What magics do you use, Iwaku?

Wow, people use various magics for plenty of things I've never thought of, *cough cough* @Cpt Toellner.. ^_^
I made a who list of uses for it, including being able to take form of a cloud of smoke to before insubstantial and float around.

One of the higher functions was a limited method of teleportation., where you would simply need to see smoke, like a column of smoke, and you could blink over to it, walking out of the source.

Standard uses included creating smoke-screen, throwing balls of smoke at people (much like bursts of air or something,) or simply suffocating people by pumping smoke into their lungs.

One thing I never go to play with, was the highest function of the power, able to animate creatures made entirely out of smoke, like a big-bad smoke-gollum that can be semi-solid or legions of smoke-soldiers, all wavering in the wind as they march.

And lastly, I just want to cover myself in smokey-armor.
 
Large_bonfire.jpg


Who doesn't love fire?

Though usually I gravitate towards either magic designed to resist and dispel magic, or magic designed to enhance one's physical capacity. That way I can either be a mage killer through antimagic or a mage killer through magic leading to physical means.
 
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Usually some form of summoning magic, often manifesting as the use of Goetia in handling demons of varying kinds. It's always fun to create a conflict between the summoner and summoned, or to add some danger to the art.
Similarly, command over golems. Who doesn't love a giant army of painless, inexhaustible suits of armor?
 
I like component magic (magic you need physical ingredients to cast), and Naming magic is something I've poked at with interest

Then there's the fairly standard 'mental force' type magic, which I usually revert to when I don't feel like doing in depth rules and whatnot.
 
I tend to be fairly diverse about what kind of magics I pick. Rather than picking what kind of magic I want to use and then making the character, I tend to decide on a character personality and general history then look at the world and magic system in play and decide what would make the most sense. The things that interest me most are magic that requires some thinking to use properly and magic with interesting circumstances or influences as it pertains to the character.

Anything with okay combat uses but high non-combat utility tends to interest me. Low and moderate level illusions and mental manipulation powers tend to fit in here. They can do cool things in almost any situation but making good use of them in a fight requires some preparation or cleverness, so they're pretty fun.

I also like using magic commonly regarded as evil for good things, like a straight good guy necromancer or darkness magic used by a heroic non-sneaky person. The converse is also fun, good magic (healing and light and such) used by bad people for bad reasons. The seemingly incongruous nature of things amuses me, and I enjoy thinking up non-standard ways to use those kinds of powers to make them fit the non-standard intentions.
 
Bit of everything. When you're a GM who's introducing and utilising hundreds of characters, you tend to diversify magical abilities. There's your standards like fire, wind, ice, water, electricity, earth etc, but then there's also characters with abilities such as Sand manipulation, Lava, Weight/Mass, Teleportation, Shadows, Time, Gravity, Dance, Song, Charm, Poison, Illusion, Cloning, Beast Manipulation... the list goes on and on. It's fun to explore all sorts of different options and abilities!
 
I also like using magic commonly regarded as evil for good things, like a straight good guy necromancer or darkness magic used by a heroic non-sneaky person. The converse is also fun, good magic (healing and light and such) used by bad people for bad reasons. The seemingly incongruous nature of things amuses me, and I enjoy thinking up non-standard ways to use those kinds of powers to make them fit the non-standard intentions.
Yeah, these types of things are hella fun. One of my rp's eventual major villains will be a Cleric with healing/light magic, but used in a somewhat different fashion:- they're able to absorb and take out the damage and pain suffered by one of her allies and then inflict that damage on someone else.
 
I made a who list of uses for it, including being able to take form of a cloud of smoke to before insubstantial and float around.

One of the higher functions was a limited method of teleportation., where you would simply need to see smoke, like a column of smoke, and you could blink over to it, walking out of the source.

Standard uses included creating smoke-screen, throwing balls of smoke at people (much like bursts of air or something,) or simply suffocating people by pumping smoke into their lungs.

One thing I never go to play with, was the highest function of the power, able to animate creatures made entirely out of smoke, like a big-bad smoke-gollum that can be semi-solid or legions of smoke-soldiers, all wavering in the wind as they march.

And lastly, I just want to cover myself in smokey-armor.
Infamous: Second Son uses quite a few of these ideas for their smoke powered character. Was pretty cool. You could also gain a few other type of superpowers in that game too which were creative as well. Never done smoke for an rp though, but really should.
 
I make a point of trying to vary the abilities of my characters, and that includes magic. When designing a character, I want the ability to be an identifying aspect of that character, and I want them to be unique—otherwise I'd just reuse old characters.

However, one general theme, if you will, repeats itself in the magic I tend to gravitate towards, and that is absorption. The three I use perhaps the most often are ice, shadow, and negative lifeforce. I prefer to drain energies than to create them.

In addition, I often place two opposing magical elements in the same character. For example, light and shadow, fire and ice, necromancy and healing. Instead of simply using these two opposites side by side, I like to merge them together. Cold flames, visible shadow, a corpse whose body acts as though alive through healing magic. It's probably just a consequence of my desire to make characters special snowflakes.
 
Antimagic. Just walk around being immune to both harmful and beneficial magic and, when touching people, you temporarily shut down their powers.

Also status-boosting. Like beefing up your strength and speed.
 
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I see you're all sensible and practical. I, on the other hand, prefer creepy, body-horror powers simply because they're so damn fun to play out. They may not be your best choice optimization-wise, but there's nothing cooler than strangling your opponent with your own intestines.

Yeah, have fun getting rid of that mental image :D
 
I don't gravitate towards a certain type of magic. We'd be sitting here all day if I had to list them. There are some roles I gravitate to though. Commonly control and assault, but on occassion I do enjoy being a shameless nuke-character or stalwart tank. I very rarely go pure support.
 
Antimagic. Just walk around being immune to both harmful and beneficial magic and, when touching people, you temporarily shut down their powers.

Also status-boosting. Like beefing up your strength and speed.
That's an interesting one. this antimagic could come in useful in an rp one day. lol I may make use of it sometime. Status-boosting effects/spells/magic are all the best. One draw back that can be put in place though, is loads of strain on the body as you use it more and more.

...unrelated to the post, I just entered the dark brotherhood on Skyrim... and tried moving with the mouse instead of the controller.... don't even say it...
 
That's an interesting one. this antimagic could come in useful in an rp one day. lol I may make use of it sometime. Status-boosting effects/spells/magic are all the best. One draw back that can be put in place though, is loads of strain on the body as you use it more and more.

...unrelated to the post, I just entered the dark brotherhood on Skyrim... and tried moving with the mouse instead of the controller.... don't even say it...
I'm using this power in three RPs that I am involved in. I found it rather fun, because it means magic users have to find another way to fight. On the downside, my character can't be healed and has a BUNCH of debilitating injuries, meaning he needs to find a different way to fight as well.
 
When I'm constricted to the choice of the "four elements" (air, earth, water, fire) as the foundation for magic, I tend to gravitate towards either air or earth. Sometimes I go for water. I find those three to actually be the more justifiably versatile and overall practical when compared to fire. Granted, I speak to this mostly from the perspective of combative functions.

With fire, you're limited in terms of most respects since it's really just good for creating iterations of fire-based projectiles, with, in my view, no solid defensive or strategic backbone that can't be circumnavigated by the others. In logically run RP, where magic expends energy, as it often must in just about any situation, fire seems the most prone to needing expenditure, since it's not always readily available. Therefore, the actual process of creating fire taking up a portion of ones mana/chi/ether/midichlorian/etc, while even more would have to into actually moving/shaping the fire once it's created. There are some who branch fire out and into controlling smoke, but that's about the extent to which it reaches. Also, a lot of the other techniques that I see people using in connection with fire elements, such as creating fire shields and having DBZ-esque beam deadlocks with fire blasts, just takes a lot of justification and greater suspension of disbelief.

On the other hand, the other elements are often bountiful and almost always present and accessible in some way, shape or form. The raw material already exists for them, meaning that a character can utilize more of their energy to actually make it move/form in the way they need/want it to. Add that to the fact that they are, mostly, found in an array of forms and capable of a wide range of applications, and you've pretty much got a solid trio of powers, any one of which can work ways to outmatch fire.

With air, I'm always quick to justify it as a bridge into use of lightning as sub-element (as much as I love and appreciate the series, the makers of The Last Airbender can suck it on that logic; lightning should have been the trademark ability of a pissed off air bender). I just see air as having plenty of good uses that work great for subtlety. I mean, most of what an air-elemental can do, in terms of conflict situations, can be done in a way that the person they're using it against would barely know it was coming in the first place. One second everything is fine; next second they're being compressed by a sudden increase in air pressure, or being suffocated by sudden shortage of oxygen. At the same time, a good, compressed, gale-force blast of air can knock the wind out of someone pretty well.

With Earth... well in most fantasy settings, there's plenty of it to use, and depending on what qualifies as 'earth,' there's lot of material that's covered under that umbrella. I mainly see earth as a defensive and restricting type of power. Unless you have to deal with another earth manipulating character, you can trap pretty much any problematic adversaries in closed rock coffin, or alter the ground beneath them just enough to make it like quicksand... hell, I once read a tournament battle RP where one player just used an earth manipulator to dig out a concealed pit trap, lure his opponent into it and bury them alive; albeit it helped that the battle was under a restrictive power setting, it was an impressive feat of tact in favor of earth as an elemental affinity.

As for water, while I don't use it quite as often as I used to, it has its merits. The biggest thing that works in favor of water is that a character potentially has three different manners of matter falling under their control. Since water exists in three states as a solid, liquid and gas, it's pretty versatile. Mist veils, whipping someone around with watery tendrils, skewering them or even trapping them, with a good freeze all work pretty well when speaking of combative function. Like air and earth substances, water is something that's easily accessible, existing in most places where characters can actually live and interact and can even be pulled from oddball places, like siphoning the morning dew from the grass and such. That and I do find The Last Airbender's Blood Bending technique as a legitimate branch of water manipulation on non TLAB settings, considering that water must exist in most organisms in sufficient quantity (I've only seen a handful of characters made in my time as an RPers that could justifiably have no water in their bodies, simply through being purely metaphysical beings.

Beyond these elements, I have, of late, gravitated more quickly toward the dual use of electricity & magnetism, to the best of my ability. More often than not though, I have those two off shooting from my much favored use of the concept of chi/ki/prana in characters. Sometimes I just refer to the whole life force concept as being 'ether/aether.' When you get down to it, it's all the same thing given a different name: just raw energy that comprises the makeup of at least the physical realms. In my way of viewing magic, chi/ki etc. is the foundation on which most magic stands. Without the raw energy, no being can perform magical feats. Give a character a more refined control over their base life energy, and you can pretty much grow them in whatever direction you please, power/magic wise.

Of course, I'm pretty flexible when it comes to fandom RPs, and will always work to emulate whatever magical system is in place for whatever canon I might be playing. If I'm doing something in the vein of the RPGs (Final Fantasy, etc) I fit my character's magic skillset to whatever class of character I have them set as; if they're a mage, I'll load them up with spellwork; if they're more a warrior, I'll give them magical abilities that serve to enchant their bodies and weapons to enhance their performance.

Meanwhile, powers that I absolutely abhor (in most cases):

"My character can manipulate time!" For the sheer fact that most people simply leave it at that basic sentence, offering no explanation demonstrative of a sound backing of mechanics behind the facet of existence that their character has control over. With the exception of some fictional settings, 'time' is rarely displayed as having any physical matter; it's a perception of conscious lifeforms. And honestly, it's both more acceptable (in my mind anyways) and simplistic to just define a character as being able to accelerate themselves to a point where 'time' seems to stop than it is to argue that they 'simply stopped time.'

"My character controls Darkness." In the cases of some canon settings this is fine, it severely irks me when people bring it into an original setting that has yet to account for darkness as an 'element.' It's for the same reason I dislike time as a power in most instances. Frequently, when it's used outside of a context in which it has naturally and significantly existed (IE Darkness in the Kingdom Hearts series is defined enough to be somewhat understandable) it often lacks the accompanying explanation of what it is within the universe it's being thrown into. Is it Darkness as in the opposite of light? If so, how is it then tangible? And what then would light be in this context? Or is it simply some obscure for of matter?



I suppose that, in a nutshell, I prefer to use magic that functions on the basis of some sort of understood logic or principle, or otherwise such magic that can be easily given logic or a principle.
 
I assume technically body enhancement's my most common, but usually I have it as the result of mutant powers, augmentation etc rather than powered by magical means.

Other than that then? Wind and Lightning Magic.

Wind because it very quickly double's up as being used as force magic, telekinesis, ability to levitate yourself etc.

And the reason for lightning is very simple...


Though usually I gravitate towards either magic designed to resist and dispel magic, or magic designed to enhance one's physical capacity. That way I can either be a mage killer through antimagic or a mage killer through magic leading to physical means.
Basically you're a Templar? :P
 
Hmmm...

Given I create/RP only alien/fantasy critters (non-human non-humanoids), most of my characters either possess natural physical "powers" or derive their abilities from technology, either external or internal. I do have one character I've RPed... what I refer to as an "anti-gremlin" species... who uses a form of magic which allows him, through both his own body and the use of special tools, to repair/maintain broken things created by humans. Just the exact opposite of what gremlins do. Most commonly, however, I like to use some form of telekinesis.

Really, when you think on it, telekinesis allows you to manipulate all matter, in one form or another. Heh. With my Nism character Deen, and also with his son, Peet, I've had weird things happen with liquids becoming "animated" and... misbehaving. I've also used the manipulation of water through telekinesis to allow a character to take a simple bath. Or to simply use a ball of animated water to drink from. Orrr throw like a snowball, dousing their "target." Fun fun!