Re: Balancing Magic and Technology in a Setting
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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