Back to the cost of magic...

I don't buy the idea that it has to come at a cost. Plenty of magic systems use that concept, but I don't think it's necessary.

What if it cost them life? Use as much as you want, but every time you deplete your energy, you take X number of units of time off of the end of your natural existence. That would control usage quite a bit, assuming your characters aren't immortal or unusually long lived.

If you want to deal with physics and energy transfer, make it so that as they use magic (energy) they heat up. Once they hit about 40 c they pass out or something. Overload their brains and knock them out until their body is able to restore normal temperature.

Emily Croy Barker in The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic went the opposite way--that using magic has an energizing, life-extending effect on the human body.

There are many ways for magic to cost. It may be a physical cost -- using it is tiring to the user because the user has to control the flow, direct the energy, focus it, prevent leakage/overflow/explosion/etc. or something else that requires the user to expend their own physical energy, whether or not it's proportional to the magical effect.

Or there may be a psychic cost -- using it takes a lot of mental focus and leaves the user dazed and confused until they recover. Or perhaps using it actually drains the user's mind or changes it, so the more magic they use, the stupider they become, or the less able they are to function in anything other than using magic.

Or there may be a moral cost. Using magic makes you evil. Or using magic makes you selfish and lazy (because magic is a shortcut to getting what you want.) Or using magic makes you seem selfish and lazy, so the true cost is that it changes the way other people view you.

Or possibly magic is not a systematic pseudo-science, and the cost of one kind of magic may be different from the cost of another, and magic cost may not be proportionate (in any obvious way) to the scale of the effort or the effect.

Lots more possibilities, hope this hopes get your started.

Conduits can break, like old water mains, or the Oroville dam breaking during last years California storms, or arterial cholesterol plaques. Something like inflammation or tendonitis where overuse causes damage, but not exactly fatigue.

I'm not sure magic necessarily needs to cost anything. It just needs limits to avoid getting overpowered and boring. If tapping is like drawing water from a well, drawing quickly could empty the well (locally), and it might take time for the groundwater to seep back and replenish it.

This idea of magic users as conduits that need to maintain control over the flow of energy is pretty intriguing. I may steal some of this for my own projects...

You could capitalize it, establish public corporations and attract investors, with competition among large companies specializing in different kinds of magic. What's a share worth in Invisocom Ltd worth in the stock exchange at Mage City?

caw

Addiction is another common one (see Robin Hobb's Fitz books). The magic there is physically beneficial and empowering, but also mentally addictive. Admittedly, she does use the tiredness thing, but she could have chosen to replace that with something else (eg people get sucked in).

There's a common theme in asian supernatural stuff of losing your essence. So say for example using a lot of shadow magic/demon magic, and becoming one of those things. The usual stuff.

sanity is the most fun ; if there not mad to begin with

There definitely does not need to be costs to magic, as such, but there does need to be limits. Otherwise they will be gods, which does not tend to make for interesting characters.

In my own novel out on submission I don't have costs, but I do have risks. Conduits can shatter, and an unprepared mind is a fragile thing... The question then is what happens when they let the magic run amok.

I'm not sure of the idea of "That would control usage quite a bit". Smoking is very likely to take years off the end of life, and there are still a lot of people who light up. It took YEARS for me to convince a best friend to stop smoking, and it's the only time out of several I've been successful. I don't nag, I just describe once every few years how smoking kills the cells in the lungs that pick up oxygen, and they do not regenerate. Drug use and other self-destructive behavior proves that many people live for the day, and that day is TOday.

I think given the choice between incredible power now, and living 10-15 years less time, probably MOST people would take the power.

Shoeless said:

This idea of magic users as conduits that need to maintain control over the flow of energy is pretty intriguing. I may steal some of this for my own projects...

Click to expand...

And it's been around for a really long time, too. The Myth, Inc. series is one of many, many examples.

I don't think it's important what the rationale for magic use is, just that there is (at least mostly) internal consistency within the narrative. For example, Jim Baen's guidelines discuss that for any work submitted to them, a magic system have a specific rationale and consistency of use.

To me, that's not so important. What's important is that magic fulfill it's purpose in the plot as a dramatic device, and not as a crutch or deus ex machina.

The danger is that if you show powerful, easy magic, then readers wonder why it doesn't save the heroes from every scrape. Look at "Bewitched" (the TV show). Powerful, instant magic with virtually unlimited utility. The writers constantly wrangled with how to craft problems it couldn't solve. Most of the time they succeeded, sometimes not. And they weren't that consistent. A lot of magic was accomplished with the wave of a hand or the twitch of Samantha's nose. Other times they had to come up with a rhyme (incantation).

You see a lot of "coming of age" magic use knowledge as a limit -- you have to learn how to do things. That shouldn't really be only in "coming of age". Anyone could need to learn. I've used ritual as a device. Powerful spells require knowledge, time, components, and a source of power.

Then there's the subject of maintenance. You put up a ward of protection. Does it just sit there? Is it like locking a door, or leaning up against a door to keep it closed?

In my mind magic needs to have limits and fallibility. Fallibility is a great tool. A "moment of distraction" is a great way to explain how the magic that saved you in Chapter Five couldn't save the day in Chapter Ten. ;-)

I like the discussion surrounding the cost of magic. When I was younger, the stories I read rarely seemed to focus on that. If you had magic - you used it! But there's definitely been a shift toward grit and realism, and to be honest, there's something really awesome about the idea of magic being a double-edged sword. I really like the idea of the cost of magic being tied to the user's sanity.

In my story, prolonged use of magic over time can make the user go insane. So I've got an antagonist that is deliciously warped, and my protagonist struggling with whether or not to use magic as a means of defeating the Big Bad. The problem is that she doesn't know that using it can make you crazy until she's already pretty addicted.