stored. This is perhaps a little less intuitive, but bear with us. To power a vehicle with multiple spells that are used in conjunction, such as our overly-simplistic "water-injected piston chambers over a roaring fire" engine example, one of two things must be true. Either it must be fairly straightforward to get the precise timing of those two spells correct, as well as adjust them on the fly to accelerate or decelerate, or it must be possible to store and gradually release magical energy on command. Not only does the latter option make more sense considering the various uses we intend for magic to have, but it also explains why we can alter the amount of magic by simply pressing a pedal or manipulating a lever.
Finally, we can use all of these features to roughly measure the size of our third leg. We're looking for a Fee that will:
- Have a certain minimum, which scales upward with the energy required
- Have a minimum which multiplies faster than it scales (so that four basic spells are more expensive than a single, four-times-larger spell)
- Increase with precision and level of control
- Require conscious thought
- Have a maximum which prevents the average person from destroying the world
- Be expensive enough to explain why technology is necessary
- Be cheap enough that an average person can routinely pay for basic spells
- For flavor, fits with the Form and Function that we've already established
That sounds like a lot of requirements, but having so many isn't necessarily a bad thing. This will help narrow down our possible Fee from "it could be anything" to "it needs to land somewhere near the center of this Venn diagram that has like a half-dozen circles."
Building Blocks for a Stool Leg
Before we go any further, let's talk real quick about magical Fees in general. It helps to understand what the generic options are before we dial down to our more specific costs.
Energy. The most commonly seen cost in magical systems today is energy. It isn't usually called that, of course. It will typically have a more evocative name; "mana" is pretty common, for example. Regardless, the idea is the same: the typical caster has a finite supply of energy that they can use to craft magical spells. Out of energy? No spells. Various tweaks can be made to this particular Fee, such as the amount of time and/or effort needed to recover expended energy.
Thought. Second place goes to something called Vancian magic: the concept that, for a variety of reasons, a given caster can only hold a certain number of spells in their mind at once. Once that spell "slot" is used, the magical energy involved makes that slot useless until the caster recovers. This is so large mostly because D&D champions this particular Fee.
Life. Quite a few magical systems, including real-world occult systems, hold that magical energy comes from within. In these systems, casters pay the cost with their own bodies. On the one hand, this can be very dangerous; it's easily possible to try to use too much magic and die. On the other hand, this encourages casters to be more robust and thus have more life to spend on magic... and any system where a wizard could out-arm-wrestle a knight is going to be entertaining.
Time. This cost tends to get mixed in with the others as a secondary Fee. The basic gist is that the more complicated or powerful the spell, the more time must be spent casting the spell. Want to cook an egg? Snap your fingers. Want to destroy the moon? That particular spell will take years.
Sympathetic Costs. To cast magic, in these systems at least, you must first pay a cost in kind. This particular Fee is common in literature because, we guess, metaphorical sacrifices are deep. Or at least, they can be; we can see why authors like asking questions such as, "Would you sacrifice the happiest day of your life to make your loved one smile again?" Less understandable would be, "Would you cut off your finger if it meant your enemy lost their finger, too?" We're just saying, you've got the knife already; maybe skip the middleman.
You can decide to use any, all, or none of the generic costs in some form to build your Fee for magic. These costs are meant more as a starting point than anything else; the important thing is that the Fee we build lands in our set of rings. If we can manage that, we'll have a stool that may or may not wobble, but certainly won't collapse the moment any weight is placed upon it.
Price-Setting
For the magic system we're building, we're going to use some of the generic costs to inform our Fee, but more significant still will be the features of our system as of now. We'll talk this out as we go:
Magic revolves around tapping into dimensional magic. Let's say that the minimum cost is what it takes to actually tap a given dimension. Certain dimensions are easier to tap into than others, and each dimension has a minimum and maximum amount of energy that can be safely drawn at once. As we've already mentioned, more energy does require more effort than less energy, but not significantly more; in fact, on a cost-for-energy basis, it gets cheaper to access more energy at once than less energy. So it is that, when someone starts a car, they tap into a set, moderately high level of energy, store it in the mystical equivalent of a fuel tank, and use that to power the engine reactions as they drive. After powering the vehicle for a certain distance, they'll have to recast the spell to restore energy to the magic tanks, although maybe our world will have magical refueling stations that work like gas stations and allow drivers to buy more energy.
Magic grows more costly as it grows more complicated, precise, or focused. These all imply that a combination of time and mental and/or physical effort is involved in casting spells. We already know the initial starting of a car is on the same scale as turning a key in a conventional vehicle, and we've just said that involves a moderate-high level of energy being stored and used, which seems fairly basic. Something on the order of magical surgery, where near-microscopic incisions and sutures are involved, and possible regeneration of damaged tissue might be needed, would be much more difficult, even though the energy used is lower. We can therefore expect magical surgery to require a longer, more complicated spell, with a greater mental and/or physical cost.
The Fee is starting to come into focus. Magic takes both physical and mental effort to cast, and the basic cost is both physical and mental. Our casters are manipulating energy that has different effects depending on its source dimension; the cost will also differ based on the source dimension, but the upshot is still that even a basic spell involves a minor amount of physical and mental taxation. The cost can be representative of the dimension involved, so tapping into the Dimension of Fire and the Dimension of Water to start a car means that, physically, you grow hotter and wetter; starting a car is akin to working up a sweat with some brief, intense exercise. Mentally, a caster might be briefly influenced by thoughts or emotions associated with heat and water, or possibly a mix of the two, since the spells are cast simultaneously; a short burst of emotion is associated with turning on the car.
Here we can see why some people might decide driving a car isn't worth it for short trips. Yeah, you'll save a few minutes by driving, but do you really want to deal with that initial burst? For moderate and longer distances, or those tasks that involve transporting objects, a car makes sense, because the equivalent of a quick, angry sprint is a small price to pay for not throwing out your back while carrying a sofa across town. This also explains why those refueling stations are more attractive than simply paying the cost yourself to keep the spells running; at a certain point, giving somebody $20 so that you don't have to jog in place to keep your car fueled is going to seem like a deal.
This also explains why spells have a set maximum that differs from dimension to dimension. A given person's body will be able to handle different types of exertion better than others, as will their mind. Regardless, at some point, mental or physical exhaustion will take its toll. Similarly, it might be possible for people to push beyond those limits rarely, but doing so places the caster in danger of killing themselves. This even allows for certain people to have natural talents that lend themselves to one type of magic or another, since the ability to cast a particular kind of magic is secondary to being able to endure the cost of casting. Some ice wizards (or whatever our equivalent turns out to be) may be the type that wander around in flip-flops and shorts in sub-zero weather. Others may be the type that are so naturally warm and bubbly that icy feelings don't slow them down. The best might have both qualities.
Conclusion
With this, we now have a Form, a Function, and a Fee. Our basic, three-legged stool is complete. The shape of the stool is still quite rough and in need of polishing, but more than that, we'll need to look at how the stool wobbles and how to remove those wobbles.
What that means is, next week, we'll look at the consequences of the choices we've made so far. Some of them will be good, some bad, some weird, but most importantly for our consideration, some will be unwanted. It's going to be our task to shave off the unwanted consequences... and hopefully, not shave off so much that the stool falls over.