I simply see magic as an unconventional way of doing things. In the case of mage versus gunman, it will boil down to how much bullets the gunman have and how much energy the mage can draw upon to throw fireballs. Of course, the gunman will have to buy his ammo, not to mention he will need pockets and whatnot to carry all those ammo. The mage, making use of energy will basically have unlimited fireball’s, unless drawing energy is taxing. I’d prefer for it not to be the case, otherwise the mage won’t really have that much of an advantage, and may as well go buy some ammo himself. In my opinion, magic should be a jealously guarded secret for those cheating the system, but hard to learn or discover.
I dunno, casting fireballs out of thin air is already pretty advantageous compared to bullets
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I’ll notice one thing - people did things that were garanteed to kill them, like working in match factories or mines, because what else are you gonna do, starve to death? Societies can have very little options sometimes, and dealing with something, knowing it very well might kill you can be just business as usual in some cases.
But also also… guys, science cannot explain EVERYTHING even today. And, that’s even funnier, we can’t really explain science in a scientific way. Modern philosophy of science tries, but it’s impossible for now using existing language of mathematical logic. Biology also has it hard - we can describe some things in math, like biochemistry or population dynamics, but if something is more than just the sum of its parts - well, tough luck. And we don’t even have a proper definition of life itself, only attempts at it. It’s difficult out here. So even if something has a perfectly logical explanation you still may not be able to understand it, because the logic you have is lacking for some reasons. Wondorous things don’t have to be stricltly poetic, you know.
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It really isn’t on this one, is it? Wow. Sorry. Yeah, @Ixtli has it right. You’re good at arguing in ways that would have you winning by definition, trying to define away your opponent’s position. (You’re also, incidentally, so good at arguing in fluently idiomatic English that it’s a surprise to have stumbled onto an idiom you weren’t already ready to wield right back at me.) 
Though as you know I do believe in the supernatural, I also think science is a limited tool even on a naturalistic account of reality. We need other methods no matter what, to engage with the (many, everyday) spheres of life where science at best gives us a little assist – any sphere where you can’t control for “external” variables, where repeated experiment is impossible, where serious systematic thinking can yield different results based on different plausible axioms, and where “ought” rather than “is” plays a central role.
Like @Anarore_Kriptih said, the philosophy of science throws up plenty of barriers to treating science as the master key to all of reality. To say nothing of the anthropology of science, which I’ve been dipping into with amused shock since my wife started a PhD in an adjacent subject.
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Only if your casting is fast and infinite. If you’re getting drained, you’re better off buying your own gun and ammo.
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You apologise for teaching me something again and I’ll find a way to smack you from across the Atlantic, I swear. 
I dunno, a fireball typically has a wider area of effect and is stealthier to bring into a fight (not to use, obviously). Like, the guards can pat you down for a shotgun, but they can’t check your brain for a fireball. It’s not so much a gun, it’s an RPG launcher that people can’t tell you’re carrying.
Of course, presumably, there’s no reason that, if you can do either, you can’t do both.
So, to put an example back to the previous discussion, and that’s the last I’ll say of it, mostly because it has already taken so much of my time that yesterday I didn’t get to play any Testament of Sherlock Holmes at all 
:
Let’s say you (impersonal you, not YOU you) want a custom wooden table. Your desired customisation makes it so this table doesn’t actually exist. So you go to a carpenter, describe the table, he gives you a budget, you say he’s robbing you blind, he says how dare you sir, and either you eventually agree on a price or someone gets stabbed with a wood chisel. For this example, let’s presume it’s the former. You hand him money, he hands you the table.
Carpentry has undoubtedly happened - there was no table, and now there is. I don’t think anyone would argue that it was you who did said carpentry. If entreating a carpenter to make a wooden table isn’t carpentry, I fail to see why entreating a spirit to do magic is doing magic.
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Across the Himalayas, soon – I’ll be leaving England to head back to Nepal from May.
In your example, carpentry has indeed happened, but from a modern Western perspective we could say “the market” has also happened. Our (mercifullly chisel-free) encounter is one example of the sphere of life constituted by haggling over the non-compelled exchange of goods or services, a sphere which leads to specialized producers like our carpenter who aim to sell things through such exchange.
“Magic,” in many cultures and fictional works, is a whole sphere of life centered around propitiating, manipulating, persuading etc. invisible personal forces to accomplish desired outcomes. If you’re in one of those cultures/stories, restricting the definition of magic to be just about the spirit’s own power of agency would be as odd as someone claiming that the only “market” thing that went on between you and the carpenter was his production of the table.
Especially if you have a magic system where the humans make some causal contribution, just not one they understand at all – e.g. where the shamanic ritual is a mix of contacting the spirit and creating conditions (which might be as much aesthetic as scientific) under which the spirit has the power to fulfill the request – it makes it hard to limit “magic” to the spirit’s part of the deal.
Fantasy tends toward magic-as-tech, while horror tends toward magic-as-uncanny, I suspect because the former is more empowering than the latter…but terrific stories can be written with both.
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Oh shit, that’s a lot less distance to smack you across from than I thought! Happy trip!
EDIT: I just noticed today is a great day to make threats! 
Beware the Ides of March, Havenstone! 
We are in the Ides of March, when, in a spirit of cooperation and community, a bunch of people came together… to stab Julius Caesar in the Senate! Ah, the good ol’ pointed political discourse.
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And here I thought that to these people there is no “supernatural”, because everything we label as such about their worldview is a part of natural order of things to them. (Or is it a European thing only? Or just a perspective shift people forget?)
Wait, what?
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I think the point is that, whichever way you approach it from, the distinction is irrelevant. Everything is mundane and/or everything is supernatural because there is no hard line between the two in these belief systems.
We can agree there. You only have to look at our incomplete understanding of how humans interact to see that science itself can only get us so far. The rest is more imaginative than analytical.
Back to the topic though, I do still like hard magic systems. The puzzle of figuring out how they work and what can be done is fun. It just depends on the story which one is more appropriate. To me, if de-mystifying your magic doesn’t serve some purpose within the story or contribute to a theme or atmosphere you’e building, I’d wonder why you wanted to include magic at all rather than just using, well, science and technology.
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Probably, but if you’re writing a story that takes place in that kind of setting (instead of discussing about existing cultures), I think having the perspective the correct way (I mean, the way the culture in question has it) is important for understanding the way the characters think, act, and deal with the world.
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I used the term supernatural on the grounds that natural usually brings the idea of a rather passive, impersonal reality, which is exactly what I am trying to avoid. At the end of day however, either natural or supernatural are both rather difficult terms to use in such a context, and not at all ideal.
I like to have clear rules about the limits of magic so I can study the heck out of them and break them to become op like Eiden in Magium, one of the best CYOAs I have read
I can appreciate appropriately sprinkled soft magic, but it has its limits for me. It does feel like some fetishize this unknowable force and use words like awe and wonder as if they are unattainable unless the author has an enigmatic smile and literally wings it with no rhyme or reason (but the real reason is that the author wants it to be that way and doesn’t want to be held to any standard). It’s not an appealing trait to me, which seems to ignore or deny that very mundane, natural processes can be awe inspiring and wondrous.
I like the idea of soft magic as represented by a force of chaos that can do amazing things in unpredictable ways, but that is only interesting as set dressing or as a way to create problems. If you are using magic to solve problems, I feel that it cannot be done in a satisfying way unless you are using hard magic, that is to say, magic with rules, even if the reader or characters have no understanding of those rules, so long as the author does. The narrative tension drains right out of the page otherwise.
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Now if it only would rhyme.
…I’m sorry, I need sleep.
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If only they had rhymed, the words of that mortal man, they would have pleased the demon, Etrigan. But they have not and so he shall burn upon a pyre started by the spewing of infernal fire!
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If soft magic is just there to keep the plot on rails and handwave away obstacles at the right time, I don’t like it either. But the awe of the inexplicable is hard to get right; more authors than you think might be sincerely trying for it, not just leaning on soft magic as a plot crutch.
They absolutely can. At the same time, a lot of magic-as-tech authors don’t seem to be trying all that hard to convey wonder other than the Awe of the Badass – i.e. that the magic-users can do crazy powerful things. Magic doesn’t often have a lot of intrinsic wonder in D&D-style or even Sandersonian hard magic systems. So it easily becomes another myth of the idolatry of Power, rather than a myth about the wonder of the cosmos.
That’s really interesting. What kind of writing would give you confidence that the author understood the rules, other than giving you as the reader some understanding of those rules?
I agree that if magic is being used to solve plot problems, it ought to be rules-based. And I’d offer LotR as a good example of a non-rules-based magic system where magic is intertwined with but doesn’t “solve” the plot.
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This 
gets straight to the point
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I believe that for sure. Even if only based on the premise that most proponents of soft magic hinge the majority of their preference on the idea that being inexplicable is the only way to be magical. If they genuinely believe that, then when they write that, it is with the impression that their evocation of that will work for the readers/players the way it does for them.
Perhaps it’s just an inherent risk of soft magic systems that they don’t allow you to point to any reasoning for things to work out the way they do that doesn’t sound like “because I want it to”. If it doesn’t hit the right note with the reader/player, it’s going to feel contrived, and the author can’t explain why it isn’t actually contrived because there is no logic underpinning the magic that eases the reader into suspension of disbelief, because if there were logic to it, it would be hard magic.
There’s truth here. It is perhaps the flipside of the coin that hard magic receives as a risk in trade for gaining the trust of the reader/player. A closed system where all of the moving parts are laboriously explained can easily lose its luster; much as an overexplained joke loses its punch. A hard magic author generally is predisposed to explaining their magic to the reader and much of the awe that they tend to reach for is in clever applications of the understanding of those rules, which isn’t as punchy if the reader doesn’t understand why the trick is clever, so pains are taken to explain it and hype up how cool it is when it works.
I think it is a difficult trick to trust the reader enough to provide them the sense of wonder at the unknown in a hard magic system for the above reasons, but I think it is still possible, and in fact is much of what makes learning those systems compelling for the reader/player. It’s not interesting to have it explained to them, it’s interesting to speculate and then it’s thrilling to see when your predictions based on the evidence provided in the work prove that your hypothesis is true. When it surprises you and then again when the surprise turns out to have fit perfectly within the bounds of the system, whether you had the evidence pointing to that being the case ahead of time or not. When you connect dots that the characters do not and realize the gravity of their mistakes or misunderstanding. It’s perfectly possible to use hard magic in other ways than as a power fantasy, though examples of that are certainly thin on the ground.
I’d very much agree with your LotR example, but even LotR has a mixture of hard and soft magic, and the deeper you dig into Tolkien’s writings, the more what was once considered soft magic proves to be a bit harder than initially believed. The One Ring is not fully explained in The Hobbit, but it had rules, some which were understood within the context of the Hobbit, while others are more fully understood in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. There are elements of soft magic that aren’t explained, but it is easy to suppose that there could be an explanation. Still, I see hard and soft magic as paradoxically both a spectrum and a binary. In the binary, the simple line between hard and soft magic is that if the magic follows rules, it is hard magic, and if it does not, it is soft magic. The spectrum comes in when you insert the reader’s knowledge of those rules. A work can be hard magic that is unexplained and thus appears as soft magic to the reader, like some elements in The Lord of the Rings. A work can be soft magic and the author could fib a bit and say there’s a plan, when really there isn’t, sort of like Lost but with magic instead of fully planned plot arcs.
When discussed in these environments, hard magic systems are often talked about as if they come to the reader fully formed and understood. For example, Feruchemy, Allomancy, and Hemalurgy are talked of as well-understood sciences with established causes and effects, and from a certain point of view, that of hindsight, that is true. What this ignores is the journey that the reader takes through the story, wherein they begin with no understanding of the system and, as events unfold, their experiences heap lesson upon lesson until they arrive at an understanding of the system.
As another poster said, one does not need to explain the rules in order to follow them. And another can learn the rules without having them spoon-fed through exposition. The magic is witnessed acting in a certain way without explanation and you are confused, perhaps that event is explained and you remain skeptical, then further evidence proves that it does work that way and you get comfortable, and then a given explanation is contradicted leading you again to confusion, only to reveal additional layers that were always true despite not being understood before and which looked like contradictions until you had the full context of them and that shed light on subtleties that may or may not have escaped your notice before or gnawed at the back of your mind until this moment of clarity.
Your struggle along the way is rewarded, your attempts to understand are validated, because there is a method at work, even in the moments which defy your understanding at the time. There are enough setups and payoffs to earn your trust, and enough such payoffs can allow room for setups without payoffs. Setups that linger with you long after the story ends because surely there is an explanation, the author had proven reliable in that regard. Perhaps it takes years for your suspicion to be confirmed that the characters’ clashing balefire entangled their souls and is the reason their souls swapped bodies.
Perhaps not everything is neatly laid bare by the end of things, but the author can hint at answers without providing them explicitly. A latticework of cause and effect becomes apparent when the reader steps away with their current knowledge, they are able to map out what they know, and find a pattern that shows gaps which are heavy with implication. Perrin could not have killed Lanfear in the dreamworld, surely! Even though the text of the book states that that is what occurs… there is a great amount of evidence that the reader can piece together and arrive at the conclusion that Lanfear was not having an out of character moment in order for the plot to resolve in a satisfyingly heroic way, but that Lanfear was being true to form and tricked both Perrin and the average reader into believing that they had been vanquished by lying about how the magic worked and using that lie to weave a comforting fiction.
I suppose all of that is a long-winded way of explaining that an author who earns the players trust through judicious use of setups and payoffs can afford to be withholding when it comes to explaining their hard magic to the reader, because they have earned enough trust to do so. A common example of this is to have multiple hard magic systems, where one comes to be well understood by the player, and then others are introduced which baffle the character and reader in unison. Stories can afford to retain the air of mystery around these unknown systems, so long as they don’t overextend themselves.
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…I am suddenly having an urge to make the other half of my magic systems called “soft magic” in-universe (because it softens worlds together, or something along those lines. Make things and places lose shape)
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