Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm

[Max_Killjoy]

I think the confusion is caused by your formulation of this part:

The underlined part doesn't really follow - a piece of technology or some achievement can be limited to a small subset of people, even one person, even if no-one in the setting thinks anything fantastic is going on. The word special refers to rarity, not necessarily impossibility.

So Tony Stark totally is doing things impossible in our reality, he's totally non-magical from the perpective of his reality, and his technology is totally reserved to him and few other genius inventors with deep wallets. But that last part is a manifestation of Clarke's Third Law: if someone in Stark's setting thinks his technology is fantastic, it's because Stark's tech is so far ahead the curve as to seem so from the perspective of the observer. Not because it's supernatural.

No matter how I word it someone gets confused as to what I mean, unless I write a damn treatise every time I post. And yet people want to give me grief when I wish language was more precise, and less mushy and overlapping and vague.


My point was that it's "magic" in the sense of "outside the realm of the normally possible in that reality". Of course, if I word it like that, then someone will chime in that because magic is part of that reality, it's perfectly normal in that reality, and we end up with a 15-page tangent of philosophical naval-gazing that ends up with some nimwit trying to prove that the world only exists in our imagination and that the chair holds you up because you believe in it or some nonsense.


I could just say that the fighter in that setting is tapping into the same forces as the spellcasters, just via different means, in order to do things that people normally can't do, but I've seen that blow up into a tangent too.