Science or magic?

[Tiny Coffee Golem]

Calybos1 wrote:

One minute after High Magic is available, some inept fool will use it to poison the air, dissolve the ground, or otherwise make the world uninhabitable.

Technology is slower and far more limited, but that's what gives the rest of us a chance to survive the idiots that play with it.

Again, not for the world. Just you. Though I suppose if you choose to share with "some inept fool" then the mayhem to follow is on you.

[zylphryx]

Magic ... If for no other reason than to befuddle scientists (have water flow uphill, floating objects, control elemental forces, etc.) and religious experts (turn water into rum, call up some lower planes critters and higher planes critters, let them ask questions of the source directly, etc.) ... This assumes access to both arcane and divine magic ... Yep, I wanna be a mystic theurge. ;)

[Sparel Radtymah]

zylphryx wrote:

Magic ... If for no other reason than to befuddle scientists (have water flow uphill, floating objects, control elemental forces, etc.) and religious experts (turn water into rum, call up some lower planes critters and higher planes critters, let them ask questions of the source directly, etc.) ... This assumes access to both arcane and divine magic ... Yep, I wanna be a mystic theurge. ;)

This is Tiny Coffee Golem.

This is who I'd want to be if I had to pick within the next 5 seconds. Not everything on the sheet is RAW, but the discrepancies are with DM permission.

[Set]

LazarX wrote:

xavier c wrote:

Asgardian Magic ( marvel comics) is not technology despite what the thor movie said

Actually the movie is very close to how Jack Kirby first depicted Asgard way way back when Thor was launched. It's an excellent tribute to the master.

Ah, the glory days, when Asgardians were aliens who had been worshipped as gods, and rode around a bizarre fantasy-tech Asgard on funky hover-cars...

Still, Walt Simonson took a hard turn into mything it up and getting rid of the science/aliens angle (which was always a 50/50 thing anyway, since Asgard also always had elves and trolls and magic-users).

Anywho, yeah, I'd rather live in the Star Trek future than in any magical fantasy world I've seen, since magic never seems to be bettering the life of *everyone,* only being concentrated in the hands of a special few.

That's actually my reason for preferring Star Trek to Star Wars. In both universe, a farmboy can go on to save the galaxy, but in one of them, he has to be the special one-in-a-million immaculate midichlorian savior (I.e. born with 'magic'), and in the other he just has to be able to throw a punch and break some rules and seduce green alien women.

[thejeff]

Set wrote:

LazarX wrote:

xavier c wrote:

Asgardian Magic ( marvel comics) is not technology despite what the thor movie said

Actually the movie is very close to how Jack Kirby first depicted Asgard way way back when Thor was launched. It's an excellent tribute to the master.

Ah, the glory days, when Asgardians were aliens who had been worshipped as gods, and rode around a bizarre fantasy-tech Asgard on funky hover-cars...

Still, Walt Simonson took a hard turn into mything it up and getting rid of the science/aliens angle (which was always a 50/50 thing anyway, since Asgard also always had elves and trolls and magic-users).

This is way off topic, but "Walt Simonson" "mything it up"? I'll admit Kirby drew some cool magic-tech stuff back in the day, but there was always plenty of gods/magic/fantasy stuff around. Far more than anything identifiable as tech. They sailed the stars in a Viking longship.

And I don't recall anything that claimed that the Asgardians were aliens, any more than the Greek gods or other mythologies that appeared in the Marvel universe were. Certainly not that they were a race that lived on some other planet and evolved/used superscience to become what we knew them as. I don't recall any early evidence of "pre-Odin" Asgardians until much later.

Although that was still well before Walt Simonson's turn as writer. The Celestials Saga and the Asgardians as recreated by survivors of an earlier Ragnarok, to explain the differences between them and the myths. A few earlier bits as well, but that was decades after the Kirby days.

[Ross Byers]

LazarX wrote:

Years later Niven would admit that he went too far in that way, and he closed the Known Space series with a story of just how silly the Teela Browns and the other concepts made the world. With a short story about how an Earth family and their saucer get swallowed up by a monster and they simply wait for the monster to die (it choked to death on the indigestible saucer) and rot away for them to continue on.

Yes, I've read the story ("Safe at any speed", to take a jab at Nader).

It wasn't specifically that he'd gone too far: it was that he'd made so many stories that each had one semi-plausible widget, that when added together made it hard for him to write new stories that weren't just solved by one of the old widgets.

I'm a fan of 'A Gift from Earth', which was a novella he wrote to demonstrate the premise that if psi powers were real, they have to be useless, or we'd have done something with them by now.

[Ross Byers]

Set wrote:

LazarX wrote:

xavier c wrote:

Asgardian Magic ( marvel comics) is not technology despite what the thor movie said

Actually the movie is very close to how Jack Kirby first depicted Asgard way way back when Thor was launched. It's an excellent tribute to the master.

Ah, the glory days, when Asgardians were aliens who had been worshipped as gods, and rode around a bizarre fantasy-tech Asgard on funky hover-cars...

The New Gods were sort of Kirby's attempts ot make Asgard with DC, and they were pretty much 'sufficently advanced' tech.

[DM Pendin Fust]

I would prefer a blending of the two, such as technomancy or magitek. Honestly, the argument of "sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic" is untrue in my mind. Sure, it may be indistinguishable to me, or to humans of earth, but to an Asgardian it is not.

And at the end of the day, sufficiently advanced technology is still that, technology. It will still follow the "rules" of the universe. Magic, on the other hand, by definition pretty much doesn't follow those "rules". They have specialized rules within themselves but not following the same ones as technology.

A hybrid would be the best, where I build a prayer wheel but the wheel actually entreats a god for favor and magic.