Brainstorming for Novel Ideas, How About a Magic System?

[Weimann]

Have you ever had that thing when you can't seem to concentrate on anything other than this one thing despite having loads of very important work to do? Yeah, that's happening right now.

I've always wanted to write a fantasy novel. I've never had a clue where to start, but recently I've been picking up some tips in the form of books and Youtube lectures. In the back of my head, I've started to generate ideas that might work as a foundation for an outline that may one day become a book (and, hope beyond hope, even a published book). Right now, I'm still on the "generate ideas" stage, though. While I have a few ideas for each major part of the story (setting, character and plot), I've decided to begin with fleshing out a part of the setting that I feel I, as an RPG enthusiast, at least has some relation to: the magic system. I'd really like to just throw out a few things there and see what you lot throw back at me, just to get a set of fresh eyes on it.

So far, the core idea is this: some people are able to enhance or diminish certain aspects of their bodily functions. To enhance an aspect is called to Blossom it, and to diminish it is called to Wilt it. In accordance with Sanderson's Third Law of Magic, I want to keep the number of separate abilities rather low, and focus on developing them in a deep an interesting way. So far, I've divided them into two roughly separate groups: Sense and Body. I'm not sure if they'll be in-setting terms or not. If they are, I need better names for them.

Sense includes the following, with examples of uses. Normally, these should be beneficial to both Blossom and Wilt.
Sight - Blossom to gain improved visual acuity and distance, judgment of distance or low-light sight. Wilt to gain better high-light sight or go blind for tactical reasons.
Hearing - Blossom to gain improved auditory acuity and distance, improved auditory range (as in being able to hear sounds humans normally can't) or improved voice recognition. Wilt to focus on specific sounds or voices in a din or go deaf for tactical reasons.
Touch - Blossom to gain improved tactile acuity, ability to sense subtle irregularities, tremors or shifts in a material, and a particularly light and careful touch. Wilt to go numb, I guess?
Taste - Blossom to improve taste intensity or taste recognition. Useful for finding poisons or such by ingesting non-lethal doses. Wilt to focus on a specific taste in a dish.
Smell - Blossom to gain improved sense of smell and smell recognition, allowing for tracing and other things. Wilt to ignore smells in the surroundings.
Temperature - Blossom to gain an "infra-red" sense, allowing the user to identify sources of heat incongruent with the surrounding temperature. Wilt to ignore weather conditions related to heat and cold.
Pain - Not really sure why you'd want to Blossom this one, to be honest. Wilt to reduce physical pain from all sources.

Body includes the following, with examples of uses. Normally, you'll be mostly wanting to Blossom these, but they are possible to Wilt.
Strength - Blossom to grow strong and explosive. A very powerful ability that turns you into a wrecking ball. Enhances punches and attacks, explosive charges, feats of strength, climbing, jumping, swimming. A battlefield monster, but runs out of gas quick.
Agility - Blossom to gain improved reaction times and control over your body. Reflexes, balance and other involuntary reactions become faster, and voluntary actions becomes steadier and more controlled. Allows for excellent dodging, dancing, aiming and rapid-fire attacks, and general precision movement.
Stamina - Blossom to be able to operate at max physical capacity for longer. Long-distance running, extended combat in heavy gear and other physically exerting activities can be sustained for much longer. Able to sustain an attack and wear their opponent out.
Regeneration - Blossom to increase your body's natural regeneration and health-restoring powers to extreme degrees. Heals both flesh wounds, fractures and diseases, and speeds the expulsion of poisons. Not fast enough to use on the battlefield (normally...) but reduces recovery time from wounds from months to days.
Pheromones - Blossom to boost your natural pheromone production. I kind of need to read up on pheromones, but the main gist is a more social kind of effect that encourages certain behaviour in others. Much more blunt than speech, but useful to supplement it and affect subconscious levels.

So, now you know the broad layout of the current version of this magic system. General comments, ideas and complaints are greatly appreciated, but I also have a few things I'd like to focus attention on.

1) Does this feel even moderately interesting? Does it just feel like what it is, a bleak copy of Mistborn? Before that, I had a whole system of elemental magic that I had worked out before I realized it was actually done to death. I'm not asking to be original, but if it doesn't even tickle the audience, then it needs to be scrapped and sent back to the drawing board.

2) Is the difference between Blossoming and Wilting really beneficial, or does it just make you divide up effects for the sake of having nifty names? Would using, like, Manipulate (or just Blossoming for everything) instead make you care less about if certain effects should be the one or the other, if they can be combined or not etc., or does it add depth to the system in a way that's worth keeping around and working with?

3) Touch and Taste seem rather weaksauce to me. I had an idea of mixing Taste with Smell and create a sort of blood hound investigator type of effect. Furthermore, since Touch is weak on the Wilting, and Pain is useless to Blossom, and they both seem to move in about the same circles, maybe there's a case for merging them. Thoughts on this?

4) Does my game background show in this summary? I fear that I might be struggling to "balance" the system a bit much, and particularly that I might be using a combat scenario as my point of comparison. This might feel plastic and artificial when put in a novel. I definitely need to come up with costs and downsides to these powers, but I'm not sure they need to necessarily be "balanced in a vacuum".

Again, much more need to be done with the system, in terms of why it works, how one gains access to it, what the limitations, costs and requirements of it are. Not to mention the rest of the setting, and all the character and plot work. Right now, though, I'd be very grateful for any comments on this part in particular.

[Grinner]

1) Does this feel even moderately interesting? Does it just feel like what it is, a bleak copy of Mistborn? Before that, I had a whole system of elemental magic that I had worked out before I realized it was actually done to death. I'm not asking to be original, but if it doesn't even tickle the audience, then it needs to be scrapped and sent back to the drawing board.

It'll work. I do hope you're not planning to emulate your predecessor, though. Sanderson has this irksome habit of taking entire chapters to blather on about how awesome his present novel's worldbuilding is. Admittedly, my reading of his novels isn't thorough, but still, I'd like to see some plot progression sometime.

2) Is the difference between Blossoming and Wilting really beneficial, or does it just make you divide up effects for the sake of having nifty names? Would using, like, Manipulate (or just Blossoming for everything) instead make you care less about if certain effects should be the one or the other, if they can be combined or not etc., or does it add depth to the system in a way that's worth keeping around and working with?

It makes sense, though if I may make one small observation, it's unlikely that every practitioner is going to spontaneously call these abilities the same thing. Unless there's some overarching governing body regulating the practice, it's more likely that different traditions will develop, and each tradition will develop its own terminology.

Edit: They might also develop very different theories about how their abilities work.

3) Touch and Taste seem rather weaksauce to me. I had an idea of mixing Taste with Smell and create a sort of blood hound investigator type of effect. Furthermore, since Touch is weak on the Wilting, and Pain is useless to Blossom, and they both seem to move in about the same circles, maybe there's a case for merging them. Thoughts on this?

Wilting Pain will also make your movements more clumsy, since you're not getting as much feedback from your limbs.

And yeah, Touch and Pain are basically the same thing. Do merge them.

Not sure about Taste.

4) Does my game background show in this summary? I fear that I might be struggling to "balance" the system a bit much, and particularly that I might be using a combat scenario as my point of comparison. This might feel plastic and artificial when put in a novel. I definitely need to come up with costs and downsides to these powers, but I'm not sure they need to necessarily be "balanced in a vacuum".

Extremely so. One thing I'd warn against is writing your characters as though they had your knowledge. I'm tempted to say that they should be fundamentally ignorant, but that's not quite true. Instead, depending on how widely studied it is, they should have relatively limited knowledge, and their dialogue should reflect that.

They should by no means know everything.

[Duck999]

Just one thing about the different things you can blossom/wilt. The pain blossom/wilt may not be useful. If you could blossom/wilt touch in specific areas, you could numb an area where there was pain, giving you the equivalent of a pain remover.

[Weimann]

Thanks for the comments, Grinner. The ones about the information characters have about their abilities will kind of have to depend on how I decide to frame the rest of the setting, and then where in it I choose to put the characters. My first idea was a kind of nobility high-school setting where students being able to Blossom something wasn't all too uncommon. I'm kind of starting to lean away from that, but even then, the users would by no means have all the information presented here. Neither would the abilities be "switch on, gain power", but it would take effort and training to develop each skill beyond the basics.

Just one thing about the different things you can blossom/wilt. The pain blossom/wilt may not be useful. If you could blossom/wilt touch in specific areas, you could numb an area where there was pain, giving you the equivalent of a pain remover.

The list of senses is basically lifted from the Wikipedia page for senses, on which is stated that while pain is related to the sense of touch, it is in fact its own thing, so I'm not sure it would ectually work quite as cleanly. That's why I listed it on its own, but I'm definitely leaning towards merging them for reasons discussed above.

Two more senses were cut from that list: 1) balance, partly because the other senses are more like collectors of external information in a way balance isn't and partly because I felt like agility needed something more to go for it, and 2) the kinesthetic sense, which is the sense you have of where your bodyparts are in relation to each other without perceiving them with any of your other senses. If you can touch your nose with your hand while your eyes are closed, your kinesthetic sense is working. That just didn't seem useful. I mean, you Blossom your kinesthetic sense and you will be able to touch your nose with accuracy such as never before seen in the human realms. Yeah, maybe not.