Balancing Magic and Technology in a Setting

Recently in the World Building Turn-offs thread, I read a debate on Magic and Technology, and it made me wonder: What are people's solutions to having technology AND magic in a setting. The way I see it there are various options: Having it heavily one sided (more magic/less tech or visa versa) or having a combination of the two like Magitech.

So, what are your solutions? What do prefer to do? What settings work better for which option in your opinion? Which option works best? What do you like the least?

Assuming magic can be replicated and analysed, which in almost any setting it can be, I see them eventually coming together. Just because magic doesn't follow our rules doesn't mean it follows no rules, and if it follows rules at all, you can do science to it.
Doesn't mean you can't have conflicts.
"The Eternal Flame of Arnor is sacred! You don't use it to . . .boil water like a common kettle!"
"But think of the potential! With the steam generated, we could power the entire cities power needs and heat the temple complex! All without any pollution whatsoever!"

In most settings, magic is essentially a physical force or part of the laws of nature. The divide would actually be between magic using machines and non-magical machines.

Remember back in the 50s when there were all those pictures with nuclear powered cars and refridgerators? It sounded like a good idea at the time, but it turned out that radioactivity has all kinds of limitations and drawbacks that make such applications economically prohibitive.

Only because you can do something with magic doesn't mean that magic is the most economical solution. You could convert a water mill to magic so it doesn't need any running water to turn the wheel anymore. But that will cost you and might cost a lot more than simply transporting the grain to the river and back to the town once its ground.
If you have a level of technology that gets slightly industrialized, you could add the complicating factor that magic doesn't really stick to everything equally well. You could enchant a wooden mill to run by itself, but the enchantment might only stick for weeks or even days before it needs to be renewed. If you need an alloy of high quality steel and silver for the spell to last for years, building such a mill might be very expensive both in building and maintenance and that is even before you count all the additional costs for making the magic lasting for more than a few minutes.

In some cases magic would be just too useful not to use it, like using magic mirrors for communication rather than sending a messenger on a four day trip. But that would be for the highest level of government and industry only.
The option to use the pony express didn't mean that normal post service wasn't used. Pony express was much quicker, but you had to pay quite hefty for it.

In the kind of settings I run, magic simply doesn't have the ability to do the things that would otherwise be done by technology. You can go into a trance to commune with a spirit, but you can't do the same thing to call your aunt. Or you could make vines grow from the ground and cover a cave entrance, but you can't make them into sturdy walls for a building that will stay in place and carry the weight of the roof and upper floors.
Also, magic requires a lot of education. In the modern world, almost every person is mentally able to learn latin, greek, sanskrit and ancient chinese, get a degree in law and economics, and find a well paid job. But most people don't because they don't have access to such education. Sure, all lawyers and managers can easily say "I lay down my work for a few years and live in humble conditions from the wages I saved, so I can educate poor kids to understand the law and how to become businessmen. Out of my love for all mankind."
But they don't. And in the same way wizards and priests would not just take everyone who comes to their door wanting education, lodging, and free food. If you want to get in, you have to pay the tuition fees and cover the expenses for lodging. Magic isn't taught out of charity, but as a commercial service. And those who can cast magic also are not really that interested that there are more people who can do it, which would make the fees for the casting of spells to fall.

So . . .
Does that mean if technology does something it couldn't do before, magic can't do it any more?

Sure it can. But when the technology is able to be commercially sustainable, it must be more cost-effective. If you have two ways to do something and the result is exactly the same, only the cheaper one will stay in demand and the more expensive one will disappear. When one of them has a drawback the other does not have, but it is not a problem most of the time, then it will be the general purpose technology while the other one still remains in use for the special applications in which the drawback would be a problem.

Color photography and black and white photography existed side by side for very long time. Black and white was cheaper and good enough for most purposes, while color was more expensive but didn't provide any advantage in most applications like newspaper pictures or IDs. Except for those cases where you wanted the color and were willing to pay extra to get it.
The ability to teleport letters would not make messengers who carry them to their destination obsolete. Since the wizards provide better service, they would charge more than the messengers. But for most people sending the messenger through the city and having to wait half an hour for the letter to arrive is not such a big inconvencience that they would pay extra for a wizard.
But when you have a swarm of dragons flying by an outpost towards the capital, paying 10 times as much for the wizard than for a messenger would be completely worth it, because the messenger would never make it in time.

OK, that's different from saying magic *can't* do something.
Also, there can be a certain prestige factor in doing things the hard way.
People still buy hand crafted items, even though objectively mass production could make make them a lot cheaper.
People often prefer natural flavours even though the synthetic ones involve the exact same chemicals.
People could prefer magic in some situations for similar reasons.

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Originally Posted by Ravens_cry

OK, that's different from saying magic *can't* do something.
Also, there can be a certain prestige factor in doing things the hard way.
People still buy hand crafted items, even though objectively mass production could make make them a lot cheaper.
People often prefer natural flavours even though the synthetic ones involve the exact same chemicals.
People could prefer magic in some situations for similar reasons.

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Same as I prefer real books to digital ones, and records and LP's rather than CD's.

My world doesn't (and never has) really differentiated between magic and technology. They're one and the same thing, sciene is merely the study of observable events, when magic is an observable event, then science incorporates that magic as a matter of course. Machinery in my world uses mundane and magical components based on cost, use and prestige.

I use the same thought for Alchemy, it's merely a fancy name for chemistry in my worlds, and is unrestricted as a result. You don't need to be a spellcaster to understand what happens when substance A is heated and added to substance B.

The difference for a spellcaster is simply the lack of need for apparatus. ANY spell can be replicated in my world by essentially mundane 'scientific' means, but it requires huge amounts of investment for the equipment, power and materials required. Spellcasters flick bat poo at you and mumble something which is probably rather rude, and get the same effect. No wonder they're all smug bastards...

The way I do it is to put the setting's "present" at a point where magic hasn't yet become fully analyzed and employed.

It's there, it's doing things and a person with good foresight would see the implications of using magic this way. But it hasn't done so yet because the smart people are still working out the answers.
A bit like fusion power really.

Innovation is not instant. Just because magic make a post-scarcity economy does not mean someone doesn't have to do the work first (unless time travel is involved; which I strongly disallow).

Balancing natural and supernatural would be a far better way to put this. because spells, ritual, enhanced items etc. are technology. If you're having some of them just to replace real technologies, maybe you shoud ask yourself why not use the real counterpart instead? For those instances that don't have real counterparts, ask: how repeatable are they? How much effort does it take to learn and use them? Who invented them and when? Are they sharing? Do they have a common cause?

The last question is especially important. What does it actually mean for two things to be "magic"? The most common thing skewing the balance towards supernatural is attributing too many effects to one, ill-defined source - in other words, something can do anything.

One way to curb this is to give all forms of "magic" defined rules, and make them isolated from each other. (As a side-effect, this leads to catch-all words like "magic" becoming useless in the setting.) This way, introducing one supernatural technology won't undermine existence of all natural technologies. The funny thing is that this approach slowly makes your work closer to sci-fi than traditional fantasy.

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Originally Posted by TheWombatOfDoom

So, what are your solutions? What do prefer to do? What settings work better for which option in your opinion? Which option works best? What do you like the least?

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I like having both, but with neither really dominant and both needing each other.

You need technology to make use of magic. Magic can do a lot of stuff, but it's not every good at doing everything. You can make a flying cargo ship and zip around and make all sorts of trade deals. But to do that you'd need a ship, and a ship is technology. You can enchant armor for protection, but you'd need armor first and armor is technology.

You need magic to make use of technology. Technology can do a lot of stuff, but it's not good at everything. You can have an advanced technological foundry, but you still need a way to make a lot of fire and heat and magic can do this easily. Any workshop can make great use of animated objects.

But both have drawbacks too:

Technology is long and hard to learn. Plus it often takes great labor and amounts of people. And you need materials to make the technology.

Magic is mysterious. Anything can happen with a magic effect, quite at random.

I'm not sure if this is really relevant, but, since this thread is here, I'd like to take the opportunity to ask some questions:

How would you balance magic spell-shooting guns that anyone can use with regular magic users? Or those spellguns with regular guns (like revolvers and repeater rifles)? Or magic users with mad scientist rayguns that can basically do the same sort of things as spells? Or any combination of the four?

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Originally Posted by Frozen_Feet

One way to curb this is to give all forms of "magic" defined rules, and make them isolated from each other. (As a side-effect, this leads to catch-all words like "magic" becoming useless in the setting.) This way, introducing one supernatural technology won't undermine existence of all natural technologies. The funny thing is that this approach slowly makes your work closer to sci-fi than traditional fantasy.

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I tend to take a science fiction approach to fantasy anyway, thinking through the mechanics and applying them rigorously, thinking through some of their consequences, and making sure that things that aren't magic actually work like that. For example, dissatisfied with how dwarven mountain fortresses could ever produce enough food to feed them, I made most dwarves in a setting live outside the mountains, with the fortresses been just that, fortresses, places to flee in times of trouble, but not the main population centres. One consequence of this is that there is a lot of grumbling and friction between what warriors and retainers who do make their homes in the mountains and the low landers who barge in now and then.

Things I've used to balance magic versus technology without magic:

1. Cost controls. Yora hit this on the head. Magic can be a very expensive way to solve a tech problem.

2. Technology has specifications and interchangable elements; magic doesn't (or has less). Take the image of the water wheel versus the magicked wheel that doesn't need a water source. Where's the off switch? If a part wears down, does replacing it affect the enchantment? The corollary of this that magic is difficult perceive the mechanisms of, and thus difficult to alter by anyone other than the creator, whereas tech involves understood principles and the skillset is broadly held. If magic goes wrong, things get complicated. Magic does get same results for same spells, but there's all sorts of complications with caster levels and Spellcraft checks (in-universe, enchantments are best understood by their maker) to comprehend someone else's work.

3. Magic cannot, by fiat, replicate craftsmanship. This is something that came to me a while back, as I've learned more about carpentry and metal work: one of the giant cop-outs in magic is that mages can create functional objects without any understanding of what they've made. Whether you're talking about a wrench, a stone wall, or a table...there's a method of crafting that objects that has an internal logic and requires special knowledge of what constitutes a well-made one versus a poorly-made one. This logic makes magic less utilitarian...unless you've got a mage with both the knowledge and the power, they can't supplant mechanical labor entirely.

4. Magic makes for a fragile infrastructure. I guess this is a corollary of (2), but magic doesn't have tolerances like technology. Dispelling and disjunction, anti-magic fields--all of the above mean catastrophic failure--anything that disrupts magic is a huge threat is a society where vital systems are regulated by magical devices.

5. Specific to warfare and spell use: magic spectacularly increases casualties and change the shape of military actions. If you're at all familiar with the period between the US Civil War and World War 1...that's what a battlefield would be like in a fantasy setting that has D&D weapons technology and spell-casting. Fireballs (radius spread attack) and Lightning Bolts (uninterrupted line attack) are the doom of open-field formation tactics. At some point, magic-as-ordinance is going to come under examination as part of the ethics of war--think, the Geneva Convention ban on incendiaries and dumdum bullets.

None of the above means magic shouldn't ever have a role as tech.

• Cost will always be modulated by urgency of need and lack of alternatives. A decanter of endless water will have a different infrastructure value in a desert city than a temperate one. A corollary of this is the availability of materials for mechanical construction (metal, wood, stone) versus the material components for complex spells. Under conditions where the former are scarce, the latter may be expensive but nonetheless the better option.
  
• Magic does have the advantage of allowing circumvention of the inherent "tree" structure of tech. For example, society without pulleys and winches using Tenser's disks to achieve the same weight-transport needs. A corollary of this is that magic will sometimes circumvent a situational limitation of an other useful technology. For example, simple wheel-based freight is only useful where there's roads and no need to traverse steep inclines; a Tenser's disk may not be able to haul as much as an ox cart, but in can do so regardless of terrain issues.
  
• The single biggest, society-changing form of "magitech" is any form of healing/disease removal. Given the pseudo-feudal, semi-industrialized structure of most fantasy societies, maintenance of a healthy labor force would be a major plus...as would healthy, not-dying-of-childbirth women.

What if you do have the skill, and just want to use magic to 'cheat' in certain aspects?
The magic flame been used to heat water for steam power I already used as an example is a very basic idea. True, any mage could try to dispel it, but that's what security is for. We don't generally let anyone simply walk around power plants in Real Life™ either.

I've put a lot of work into trying to limit magic and give magic a sort of scientific or logic behind it.

First, magic is split into two forces, Divine and Arcane. Divine loosely defined as the magic of Gods or the will of the Cosmos. Basically its like Arcane magic but seems to possess its own independent intelligence. As if it were part of some greater intelligent entity or entities. Arcane magic is raw, chaotic and unstable in its pure forms.

I've put a lot of limits to magic, in fact Yanagi's list is pretty much like my list, however I have a few additions...

Unknown spells: Some spells in the litany of splatbooks, the SRD and elsewhere may not actually be known. Basically I know create water is in the SRD, but that doesn't mean my setting has such a spell available. Other spells like say "Fly" for example are plausible but have not been invented. So no spellcaster has figured out how to use magic to grant flight. Or if any have they died before they could teach it or write it down in a way that others could learn it. In terms of Arcane sciences, its still a work in progress and people are still researching how to manipulate this curious "force," in nature.

Magical Instability: My setting has all sorts of things that limit Arcane and Divine magic. For Arcane magic it is the simple fact that over time some spells decay. Even spells cast with permanency may fade over time, or be altered by the latent magic of the planet. Some areas of the world have dampened magic, in fact the geology of the planet can effect spells... especially a high level spell, one that's permanent ect. Divine magic has the effect of being effectively its own intelligence. The intelligence that is Divine magic can chose to rescind the spell at any time.

Basically magical means of doing things either aren't available or are simply too unstable or haven't been mastered.

i think spells like alter self, charm person and teleportation (not to mention self replicating undead) would have an exponentially greater effect on the battle field then fire balls and lighting bolts.

the fire balls and lightning bolts due to limited spell slots are not going to have as big an impact on the battle field that cannons and machine guns did.

but illusion, shape shifting and mind control spells, combined with most of an armies raw destructive power being focused on a few individuals means espionage, sabotage, and assassination will be what decides a war.

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Originally Posted by awa

i think spells like alter self, charm person and teleportation (not to mention self replicating undead) would have an exponentially greater effect on the battle field then fire balls and lighting bolts.

the fire balls and lightning bolts due to limited spell slots are not going to have as big an impact on the battle field that cannons and machine guns did.

but illusion, shape shifting and mind control spells, combined with most of an armies raw destructive power being focused on a few individuals means espionage, sabotage, and assassination will be what decides a war.

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I agree that those spells will have more impact, but I think your forgetting about wands... These eliminate the spell slot issue. In the space of a magazine that holds say 20 rounds, you could have 2 wands with 50 shots each. That is 5 times the ammo and unlike how the magazine needs a rifle/gun to be useful the wand is used on its own. The bigger weapons like your cannons and machine guns are even heavier, for that weight you could carry the wands for thousands of Fireballs. Imagine an army armed with pistol sized rocket launchers that have 50 rounds and no/little reload time... Yeah wands are scary!

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Originally Posted by Ravens_cry

Just because magic doesn't follow our rules doesn't mean it follows no rules, and if it follows rules at all, you can do science to it.

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I'm stealing this quote, I want you to know.

I've been working off and on for years now on a setting which asks this same question. Currently it has evolved into something similar to an early 1900s American setting based out of a sort of pseudo-Saint Louis. In this setting science and magic do not mix, and as technology spreads, magic is pushed back further and further (the current, relevant boundary is the "Mississippi River" magic works west of the river, but not east)

This thread is pretty much concluded, as I think most of us agree that any distinction between Magic and Science is pretty arbitrary. I will add that the reason we tend to see it that way has a lot to do with scientific history. The actual history of science is so tightly intertwined with belief and religion and it's almost impossible to separate the two until you get widespread acceptance of the scientific method, ~1600.

Even a brilliant scientist like Newton was conducting Alchemical experiments which relied on the theory that every object has an "essence" that would cause degradation of the object after separation.

The physics of my own homebrew world aren't so much "magical" in my opinion as they are more malleable. As a result, the human cultures in my world didn't have huge time increments between important discoveries like tools, language, agriculture, metalworking, bureaucracy, all of it eventually leading to mechanisms. The ability to use energy to achieve these vital tasks was easily accessible to them even without a thorough understanding of electromagnetic radiation and other forms of energy.

These huge time increments shaped OUR history weirdly, because even though humans developed all the brain power they will ever have on the southern half of Africa, it took many generations for humans in Europe to develop technology sophisticated enough to usher in modernity. My world's history is a little more linear, as the first humans were able to magically monopolize the whole continent they were on within the first few hundreds years, and the development of a scientific method for their magic came a few hundred years after that, generating some relevant political upheaval and a split of the original empire, of course.

Another result is that there is no "divine" and "arcane" magic in my world, and there is much less importance on the divine, religious organizations didn't really have the same opportunities to manipulate populations, because the abstract benefits of divine intervention were much less appealing than the real benefits of the magical world. THe history of my world is just as bloody, but the reasons for it are much less arbitrary than the religious ridiculousness of real history.

I can't help but notice the comments on warfare.

I heavily agree, take WW2, it's 1944 the eastern front 6 weeks ago was D-Day, Germans discover that the Soviets are trying to develop magic, something that hasn't been done, the soviets are nearly finished, next is getting it to the front.
5 Panthers, 1 Tiger, and a few halftracks from the SS are dispatched. the players are the commanders of the panthers.

I use my own system, a wand will only store about 8 small spells (pistol), or one larger spell (grenade).

a staff can hold about 100 small spells (LMG), or 5 fairly powerful spell (ATR)
or one stupidly big spell (AT gun)

they get to the testing facility, a firefight rages, in the end they're the only survivors aside from the 5 best enemy mages. the get the last panther and in this time the mages plane shift away, in a rush without any prior knowledge and a milaculas spellcheck, they enchant the tank with a modified plane shift. and this is how the chase across time and space began.

I usually write my settings in at least a post-industrial to somewhat modern world, with magic layered on top.

In general, if mundane technology can accomplish the task easier than magic, then it is usually done that way, but I keep real-world physics (or at least an approximation of it in game system form) and simply layer magic on top of it, to make things that aren’t possible (with current technology) possible.

So magic tends to be natural, inherent, and where the scientific method is applied, artifact-centric. There are spellcasters, some professions require at least a minimum proficiency in some forms of magic, even if it is only a highly selective list of spells.

The end result tends to be species with some form of inherent magic (I gave my Industrial Punk Dwarves natural fire-breathing to augment their metallic craftsmanship and accelerate their technology-level), a lot of dimensional and planar artifact-based magic, a lot of magical life in favor or in place of just “normal” flora and fauna, and professions like magic Doctors that are usually far more skilled and effective than real world Doctors and instead of casting things like “Protection from Disease” might heavily rely on your natural immune system and give your antibodies a boost, or kill virus reservoirs in your body simultaneously, or using magic to put you or parts of your body in a full or partial stasis during a delicate operation.

The key for me is to not do it magically just because it can be done, rather than boom-wands in place of boom-sticks, but do it magically because it is a shortcut and it is more interesting to have a setting where things like a private conference room you can physically enter through any mirror or magical doctors who have greatly accelerated the standard of health, or time manipulation are possible without having to figure out how that would work in the real world first.

Then I do Rule of Cool things sometimes, like magical computers where the hardware is basically irrelevant and all the cool stuff is software anyway (like a real computer, but without having to worry about annoying physical limitations that would severely bog down the role-playing experience). All of it is to help shape the setting into what I basically want it to look like and enhance the experience for my players.

One other thing about magic in my settings: a process done with magical assistance is still the same process done by mundane means, but with its own associated costs. Sure you can hurl great big balls of fire around, but you can also ignite a pile of black powder with a spark, or cast a gust of wind to blow white phosphorus over the enemies’ side of the battlefield if you wanted, but whether the fire was started with pure force of will or a match, fire is still fire and will behave like fire.

I have multiple world ideas with a vast range of technologies from stone age to electronic age, and magic ranging in technological development from the mercurial 'perform ritual and hope it works the same way again' to the scholarly type where the learned not only know that magic works, but why it works when the right particles are brought together.

I mention this because I treat the origins of technology and magic to be independent subjects of the subject of how they are 'balanced' together. Each combination of tech and magic advancement can be spun by a good spinner.

Creating the two systems you think work in your world can be done before you even get started on how they affect or regard each other, and you have even more drama to work in if you need some. By that point, you've already created a world that brought magic and technology to where they are now. This usually forces you to have a fair amount of history, culture, ecology, and cosmology by the time you get here. At least that's the way I do it.

I believe this prevents the cliches from popping up where the two are seen as diametrical opposites and wrestle for power or relevance.

There are few tricks that I've found useful in dealing with the tech/magic issues.
Usually it is a matter of finding a limiting issue for magic-namely why a decent level spellcaster doesn't use a permanent wall of fire to do anything from make sea salt, smelt ore, or fire a pottery kiln and then sit back and make a large profit selling into the marketplace for a very easy example spell. Or inheritance questions when raise dead spells exist. I find it generally easier to limit the magic in some way rather than figuring out how animate object alone could rewrite the local economy and suddenly I'm not telling the kind of stories that I wanted to when setting up the game.
Most involve a bit of rule bending or annoying levels of strictness.
Options for such limitations:
Magic is new or newly rediscovered and hasn't been applied to much yet
Only a tiny part of the population can cast spells at all-and hammer it
Be very stingy on letting players find new spells-no automatics into the book
Social or legal controls on learning magic strictly enforced esp at low levels
Require skill checks to know how to use a spell-the magic allows you to ---- change something but the skill say what to change, & what to change it to.
Have permanent or semi permanent spells need semi regular maintenance -- with either the original caster or a spellcraft check-extra cost in may allow -- this to be waived.
Be rather free with cantrip level items/effects and strictly enforce the number of magic users of advanced spell level in a given region - which is easier if there are few large cities in the world. If you pay attention to the max number of even moderate level NPC in a given population and say only 10-20% are spellcasters the max effect they can create is pretty low. Pay close attention to permanency in particular as it is a major limit for magic in the general setting vs in the spellcaster's immediate vicinity. Looking at a 5th level Mage versus 5th level expert blacksmith to look at who will shape more of the local's lives. At higher levels the mage or cleric is a much greater effect but you can make that very rare.

Usually when I include magic and tech, I make them interfere on a small scale. Basically I define magic as an individual affecting the world through willpower and focus rather then physical effort, however this plays havoc with any electromagnetics in the area, and vice versa. A caster can try to compensate for such interference while casting the spell, and if they do succeed in casting it the interference has a chance to cut short the duration. Additionally, casting magic near delicate electronics, like computers or radios, can burn them out in the same fashion as an emp pulse.

Of course, that setting doesnt have all the fancy spells of dnd, like teleport, charm person, etc, instead focusing on simple alterations or control of the natural environment, like stone shape. And I generally make most spells either a permenant change, or have a duration of concentration.