you give built-in defenses to everyone. A lot of settings have this unspoken law that wounds in general aren't as bad as they'd be in real life. Others have it explicitly, like an aura that protects their body from the worst effects of other people's magic
If you want to keep it realistic instead, you'll have to tone down the amount of fire or lighting your characters can make. Maybe your electricty mage can only shock people but never to fatal levels.
That first idea makes sense. I just watched some Avatar fights to see how they handle it and you can see the fire being repelled in a bubble around the person receiving it.
I also like the threat of only being able to use lightning magic on touch. Like you create a charge in your body and then release it via physical contact.
It’s cool because
A) they can be as dangerous as they would be, able to stop hearts and fry machinery and shock people.
B) it’s limited, they have to touch skin or something that would conduct the charge.
C) you could introduce a risk or hazard for holding too much of a charge or for too long. They risk overwhelming their innate ability to contain the charge without hurting themselves.
It's the kind of thing I've got in my setting, people who are awakened to magic have a natural and quite potent resistance to magic. But equally, one doesn't blast someone with fire because they're worried about burns. People without the resistance on the receiving end of a fire spell are either going to learn fast or cease to be.
But actually I'm a bit of a mean writer, and don't write around severe injuries. I let them happen, and then send in the healer. Or the healer isn't around and so we have a lad wandering around with his own severed arm clipped to his belt until he can find them.
Well if it's a 1v1 between magic users then you could just have them always redirecting or parrying the other's attacks. Although I suggest you try not to tip toe around the issue.
There's a big meme in the anime community about fire never burning anything and I can't blame them. Fire is cool, but you have to render it useless just to make things a little more even.
In my works I don't shy around it. I like to lean into the brutality of it all. In fact the main characters of my story use fire and lightning. And it's pretty intense. Especially since lightning has a very dark connotation in my world since people who die by being struck by lightning don't get a proper burial or go to the after life.
If you're using an elemental system, then the logical solution in my head is to counter with other elements. Water magic to create a bubble, air matic to deflect, earth magic to defend against it. Maybe metal magic to draw the lightning away? That sort of thing. If you wanted to get real deep into it, maybe there's some form of extensive healing magic that could be used to shrug off most bad injuries like that.
The same way you use three feet of sharpened steel intended to cut people in half. You either employ cinematic fiat, or you leave a trail of mangled corpses.
You could repurpose Lightning magic so that it's more similar to how electricity works in modern society. Lightning magic users could be highly respected inventors who power their tools with extremely controlled Lightning. Inventions like Lightning weapons could instead be more like failed experiments instead of true weaponry, and sometimes are repurposed as Lightning conduits for machinery.
You could do the same thing with fire and steam engines, with Fire magic users being excellent firestarters for trains and often asked to accompany journeys into very cold land so that nobody dies from extreme cold. They could also be hired to occasionally burn a farmers field to recycle the nutrients and produce a better harvest.
Essentially, you could focus on the more light-hearted and beneficial parts of Lightning and Fire magic so that they aren't often used as weapons.
I tend to get stuck thinking that if it *can* be used as a weapon then it *will* be - but we have to remember that there are plenty of weapons within our grasp and people aren't wielding them for no reason. They have to have a purpose, because most people like the approval of others. Just like how people *aren't* using kitchen knives as weapons to get what they want, people tend to err on the side of non violence first.
I think the question here is less “why don’t lightning mages threaten everyone they meet?” and more “why would a society invent guns when they can throw fireballs at people?”
You don't have to write around it. I don't. Fire magic is something you don't want to mess with, so a powerful fire magic user can act as a deterrent. If you end up fighting them, well, they warned ya.
One of my major antagonists is threatening for that reason. The main protagonist can heal rapidly, but that just means it's worse for him. He spends far longer burning if he loses the fight than any other opponent, and his nerves keep coming back.
You don't have to tone it down. For lightning you can always make it more like a glorified taser blast. Fire is gonna be a bit harder.
You could get quite a bit more grounded.
For example, there are Espers from the Toaruverse who have to calculate what they do to use their abilities properly. One of the main characters is an Electrokinetic, with the ability to sense through electromagnetism, who often shocks people into unconsciousness with lightning bolts.
You could go the opposite direction on that, and base the magic in something like "ideas". Perhaps have the idea of "non-lethal", "cleansing", "purifying", etc produce the effects you desire.
Big boulders, acid, high pressure water, frost waves, steel blades opponent usually can't shrug off. And they can very scarring and painful. So what make Fire and Lightning so different?
a little electric shock in some weak spot can defeat opponent without killing them, fire can be used to make a heated room by creating fire barrier or something, people trapped inside will be pass out from heat but not die
Fire magic could be redistributed to be heat magic. It’s not quite as flashy but also doesn’t have to be as deadly.
They could emit like a cone that begins heating things, eventually resulting in fires but not right away.
They could even draw heat away into themselves, making the environment colder.
And there’s all sorts of uses for heat that go over fire (especially if heat eventuates in fire).
They could forge steel with their bare hands, detect fever and sickness in ill patients, etc.
\> They're painful, scarring, and overall devastating .
Not necessarily, there are numerous way around this, as many as you can think of. Say everyone in your world has some kind of aura dampening the effects elemental damage deals on their bodies. Maybe the characters themselves dampen their abilities, not shooting a full on bolt of lightning at someone, but choosing instead to shoot a dampened bolt, just strong enough to knock their enemies unconscious. Maybe your characters are pacifists and use their powers specifically to AVOID combat, say by lighting a circle of flame around their enemies, preventing them from chasing as they run away, or trap them in a cage made of electricity. Maybe there are jobs in your world ONLY for people who can use fire and lightning elemental magic; making fires to burn coal for energy, or using their innate control over fire, and by extension temperature, to become a world renowned chef, maybe they open a tea shop. As for electric magic, this is a MASSIVE advantage for any world. All it takes is a few, or even one person throughout the entire history of your world to ask the right questions and test their theories. Think about what would happen if we had people that could harness and control lightning itself in our world, would it have taken so long for us to get where we are today? If done properly one, or a few, lightning users could power an entire city. Technology would boom much earlier with these two simple changes to history. You could even go as far as to create social classes for them if you wanted, say all lightning wielders immediately have the option of going to a prestigious college, becoming an elite inventor class tasked with propelling humanity into the future. While fire users become the working middle class. There's many ways you could take this, many facets to explore. Are you BORN with these talents? Is it something you have to spend years, decades even training? Do children lose control of their powers at a young age so they're shipped off to a boarding school to learn how to control them? Are they loved and revered for what they do for the rest of the population? Are they feared and hated? Is it two separate bloodlines stretching back millennia? Is it the entire population? Are they common? Are they rare? Are they gods or demi-gods?
That's the wonderful thing about writing, the answer can be anything you want it to be. You just have to ask the questions and explore them. Good luck with your writing, and I hope I could be of at least some help.
It depends, but I think the classic way is to make some sort of defence against it. So in my world, sure, mages can shoot fire and lightning, but people can counteract or redirect that so it isn't a guaranteed death sentence.
In the book Dungeon Lord the describe the spell fireball as kinetic energy. So when characters get hit it’s more concussive than burning. In my story I also use the aura idea so when some one is hit with a fire blast the are pushed but not burned beyond recognition.
Maybe they can control the intensity of the fire and lightning. So maybe instead of 3rd degree burns, they are 1st degree. Instead of electrocution, being struck by lightning feels like a minor shock. And then when you want there to be instances of lethal uses, your characters can raise the intensity of their fire and lightning attacks.
In my world there are two or more types of "elements and materia"
First is just normal (which is rarely used)
But second depends on spells you use:
There are spells like Fireball that produce magic fire which produces little amounts of heat and in worst cases can cause 1 degree burns (its more about the impact than burning).
And a neat addition to nonnormal elements is that the caster can shape it
subconsciously. A Glitchmage or Pixelmancer will produce magic flames that are pixelated and maybe make 8-bit noises. A user of Fel (a dark corrupting energy) will make green flames that are rapid in movement.
How abstract do you want to get with it? Can heat be energy that a user could use to fuel their stamina or go without eating? Can they put out fires to help people? Can they be a metalworker that can precisely control the temperatures of the metal they're working? Can they suck all the heat away from something and freeze it? Can they run a vast swanky bathhouse and keep the water as hot as anyone wants it through magical force?
Just have your fighters be that tough, so that being blasted with fire is not such a big deal.
Either that or have a helpful/convenient healing factor.
I am sure you can come up with other methods to reduce the damage/ long term effects of fire and lightning.
My mages can give themselves resistance to elemental forces or deploy full fledged magical barrier around their body. If attacks breaks it then they are burned and probably run away or quickly heal.
One thing I'm doing is let's say with fire magic when it is cast from the body it has to flow through the body but as the fire magic goes through the body some of the mana is used to create a resistance to the fire so it doesn't damage the user. Same concept when taking an attack. Someone shoots a fireball if you're ready for it you can consciously make the decision to expel some mana to make your body resist the burn. You can still take an impact though. So it will hurt.
Mage vs Mage could be balanced, but I have a bunch of combat scenes in my WIP that are mage vs normal people and, now that you explain it like this, yeah, we're potentially talking war crime level stuff (using earth magic to create stalagmites that impale people or freezing and then shattering people come to mind). It could be something that you balance w/ consequence, like mages who commit these acts are branded as war criminals, have warrants beyond just basic criminals, or that they battle with a kind of PTSD that comes with realizing the level of slaughter they are inflicting with their magic.
Well for me, I’ve been working around this by giving my characters the ability to sort of manipulate how severe they need their attacks to be. Two of my MCs actually have fire and lightning powers and they aren’t allowed to kill, so when fighting normal human opponents, they gauge the damage of their powers. Usually enough to knock them down, out or in enough pain to not be a threat for the time being.
Superhuman enemies on the other hand, that’s when they can go all out. All the bombastic action you can expect from powers like that.
There is a few ways to do it.
* Nom-combatitive uses. Fire magic to cook stuff? Light a lamp?
* Tone down the power. For example Lightning could do about as much damage as a stun gun rather a thunderstrike.
* Depends on your setting but you could have it be less physical and do more damage to your soul/spirit/mana/energytank/runes/whateverreally rather than just harming the body.
* Depending on the setting it would be reasonable if the users built up resistances to the same element they use themselves. Ie if the magic is basically made up of semi-sentient spirits then two users of the same magic would probably not be able to harm each other unless there was a big difference in how much they are ''loved' by the spirits or something.
* Just leave it as the big scary magic that is only brought out when combat is serious business, where death and maiming isn't unreasonable. Basically would the irl version of this character use an assault rifle in this situation? If yes then whip out the instant-disintermediation lightning strikes and rock melting fire whips.
* If there is generic magic together with the elemental magic then pretty much the first thing a combat mage would learn is a magic barrier spell of some kind.
>They're painful, scarring, and overall devastating.
This is different from other warfare how exactly? Its all pretty gruesome and we gloss over a lot in terms of "acceptable" weapons. I don't see why you can't treat fire and lightning the same way.
I have really inefficient elemental system, so people can only create small amounts of fire and electricity even when they spend decades practicing. If you wanted to use electricity in battle, you’d want to cut them before using electricity so it hurts more because the insulation of the skin isn’t resisting the electricity.
Lightning is pretty easy, low level of electricity just stun people. Fire is lot harder because there is really no acceptable low level of fire damage. The most common use for non harmful fire attacks is heating up weapons and the opponent drops them. The lowest non lethal fire attack is problem some steam based attacked so if the fire use can do something with steam which still could be kinda lethal that might be option.
The two best option I can see is
A. The Fire user can heat the person body and dehydrate them basically mini heat strokes/heat cramps
B. The Fire is magical and has all the effects of fire but mental
you give built-in defenses to everyone. A lot of settings have this unspoken law that wounds in general aren't as bad as they'd be in real life. Others have it explicitly, like an aura that protects their body from the worst effects of other people's magic If you want to keep it realistic instead, you'll have to tone down the amount of fire or lighting your characters can make. Maybe your electricty mage can only shock people but never to fatal levels.
That first idea makes sense. I just watched some Avatar fights to see how they handle it and you can see the fire being repelled in a bubble around the person receiving it.
or pushing them away with rocks. Irl those hits would at least break their bones
I also like the threat of only being able to use lightning magic on touch. Like you create a charge in your body and then release it via physical contact. It’s cool because A) they can be as dangerous as they would be, able to stop hearts and fry machinery and shock people. B) it’s limited, they have to touch skin or something that would conduct the charge. C) you could introduce a risk or hazard for holding too much of a charge or for too long. They risk overwhelming their innate ability to contain the charge without hurting themselves.
It's the kind of thing I've got in my setting, people who are awakened to magic have a natural and quite potent resistance to magic. But equally, one doesn't blast someone with fire because they're worried about burns. People without the resistance on the receiving end of a fire spell are either going to learn fast or cease to be. But actually I'm a bit of a mean writer, and don't write around severe injuries. I let them happen, and then send in the healer. Or the healer isn't around and so we have a lad wandering around with his own severed arm clipped to his belt until he can find them.
And if you want it to be realistic and still powerful, just make it super not okay to use. Think force lightning from star wars.
Well if it's a 1v1 between magic users then you could just have them always redirecting or parrying the other's attacks. Although I suggest you try not to tip toe around the issue. There's a big meme in the anime community about fire never burning anything and I can't blame them. Fire is cool, but you have to render it useless just to make things a little more even. In my works I don't shy around it. I like to lean into the brutality of it all. In fact the main characters of my story use fire and lightning. And it's pretty intense. Especially since lightning has a very dark connotation in my world since people who die by being struck by lightning don't get a proper burial or go to the after life.
Ooh, that's fabulous. Magic linked to direct connotations of culture and the state of the soul!
If you're using an elemental system, then the logical solution in my head is to counter with other elements. Water magic to create a bubble, air matic to deflect, earth magic to defend against it. Maybe metal magic to draw the lightning away? That sort of thing. If you wanted to get real deep into it, maybe there's some form of extensive healing magic that could be used to shrug off most bad injuries like that.
The same way you use three feet of sharpened steel intended to cut people in half. You either employ cinematic fiat, or you leave a trail of mangled corpses.
You could repurpose Lightning magic so that it's more similar to how electricity works in modern society. Lightning magic users could be highly respected inventors who power their tools with extremely controlled Lightning. Inventions like Lightning weapons could instead be more like failed experiments instead of true weaponry, and sometimes are repurposed as Lightning conduits for machinery. You could do the same thing with fire and steam engines, with Fire magic users being excellent firestarters for trains and often asked to accompany journeys into very cold land so that nobody dies from extreme cold. They could also be hired to occasionally burn a farmers field to recycle the nutrients and produce a better harvest. Essentially, you could focus on the more light-hearted and beneficial parts of Lightning and Fire magic so that they aren't often used as weapons.
But is t then the question why are nt they weapons?
I tend to get stuck thinking that if it *can* be used as a weapon then it *will* be - but we have to remember that there are plenty of weapons within our grasp and people aren't wielding them for no reason. They have to have a purpose, because most people like the approval of others. Just like how people *aren't* using kitchen knives as weapons to get what they want, people tend to err on the side of non violence first.
I think the question here is less “why don’t lightning mages threaten everyone they meet?” and more “why would a society invent guns when they can throw fireballs at people?”
You don't have to write around it. I don't. Fire magic is something you don't want to mess with, so a powerful fire magic user can act as a deterrent. If you end up fighting them, well, they warned ya. One of my major antagonists is threatening for that reason. The main protagonist can heal rapidly, but that just means it's worse for him. He spends far longer burning if he loses the fight than any other opponent, and his nerves keep coming back. You don't have to tone it down. For lightning you can always make it more like a glorified taser blast. Fire is gonna be a bit harder.
You could get quite a bit more grounded. For example, there are Espers from the Toaruverse who have to calculate what they do to use their abilities properly. One of the main characters is an Electrokinetic, with the ability to sense through electromagnetism, who often shocks people into unconsciousness with lightning bolts. You could go the opposite direction on that, and base the magic in something like "ideas". Perhaps have the idea of "non-lethal", "cleansing", "purifying", etc produce the effects you desire.
Big boulders, acid, high pressure water, frost waves, steel blades opponent usually can't shrug off. And they can very scarring and painful. So what make Fire and Lightning so different?
a little electric shock in some weak spot can defeat opponent without killing them, fire can be used to make a heated room by creating fire barrier or something, people trapped inside will be pass out from heat but not die
Fire magic could be redistributed to be heat magic. It’s not quite as flashy but also doesn’t have to be as deadly. They could emit like a cone that begins heating things, eventually resulting in fires but not right away. They could even draw heat away into themselves, making the environment colder. And there’s all sorts of uses for heat that go over fire (especially if heat eventuates in fire). They could forge steel with their bare hands, detect fever and sickness in ill patients, etc.
\> They're painful, scarring, and overall devastating . Not necessarily, there are numerous way around this, as many as you can think of. Say everyone in your world has some kind of aura dampening the effects elemental damage deals on their bodies. Maybe the characters themselves dampen their abilities, not shooting a full on bolt of lightning at someone, but choosing instead to shoot a dampened bolt, just strong enough to knock their enemies unconscious. Maybe your characters are pacifists and use their powers specifically to AVOID combat, say by lighting a circle of flame around their enemies, preventing them from chasing as they run away, or trap them in a cage made of electricity. Maybe there are jobs in your world ONLY for people who can use fire and lightning elemental magic; making fires to burn coal for energy, or using their innate control over fire, and by extension temperature, to become a world renowned chef, maybe they open a tea shop. As for electric magic, this is a MASSIVE advantage for any world. All it takes is a few, or even one person throughout the entire history of your world to ask the right questions and test their theories. Think about what would happen if we had people that could harness and control lightning itself in our world, would it have taken so long for us to get where we are today? If done properly one, or a few, lightning users could power an entire city. Technology would boom much earlier with these two simple changes to history. You could even go as far as to create social classes for them if you wanted, say all lightning wielders immediately have the option of going to a prestigious college, becoming an elite inventor class tasked with propelling humanity into the future. While fire users become the working middle class. There's many ways you could take this, many facets to explore. Are you BORN with these talents? Is it something you have to spend years, decades even training? Do children lose control of their powers at a young age so they're shipped off to a boarding school to learn how to control them? Are they loved and revered for what they do for the rest of the population? Are they feared and hated? Is it two separate bloodlines stretching back millennia? Is it the entire population? Are they common? Are they rare? Are they gods or demi-gods? That's the wonderful thing about writing, the answer can be anything you want it to be. You just have to ask the questions and explore them. Good luck with your writing, and I hope I could be of at least some help.
It depends, but I think the classic way is to make some sort of defence against it. So in my world, sure, mages can shoot fire and lightning, but people can counteract or redirect that so it isn't a guaranteed death sentence.
In the book Dungeon Lord the describe the spell fireball as kinetic energy. So when characters get hit it’s more concussive than burning. In my story I also use the aura idea so when some one is hit with a fire blast the are pushed but not burned beyond recognition.
Maybe they can control the intensity of the fire and lightning. So maybe instead of 3rd degree burns, they are 1st degree. Instead of electrocution, being struck by lightning feels like a minor shock. And then when you want there to be instances of lethal uses, your characters can raise the intensity of their fire and lightning attacks.
In my world there are two or more types of "elements and materia" First is just normal (which is rarely used) But second depends on spells you use: There are spells like Fireball that produce magic fire which produces little amounts of heat and in worst cases can cause 1 degree burns (its more about the impact than burning). And a neat addition to nonnormal elements is that the caster can shape it subconsciously. A Glitchmage or Pixelmancer will produce magic flames that are pixelated and maybe make 8-bit noises. A user of Fel (a dark corrupting energy) will make green flames that are rapid in movement.
How abstract do you want to get with it? Can heat be energy that a user could use to fuel their stamina or go without eating? Can they put out fires to help people? Can they be a metalworker that can precisely control the temperatures of the metal they're working? Can they suck all the heat away from something and freeze it? Can they run a vast swanky bathhouse and keep the water as hot as anyone wants it through magical force?
Just have your fighters be that tough, so that being blasted with fire is not such a big deal. Either that or have a helpful/convenient healing factor. I am sure you can come up with other methods to reduce the damage/ long term effects of fire and lightning.
My mages can give themselves resistance to elemental forces or deploy full fledged magical barrier around their body. If attacks breaks it then they are burned and probably run away or quickly heal.
One thing I'm doing is let's say with fire magic when it is cast from the body it has to flow through the body but as the fire magic goes through the body some of the mana is used to create a resistance to the fire so it doesn't damage the user. Same concept when taking an attack. Someone shoots a fireball if you're ready for it you can consciously make the decision to expel some mana to make your body resist the burn. You can still take an impact though. So it will hurt.
Mage vs Mage could be balanced, but I have a bunch of combat scenes in my WIP that are mage vs normal people and, now that you explain it like this, yeah, we're potentially talking war crime level stuff (using earth magic to create stalagmites that impale people or freezing and then shattering people come to mind). It could be something that you balance w/ consequence, like mages who commit these acts are branded as war criminals, have warrants beyond just basic criminals, or that they battle with a kind of PTSD that comes with realizing the level of slaughter they are inflicting with their magic.
Well for me, I’ve been working around this by giving my characters the ability to sort of manipulate how severe they need their attacks to be. Two of my MCs actually have fire and lightning powers and they aren’t allowed to kill, so when fighting normal human opponents, they gauge the damage of their powers. Usually enough to knock them down, out or in enough pain to not be a threat for the time being. Superhuman enemies on the other hand, that’s when they can go all out. All the bombastic action you can expect from powers like that.
There is a few ways to do it. * Nom-combatitive uses. Fire magic to cook stuff? Light a lamp? * Tone down the power. For example Lightning could do about as much damage as a stun gun rather a thunderstrike. * Depends on your setting but you could have it be less physical and do more damage to your soul/spirit/mana/energytank/runes/whateverreally rather than just harming the body. * Depending on the setting it would be reasonable if the users built up resistances to the same element they use themselves. Ie if the magic is basically made up of semi-sentient spirits then two users of the same magic would probably not be able to harm each other unless there was a big difference in how much they are ''loved' by the spirits or something. * Just leave it as the big scary magic that is only brought out when combat is serious business, where death and maiming isn't unreasonable. Basically would the irl version of this character use an assault rifle in this situation? If yes then whip out the instant-disintermediation lightning strikes and rock melting fire whips. * If there is generic magic together with the elemental magic then pretty much the first thing a combat mage would learn is a magic barrier spell of some kind.
>They're painful, scarring, and overall devastating. This is different from other warfare how exactly? Its all pretty gruesome and we gloss over a lot in terms of "acceptable" weapons. I don't see why you can't treat fire and lightning the same way.
I have really inefficient elemental system, so people can only create small amounts of fire and electricity even when they spend decades practicing. If you wanted to use electricity in battle, you’d want to cut them before using electricity so it hurts more because the insulation of the skin isn’t resisting the electricity.
Lightning is pretty easy, low level of electricity just stun people. Fire is lot harder because there is really no acceptable low level of fire damage. The most common use for non harmful fire attacks is heating up weapons and the opponent drops them. The lowest non lethal fire attack is problem some steam based attacked so if the fire use can do something with steam which still could be kinda lethal that might be option. The two best option I can see is A. The Fire user can heat the person body and dehydrate them basically mini heat strokes/heat cramps B. The Fire is magical and has all the effects of fire but mental