(07-04-2016, 04:25 PM)Unnamed Mercenary Wrote:(07-04-2016, 04:01 PM)Piphan Wrote: I really wasn't sure which section it better applied to, so I figured I'd post in both and if it was a big deal then a mod would lock one down and I'd be better informed on where to post questions like this in the future.
I'm new to the forum and since my question applies to both role playing and lore, I wasn't sure... Er, well, there's also the small hope that I might get more responses that way, so I have to admit I was taking advantage of the ambiguity to some degree. Sorry!
Former mod, still staff.
The way your topic's worded, it's currently wishy-washy on what you're looking for.
If you're looking strictly for lore, we can keep that one alive. If you're looking for a discussion on whether people could/should/can/want to RP with someone with such  magical "restriction", then over here's good.
I'd suggest rewording and maybe retitling each to fit what you're looking for. There's nothing against having a lore thread for the facts and an RP discussion thread for people's opinions. ...you'll....just wanna keep them separate because those are pretty different topics.
I had hoped placing my key questions at the end of the post in bold would resolve any "wishy-washy" uncertainty as to what was I was asking. I'm not really asking if folks could/should/etc RP with someone with these kinds of abilities; I really only included that part in my post to avoid the conversation focusing too heavily on that. It seems like any time I've asked hard questions about how lore and RP mesh, I've gotten a lot of defensive or aggressive responses, and I mostly wanted to avoid that.
My questions are really lore-centered, but I'm asking them for the purpose of RPing with whatever knowledge is gained. To that extent, I had sort of expected my thread in "RP discussion" to be the one that got locked down, but I'm not overly concerned about it either way. All the same, I appreciate you weighing in here!
(07-04-2016, 04:25 PM)Unnamed Mercenary Wrote: That said, how someone involves magic in their RP varies within the community in general and within the small peek that RPC provides as well. Some people believe healing magic is a super-fix-it button. Others believe it can help or close wounds, but can't do much more. And so on. The same applies to offensive spells as well. Do we know if there's a difference between a fire started with some flint and an aetherial fire? Not particularly. We know they started from different means and are fueled differently, but they can likely reach the same temperatures and spread.
Yeah, I can definitely see how it'd be sort of "open to interpretation". I tend to view "magic" as just a more fantastical version of RL science, and so I really enjoy when any fiction attempts to explain how their concept of magic functions. Still, with so many different kinds of people RPing in their own way, I can understand why many others would tend to view magic as simply a means to an end (i.e., healing magic being a super-fix-it button).
As for aetherial fire and fire started by flint... I mean, if aether is the source of all things in this universe, then it stands to reason that regardless of whether fire is started by flint, a bolt of lightening hitting a tree, or a Black Mage's spell, all fire would still possess aether... Er, right? In which case, all fire would still be more or less the same. If anything, "aetherial fire" might be more "pure" or something because it was brought about by atherial means rather than being forced through some other mechanism.
And if any of that holds true, then the only things I could see varying are the manner in which it spreads or how hot it is at the start. For example, consider the way a fire behaves when started from oil verses fire started from flint. You can't quite put out a grease or oil fire in the same way you might put out others because of the type of fuel it's using to continuously burn.
Hahaha, this sort of speculation is sort of headache inducing, I have to admit. All the same, I think of it as a fun sort of thought-experiment to weight out the different possibilities and the logic behind them.
