Back in the day, I spent a couple of years as gamesmaster for what would now be called an RPG that I basically made up myself, based around the background I was using in my Lyra series. Paper-and-pencil gaming was fairly popular then, at least in my social circles, so there were quite a few other games, gamers, and gamesmasters running around.
One evening, a bunch of us were at a party and one of the other gamers was complaining bitterly about how cheap his gamesmaster was – his group would get almost killed fighting a dragon and then discover that its hoard consisted of a rusty dagger, six copper pieces, and a couple of tiny, badly flawed gems, for instance. He wanted to know why they never got any good spells or powerful weapons. Without even thinking about it, I shot back, “Because there is no spell or tool, no matter how cheesy or apparently useless, that the gamers cannot find some way of using to short-circuit the gamesmaster’s most carefully worked-out plans. The only hope we have of keeping you guys under control is to limit your obvious firepower, so that you have to work a little harder for it.”
I learned a lot from being a gamesmaster, but that was possibly the most useful thing of all. It applies to writing in two ways: first, if your heroes get too powerful too fast, they’ll overcome all their problems too easily. So you have to jack up the level of problem they’re dealing with and the power level of the bad guys, and next thing you know, they’ve gone from needing to save the village to needing to save the universe, completely bypassing saving the kingdom, world, planetary system, and galaxy along the way (which can be really inconvenient if you end up writing a series, because you could have gotten several more books out of saving all those other things along the way).
Second, anything a writer puts in a story has implications, and if you don’t think about them at least a little bit, you can run yourself into believability problems. I recall one story in which, early in the story, it was established that a) in this particular future, people had figured out how to manipulate gravity, and b) they’d used this technology both to make their space stations comfortable and to make really deadly hand weapons.
So far, so good. But then in mid-book came the scene in which Our Heroes were waiting for the fork lifts to unload their cargo, and I set the book down and didn’t pick it up again for a long time. Because from the description, these were obviously normal 20th-century mechanical fork lifts, and if this society had whizzy gravity-control based hand weapons, there didn’t seem to be any reason why they wouldn’t have applied that technology to unloading space ships.
This author was not a beginner, nor was he terrible or careless. He was, I suspect, simply so wrapped up in his story that he didn’t think through the implications of having gravity control. It happens to a lot of SF/F writers, because the things we come up with haven’t been reality-tested. In real life, when someone comes up with a nifty new technology or gadget, there are billions of people to look at it and think “Hmm…how can I use this to make my life easier?” And it’s fairly obvious from real-life experience that even the people who invent various new gadgets cannot always predict how people are going to use those gadgets in real life.
When I come up with a nifty cutting spell for my characters to use against the bad guys, there’s nobody but me around to say “Hmm…how would that help me dissect animals in the lab?” or “Hey – that’ll make butchering cows much easier!” or “What a great thing to use to cut the grass! I wonder if I can use it on trees, too?” If I don’t think about the implications, nobody will. And when I’m focusing on getting my characters out of a sword fight and on to their next adventure, I’m not really thinking about cutting the grass or doing dissections or the hundreds of other places where a cutting spell might be useful in everyday life. I have to stop and think about the possibilities for a while (and even then, I probably won’t come up with all, or even most, of the obvious ones).
And there isn’t time to think about all the implications of each and every thing one puts into a book. When you’re inventing a whole imaginary world, there’s simply too much of it to get everything. This is one of the reasons I prefer to do a large chunk of my worldbuilding in advance – because as long as I’m not head down in finishing the fight scene, I can take time to consider the implications of at least some of the things I’m putting into my imaginary world. I can, with luck, spot the things that could throw things out of balance, and put some limitations on them. I can talk about them with friends who will spot different problems from the ones I see, simply because they have different jobs, different life experience, a different point of view.
I’m never going to catch everything. Even the best writers occasionally miss things. And there are a lot more of my readers than there is of me; it is inevitable that some of them are going to spot places where some technology, spell, or ability that I’ve put into a book has important implications that I haven’t thought of. All I can really do is stop and think…and try and make those people have to work a little harder.
Suggested rule of thumb: Anything which generates heat is likely to be used by somebody for cooking. The equipment for melting lead type (this turned out to be a bad idea), washing machines, automobile engines, electric irons….
I learned that lesson the hard way once. Gave a player character a 300 lb crossbow (ignorance being my only excuse) that fired once every four rounds. Even that was too damn fast.
Never gave ’em anything like that again. Did, however, fireball them a lot because they kept getting loads of armor. (I was a bit more generous than the GM you mention.)
As far as writing goes, however, I rather like the “Earn your happy ending” trope, myself.
How many times do you have to say the cutting spell to cut a lawn-full of grass?
Again and again I see published spells which with a little ingenuity allow for unlimited divination or perpetual energy.
Dan – Depends on how much heat and how much control you have of the heat, doesn’t it? Also how “expensive” it is – if you have a heat-generating spell that uses three ounces of gold every time, most people will still go with firewood for cooking…
Deborah – I got really good at getting my player characters into situations where their cool armaments did them no good at all. One of my fondest memories was having them all teleport into a cave they KNEW was trapped, and then spend round after round throwing detection spells and protecton spells to try to find the traps…while their radiation poisoning got worse and worse…
David – Depends on the size of the lawn. 🙂
Andrew – Sometimes people do put limitations on their spells in their heads, but don’t manage to mention on the page the things that make perpetual motion not work. Other times, they just didn’t think about it. (In other words, you’re right.)
It seems that some of the ways of cutting down on this problem are worse than the problem in the first place. Dealing with magic in a book can really be problematic. I understand the tendency to restrict, restrict, restrict, but if magic then becomes so difficult and costly, you start to wonder why anyone bothers to use it at all.
I think one of the reasons Harry Potter took off is because the magic was so nearly ubiquitous. It allowed you to have the vicarious joy of power, and excitement when another implication was realized. And the rules weren’t complicated and technical. Kids could learn them.
I think it’s also why the Enchanted Forest is so alluring. Something that is full of magic has to be *full* of magic, not just trees. Everywhere you turn there’s another creature or enchanted bush, and the forest itself is messing with you.
It seems to be the difference between writing a magical world and writing a world that just happens to have magic. And it’s the same as what happened with my friend who had a student who turned in a story including a ‘futuristic gun.’ In a story that’s set in the future, it’s just a gun. If it’s not set in the future then the gun needs a lot more explanation. If it’s a magical world it’s just a spell. If the world is mundane, then the spell needs a lot of explanation.
I agree: magic has to be constrained in some way, or you start wondering, “Hey, wait, why can’t you just do whatever you want?” Even in Harry Potter, it’s always struck me as odd that Hermione would cast a spell to fix Harry’s glasses when she first meets him. As someone who wore glasses myself, I wondered, “Why not just fix his eyes?”
Obviously, you can’t think of everything, and I think sometimes people get too nitpicky with the details: if the story is well written and plotted enough, I’ll suspend my disbelief to a point. But you can only violate my sense of what’s possible and not in your fictional world so many times before I start feeling cheated. Also, I think faces and comedies get more of a pass on this one. If you’re too serious, I expect you to be firmer on the details.
@ Michelle
The answer to your Hermione question is in the fact she is 12 years old on a train going TO her first magic class. I don’t think I’d want a self-taught child messing with my eyes. (broken glasses wouldn’t matter as much)
It would be nice if you could please make a follow-up to this post, one talking abut the traps of establishing all the “magic” or “super-science” elements in sufficient detail, before actually writing a short story series or a novel.
The classic one is spending so much time on this that it becomes an end in itsef , eventually, and the fiction falls by the wayside. How do you avoid this?
Then there’s the reference work that’s so boring to read that you end up re-inventing things instead. How do you make your dicitonary/glossary/encyclopedia interesting or “easy” enough for yourself?
And so on, and so forth.
Cara – Some of what you’re objecting to is a matter of taste. Some people like egalitarian magical worlds where magic is relatively easy for anyone to do; others prefer the ones where there are relatively few wizards. Also, putting limits on magic is one relatively simple way to solve the problem I was talking about, but it can also create its own problems if the limits aren’t carefully thought out.
Michelle – There’s always a necessary balance. I don’t sit down and write an eight-volume encyclopedia every time I invent a new world, but rarely do I just plop down and wing it, either. Also, either system can result in the sort of worldbuilding problems I’m talking about. I think you’re right about comedy getting more of a pass on this than drama.
Esther – Well, that answers the specific question (why Hermionie fixes Harry’s glasses on the train) but not the general one (why does anybody in the magical world still wear glasses at all?) There are innumerable possible answers to this, from “glasses are a fashion statement” to “they don’t have a spell for fixing eyes” to “to fix something complex, you have to understand how it works and what’s broken; they don’t understand enough about complicated organic systems to be able to do that yet” and so on. If the readers trust the author, they’ll simply assume that the author has one of these reasons and will let it slide, but if there are too many of these, if they’re too blatantly obvious, or if inconsistencies start cropping up, the readers will start to get upset and/or stop believing in the world, which sooner or later leads to not reading that book/author.
Alain – I’ll do that, but it’ll have to wait until Wednesday, I think.
In my last first draft (up for rewriting this year) I decided that everyone is telekinetic which means that nothing motorized has been developed and they can build on nearly sheer mountains. Language differences haven’t happened between countries because with it so easy to travel quickly communication lines have been open forever without the breakdown that would cause language shift.
It also allowed me to create a ruling class who disdain magic as something for the peasants, giving a twist to the usual peasant/noble situation – the nobles are more important because they don’t need to be “lazy” and have the time to work with their hands.
I’m certain that there are a million other implications I’m missing, but the biggest is the day to day life for most of the population is relatively easy because they do almost everything with their mind.
Oh there’s definitely part of it that’s personal taste, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason that the incredibly arcane magic with excessive physical restrictions and very little payoff is not to my taste is because it resembles my life a little too much right now. That’s the trouble with being in an arcane, pseudo-scientific, academic discipline where you spend your days reading ancient texts and minutiae-obsessed articles with mysterious charts and formulae full of greek letters… Sometimes you just want a wand to blow things up with.
Thank you for writing this wonderful blog, and all of your wonderful books. They have been great support and comfort to me this whole year. I have learned such an incredible amount about writing from you, and I hope you continue to give us the gift of your experience and knowledge for a long time to come. Wishing you the best. Happy Christmas!
Cara
Alex – That sounds really interesting! I think the language thing is arguable – when the Great Vowel Shift in English happened, they ended up with grandparents and grandkids who couldn’t communicate because they essentially spoke different languages in spite of all living in the same place, so it’s not just the availability of communication that causes languages to shift and change, but since nobody actually knows why the GVS occurred (last I heard), you can just declare by fiat that nothing like that ever happened in your world. And the peasant/nobility reversal is also neat. I’m really curious about a lot of the details, but I will restrain myself…
Cara – Blowing things up can be very cathartic; it’s why I keep Diablo II on my computer. 😉 And I’m really glad you’re finding the blog useful. Happy Christmas!
Thanks for another entertaining and provoking post.
Apropos of Cara’s points especially, there’s another approach to magic that I like a great deal in fiction, but is almost impossible to fit into a rules-based system like RPGs or ‘hard fantasy’. That is to make magic behave like the enchantments of art in our own world – to work to guidelines rather than rules, and for its greater workings to be inimitable even by their original makers.
So anybody who can crack a half-funny joke might be able to mend a single crack in a pot. But every act of restoring a blind person’s sight might require an act of creation on a par with composing (say) Santa Lucia – or, at least, with playing it so well as to bring a glad tear to the eye.
One of the main characters in my WIP is dogged by a popular assumption that she can, for practical purposes, extemporize a new and better Song of Songs every time she turns around. She wrought That Spell once under truly adverse conditions, didn’t she?
Most of Tolkien’s great magics are something like this, from the Two Trees on down, though I think his themes of lessening and nostalgia create a downhill trend rather than the uphill one of a living tradition of art. That last possibility is… possibly one which the elegiac tone of much epic fantasy has done little to nurture. I must think more on this.
@Alex: That’s an interesting idea. An implication that occurred to me is that the nobility is going to be a lot more physically developed than the peasantry. How would that affect the mode of dress? Would the nobility wear sleeveless outfits to show off their muscles? Would the peasants’ “dress outfit” make them look more muscular than they actually are?
Just thinking.
I got another one. My WIP has a pretty complex magic system that works like chemistry does. Specifically that there are a LOT more ways to get a spell wrong then ways to get one right and a messed up spell can have very explosive/corrosive qualities. Technology is currently in a massive Dark Age style recession and there is no “Theory of Magic” to create new spells. Trial and Error only! (And all trials to be conducted as far from neighbors as possible.) This allows complex spells saved from the “Golden Age” as well as large gaps in knowledge and new spells to invented any time my plot needs it. ^_^ I’ll just have to use that plot trick very sparingly and foreshadow it well.
Very interesting! I thought of a former WIP when I read this. How would a freeze-motion spell work in regular life? Hmm…
@nct2 – There’s an implication I hadn’t thought about but it does make for more teenage angst with the main character and therefore wouldn’t be as fit as the group of nobles he’s been thrown into. Thank you!