Now I know this is a huge mess and entanglement that may be difficult (or impossible) to fix since we have no limits in many areas, but if you could change something about the HP magic system what would it be?

What would you add, and and how much of a change in the magic system are you willing to accept as a fanfic reader?Slight tweaks? A few major changes? Or a complete overhaul.

And keep in mind a complete overhaul doesn't mean a move to DnD magic, just a complete change of how transfiguration, charming etc work. They're ill-defined anyway.

And how much new magic can be inserted. One of the criticisms of Miranda Fairgold's fic is that there's some new magical thing every ten seconds. So is all new magic a bad thing? Or is it something to use once, like the "One Exception" rule in sci-fi?

 

I wouldn't change much, to be honest.

I don't think there's that much of a problem with the HP magic system. The big problem, in my opinion, is rather the way the wizards use it. It's really under-utilised. Their society does not match with their puported abilities.

(This is the general premise of Lords of Magic: magic is mostly the same, but wizards aren't fucking retards).

There are a couple of things that I think are essential to the "flavour" of HP magic and couldn't be altered without completely destroying the magic system:

1. Primacy of wands.
2. Costless casting.
3. Mundane magic use (e.g. magic for household chores).
4. Majority of magic limited to line-of-sight.

I think 3 is the most important, though 2 is in many ways a pre-requisite for 3. The whole idea of HP magic is, for me, that it's roughly analogous with technology in terms of its place within society. Above all, it's useful. This is also my primary reason for liking the Harry Potter world so much. In so much fantasy the only role of magic seems to be that of fighting other magic - that is, magic does nothing other than undo the problems that the existence of magic creates. I much prefer the creative aspect of Harry Potter magic. Combat is a tiny part of what magic is used for.

I really dislike stories where Harry starts talking about what a gift magic is and how it should be used with solemnity and reserve. That's taking it in the opposite direction, back to traditional fantasy.

 

Pretty much what Taure said. The magic system in Harry Potter world is pretty much flawless.Some people dislike the simple Latin chants, and honestly, compared to other works, it sometimes does seems a little childish.

There is no explanation of any source for the power, you are just born with it. This is the only change I would wish.

No limits. Some students have difficulty mastering certain spells, but other than that, everyone is expected to perform what they are taught, which means if Voldemort and Dumbledore, although exceptionally bright, were simply great students of the art.

So, we have a wizarding world too happy to live in abstract, with most people learning only enough to get a job, manage a household, etc. Of course, are the medical benefits. Nobody dies in the wizarding world because of mundane things like a fall from a 5 story building. Then again, we have magical ailments like dragon-pox.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, JKR kept a large number of possibilities in mind. Its so good, its hard to find a loop-hole in the basic magical structure itself.

 

Main problem I have with HP magic is that it doesn't even pay lip-service to physics, philosophy, economics, and countless other sciences. Every spell shatter the First Law of Thermodynamics, apparition does horrible things to the Theory of Relativity (in the books, at least, the movies changed how it worked), and so on. Philosophically, look at Pettigrew. His mind goes from living in 1.5kg of grey matter to two grams with no ill effects. Rita Skeeter fits into a beetle even smaller, and is still able to both think and remember and recognize and follow, but still somehow knows how to fly a beetle's body around and interpret it's weird-ass bug senses. And the whole prophecy bullshit is a pain in the arse to approach while still giving your characters at least the illusion of having free will. Economically... there's too many things wrong with it to even start going into it, so I'll just point out that their economy is built on gold coins and the plot McGuffin in the first book could create infinite gold.

I don't mind sticking to the MST3k Mantra while reading a book, but when you try to pull canon apart for scrap parts to make fanfic out of, you quickly realize that half the parts aren't there and the other half are made of bullshit. Harry Potter was written by an undereducated single mother and it shows. This gives you a lot of room to maneuver to get whatever plot you want to fiddle with off the ground, but it also gives rise to people like Taure who honestly think you can extract some sort of rational all-encompassing master theory from the books despite the fact that you self-evidently cannot without discarding all knowledge of how the world actually works.

tl;dr:



Is a mixed blessing at best.

 

Personally I don't see why magic totally ignoring science is somehow a problem. What annoys me is that HP magic has no internal logic and the facts that we know are contradictory. I fucking hate Gamp's law. It makes no sense that a wizard cannot simply conjure a steak when he can conjure a cow, slice it with Cutting Curses and then roast the meat with a multitude of fire-spells - effectively creating a steak.

It's painfully obvious that JKR tried to patch up a few of her huge plot holes, and failed horribly.

 

I'd change a few things, but that depends on what story I'm trying to tell.

I have a question though - anyone knows a good book where magic doesn't make any sense and it's the main point of it? Most stories even if they don't tell how exactly magic works, still have so called rules of magic. I'm looking for one where when you try to explain magic, making it to fit into box, it's not magic anymore, so every wizard is doing it in different way he thought for himself and it just works.

 

Because it's coexisting and interacting with science. There's magical radios and clocks and cars and trains and buses, and yet magic completely ignores every single principle that makes all those things work. There's this little bullshit tidbits like magic zonks out electronics and Gamp's Law that hints at some sort of underlying logic behind it all but it's all just made up on the spur of the moment. The example that really hit it home for me that Rowling made it all up as she went along is that neither Apparition nor Floo exist in Philosopher's Stone, and yet transport is one of the first things you should nail down when you're building a fictional society.

Look, if she had come out and said that the canonical theory of magic was It's Magic I Ain't Gotta Explain Shit, then that would be alright. But it's not. There is none. The closest you could find to one is Discworld's Theory of Narrative Causality - magic works however is most convenient for the plot.

And yes, I am deliberately inflicting TV Tropes upon you all. Deal with it.

 

Hmm, I don't really have a problem with HP magic completely trashing physics and other natural sciences. In fact I tend to prefer magic to work like this. Magic that works within a natural framework a) doesn't feel very magical at all and b) isn't really any more scientifically sound than physics trashing magic. It just feels more scientifically sound to the reader.

But saying "life generates a quantifiable energy which is usable by a conscious mind to perform a variety of tasks" (approximately Dresden) is no more scientific, really, than simply saying "these people can make the world work differently". It just feels vaguely scientific because it works in an analogous way to a variety of physical concepts like conservation of energy, momentum, etc.

Magic clashing with human sciences (e.g. economics) I take is somewhat similar to what I said about how the way the magic works not matching up with how their society works.

Why not? There doesn't seem to be a contradiction here. Conjuration, after all, is a different process to transfiguration. The bit that doesn't make sense is wizards acting like they can't create food with magic.

----

My own greatest issue with HP magic is that everyone treats it like it's hard, but it really shouldn't be.

So far as we can tell, the vast majority of magic really is just saying words and waving a wand. Very few spells apparently have a mental component. There's no reason for the correlation we see between intelligence and practical magical competence, nor any need for the theory that they learn at Hogwarts. Nor does there seem to be anywhere for talent to enter the equation, though we're often told that high end magic users have great talent.

And the role of practice is unclear too. For some reason, if you're bad at a spell (for apparently arbitrary reasons) and then cast it over and over again eventually you are good at that spell.

In short, what we're told about magic and what we see of magic don't match up. We're told it takes great skill to use well; all we see are people learning, essentially, a list of command words. It can't be denied that intelligence, knowledge, some kind of natural talent, and in the absence of talent then practice/hard work, lead to one being better at magic. The problem is that there is no real mechanism as for why.

Edit for Tehan's post:

What I really love about this is that in PS Hagrid could fly. She unashamedly retcon'd that one without even trying to rationalise it.

I had always assumed that these things only resembled the Muggle appliances in appearance, not in internal workings. E.g. magical radios don't use radio waves but rather some magical process that manages the same thing (a protean charm - the charm on the DA coins - applied to audio instead of text?).

 

I think that is the whole point. Magic causes the physical laws to fail. It is a far more powerful tool, and is governed by its own laws(which are hardly explained to us, but we know they exist). So, there is not co-existing. The engines in the knight bus are not powered by petrol. In fact, you could also say that the engine is not working at all. Magic is turning the wheels.

So was she supposed to describe in detail how Hagrid vanished from the platform? (he does in the book,doesn't he?)
There were plenty of other more important things going on. The people, the school, and a whole lot. There were always hints of things. IMO, quidditch made up for it anyways

 

This is a basic rundown of my problem with your theory of how magic in the potterverse works, Taure.

There is no fundamental 'It just negates physics' argument in the books. There's no explanation for how it works, sure, but when the majority of spells have a physical effect it implies there's an interaction with/by some physical force, not just a total lack of it. A levitation charm can't just be 'turning gravity off' if you can further control what your object does.

The only things we do have laid out for us as fundamental to magic in practice are what you just listed out; it's harder for some than for others, there's a correlation between intelligence (or rather, studying magic/magical academia) and competence, they need to learn theory in order to practice magic (implying that there is fundamental theory behind it all), wizards can be more and less talented at what you argue is simply incantation and wand-waving, and practice makes perfect.

That's what we get, as fact, from canon - or at least as much total fact as we can get. And it doesn't fit with 'it just is' as an overall theory, if there even is any overall theory.

 

Forgive me if I'm remembering things wrong here, but wasn't the "can't conjure food" thingy one of the five exceptions of Gamp's Law of Transfiguration? It doesn't have to make sense, or even shouldn't, if it's one of the few exceptions of an apparently otherwise universal law.

 

The inability to conjure food is part of Gamp's Law, not an exception.

Gamp's Law

What I don't understand:
Gamp's Law is a "law of elemental transfiguration" but the problem is actually with creating food out of nothing (conjuration?). Would there be a problem with transfiguring a pile of dirt into a steak?

 

Although in a certain sense "the levitation charm levitates an object" is negating physics by default, simply in that it's not the natural way of things.

But it's not that the mechanism of magic is via negating physics. It's that the effects of magic fly in the face of physics.

 

If I could find the quote referencing turning gravity off I would post, lol. But yeah, likely a misunderstanding (or I was thinking of a Harvest King response...)

Aye, I get that part of the argument, but my point is that it doesn't gel with what we're presented in canon, which Taure and then I listed out. It can't be any easier or harder for someone to learn if magic is just effect. It doesn't take practice to flick a switch. In fact, with the exception of the 'levio-sah' part, it isn't implied that mere pronunciation or wand movement is holding wizards back, nor is it implied that more precise incantation or wand motion is what makes McGonagall better at a charm than Ron (unless I'm outright mistaken on that point..?), but rather that magical talent, learning, theory and practice are something to do with the interaction with and use of magic itself rather than the Word + Movement = Spell. There's magical ability, not just memory, at play.

 

The magic system in Harry Potter is more or less consistent, which is not at all the same thing as being realistic/plausible. I wouldn't bother trying to make it more "realistic" -- the laws of physics as we understand them go out the window in the Potterverse, period.

I might try to fix some of the inconsistencies, mostly arbitrary rules Rowling created to serve a specific plot purpose. For example, Gamp's Law. You supposedly can't create food, but you can conjure plants and animals. (I know, it's been proposed that they're magical mirages, like leprechaun gold, but like gold, there are just too many ways magic could be used to acquire food to make it plausible that a wizard could starve unless stuck in the middle of a desert.)

 

I know this is an over-used explanation but magic doesn't require any explanation in the physical sense, that's why it's magic. It can fuck with physics all day long and I wouldn't bat an eyelash, it's when it fucks itself that there are issues.

Unfortunately Tehan is right, you only realise how messed up the system is when you actually try to write something, or you spend enough time reading new and original fanfiction.The universe can look look deep and well-constructed when it isn't, something very few pure canon fans will ever accept.

You know you have it bad when Jim Butcher answers questions about your magic system better than you can (I'm speaking of the need for Latin enchantations)

And don't even get me started on the issues Taure brought up, like the lack of any sort of 'feeling' or such when using magic. You say a few words, you swish a stick and shit just works, no pressure, no fatigue, little to no indication that you've bent the laws of physics at all.The lack of fatigue bother's me much less than the lack of feedback. As a Star Wars/Dresden Files it just bugs me that wizards seem to be totally dislocated from their power.

But the HP magic system can work- ignoring the fact that it does not make sense in the context of the larger world in any way- I think if you simply eliminate any and all of JKR limitations- Gamp's Law, flying, I would go as far as to say that you should eliminate the Killing Curse.

It doesn't fit in well to me.The only time not to use it would be when you needed to use spells with a wide area of effect. People go around inventing all these cool new spells which will probably not trump the Killing Curse in terms of firepower and are just as much a tainting influence on the soul.

I think the one fanon thing (at least I think it is fanon) I like is the idea of non-magical elements having different effects on magic. For example we see the horn in Xenophilius' house react explosively to magic. What if some materials- like gold or lead- are extremely magically resistant (which would explain the use of gold as a currency (speaking of which it probably isn't just gold being used anyway but a heavily charmed variation, which would prevent the economy from imploding)), while other materials are better for enchanting and such because they can 'hold on' to more spells and enchantments better.

I once started a story like that exploring the different ways that Smallville kryptonite could affect magic, given it's 1001 uses in the TV show, but like everything else I write, it petered off.

EDIT:

Well you could say that different magic requires different skills. A person dueling would need fast reflexes, lightning-fast judgement, and a sharp split-second focus; he would need to be able to will whatever spell he needed exactly that moment by accessing the relevant emotion ( when emotion is needed).

A transfiguration master would probably need to be good at visualization or whatever, there's very little information in canon about how exactly enchantment and the rest of it work in general so I might just be pulling sht out of my ass.

 

I'm going to go ahead and say that LotW mangled the system of magic into something that actually makes sense by giving Magic itself some form of sentience. I mean, we sorta assumed that magic somehow made decisions in canon given GoF, but for all we know it could have been checking off a list.

Also, I agree GL - it never made sense that most magic was difficult to learn or use given what we learned it canon. The way Harry does it in VINCET makes much more sense, if you ignore his spiel on feeling your magic and Dumbledore's lecture on his ability.

 

I think you're conflating two issues here:

1) How magic works.

2) How wizards use magic.

The problem of why different wizards have different competencies is not necessarily connected to the interface between magic and physics.

Even if magic is "just an effect" (i.e. works via no physical mechanism, it just makes things so), the process by which wizards trigger this effect may be complex.

Further, saying "it doesn't gel with canon" isn't really true, because, as I tried to point out in my post, canon tells us two conflicting stories about it. By everything we're told, the triggering process is complex. By everything we see, it isn't.

I'm not sure if this is a problem of inconsistency or incompleteness. It could be that additional information would resolve the apparent inconsistency to explain how the triggering process is complex like we're told, and why it seems like it isn't when we observe magic being performed.

(One possible explanation: though the knowledge of theory and understanding of magic takes no active part in the concious act of spell casting, the mere fact that you know it is subconsciously involved and makes the magic work better. This explains how older, experienced, magic users can pick up simple charms easily, but first years have trouble with them. The more experienced students have a better "mental backdrop" that their magic use takes place in. Completely fanon, but it shows that the apparent inconsistency is not fundamentally irreconcilable.)

 

The sense I always got from canon was that familiarity with a spell, through practice, increased your 'ability' to cast it. The instances where spells half-work (Harry learning accio for example) stand out to me to support this.

A weird analogy though it may be, can we relate magic to darts? Bare with me for a second (I'm watching the World Championship as I write this).

Anyone can throw a dart, it's a simple enough task to propel something forwards. However, it is a different task completely to hit the dart board, hit a specific number, hit a treble or the Bullseye. There is a chance that just by going for it you may get it right, 'winging' it may pay off now and again; specifically if the target is large. But this chance increases first with proper technique, and then exponentially with practice.

Now let's have the dart throwers be everyone with magical ability. The target is the effect of the magic, and the 'throw' is the use of magic. There are many ways to actually 'throw' and hit the 'target', but through specific technique and practice the chance of being successful is greater.

Fuck it, there could even be outside factors involved such as concentration, pressure and fatigue but this is how magic in the HP!verse seems to be to me. The fact that Dumbledore can achieve the same effect with a motion of his hand that someone else would require strong concentration and focused technique just tells me he's fucking good at darts/magic and has practised a lot.

TL;DR, Dumbledore = Phil Taylor and I'm drunk.