Is Your Book's Magic System Too Complex?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 4 июн 2024
- People often talk about the distinctions between hard and soft magic systems, but rarely consider magic system complexity. Magic is a staple of fantasy, but it's also something the audience needs to learn in order to understand the story. People can only take in so much information at a time. In this first episode of Story Tips, Adam discusses magic system complexity and cognitive load theory.
Script and VO by Adam Bassett
Animation by Cole Field
#magicsystems #writingcommunity #authortube #writingadvice
Check out Campfire, a customizable tool for writers to plan, organize, and share their work:
www.campfirewriting.com/
-References-
Learn More About Cognitive Overload: www.mindtools.com/pages/artic...
Worldbuilding Magazine, V4I6: www.worldbuildingmagazine.com...
-Social Media-
Adam's Twitter: / adamcbassett
Cole's Art Insta: / acolefield
Campfire's Twitter: / campfirewriting
Discord: discordapp.com/invite/6dTUvx3
Facebook: / campfirewriting
Reddit: / campfiretechnology
Instagram: / campfirewriting
-Affiliate Links-
ProWritingAid: prowritingaid.com/?afid=9308
A powerful spell checker and style editor that works wherever you do your writing!
Bookshop: bookshop.org/shop/CampfireTec...
Support local, independent bookstores (and Campfire Technology) by buying books on our Bookshop page.
![Oscar Maydon x Junior H - Volver Al Futuro [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/sa52xabMSB8/mqdefault.jpg)
What I should grasp from this video: " Your magic system and plot are too complex for the audience to follow the story in a way that doesnt put too much strain on their brain. Simplify."
What I ACTUALLY grasped from the video: "Animated Adam is adorable. Ooh, Avatar! What was the question?" Like Dug the dog from Up :-)
Hopefully once the novelty wears off, I can focus on the nuggets of wisdom being dropped by the Campfire Story Council. Great one, guys!
😊 - Adam
Welcome to Story Tips! This is a new series we'll be doing on the channel alongside our regular video essays. It dives into more specific subjects than our usual videos and features a wide variety of topics, from worldbuilding to characterization to publishing. Adam and Cole have been working hard for the last few months to put this thing together, so we hope you like it! 😊 - Levi (Adam will take the comments from here)
Great tips! As an amateur writer, I'll just share that I found it's way easier to add complexity if you avoid exposition. When I first wrote my book, I felt I had to explain how a mage could shoot lightning, what the magical resource was, how they pulled it from their whel, how they structured the electromagnetic field etc. And then of course, where lightning fell within the context of the other magical outputs. In editing, I realized all of this stuff is confusing and BORING if it's early on in the book. Instead, I just show what my characters do. Especially from the POV of a mage, they wouldn't be thinking about all of these details because magic is second nature to them.
In short, avoiding exposition allows me to focus on the OUTPUTS, which are ultimately what affect the plot and characters. Then, as you go further into the story, you learn more about the INPUTS, as they become relevant to my MC discovering new/hidden secrets about magic.
What do y'all think?
Yeah it's definitely easy to feel you have to explain everything when you usually don't, haha! Definitely focus on character actions and explain stuff just when you need to. I like that approach of starting by laying the groundwork showing off the output and then taking the time to slowly introduce the different ways you can arrive at those results. I think it' sort of the opposite of what ATLA did where they said "there are four kind of magic" then used it in clever ways or branched off to create bloodbending/icebending/lightning etc.
It will probably need some refining, but I'm sure you'll get there!
-Adam
You could also not make it necescy to know the whole system but rewarding we some one takes the time to learn... Pokemon is great at this you can still trade cards and beat the games with out knowing the lore or even how each elemnt interacts... For how I right magic I have a complex hard magic system but only show it like a solf fairy tale like system... Like do you need to know how a sword is made and used in deatail to have swords in your book?
Exactly!
You don’t need to know what trivia effects different religions about a magic sword.
You just need to know the relevant stuff about it. Chekhov doesn’t need cartridge-less guns.
Great first vid in this awesome looking new series, Adam!
A way that I personally like to handle complexity is via giving it depth, rather than breadth. Allow for a surface understanding which is simple, and can be understood without the need to have a total understanding of the underlying systems and mechanics. That way the people who want to dig in further can pick up on the clues and discern all the underlying mechanisms, but those that just wanna read a story can do just that.
Using a simple set of axioms that interact for form complex results can be a great way of doing this. That way there's a really small list of rules that anyone can understand, but due to their interactions, the "true complexity" can scale however you like.
Yeah it's way easier to understand how a system becomes deeper rather than introducing new elements or additional systems. As much as I love McClellan's Powder Mage stuff, he kind of went the opposite direction. Even if it's loosely connected. All the magic in The Bone Clocks is related to time. It's expressed in a lot of different ways, but it all ties back into the concept of time passing.
It's kind of a similar thing to game design-if that makes sense? You generally want to teach people a minimum number of rules, but still give them flexibility to make decisions that matter and implement those rules in a variety of ways.
-Adam
Super useful magic system tips!!
This is incredibly helpful. Thank you!
The way i look at is this, a straight razor and an electric razor are excellent tools for shaving. But a complex electric razor cant be used to slice an apple or pull a sweeny todd, a simple straight razor can.
Keep the magic system and you can create complexity in how its used, make a complex magic system and it will become more specific and less useful overall.
Simply put, magic systems can be great and fun to assist the story. However, when you have a soft magic system, questions and confusion can be brought up to service the plot. On the other hand, hard magic systems have a lot of rules to follow and have to avoid breaking them, otherwise it requires an explanation. In short, whichever route you go for, make sure you only world build as much magic as you plan to use in the story (as a personal example, I had a “soft” magic system when it revolves around the state of the world and all major characters, which became confusing when colloquial terms are mentioned about it, but characters don't bother to explain it-requiring rewrites to “explain” how it works and give terms to define why its concrete). Concreteness works better than vagueness, and your audience will trust you for it, allowing for even a hard magic system, intuitively easy to follow (as long as you show it right in service of the plot/story).
I enjoyed how you broke everything down. Thank you for the information
Awesome vid, looking forward to more 😁 Another option for keeping the magic system(s) more simple yet still allowing for great variety is what I call the X-Men method. Each character has only one or two relatively unique abilities and rarely (if ever) strays away from those skill sets. As long as the rules for who gets powers and why are logical (such as mutation) this can allow for almost limitless variations on the magic powers available to the world at large while still forcing the characters to seek out unique problems for each situation, since their own power set is limited.
"The X-Men Method" is such a good way to describe that haha!
-Adam
Really helpful video! I've never thought about power systems like this (input, output)
I'm looking forward to the rest of this series!
Awesome ❤
I have several magic systems with varying levels of complexity. But, its a big wide world and in a particular story only one or two will be seen. In another part of the world or in a different story one of the other magic systems will take the stage.
That seems like a good way to approach it!
-Adam
I would love more videos on this topic (will be checking if you've made more).
TLDR: I'm writing a magic system, trying to work out the kinks still. It's gone through a number of changes. Most recently, I've added a pantheon of original gods to it. The overall point of this comment is my notes on this system are a mess and I have no idea what the best way to organize them are. A video about organizing a magic system would be helpful.
I'm an aspiring author and I've been working on a magic system for a semi-modern fantasy story. I say semi-modern because, the story was originally set in modern day New Orleans, and while the city still plays a role in the story, I changed the setting to an otherworld so I would have more control over it.
I want to create a fun world filled with magic similar to what Rowling did with Harry Potter. All the ways magic is used fills her world with a childlike whimsy and a lot of it is fantastical. I want those feelings for my magic. However, I also want it to be more balanced. It should be usable for problem solving without solving every problem in a "a wizard did it" type of way. A lot of the problems with the HP magic is that it unintentionally opens the door for spells to be abused or they solve problems you didn't want solved. Most stories don't work if the world is perfect, there needs to be conflict and problems to solve, but if suddenly you can solve world hunger with magic, for example, a major problem has been wiped out. It's really annoying to think of a cool magic idea but then think of the overall repercussions of that idea and then have to spend hours trying to patch it up. I have thought of a few ways to balance this out.
The system has some complexities. A handful of elements that spells are separated into. More than Avatar but less than Pokemon. I figure, if people can remember 18 different types and the specific match ups of those types while also remembering what types each Pokemon are, than they can remember the 10 elements in my magic. Originally, it was the classic four elements because this system has some alchemy mixed in, but I wanted to separate it from ATLA. Some of the spells didn't match well with any of the four elements.
The rest of the system should be relatively easy. Performing magic requires energy, spells or magic stones or other objects can be used to cut down on this price, casting a spell uses up energy which wears out the caster.
There are also gods that can be patroned for more powerful spells. A lot of magic users have a low threshold for magic meaning many spells are beyond their ability.
Hey, glad you found the video helpful!
If you're trying to figure out a way to organize worldbuilding info, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our app, Campfire. You can use it for your magic system and anything else you're writing about: www.campfirewriting.com
That said, any system could really work so long as you stick to it. If you prefer handwriting stuff, for example, pick a notebook and create some kind of standard way of taking notes. Maybe you have a section for what the spell does, what its practical applications are, and what limits it. Those three factors can carry you a *long* way.
@@AroundTheCampfire Hey, thanks for the reply. I do use Campfire for my project and it was great until I ended up with 8 pages with notes scattered everywhere. I have a rough idea in mind for how to restructure the pages and condense them, but have been searching around to see if there's a suggested way for it.
I don't think mine is too complex to be honest I need to make it a little bit harder you get 10 different magic types out of the 100 magic types you could have Elemental Magic which counts as one and you could level it up unlocking different abilities like water Wind Fire or Earth but those are just the first 10 levels after you can start unlocking things like metal and electricity and even magma and so on and so on you can combine them to create new types like electric magma renders the floor useless in a certain range or earth and water to make sand and Earth and magma to create volcanoes it's just a leveling system of 100 or 50 levels every time you level up the XP you need goes up by 100 for level 1 the amount of XP you need is just 50 bass kit mobs just give you 25 XP so in the early game it's actually quite fun the only thing that takes a little bit of time is just grinding items to unlock new areas or different magic types you can even discover some magic Types on accident you can accidentally create sound Magic and soundless Magic and you can make other magics with those like illusion magic or Vision Magic some magic count as subclassmagic which is just combining them while using them at the same time like a vision and illusion using both of them Grants you Shadow Magic or dark magic depending on the area you're in and state , you aren't really confined to a story all encounters are random even being low level if you're too low of a level sometimes would be encounters don't happen because some entities don't see you as Existing or tooo weak to be an opponent . And because you aren't confined to a story you can go in any place anywhere meaning you can develop any magic an any place so if you want to go for a specific play style go for it this world is a little bit of kill or be killed in some areas , also what I mean by you being in some type of State when using Magic if you were to use Shadow Magic and/or light magic with Fire magic or water magic you would be able to create emotion Magic and with emotional Magic you can do a lot you can increase your power with determination or weaken your enemies with fear or make your comrades stronger with courage but if you are hating something and use Shadow Magic a new subclass Magic is formed called hate if there is a type of magic that is okay for my game please let me know I probably might already have it in my game with normal magic and subclass Magic but it would be a huge helper I'm still in the testing phase of the game it hasn't been released yet but it's getting there .
But I do want to know if I should make a Guardian system to help players understand how to combine and use dual Magic
Well i was going to buy your software on steam for the acceptable one time price, but no you have to go Adobe and force a subscription model on your crapy software that apple notes and a well laid out word document can completely invalidate your software.