x4740NWhat is a bad writing trope you hate in fantasy fiction ?
Treating wands like guns in fights instead of using spells creatively
HadriscusOh yes…this is SO lazy. There’s this immense potential for creative choreography that’s left untapped. Directors should really consult dungeon masters for this kind of stuff
There’s a meme floating around that suggests taking inspiration for wand using from conductors and I cannot stress how amazing every fight in Harry potter would have been if this was the standard.
Bringing Harry Potter into this, the fact that they showed they do know how to do this, when Dumbledore and Voldemort fought in the 5th movie, makes it all the more annoying that almost every other fight in the series was just shooting blasts and energy beams at each other
Except, of all people, those idiots Crabbe and Goyle busting out a living dragon made of fire. I mean, they shouldn’t have, but they managed it.
Nothing but direct strikes from aurors and death eaters.
They actually pull this off well in Frieren. There are tons of different and unique spells but the one the MC always uses is the basic magic attack spell because she is stupidly overpowered she doesn’t need to be creative.
To me that is lazy writing. Specfic spells should have a set damage unless they are upcast. Maybe this is just the dnd player in me that thinks that though.
I think the other person doesn’t word it well. First, the fighting isn’t the main plot of the story, its more about everything in between. The MCs are powerful, but still need to be careful in their fights. or they will die.
The story doesn’t want dragon ball fights that are 20 chapters long, or have an impassible monster that de-rail the goal for 20 more chapters. Their obsticals are more about the world and people they interact with.
The magic combat system is pretty well thought out, but not complex.
The MC basically has lots of mana. That’s their “op” trait. They developed a stragedy to spam cast the basic damage spell.
I’m making up some numbers here to kind of paint a picture of how this “basic spell” work. Attack spell =
- 1 second cast time
- 1 damage to defence spell
- 10/10 damage to unprotected person. (Can do 9/10 depending on what the plot needs)
- Can be cast in a variety of directions. (I.e it’s not a gun, its a targeted missle)
- cost more mana than the defence spell.
Defence spell =
- .5 second cast
- Can absorb 100 hits
- low mana cost for small area over a short period of time, high cost to do “full coverege”. Its essentially a sheild they move around and resizr to block attacks. Fully protecting yourself burns too much mana and you’d lose.
For most hitting the defence spell a hundred times is a stupid stratagy, so everyone came up with different spells that break through it in a few hits.
Out MC instead trained the basic spell so much, they can cast it 20 times a second over a long period of time. This forces the opponent to burn mana trying to maintain defence. The opponent is overwhelmed and get hit. However the stratagy only works if they back the openent into a postion where they can’t counterattack or have a buddy attack MC from behind.
So its kinda like they have infinite level 1 spell slots and they are just spaming magic missile over and over?
Pretty much, yes, but infinate isn’t quite true.
(The magic system isn’t DnD, so I’m spending way too much time making up a lot of shit here to give a general idea that no one really asked for. (And because its fun to brutely mash one magic system into another)).
Let’s say your average mid to high level mage has 100x spell slots (and for now assume all other stats are also equal). In this system, there are no spell levels. Instead, more complex spells require more slots to be used at once.
The basic defence and attack spell are 1 to 10. 1 defence spell blocks 10 basic attacks. However, you can’t attack and defend at the same time, and 1 defence is only for a small area. Full 360° coverage would cost a lot of slots per second. You conserve slots by precicly blocking the opponents spells as they come.
To break the defence you need to to be able to hit it really hard and follow up before they can cast more defence or counter attack. To do more damage in a spell, it costs more slots. This is where things like the other stats, skills, refelx time, unique spells, and combat stratagy become deciding factors in fights. Slot count also varies, a young mage might start of with one slot, but can become a very high level mage with 300 slots.
MC has 200 slots to start with and trained to get a very fast cast per second rate for both basic attack and defence. They are so proficient in the spell, it’s the equivelent effort of you or me walking.
While MC’s magic mistle does little damage, they can cast the spell 20 times in a second from multiple directions. This forces opponents to use up all their slots to defend until they run out or get overwhelmed by the numbers. The only defence is to do 360 defence, which can’t be maintained for long. (For simplicity sake, assume all the magic is a one shot kill. If you don’t defend or dodge, you die).
To make things more fun, MC has no idea they are insanly strong because their only reference growing up was their mentor who has the 5000 slot cheat code.
Yes, I am over thinking this. And yes, I should be sleeping right now.
To be clear, the magic system in this world is essentially technology. There is a set input and a destined output. The MC simply doesn’t care about fighting to learn any advanced fighting spells and just gatling-gun-spams the weakest attack spell until the opponent gets exhausted.
OrbituaryYou meet your party at the tavern…
snooggumsA tavern is a perfect place to meet strangers. It is a social hangout where new things are bound to be found!
The problem is always starting an adventure by interacting with a mysterious stranger they have no reason to trust. Why isn’t Aunt Elovynn sending them on their way from a family get together? Or the religious leader that the characters know and trust giving them a start?
Tavern is a perfect place to meet, though it’s neutral ground and it’s public. Most people won’t start shit in public.
simpleZero consistency to magic systems. I get it, having all sorts of spells in the story is fun and gives a lot of creative ways to make fights more interesting, but…
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If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
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If time travel magic exists, why isn’t everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.
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The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn’t work against main characters and there’s no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.
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Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because…
I’m a fan of stories like Avatar the last airbender or Witch Hat Atelier because their magic is very consistent. It makes things way more interesting when a character can’t just pull something out of their ass to save them in the middle of a fight.
Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it’s just “Oh no, I can’t use [spell] anymore because… Um… The plot says I can’t!”
Harry Potter was the worst culprit for a lot of these. The author was just writing a fun story that she threw together wildly. She didn’t care about consistency in magic… which is the UNDERLYING PREMISE OF THE ENTIRE STORY. But, cool it’s a Coming Of Age story with a mix of the Hero’s Journey in there, and a few odds and ends from other stories and mediums. There’s enough fun to suspend disbelief… but, upon further inspection you wish you just hadn’t inspected further.
I can give the first half of Harry Potter a slack because it’s pretty laid back and whimsical. As soon as it tries to take itself seriously it kind of falls apart for me. God, deathly hallows sucked.
I stopped reading after the 4th book at release. Never really had interest in picking up the next couple of books.
When my interest in “well, might as well give it a go again” started back up, JKR started to go insane and now I don’t want to have anything to do with the series anymore
I was reading the books religiously through middle and high school, as the movies were coming out… but, the movies finally caught up with the books for me, for some reason I didn’t get around to reading the last one before the movie. Anyway, I’ve NEVER gotten back to it. I’ve tried, but the magic is gone. The author is outspokenly uninclusive while her books, the original world she built, is all about inclusivity. I can’t fathom how separate and different her works are from her blatant bigotry. Fucking. What.
She likes the slytherins and Snape. The warning signs were there from the beginning.
For a woman who wrote “it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” She seems awful fucking concerned with what categroies people were born into.
If only there was an epic saga about the conquering power of love over bigotry that she could read. Maybe one involving a boy who lives or some fantastic magical beasts?
She started the series on benefits, and ended them a billionaire.
“If matters not what someone is born” is a very unfair sentence, what you are born can set the difficulty level of your life to extra easy or infinite pain regardless of your will and efforts. The anti-suicide nets off the windows of the iphone factories are not there for people born in a rich family.
I remember when all the controversy started I thought wow, this must be exaggerated somehow, and sought out what she had actually said. Oh. My. Fucking. God. When she was challenged she didn’t just double down, she quadrupled down, and then some. Loathsome woman, just awful.
Why couldnt she just fuck off to a tropical island and stay off twitter? Same thing with notch (guy that created minecraft)
agamemnonymousEliezer Yudkowsky can be a bit preachy at times, but he did a good job of pulling on threads in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to try to get to a fairly consistent model of magic
The series goes from “magic wands require extreme responsibility and must be used carefully,” to machine gun wands.
One of the things I enjoy most about Sanderson’s work is his attention to detail in his numerous magic systems.
owenfromcanadaAnd the imaginative variety. The magic system in the Mistborn series was fantastic and unlike anything I had ever read or even imagined. And then he adapted it consistently to an industrial age, and somehow made it work. Respect to Sanderson.
Fat TonyI feel like the best “magic system” has the be the alchemy used in Full Metal Alchemist. Given they treat it more like a science and there are some very clear ground rules regarding alchemy.
To those that don’t know. With in FMA you can use Alchemy to create new matter out of old matter as long as it’s equal in value. For instance if you want to make a wooden table with alchemy, you can but you would need to have a proper amount of wood to actually make it (otherwise it would be either a very tiny or very badly structured table). So now ask yourself, what would it take to actually create a human person?
Same reasons I find extended comic universes to be appalling. Why don’t superheroes just use all of their powers all the time? Why isn’t the more powerful superhero conveniently here right now? Why do we have to pretend there is a struggle?
The minute 2 or more superheroes are put together, it’s basically ruined.
I think the web novel Worm does this really well. I recently got it recommended to me and am enjoying it immensely! :)
There’s a thing I heard somewhere about how your magical system needs to have a balance between how well it’s understood vs. how useful it is, or else it will break the plot.
If a magic system is extremely useful, then it must also be extremely mysterious, so that you can say “Well, it can’t immediately fix all problems because the gods work in mysterious ways.”
If a magic system is extremely well understood in-universe, then it has to have hard limits on how useful it is, so you can say something like “Well, the Law of Equivalent Exchange says that to solve all our problems would require a blood sacrifice of the entire population, so that’s not an option.”
If your magic is pretty well-understood AND very useful, then by all rights it OUGHT to solve all your problems, and when it doesn’t then readers rightly begin to question why any of the plot needs to happen at all (see, for example, the time turners in Harry Potter).
If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
Because you die and a copy of you is created.
If time travel magic exists, why isn’t everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.
It can only be used by women who have borne children, to travel to a point before they bore children. Obviously, this means their child disappears from existence.
The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn’t work against main characters and there’s no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.
The main character leaves his normal life when a villain’s casual disappearing spell actually “doubles” him, resulting in the origin of his heroic power.
Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because…
Because schizophrenia. Main character hears voices and they occasionally meld into a chorus in a way that produces unique magical outcomes.
If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
Another wizard and I absolutely wrecked our DM’s in game economy just teleporting everywhere. Wizard Instant Shipping Inc.
Checks out lol, it’s a busted ability
Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it’s just “Oh no, I can’t use [spell] anymore because… Um… The plot says I can’t!”
hhahahaa, just like reload when dramatically appropriate.
spittingimageYou’re looking for opinions? I got opinions.
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The Chosen One who gets dragged around like a sack of potatoes until they Come Into Their Own and go on to Turn The Tide.
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The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.
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The Sharp-Tongued Princess.
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The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.
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Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes.
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Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements.
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Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.
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Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you’ve ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author’s not plagiarising their own favourite author.
Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you’ve ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author’s not plagiarising their own favourite author.
For real. There has to be a better use of elves other than “they live in the woods and appreciate nature and hate dark elves or night elves or whatever your story calls them”
www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Urban_Elf_(5e_Subrace)
Well they tried…
I’m at least glad to find out it wasn’t a horrible attempt at a politically correct rebrand of the Drow.
GraniteNow I want to read a fantasy comedy where someone trying to make cookies from an ancient recipe is whisked off on an adventure to fulfill the prophecy, but they just want snickerdoodles dammit.
as a reward they get one magical wish and they wish for snickerdoodles
Dharma Curious (he/him)That sounds amazing. OMG I would so read that
I want the ancient recipe to be formatted like a modern blog post. You have to read the entire Silmarillion before you get to the list of ingredients and the instructions.
The Chosen One who gets dragged around like a sack of potatoes until they Come Into Their Own and go on to Turn The Tide.
The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.
The Sharp-Tongued Princess.
The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.
I was expecting a joke about Star Wars: A New Hope later in the post!
Yeah, those have all been done to death in novels and I’m sick of the reluctant chosen one the most.
CouldbealeotardYou may as well be describing The Matrix.
Me reading the wheel of time:
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The Chosen One ✓ the main male characters, but definitely Rand
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The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage ✓Moiraine
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The Sharp-Tongued Princess. ✓Nynaeve
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The Rogue With A Heart of Gold. ✓Mat
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Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes. ✓All the prophecies
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Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements. ✓The forsaken all having distinct methods to get to the top
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Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology. ✓The one power
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Elves ✓Warders
All that said, I’m still enjoying the series thus far.
I honestly don’t understand the appeal of Robert Jordan. I made it through 50 pages of The Eye of the World before throwing it into the nearest little library. By then I had uncovered every fantasy cliche known to man, made even worse by the writing style of a 12 year-old.
It is my favorıte book series. j just like the story and the characters
I started that book over and over and just could not do it. But then my dad convinced me to read it further. I did. Got hooked by book three, and then got stuck in a loop of reading the series on repeat. Love it.
The Eye of the World suffers from being a fantasy work published in its era, when publishers wanted Lord of the Rings. So it’s basically Lord of the Rings. Chock-full of cliches because that’s what got published. The series gets significantly better from there on.
Jordan wasn’t without his shortcomings as a writer, but he was very good at two things I find most appealing in a fantasy author: worldbuilding and hard magic systems. This is the same reason I love Brandon Sanderson, despite his (comparatively) weak prose against someone like, say, Rothfuss.
He also, when he knew he was dying, managed to outline enough of his planned ending that another author was able to take it up and write the final three books of his series after he died, which is a really cool gesture for his fans.
that’s what I have been thinking
Sorta star wars too.
I think ypu just don’t like wheel of time lmao
Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.
I’m just the opposite. I like magic systems that are basically alternative physics. Gimme some of that inherent plausibility Brandon Sanderson.
grasshopper_mouseI dunno if it’s considered “bad”, but I personally hate when one of the characters gets amnesia, or the group meets a character that has amnesia. It just feels like a laziness by the author who can’t think of any other way to make a storyline interesting.
One book that did it well was Nine Princes in Amber. It worked because the readers got to discover the “real world” along with the main character. Although it might have been fresh in 1970 and overdone since then.
By modern standards this is pretty bad, and it boils down to an exposition problem.
The author needs to explain certain basic information up front (or at least pretty early on). A good way to do this is to have one character be a novice who needs to be told basic details, thereby informing the audience. In fact the “new guy” angle to exposition delivery is so good that it itself is becoming cliche.
In the example you brought up the author wanted to take advantage of the “new guy” trope but for whatever could not do that. Maybe the character needed social status or standing that a rookie would not have in order to make the plot work. Rather than find a creative workaround that made sense in their story they pulled out the old amnesia trick to eat their cake and have it, too.
Dragons are cool, but god am I sick of them. The worst part is they are either evil and directly attack people or good and completely missing for 90% of the story.