Tim: Rarity and Response, yes. What those two things are determines a lot about what kind of magical story it is.

Dave: Champions was the first game to say “there’s no difference between a firebolt and an energy blast except the window dressing”, and I loved it — it was a wool-from-my-eyes moment.

De:
I love all the author suggestions, though I don’t agree with comparing any author to a edited collection of original fairy tales, though: that’s like comparing a house to a hill.

“I think the reason I find fairy-tale magic interesting is that people in stories, for the most part, don’t know how it works.” Yes. Yes yes. A thousand times, yes.

Arillery_MKV:
Ooh. which iteration of the MG magic stuff did you read? On the wiki or the Burning Wheel Forum? You should read the BW Forum one, because I started with something else entirely, was told my idea would completely break the whole game and actually directly caused world hunger — it was only after a brisk discussion that it got to the final, better version. Creative feedback from your peers is awesome.

It isn’t that fairies were weird and worked by strange rules, it’s that everything was weird and strange. Angels danced on pins, blood sacrifice kept the Sun from going out, witches living in hovels could curse you with a nasty look, Zeus nailed Leda in the shape of a swan, you blessed people who sneezed to prevent their souls from escaping…

“No other storyteller grasps this kind of magic and how to talk about it on the page so well.”

And while he’s good, he’s hardly the best – you’re familiar with him, and he writes to your milieu and tastes, and I didn’t spot an “in my opinion” anywhere near the statement. I know it’s not what you want to focus on, but make this kind of blanket statement around me, and I question everything else and don’t listen :P

—

I think the reason I find fairy-tale magic interesting is that people in stories, for the most part, don’t know how it works. They’re trying to play by rules – and there are rules – they don’t understand, rules that have nothing to do with what other people tell you is right or wrong.

But the rules can be discovered, guessed, and manipulated – the fairies can be defeated or won over using their own laws.

I think that says a lot right there — and it’s not even just the “rarity” but that Excalibur is something that unique unto itself and not just describable as numbers.

Once upon a time, when running far more conventional D&Dish games, I used to actually provide folks with index cards for the significant magic items they had, just so that it wasn’t Yet Another Mace of Spiffy Clerical Magic. And, at that, the best magic item I ever had (leading to it cropping up across multiple generations of gametime) was an actual intelligent sword … something special, not a simple modifier.

Parenthetically, that’s why one of the best things about 4e — breaking things down by the numbers, balanced and well-structured — rankles so many. Because if it’s just about the numbers, some of the magic leaves it. Magic becomes mana-powered technology, and there’s no flavor difference between a Rod of Kinetic Smooshing and a .38 Police Special.

I love the movie version of Stardust (c.f. Michelle Pfeifer as my nemesis in Ironwall), and what makes that special is the main character’s *reactions* to the magic that he sees.

And, in the end, that’s what makes magic work or not work for me – how the people *react* to it. Is having lighting in a bottle cool, or a yawner? And that’s Gaiman’s genius – showing us want anyone could show us, but through the eyes of how he *want’s us to **see** what he’s showing*.

So in that way he gets both – a fantastic story element, as well as a lens through which to view the fantastic in the form of his protagonists’ thoughts.

For us jaded D&Ders, it’s very hard to not have all magic be a yawner, so having the reactions of NPCs set the tone is a great way to remind us of the fantastic of fantasy…

Dave:
You’re welcome. I have no idea what movie you’re referring to. :)

What I meant by the weather watcher thing was that Weather Watcher held that same “I can affect big things” niche in the game as some kinds of magic held in other games… not that it was, itself, magic.

De:
Point taken. Stings a bit, but taken.

We classify magic in a variety of pop culture shorthand, everything from “Jedi Mind Trick” to “Gandalf in the Closet with Glamdring…” and then there’s “Fairy Tale Magic.”

“What is the difference?”

“Fairy Tale Magic breaks the rules. See, inherent in the other systems is the idea that there are patterns and limitations that could be codified (even if they’re idiosyncratic: see _Wizard of the Pigeons_ for more details) if necessary. Fairy Tale Magic makes its own rules for the sake of breaking the others. You know, like physics.”

“Physics is magic?”

“Shhh. Don’t want to give away all of our secrets.”

Personally, I like rules. Not laws as provided by Councils and the like, but internal rules. Even fairy tale magic is never so sweet as when its limits are tested. The failure of many stories is when they keep giving magic away, figuring the solution is always “more power” rather than “subtler, smarter use of what we have.”

Anyway, this being a subject I will gladly spend hours upon hours philosophizing, I’ll leave it at that.

My favorite magic is when it comes out of a story, where to imagine the story without the magic is impossible. Magic as idea, without which there is no story.