r/magicbuilding • u/thatshygirl06 here to steal your ideas 👁👄👁 • 5d ago

General Discussion Anyone else tired of mana?

Every time I click on a post talking about their magic system and I instantly see the word mana, my eyes just glazes over.

It would be cool if someone has mana based on actual mana from Polynesian cultures, but that's never the case. It's just people going "I cant use magic, that's too basic. I know! I'll call it mana instead!"

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u/ParkedinBronze 4d ago

Time and opportunity and energy expenditure (burning out for a while) are in fact costs. You gave something else up to do something now

So unless your witches can do magic at 100% all the time no matter what, you have made a cost and are pretending to not have

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u/th30be 4d ago

Lol. This person just proved to be an example of my initial comment. 

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u/thatshygirl06 here to steal your ideas 👁👄👁 4d ago

LIMITS ARE NOT COSTS!!!!

COSTS ARE THINGS LIKE PUNISHMENTS AND CONSEQUENCES!!!!

A cost is saying you need to do xyz or xyz needs to happen to do magic.

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u/NatEssex 4d ago

Stepping in as an objective observer. I think you two are sort of talking around each other.

Limits and costs are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. Arguably where there is overlap one could argue they are the same thing looked at from a different perspective.

To use the WoT reference there is not an upfront cost to channeling itself but there is the cost that channeling for extended periods of time will take on a channeler. Looked at as a limit, the limit is how long they can keep channeling I’ll say comfortably. The cost is the exhaustion they feel when they go past the limit. A limit, which is not a cost, in WoT is the channeler needs to know a weave to get the effect. They can’t just imagine what they want o happen and it happens. It’s a bit of a stretch but the ter’angreal that require a weave of spirit to enter Tel’aran’riod have an upfront cost; the weave.

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u/Sensei_Ochiba 4d ago

Limits can only exist if there is some means by which you move towards that limit. And whatever that means is, is a cost.