I was thinking about Star Trek, and remembered the character "Q." For all purposes, his race was omnipotent. They had "magic" at an unlimited scale (he could change the gravitational constant of the universe!) and had to pay NO price at all for his powers.

However, he didn't wreck any stories he was featured in, rather, he made them all the more enjoyable.

So, if done properly, magic doesn't always have to have a price, right?

Ronnie
 

But I'm sure he would say this is true except when it isn't. I'll say: there are other ways to limit it. Q's was limited in that only the Q could do it; and to some degree they limited themselves.

I don't like the "magic has a price" thing so much. I want it to be that the people who do magic can do it because of who they are. It leads to a different type of story, more fairy-tale-like and less SF-like. It's still limited. OSC did this to some degree with Harmony.
 

Also, there are a lot of reasons to have a price for magic, and limiting the number of people who can do it is not a very good reason. Random laws of magic can dictate who can and can't do magic...you have to be born with it etc. The fact is that magic without limit is UNINTERESTING. I hate reading books where the only limitation to magic is the lack of creativity of the writer as revealed through the main characters.
 

I guess the only "limit" I will be placing on them is that they are totally uninterested in the goings on of the rest of the world. They are a race of intellectuals and academics, and enjoy living isolated in their desert.

I was just concerned, as I remembered the "magic without price" tidbit, and wanted to see what others thought.

Thanks again,
Ronnie
 

Q's powers weren't unlimited. He came from a group of people, just like himself. Because there was no great "price" for this great "magic," it was commonplace among his people. But, this power wasn't absolute. The continuum had certain rules of not interfering too much. If you'll remember, Q did get all of his powers stripped away in one very commical episode because the continuum was mad at him.

This whole Q arrangement worked in Star Trek, because everyone wasn't so powerful. If you were to write a story about the continuum...great power would be very commonplace, and easily obtained. If you like that...then go with it. Q was also important to the series as a whole, as he was a demi-god-like figure who was able to put humanity on trial (as you remember from the first and last episodes). In a fantasy setting, Q would not be a main character: he'd be a divine figure messing with the lives of mortals. If you like writting about demi-god-like societies...feel free.
 

Magic needs to have a price in my opinion, otherwise the magicians could just fix any problem with a wave of their wand. Their needs to be a cost to introduce conflict into what they're doing.

In Star Trek, there's an example of this when the crew of the enterprise first meet the Borg and are just about to be overtaken by them & meet certain death. However, Q snaps his fingers and puts everything right again. The end of the story isn't so much about the way in which Q saves them -- I dont think that the "magic" is the story. The story is that the Enterprise are given the first glimpse of an up comming threat and given a reminder that they're not so tough after all.

IMO.
 

As for limits on magic, then that depends on the type of book you're writing. A lot of people have seemed to assume magic can do anything, but that doesn't necessarily have to be true. It can be if you want characters with god-like powers but maybe magic is limited to the four basic elements, or even more restricted.
 

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I want magic to be only used by a single race of people (they look like insects and live isolated in a desert)

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Rhal22 made a good point about Q. Also, consider the episodes involving Q in Voyager. The continuum devolved into a crippling civil war, not to mention the Q who committed suicide because of boredom.

 

When everything can be achieved without effort, everything starts to lack meaning. Perhaps that was was the Q searched for, meaning.

When characters overcome odds, try and fail and try to accomplish there goals, then it becomes an interesting read.

Same in real life. It's fun to set out to do something, be it as big as getting something published, or be it as small as learning to make pasta from stratch. You can look back on an accomplish goal and feel a measure of healthy pride.

Unfortuntely, in real life this is taken to an extreme, and people's needs are withheld dispite a potential abudance. But then any idea, taken to an extreme isn't the course of wisdom...
 

I'm not particularly fond of magic having a set price. But you do have to deal with the whole thing once you put it into your story. How do your characters deal with a world in which there is unlimited magic? What does that element do to the integrity of your story? Do you even have a story, or are you just solving everything by "magic"?

The "magic" used by the Q race is a bad example, the "price" they paid for their magic is the exact same price that the crew of the Enterprise pays for their "magic".
 

The thing that keeps magic from being interesting is not its price, but its limitations. Price is one possible limitation; natural ability is another. Of course, it will have a price--doesn't everything? I mean, people don't have to exactly pay a price for being more intelligent, but that doesn't mean there isn't "a price," if you want to define it that way. I don't, because I think of a price as being voluntary: How much am I willing to pay for this? Certainly that's an option with magic, but it isn't the only one that will keep magic from simply overrunning all problems.

Harry Potter's magic system is full of holes, but the lack of limits is not one of them (although, since we don't often know what the limits are, Rowling is somewhat free to make up the limits as they suit her). Even if the limits are not entirely consistent, they're there. The biggest limit is: you're born with or you're not. That's not a "price," in my book. There are other limits, milder ones, that do involve a price, such as having to study to learn your spells. Of course, that's not a price for doing magic. Some spells seem to take more effort than others, so there's a price there. But really, all these prices are negligible. The limits are mostly applied by native ability and accumulated knowledge--just as in the real world, for that matter.

Limits? Yes, essential. Price? Just one option.
 

I may heartily dislike Q, but the actor John DeLancie is a really nice guy. I got to chat with him while we were standing in line for the bathroom at the OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) grand opening of their Star Trek exhibit.

But Q's character and power was unbelievable. And THAT is a price I don't care to pay in my own writing. I want the magic to be something the reader can believe.
 

The crew of the Enterprise were always talking about how humanity had "outgrown" things like greed and bigotry and all that. Q is flinging an unsubtle challenge to all that nonsense by showing that, no matter what powers a people may eventually master, it doesn't bring them any closer to mastering themselves.

In other words, he existed to challenge the perception of the crew (shared by most fans) that the Federation was intrinsically "better" by virtue of its social evolution. So it isn't unnatural that fans of the show should feel uncomfortable with him.
 

Q speaks to the point of how to make magic not seem costly. The cost of magic should neccessarily go down as it decreases in proportion to the magnitude/power/size of the magician/deity who does it. So a very costly bit of magic for a mortal might cost less for a thousand year old mage but cost nothing for a benevolent deity.

Perhaps the same principle as money? A dollar soft drink costs a lot to a child, less to a working man and nothing to a millionare relative to their wealth.
 

What is the source of power?
Even if that is not important to you it will be to your character. Where does he/she think this power comes from? What limits therefore, do they imagine for themselves?

PS: Elan, I've never had to queue to talk to Q or to pee.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited September 25, 2005).]
 

Yes, they do.

Does doing magic amplify their insectoid appearance?

I'm not sure I understand the question. They look like large walking / talking insects, and the other groups of people don't really know much about them.

How much do they feature in your story?

They don't feature very much, until WAAAAAAAAAAAAY later.

Do you enter their POV, or is everything from an outside POV? If you don't enter the insects' POV, the POV character's perception may be that there is no price or that the magic is all powerful, even if those perceptions are incorrect.

I don't think I'd ever enter their POV, and I like the idea of having them seem unstoppable to the other characters.

Ronnie
 

If your POV characters can't use the magic of the inscectoids because they simply can't communicate or negotiate in any meaningful fashion, then any abilities possessed by that race doesn't count as magic for your purposes, the bugs are just a force of nature.
 

I want the insect race (called the Magi Races) have all the magic. I like the idea of super powerful magic, and I want it in the story. I just don't want them to be unbalanced or simply silly powerful. I think that the fact that they are a very frail and weak race, the fact that they don't really have any outside interest in the goings on in the world, and the fact that there are very few of them alive balances them, but I'm not 100% sure if this is enough.

Thank again for all the help!
Ronnie
 

Then it doesn't function as "magic" in your story. You should probably make up some reasons that the Mags do and don't do the things they do, but they are just like the weather or earthquakes to your characters.

The Mags themselves would probably have lost much of the normal biological drives somewhere along the way in their development of magic use. They can keep themselves alive and safe pretty easily, and probably live forever or something like that, so reproduction isn't a big thing for them. All the more adventurous ones have probably died off or managed to leave the world some other way a long time ago. You can go on making up reasons that they aren't interested in conquering the world or even gaining any favor with the other races...but for a species that powerful it might seem like taking a lot of interest in the internal politics of an ant-hive. You might exterminate an entire hive if it was bothersome to you, but picking out a few ants and favoring them over the other ants...not only would it be unlikely to occur to you, but how would you do it? Even though your abilities far outstrip anything an ant could imagine, you can't easily tell one ant from another.

Or perhaps a book like Watership Down would be a better example, though of course it fails to match your idea in a lot of respects.
 

If that were the case his magic would have a serious price. Perform enough of it and he is ejected from childhood.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited September 27, 2005).]
 

Q worked well as a sidebar issue (increasing the tension in the "Next Generation" pilot, for example), showing up stripped of his powers, or assisting someone developing these omnipotent powers. (I don't remember the particular episode names.) Other episodes, where his omnipotence was more centrally featured, didn't really work for me.

(One of the "Star Trek" novels featuring Q managed to make Trelane his son, I think---and also worked in the developing omnipotent powers of the character played by the other guy from "2001: A Space Odyssey" in "Where No Man Has Gone Before.")
 

It's not that they usually decide to keep their hands off the world...I believe in a God in the real world that chooses that hands off path. No, it's more a question of them breaking that hands off approach to show themselves in this one case, or help out in this one case...what's so special about it? Why now? And with the possibility that the whole thingcan just be solved with the snap of some god's fingers, if he so chooses, the story looses all interest for me. Will the hero succeed? Who cares? My guess is yes, but if not the god may just step in.

Deus ex machina originated in Greek plays in which one of the gods came in and fixed everything. I like to think we've become more sophisticated in our storytelling, but I know that we haven't. Gods (or similiar omniopotent beings) are still very much a part of fantasy and even science fiction. And even when magic is limited in scale or scope, I keep seeing the only limitations on the use of that magic being the character's lack of imagination or simply their sheer stupidity. "Oh no, he's under attack! But he has the power to freeze time so why doesn't he...?"

This turned into quite a rant.
 

The stories typically were not about Q, or what Q could or could not do.* They were about the characters on Enterprise and what they could and could not do. If they had unlimited power at no cost, the stories would have been terribly uninteresting. But because the crew were severely limited in their powers, it didn't matter if Q had to pay a price for his powers. The crew didn't care; they had to deal with him in any case.

The stories were not about magic, but about non-magical creatures dealing with magic. So they did not have to go into detail about the rules of magic for those stories.

*The one exception I recall was were Q was thrown out of the Continuum. But notice that the story was about Q adjusting to having no powers.
 

An Omnipotent Character: What Works For Me

After a little thought, seems to me that it breaks down into a few basic situations.

(1) That the omnipotent character is the antagonist, and the protagonist and center of the story, therefore, is someone else.

(2) That he's just starting to develop his omnipotence.

(3) That he's somehow lost his omnipotence.

(4) That he's a minor character in relation to the other plots and characters.

There must be other situations where an omnipotent character can be put to proper and interesting use. I'm a little tapped out on ideas: by all means, suggest some of your own.
 

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There must be other situations where an omnipotent character can be put to proper and interesting use.

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But he has the power to freeze time so why doesn't he...?

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In most fantasy worlds that feature Gods, the Gods have limited powers. Obviously there powers are greater than humans, but that is all.

Every omnipotent character seems to have a weakness, which does seem strange. After all if they are omnipotent all they have to do is wave their hands and make themselves immune to whatever magic weapon the hero is wielding. Truly omnipotence must be boring. Even Q had his limits.

And that is the thing. Magic has its limits. Even magic has to follow some rules, my personal one being about energy. Given that magic uses energy, then there is only a limited amount that can be used. Maybe someone like Q has access to much more powerful forms of energy, but that does not mean there are no limits.
 

A couple of notes on omnipotence:

1. You can restrict magic in a couple of ways, by limiting the number of magical feats a person can and/do or by limiting the number of people who can do it.

2. This is not the same as giving a price for magic. Regardless of who can cast a spell or how many, the price is what happens to that person because they used magic. Did they get older? Dumber? Eviler? (yeah, yeah..) The price can even be directly related to the spell they cast. For example, if someone can move time backwards to change things, they may never be able to do it right for one reason or another. The price may, in fact, be the power itself.

Whatever rules or limitations you put on magic, the price is of dire importance. The price is the story. What you have without a price is something more like wish fulfillment, but frankly, I'd rather dream it than read it.
 

I've seen this in real life where a more powerful person will walk away from a fight or settle a lawsuit or drop a criminal charge because they see that they could easily win but to win would harm someone. This is also one of the ways that real life soldiers lose battles. They can see the enemy in their sights but they pass up the chance to kill out of empathic response and desire to not do harm.

I think that empathy is the primary difference between Trelane and Q. Q is obviously a more mature being and it is this response which might be the one which prevents him from just destroying the Borg (or for that matter, Picard) out of hand. Also it might be empathy which makes him self-limit like a parent who plays chess with his eight year old, starting without his queen to make things more equal.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited September 29, 2005).]
 

(5) He's concealing his omnipotence for a reason.

(6) He has a flaw beyond his omnipotence.

[edited 'cause I put "4" and "5" instead of "5" and "6."]

[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited September 30, 2005).]
 

What kind of toilet gives receipts?

And why are they so interesting?

Oh and If you are truly so bored why are you still reading and posting? Time is too precious to spend in pursuit of pointlessness.
 

So I guess that is a use for benevolent super beings...though does anyone else think that it would have been more interesting, from a sheerly story oriented point of view, if we all had to deal with the problem in our own way?
 

1) I need to rethink my bugs
2) Threads are like freight trains... once they get up to speed, they can be derailed quite easily .

Ronnie
 

P.S. Someone sort of beat me to the punch on this, except that I did like the episodes with Q in them.

[This message has been edited by franc li (edited October 02, 2005).]
 

(Alas, again, we seem to be back onto Q in particuar and not a discussion of omnipotence in general. But I'm, again, tapped out for further development.)
 

I don't know if anyone's mention this (so much has been said that it's hard to keep track of), or if it's a good idea (take it or leave it):

(1) Even if the insectiods aren't all-powerful, they still can be a force of nature. In the real world, ordinary insects in sufficent numbers are.

(2) Perhaps some of your characters could BELIEVE them to be all-powerful, while maybe having a lone dissenter to keep things in check.
 

Of course, he wasn't omnipotent...he had a massive blind spot that made it possible to defeat him.

I suppose if an omnipotent antagonist has a fatal flaw, he's a more interesting character...
 

Thanks again!

Ronnie
 

The same with selective omniscience, an all-powerful being would have the power to know or not to know, to use the power or not.

And of course there is the question of freewill and responsiblity. If an all-powerful being sets creation in motion and knows from the start how it will turn out, then that being would bear the responsiblity and blame for how it turns out. And if everything had such predetermintion, criminals couldn't be held responsibly for thier crimes.

The Dune series explores that question to some degree, 'What if you had the power could see the future?' Within the story, it was determined that Paul did not foresee the future, they created it.
 

But if God sets up the rules of the universe and lets people explore it on their own, then they are accountable for their own actions, even if God already knew what they would do. Unless they are automatons rather than people.

It is a mistake to assert that just because you can predict a person's actions with confidence that means that person is a machine. We predict the actions of people we know well all the time. If we met a being that was impossible to predict, most of us wouldn't feel comfortable acknowledging that entity's personhood.

The kind of things that you'll do in any given situation defines who you are as a person. Just because someone else knows you well enough to predict your actions, that doesn't make you an automaton. If it were impossible for anyone to predict your actions, that would mean that there wasn't a you deciding what actions to take, that the behavior was random.

But this is all getting off the subject. Back to the subject, what if someone is omnipotent and omniscient, but simply doesn't care what happens with humans? That person didn't create us intentionally, we're just some minor refuse caused by something else. This is the same as if there was no such person, as far as we are concerned...can atheists simply shuck responsibility for their own actions off onto the universe at large?

Um...that went in the wrong direction at several levels.

The point I wanted to make is that the Mags don't really care about humans/whatever that much, no matter how powerful (and presumably knowledgable) they are. So the discussion of God doesn't pertain to them. Though come to think of it, some people might worship them anyway....
 

Yeah, I guess this does veer from the original topic, but freewill verus determinism is a fasinating topic to explore in fiction and in real life.

I guess it depends on how you define predictability. People I knew have shocked me, people have pleasantly surprised me. And I've shocked myself more often than pleasantly surprising myself by my own actions.

19th century scientists believed in a clockwork universe, if you knew all the positions and motions of all the particles in the universe, you could predict the future. And many theologians seemed to agree.

But human behavior is more than the result of preditable particle trajectories and under the bedrock of newtonian clockwork, there is a sea of uncertainty and mystery.

Consciousness, intelligence, free will are all wonderful mysteries to comtemplate and gifts to enjoy.
 

What did they start out as? By doing magic did it change them in some noticeable way (such as appearance, but could also be in an anthorpological way).
 

If everyone has it and can use it freely, well, its not magic.

If few people have it and can use it freely they will have to put up with the demands of those who can't and will frequently have to pick sides and live up to expectations.

In my world there are those that can do magic, they have a very small magic ability, and are then taught how to use it, especially using rote spells, very by the book. But then there are two ppl born at roughly the same time, unrelated, in different parts of the world, who have a completely natural and unlimited command of 'magic.' They can do whatever they want, with the only consequences being, for them, the results of the magic they have thought up and worked. For those who use magic more unnaturally, 'by the book,' there are also no consequences, but they have less of an impact on the world.
I'm wondering what you guys think of this. I know the school of thought where magic has consequences, but there is no draining of power, or sacrifices to use your magic. It's like your arm, or mouth, for these to special people. It doesnt require consequences of them to use at all. So any specific discussion to this would be extra helpful.
Thx..

-leaf
 

Because if they're protagonists, then this has "linear plot" written all over it.

Yeah, that won't be a problem. She will have a lot to overcome.
 

Good point, man. I'll give that some thought... cuz I hadn't...