I disagree. They've already said that the Life element of both Good and Evil persuasion will be able to heal, for example, but they'll do it in different ways. To deal with spirits or souls is by no reasoning necessarily to equate with Death magic.
Animation or creation is not necessarily tied to Life. This is a whole new can of worms; Are golems "alive"? Does elementals have "souls"? And so on.

I don't understand how I could've been any more clear. Having Death being generally percieved as evil, or negatives in general (a form of creativist nihilism) is nothing I would consider wierd at all, but quite natural. But what's important is to remember that it'd allow for the seperation of a Good vs. Evil dichotomy, that is endlessly tiresome. For example, having my "evil" Grand Inquisitor wielding the positive part of the Life Element, "Holy" or whatever it could be called, would only be natural.
You're missing the point. None of this makes any sense if we look too close on it. This is why I said Heat and Cold, with (Fire) and (Ice) added as a general rule.

You don't just create fire either. Fire is just energy, you need Earth, Air, or even Water to create actual fire. We're dealing with psuedo-classical elements in a magic fantasy context here.

As a general rule, the unweaving of things, nihilism, or nothingness is considered evil. Necromancy and Death magic is, almost by definition, evil in their own right. Speaking specificly, however, magic doesn't have (or rather, shouldn't have) any inherent moral judgement. A good example of this are the post-HoMM5 Necromancers, who actually act as defenders against the birth of the Dark Messiah.

"Good, Evil? I'm the man with the gun."

Here we have another problem with definitions or linguisitc difficulty on your part. Generally & Generalization. This is opposed as to speaking about "Good" and "Evil" as specific definitions & judgement values attached to the notion of positive and negative.

So yes, I'd actually be suprised if you missunderstood, if english were your first language, at least.

First of all, I said nothing of the sort. I'm just saying I'm playing an empire of vampires - that statement is detached from the point itself; the raising of an undead army.

Also, you say that (while the point is moot, I'd like to address it regardless) vampirism would be both positive and negative - we don't know this, since we don't know the underlying reasoning behind any potential vampirism. Second, all Life magic, the very essence of the entire life element, is about the manipulation of life. It's the application that lends it's inherent use towards things such as "Good", "Evil" or "Neutral"; in my idea throughout a spectrum of Positive vs. Negative (rather than a moral judgement based around the usage of magics own nature).

 

If you read up on my initial post where I started the argumentation for positive & negatives, then you'd know that I have no idea. It was a general trail of thought that arose from the arguments of Life vs. Death both being within the confines of the Life element, and how it could apply to other elements.

What you speak of are simply schools of magic within the elements, then. I personally wouldn't mind that at all, really. But if they go that route, they'll have to drop any and all notions of an actual spectrum, with the potential to "lock you up" in a singular trail. We're not sure how this'll work, but if it's anything like MoM or AoW, your route in terms of elements will be largely dependant on your chocies on creation. Let's say that you specialize almost entirely in Fire, and then go down the "Pyromancy" line; This has the potential to hurt you in the future.

But I entirely get your idea. This would also allow for Earth to have a bloody Bearomancy school!

Edit: I thought of this while writing, but forgot to write it down. Of course, your system could also be used to not lock up people at all, effectively allowing people to research multiple schools within their chosen element, or specialize at their leisure. I'm not sure how well this would rhyme with their supposed spectrum or "do the same things in different manners", but it doesn't mean that the idea itself is bad. /Edit/

Bah! Plebes!

Well when you think about it, pyromancy and cryomancy are the same thing, manipulation of heat or the lack of it which amounts to the same thing.

The problem with ignoring the laws of physics is that things no longer make any damn sense. To give you a classic example, the ever burning torch.

• First of all, normal fire is a combination of flame, air and fuel. Knock off one of those from the trio and you no longer have what can be considered an open flame.
• Most of the energy released by combustion is heat, only a small fraction is released as light.
• This means that if make a magic everburning torch, it will heat up the universe until it melts.
  

You can handle this in two ways. You can make the torch somehow consume as much ambient heat as it puts out. (using the law of thermodynamics) Or you could create a magical torch which puts out no heat whatsoever (selectively ignoring it).

--

It doesn't matter what kind of magic you think up, there is one universal rule that should apply to it. Magic always has a cost. If it didn't then it would be inherently broken and consume reality.

What he said ^.

Yes, but if you go down that route then magic is no fun at all. I mean ultimately, if you keep going deeper than that, all magic is just the manipulation of mass/energy (which lose their distinction at small enough scales / high enough energy). So there'd just be one school of magic that does it all. So it has to be divided somewhere, and where the devs place that division should have everything to do with gameplay and little or nothing to do with physics.

Yes and no. Ultimately you have to ignore some laws of physics for magic to 'make sense' at all.

Only if you're working in our world, with our laws of physics. In the world of Elemental, things could be different. Or, the open flame could be purely fed by magic energy. Or magic could be used to emit light from nothing. It all comes down to how magic works in the world: what are the magical laws, what are the physical laws, and do they work together to form one big set of laws or does one set of laws trump the other? All possible permutations can and have been done, and done well, so it's just a matter of what route the devs want magic to take.

There isn't necessarily a problem with that. Who said there has to be energy conservation in a world of magic? So magic can be used to cause universal heat/cold death. So what? Why is that forbidden as a potential consequence of the use of magic?

Your 'thermodynamics' example is torches work in real life, essentially. Fire is a chemical chain-reaction, where the energy produced by breaking molecular bonds is released as heat and light. The energy stored in the molecular bonds is converted into other forms of energy (heat and light). If you want to create an everburning torch that satisfies the physical laws of our universe, then it's just a matter of supplying your flame with enough fuel and enough oxidizing agent until your flame increases the entropy of the universe to the point where ther is none left. There is no way to create a literal eternally-burning flame in a world with our physical laws without some magical deus ex machina.

What's the point of having a law that is selectively obeyed or ignored?! If the devs are going to create a set of laws for magic to follow, then it needs to be consistent, otherwise theyll have created a set of laws that don't actually govern anything.

[quote who="Tamren" reply="4" id="1 981497"]It doesn't matter what kind of magic you think up, there is one universal rule that should apply to it. Magic always has a cost. If it didn't then it would be inherently broken and consume reality.[/quote]

To reference Luckmann again, I agree that magic should have a cost and limitation. However, those needn't have anything at all to do with the laws of physics as we know them. And frankly they cannot obey the laws of thermodynamics, because thermodynamics essentially forbids the existence of magic. The rules of magic can be inspired by thermodynamics, but they inherently cannot follow it.

Edit: 

What?   says who?    Explain to me how an invisable force that cannot be detected by science (apparently) needs to follow any rules of the universe?   Its got its own rules.  And so... where does the energy go?  Well into the cataclysm or crastals or whatever that the mana used to change the thermodynamics of said ocean.  

I'm actualyl begining to suspect that 'life' will still be split into good and evil the way it was in MoM just because of the 'evil' terrain emblems and such. 

I know you touched on this but I want to re-itterate.   Ice can be made of carbon dioxide or many other things.  

It is silly to talk about it, since magic could freeze oxygen if it wants to.  (hmmm... frozen nitrogen )

Well obviously it comes from somewhere.  I personally would say that magic doesn't follow the same rules of physics the rest of the world does.  I mean its magic.  It has flows of mana or something like that that con be converted into enegry by those who know how to channel it.   Is it hot or is it cold?  no, its neither.  You need to find a source of it (those crystals) and then channel it into something usable on the physical plane, like a jet of flame or ball of ice.   However since its F***ing MAGIC, those able to shape it can shape it into almost anything.  Shaping takes time and mana of course... which is why you can't 'wink' and cause it to happen.

Really the question is just what is the difference between the different elements, and why is the mana from a water node/crystal better at doing something than the mana from a fire node/crystal.    And WTF is life mana, since there are no nodes for that.

 

And those laws are? If magic was free I could say "I am going to cast a spell that will teleport the entire planet into the sun" and you have to come up with a law that would prove that to be impossible. You can't just say "you can't do that". Its okay for magic to break the laws of energy conservation, but then you have to create laws of magical energy compensation to replace it or else you have created a loophole in the fabric of reality.

That had nothing to do with known physics and everything to do with magical physics of which we know nothing. Since we know nothing I had to make up two laws and the everburning torch respects them and the normal laws of physics.

The torch is a magical focus, it draws magic power and emits it as heat and light. The heat and the light created by the torch dissipate into the enviroment exactly as you expect. But once the energy gets too far from the focus, the force that summoned the magic loses its grip and the heat and light dissipate back into the fabric of magic. If the produced energy was permanent it would cause all sorts of problems, but since it is not you can use magic in a practical fashion.

But I AM a player whos enjoyment of the end product of those developer's efforts will depend entirely on the quality of the magic system they design.

Its a hard topic to explain but what I am trying to get at is your magic must be balanced and consistent. This is doubly important when your magic will reside in a game. By creating magic you are creating a system. This system must be consistent. If the laws that explain how it works are not consistent then it becomes broken. A broken system of magic is very dangerous because it can be exploited.

I'm not trying to ruin your fun by any means but unless you impose some rules and limits there would be nothing stopping me from pressing IWIN button #31. If you made a rule against it I could just invent then press button #32. That "twisted" version of thermodynamics can be as simple as having a mana bar on the game interface. But

I actually had something to add before we jumped the rails.

It has been said many times that death and life magic are two sides of the same coin. What is not well explained is what actually seperates the two. It can't be ethics because magic is independant of morality, what kind of person you are dictates how you use your magic, not the other way around.

So I would say that Life magic is about increasing the amount of life that already exists (because if there was no life it would be the realm of death instead). Death magic can put life where it does not belong, but can not create life.

By that measure, ressurection and necromancy would both be applications of Death magic. The only difference between the two is the intent of the user. Both healing and disease would both be applications of Life magic. Disease is after all, an overabundance of life.

Magic is a complicated topic. The usual definition is based in that magic is all that defies natural laws of real world. Be it a fireball created by the creation of some antimatter under your nose or being able to create a portal to Hell by sacrifying twenty virgins while a moon eclipse.

That magic needs some laws to govern it seems obvious. That it mimics reality real world to the point where to match a torch with magic costs the same effort as to do it normally, that's not fun. Only talking about fun factor here, ok? It's ok if Rincewind has that problem of energy/matter conservation but i would prefer  the old school feeling. It's not like there are only four dimentions.

On topic, life and death are, as stated many times in this thread already, are the same. Yet, i must say that when someone talks about "Resurection", people thinks more of (Good) Life and not Necromancy. Maybe something to do with bringing back the soul, restore the tissues and switch on the engine. While necromancy seems to forget about restoring the tissues (or the need of external elements to keep the tissues regenerated).

A necromancer could heal her wounds by draining life essence from an opponent. A healer could heal her wounds using her own life energy to heal her wounds. What is that life energy? The self ability of the body to heal? Forcing it to heal at tremendous speed forced by magic? That seems fine except that people healed that way will life less than a normal person unless their cells are rejuvenated somehow after the healing (or the magic prevents them form aging). Doesn't explain neither how a subject can be cured from poisons that his body couldn't normally heal but a healer with enough power can cleanse.

In any case, as Tamren says, Life ofr things still alive and Death for things dead. That means old good resurrection for Death Magic. Life Magic could have, depending of how it works, Reincarnation (or could be a neutral thing). Also, in D&D, the elemental plane of positive energy was fun: while you were there, you were restored of negative effects, you were healed to the point of even having more than normal hit points.... until you had an excess of positive energy and go boom.

I don't know why people are talking about the laws of physiscs, they don't matter. The rules of magic are simple:

Magic can do anything providing the relivent spell: a) adds to the fun of the game is balanced.

Magic costs: a) mana the caster must be skilled enough. Anything else like the risk of adding entropy to the universe can be ignored since it wont affect the gameplay.

So you can't teleport the world into the sun because that's not a fun spell to have, but you can turn a rainforest into a desert because that is fun.

Sounds right to me, but I'd add commnicating/commanding the dead to death magic, I imagine we'll still be summoning skeletons. 

I'd say ressurection would require both life and death magic. Death magic to find the soul in the afterlife, bring it back, and put it where it dosn't belong: a dead body. Life magic to repair the dead body.

Actually I'd suggest that the real diffrence isn't about the lack of repairing the body but actually selecting a diffrent soul, the necromancer could use a human soul but then it might disagree with you, and you'd have to use magic to bind its loyalty, gastly inefficent (and too immoral for good necromancers). Instead a Necromancer should use a simpler soul that knows how to fight but isn't inteligent enough to disagree with you.

How about this: A life healer can draws life mana from the world and creates life energy, then skillfully uses it to heal wounds. A death healer will use that same life mana to suck life energy from his foes, then he puts it in to the wounded and hopes for the best. The most effective healers use both life and death magic at once, death magic (if foes are avalible) provides more life energy than pure life magic, but life magic uses it more efficently. This also fits nicely with my view that reserection requires both life and death magic.

 

Actually what is everone's opinions for the top level spells in each path? Here's mine

Life specalist: at the top leven the life mage can create customised species for their own needs, a tough, fast spreading breed of plant that can survive in the desert and turn it into grassland. Or seriously powerful plagues, rather than just supercharging any convient desease you find living in your foes you can create one from pure mana and spread it across the land. Finally lots of new troop customisation options are opened, want to give your troops an extra pair of hands?

Mixed: Top level mixed spells are those that require both life and death to accomplish: this includes the strongest combat healing spells (and they also hurt your oponents). Also this is the path if you want reserection. The extra flexibility of having both life and death spells makes up for the lack of raw power.

Death specalist: I can see some really nice global enchantments based around makeing death itself work for you: Some sort of life well where all the extra life energy left over when someone dies gets sucked in and converted to mana, the more combat and the higher the worlds population the more mana you get. A road from your lands to the afterlife, increases happyness because you can visit your dead relatives, also allows a percentage of your dead troops to return to the fight.

Thats the point of the laws. Magic is mundane energy (or matter) that is created out of nothing and becomes nothing once we lose control over it. While the magic is active or "real" it behaves to the tune of normal physics. So knocking over a trash can with my foot would require a transfer of kinetic energy. I could knock the can over with a gust of wind, but the interaction between the moving air and the can is still kinetic energy, not an unexplained void in physics or some abstract magic equivalent.

So if I took a blowtorch and used it to melt a bar of gold into a puddle, that puddle of molten gold will eventually cool down and heat up the enviroment around it. If I melted the bar with magic the same thing would happen. However in the second case the energy released slowly dissipates back into nothing. It happens very slowly so you probably won't notice the change but the amount of magic energy released into the enviroment will eventually reach zero.

Eh simple is better. Mundane physics are a good base for your magic because everyone understands how they work, even if you can't express the concepts in scientific terms. It puts its hand on the stove and it gets burned again, etc. It doesn't matter what the laws are, but at some level they will have to interact with normal physics. If I throw a magical snowball at you I expect it to splatter on your face and send ice down your shirt collar. If what actually happens is that you explode into a mushroom cloud of kittens, sure that is magic. But then you will have to write a 20 page explanation why I can't throw a water balloon and make you explode into 60 puppies instead.

Things that make sense are easy to undestand. The less time you spend explaining the properties of you magic, the more time we will have to undestand and have fun with it.

--

I think before we get any futher we need to pin down the definition of "undead". If a soldier gets killed on the battlefield and ressurected the same day by his commanding channeler, he would get up good as new with neither "soul" or body injured in any way. This would be an application of life magic, even though the "soul" of the soldier is gone the body still has some life in it. Even when the body decays it will provide fuel for yet more life.

On the other hand what happens when you raise a skeleton? It can only be considered "undead" because for one there is no life in it or on it, and nothing which can contain life. So reanimating a skeleton would be purely death magic, you are creating fake life to inhabit a dead shell that real life could not survive in.

Both are very distinct from each other. But what happens when we combine the two? What happens when you ressurect a skeleton into a whole living creature? Is the "soul" involved and what happens if you give the body life but no soul to inhabit it? Would the result be living or undead?

 

My point was, magic doesn't make sense. To use magic in any sort of setting whether it be a game or a story you have some explaining to do. In a closed enviroment you are free to make magic as crazy as you want as long as you keep it consistent. If you declare that in your world mana = fruit, then if you come across a mad guy holding an apple you can safely assume that a fight is brewing. The problem is we have an open system. The vast majority of gameplay is going to be dependant on user generated content, magic included.

Unless you set down clear and defined rules about how spells can work then you will be met with endless confusion. One person might make a fireball spell. Another person might make a spell called "infernal skull of DOOOM". Both of them are projectile spells that deal 5 fire damage to a single target, but until I explained that you had no damn clue what the second spell did. If magic is going to be such a big part of Elemental, the worst thing that can happen is players that don't understand each other's magic.

So, to alleviate the problem you can create standards. Classify a spell as "fire projectile" and you can be sure that it applies fire to a target at range. Everyone understands how a fireball works, and if not then it should only take one demonstration for you to learn the concept.

Once you grasp that you can start learning by context. As you would expect from a ball of fire, it can set things alight. Not only will it turn your enemies into flaming torches but it has other uses as well. You could for example fire it into a pile of wood in order to create a campfire.

Using the same standard I can make up something completetly random yet understandable. The spell is called "Fruit of the Loon" (fruit projectile)

• A raving madman appears on the battlefield in a puff of smoke and begins to stagger drunkenly around the field, raving about the evils of vegetables in a loud voice.
• At random times he will pull out a random piece of fruit, seemingly from nowhere. He will then toss it with suprising strength at the nearest enemy.
  
• When the fruit hits something or lands on the ground a shower of that same fruit will rain from the sky.
  

The written description and name don't tell you what the spell does but the spell statistics that the game lists are based on rules and are very clear: Projectile spell (fruit), d30 hits, random effects. Spell canceled if focus is removed or killed. Upon reading this your brain can immediatly categorize the spell with two words, madman + fruit = meteor shower. Even if the spell has absolutely nothing to do with falling rocks, you understand how the spell works and what to expect from it.

Then comes the learning by context. Tomatoes are not very dangerous. Bananas are not dangerous but will create slippery terrain. Apples will knock you out. Oranges might be a problem if the juice gets in your eyes. Coconuts? Ouch.

If he pulls out a Watermelon its time to run for the hills. Make sense?

Plus if magic is powered entirely by magic you could remove the visual component entirely. Why bother making a visible fireball when it wastes energy and reveals your location when you fire it?

Now if you conjured an actual ball of real fire, then the visual component would be unavoidable.

Tamren, I don't think I'm communicating well enough yet. I'm not saying I don't think we need a *system*. I just don't want it to be seriously limited by 'real world physics' ideas. I completely agree that for the MP side, we'll need to be able to understand each others' contributions, but I'm not sure I want the code to force us to make that easy.

I've mentioned it before, but I really think that if you're picking tabletop RPGs as models for the magic, I vote for the Hero System (which began as Champions). That ruleset includes an extensive list of "powers" that are very close to what you describe when you talk about fireballs (those would start as "energy blast"), but also include things like telepathy, mind control, power stealing, etc. There are a host of modifiers to help customize powers for a given character, and you can have invisible fireballs if you want to pay extra for the advantage of being able to attack without revealing that you did it. Basically, if you have the time and interest, you can closely emulate almost any other RPG using the Hero System (although you'd probably have to do some house rules stuff if you really insisted on having experience levels).

So, IMO, the underlying system *most certainly should be* open. The single-player game will provide the model for 'skinning' with modifiers (material components, casting times, etc.) and special effects (is that damage from fire, lightning, or dark ether?). And some user communites will be able to put together content sets that work very much like you describe while others will be able to do things that are of no interest to you but big fun to them. My guess right now is that one thing the online side will do is create some 'referee collectives' that work kind of like the GMs for tabletop RPGs, building the custom story and more or less enforcing the local themes for their content set.

Are most of us in favour of a liner or complex magic system? Well for myself, no idea? If any Developers are reading this thread, what one would be more fun to play with? I want that one

BTW fire and ice arn't really too opposite to mix, useing negative fire magic to suck the heat out of water would make ice. As for mixing elemetnal types, why not? It makes the decision to study multiple elements more interesting.