Just trying to sort things out .
This idea has never sat well with me, and in my own stories I'll often have char's with massive amounts of power available to them.
I was re-watching some old "Next Generation" episodes the other day, and realized that the character "Q" is the ultimate example that you can easily have power without consequence. For all intents and purposes, Q is a god who can do anything. He can alter reality to whatever he chooses, and he doesn't ever "break" a story.
I think that the key to having char's with limitless power is making sure that they are a "trickster" style character, with very little involved in the overall story. If one of the officer's of the Enterprise could be like Q, there would have been no suspence at all... but since Q acted much like the "trickster" from Native American lore, it seemed to work.
Sorry for rambling Just trying to sort things out .
And the cost of magic has nothing to do with how grand the power is. Q answered to a continuum. I seem to recall that during one episode, he pissed them off enough that they made him mortal.
I do agree that you can bend or break this rule better with minor characters and more specifically, with antagonists. The protagonists having to fight seemingly insurmountable odds can make a great story. Q was a pest that the crew had to use cunning and guile to overcome. If Q had been the captain of the ship, what a boring show! Heck, even if Q worked in the engine room but was generally on their side, it would have been a boring show.
How interesting would a story be from Q's perspective? This was expressed in the story where he was mortal. He said he'd simply alter the laws of reality and move the massive asteroid somewhere more convenient, and shrugged. No big deal. It becomes harder to develop the tension and conflict needed when power is free and unlimited. Humans merely intrigued Q. At any time, he could have simply made it so they never existed. He proved this in the series finale.
A cost is important, and it should be relative to the magic performed. But mind that cost can be many things. It can be time, it could be pain, it could be blood, and it could a steep learning curve.
Harry Potter's world doesn't have much cost for magic. Then again, neither does our own world. We may pay an electric bill for the ability to talk instantly over large distances, but we hardly give it much thought (except maybe when the price goes up.) Is that breaking a rule? I don't think so; everyone had access to it (mostly). The real power in Harry's world came from sacrifice. The kind of sacrifice that Dumbledore and Voldemort, and even Harry, displayed.
So when I think of cost in that statement, I'm pretty flexible. But I always have a cost for my magic.
It's interesting that if a char has this type of power and is a "good guy" the story is instantly boring, but if the omnipotent character is either evil or neutral, the story becomes much more exciting. An interesting dynamic of storytelling.
To answer lehollis' question, there was a book about Q from his perspective. It was pretty good. It had to do with him meeting up with powers more powerful than even his own. So, to make a story interesting from Q's perspective, you have to make it so he isn't omnipotent, one way or another. The story was called I,Q for anyone interested.
A much more salient point would be Pug in Feist's Riftwar series or Zed in Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule series. In both of these the wizards have almost god-like power with little or no cost to them. The books sell, but that still leaves it open to question whether that is the best possible storytelling.
In both instances, the author uses the rather hoary device of having the powerful wizard disappear, get lost, or simply decide not to help. Otherwise there is no problem since either can generally snap their fingers and POOF the problem is gone.
It is very hard to plot a believable conflict in a story in which an important character has nearly limitless power. I have very little patience with stories like these. How many times can Pug disappear before all you do is yawn and skip to the back to see when he shows back up? Well, obviously this is one of those irritating occasions when I agree with Mr. Card.
Yes there is a cost to power in my books but there may be none in yours and that, IMHO, is okay....
~Destiny
Or perhaps I'm limiting the usage of the word "cost." I envision "magic has a cost" in a way like "in order to use magic, you must lose something for the exchange" like requiring a blood sacrifice, or losing your memory, or shortening your lifespan, etc etc.
On the other hand, my WIP is more similar to the Harry Potter world. Some people can do magic. Some can't. Some are better than others, even since birth. It takes some training to do it right, but once you get it down, there's no real cost for using magic.
At the same time, I do believe that there should be limitations on what magic can accomplish. As people have mentioned, having a Q-like character as a "good guy" would pretty much make any plot developments irrelevent, and ruin the story. But at the same time, at the end of my WIP, one of the characters ends up (not exactly on purpose) being instilled with divine "unthinkable" magical power, above and beyond what anyone else in the world. The trick, in writing the sequel (which I'm currently doing) is figuring out, even with "near-absolute" power, what he is still vulnerable to, and making *that* the next challenge.
For that matter, such an absolute power can't be good for the human psyche. Even without any more external antagonists, a story might follow the saying "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Heck, with absolute power, maybe that "good guy Q" would actually BECOME the antagonist. After all, if you or I were truly omnipotent, how bored would you soon become? How many months, years, decades, would it take before we all transformed into the role of the trickster, messing with lesser beings just to see how they react?
I guess I'll stop my ramblings now too, but in short, you're not the only person to think that "magic must have a cost" just doesn't feel right.
I just finished Godslayer (Banewreaker and Godslayer are unimaginably better than her Kushiel series imo). In in the magic is unimaginably powerful--but the cost is horrific. What is the true cost of using such power? How much does one have to suffer for it?
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quote:
Or perhaps I'm limiting the usage of the word "cost." I envision "magic has a cost" in a way like "in order to use magic, you must lose something for the exchange" like requiring a blood sacrifice, or losing your memory, or shortening your lifespan, etc etc.
Well, it can be done that way, but I happen to think that is a more shallow cost. How much might a being have to give up? What might be the ultimate consequences?
The idea that any great power is without consequences is just unthinkable. In real life, our "magic" has consequences--how large we may not even yet begin to know. Chernobyl was certainly a consequence and therefor a cost as an fairly simple and straightforward example.
Nothing comes without a price.
[This message has been edited by JeanneT (edited September 13, 2007).]
[This message has been edited by JeanneT (edited September 13, 2007).]
My personal feeling is that cost is just a limitation. I think saying magic should have limits works, too.
If all magic can do is put a little red dot on the wall, does it really need a cost? I don't think it does--because it's so limited that a cost isn't needed. (Even a modern laser pointer has a cost, but most people would consider it to be negligible.)
If magic can split a city in half, then it's not very limited. So it should have a cost (unless it's the bad guy we're talking about, maybe. Even then, I recommend a cost.)
So cost and limit kind of go hand in hand, a sort of balance. When one is small, the other should probably be a bit bigger.
If you consider Harry Potter, could the regular magic of the everyday wizard do much more than we can do in our modern world with magic? A few things, perhaps, but we could do things they thought were fascinating. To me Harry's everyday magic setting wasn't so different from characters in the modern world.
(I liked Q, especially in later episodes, though I dropped out of regular "Star Trek" watching after "First Contact"---much too gory for my tastes.)
Simply put, the POV character may not even know what the costs are, since it may be a form of magic they do not have access to or knowledge of, and therefor it would be out of character for them to know what the dangers are. I think that what Card meant, was that any character, POV or otherwise, who uses magic, would inherently need to know the consequences, but others would not. Otherwise, the characterization would be incomplete and unbelievable.
Now, it has been suggested here that the costs can be somewhat less physical, as in Q being bored. I agree that that kind of thing can work, as long as that boredom creates opportunities in the story for conflict or suspense, as it often did in the Q episodes. Physical consequences are obvious, while other consequences might take a little more thought to present well, but I imagine, such usage could be rewarding.
[This message has been edited by luapc (edited September 13, 2007).]
In my opinion, magic should have some form of cost. If I remember from Harry Potter there is a slight cost, in that whoever is casting the spell would experience a little fatigue if the spell was too complicated or if they did it all day. The cost was very minute, though. Having a cost for magic makes the effort more humane - which of us can perform tasks without paying some cost, even if the costs are small?
Similarly, I think that near God-like powers are a bit of a waste of time. Who can relate to the ability to change physics to meet your needs, or crack a planet in half down the middle? It makes for great special effects, but it doesn't help with immersion.
Jayson Merryfield
And as someone pointed out (Christine?) it's much more interesting when there's costs associated.
[This message has been edited by annepin (edited September 15, 2007).]
A similar issue was raised in "The Mirror of Erised", a chapter of Harry Potter. Love is the source of the greatest power in the Potterverse, but not if it turns you into an eemo, pining away in front of a visual pacifier.
Well, yeah. Power doesn't have a cost, everyone has quite a bit of power, but most of us don't do anything with it. We all have the same number of hours in the day as Orson Scott Card, but apparently none of us have used it to write dozens of best selling novels. Is it because he is sacrificing squirrels in his backyard to gain literary power? Probably not. He just hasn't let his fear of what other people think block him creatively. The way I see it, anyway.
What if the cost of magic was your humanity. The more powerful you become, the less human you are. It works for me because any cost of magic has to apply to everyone, not just the good guy. So, the reason the bad guy is so powerful is because as he gained power he lost his humanity. You can see parallels in our world with Hitler and Stalin. They gained so much power that the question for them became not, what should I do, but what can I do?
Looking back, this cost works for what I've already written because the characters with less power are still pretty human-like, where the ones with more power, while not necessarily evil, are more apathetic. They just don't care what happens to the world.
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"well, why don't they just conjure up a snazzy deus ex machina?"
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Is it because he is sacrificing squirrels in his backyard to gain literary power?
Jayson Merryfield
The catch is that to beat the antagonist the protagonist would have to risk the same thing in using magic to defeat the antagonist.
Instead of saying that magic should have a cost, I should say something like the author must know when, where and how to give power (not magic only) a cost and/or limit so as to make the story interesting.
quote:
Well, yeah. Power doesn't have a cost, everyone has quite a bit of power, but most of us don't do anything with it. We all have the same number of hours in the day as Orson Scott Card, but apparently none of us have used it to write dozens of best selling novels. Is it because he is sacrificing squirrels in his backyard to gain literary power? Probably not.
No, instead of sacrificing squirrels, Mr. Card is sacrificing his time and his energy at the cost of other things he could use those for.
EVERYTHING has a cost, even if a minimal one. If I walk across the room the cost in a tiny bit of energy. When I sit here at my computer, the cost is my time and the money to pay for the equipment, the use of the electricity and the broadband.
Absolutely nothing in life is free.
When dealing with uber power or god like abilities the sacrifice or cost is generally going to be in there humanity or ability to relate to humanity.
You see this in Hollywood/Washington and in the very wealthy. The influence and power they have accumulated insulates them from the masses and they can no longer relate to what it's like to wonder where the rent money is coming from or how they are gonna feed there family today.
In general this is not a cost that is going to trouble the individual paying it, unless they notice it early on. It will however, trouble the reader and the characters surrounding them.
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EVERYTHING has a cost, even if a minimal one. If I walk across the room the cost in a tiny bit of energy. When I sit here at my computer, the cost is my time and the money to pay for the equipment, the use of the electricity and the broadband.
I had a tantrum to get what I wanted at Home Depot a couple of weeks ago. That's one way to use power. The cost of that was I have to drive a little further to go to Lowe's instead. But I've always liked Lowe's better anyway. I don't have to drive to Lowe's. I just never want to go into that Home Depot again. It would be funny if I actually wind up running into other people who are avoiding the Home Depot because of my tantrum. Oh well. Some things, it will be a relief for everyone to see if there is playback in the afterlife. Because I just wish so much I could make it right and there is no way, that I can think of, that I can without complicating matters for any employees I may have gotten in trouble.
Hopefully their manager said "That's okay, that lady was clearly just crazy, it's not your fault".
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I don't know what TANSTAAFL is.
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Get a copy and read it, if you haven't.
I just put it there, though.
Quote: A much more salient point would be Pug in Feist's Riftwar series or Zed in Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule series. In both of these the wizards have almost god-like power with little or no cost to them. The books sell, but that still leaves it open to question whether that is the best possible storytelling.
Both Pug & Thomas (another character in the riftwar saga) pay a price for their power/magic. Both give up part of their humanity (especially Thomas). Pug has to pull his power from within himself. I think that their price for power is just more subtle than say someone who sacrifices squirrels.
I do agree though that in some of the later books in this same world that it seems that Pug has all this power without paying anything from it - because he already has paid for his power in the earlier books.
walt
BTW - how do you put the quotes so they are so small and indented a bit.
Another thing is that Tomas didn't give up his humanity. He looses it for a while, but was given it back. He ended up paying no price for the power.
Probably the problem of making characters and their magic so powerful that no problem really exists for them is another issue. But the only way to balance a character having a huge amount of power is to make the cost of using the power huge. Otherwise, nothing is any challenge and all problems end up being solved with a snap of their fingers.
I very much prefer the kind of cost in Godslayer where Satoris uses so much of his power that he left himself vulnerable. He knew he was doing it, and it was a terrible price he paid for the choices he made.
Let's just say if you take the cost out of using power, then in my opinion you take most of the depth out of stories.
So I do agree with the TANSTAAFL theory.
[This message has been edited by JeanneT (edited September 15, 2007).]
quote:
BTW - how do you put the quotes so they are so small and indented a bit.
walt.xeppuk, what you do is put the word
quote
inside of square brackets [ ] at the beginning of what you want to quote, then put
/quote
inside of square brackets at the end of what you want to quote.
It is also the difference, to me, in characters like Gandalf and Saruman
Every single one of us has god-like power that doesn't cost us much if anything. But since everyone else also has similar god-like power, we don't consider it magic.
Me, I like the magic of breathing. And having wounds that heal. And being able to calm a child's fear with a single kiss.
(I had written that I liked the magic of healing - ambiguous. If I had meant I have the power to spontaneously and rapidly cause others to heal, that would be pretty cool and would demand a pretty serious cost (other than getting worked to the bone because everyone wanted me to do it for them...))
[This message has been edited by meg.stout (edited September 16, 2007).]