Magic and the common people

How do those with magic get it? Are they born with it, or is it something that can be taught? Regardless, making sure that only a handful of people can actually use magic would help I think.

>>52689499
The creation of magic itself is a lost art, so these days you've got a class of learned individuals who know how to use it, but not replicate it.

>>52689499
magic sticks better to objects than people but are hoarded by the elite

>>52689519
They are born with the ability to use magic and, generally, they are take by the local magic user as disciples. I actually want them to create magic items in order to fulfill that role of general problem solvers, but I find it hard to hit a sweet spot where magic items aren't just mass produced because, shit, they're magic items that make life much easier.

My current take on the matter is that magic items are constantly active and that they fail over time, so the nice enchanted stick you're using now to improve the harvest may backfire spectacularly without proper magic supervision.

Also, magic in the setting is not really a well understood topic by magicians. They have theories that work and allow them to work with it but the magic community is very scattered and they lack a proper magic paradigm to the point that two magicians from distant places may not me able to "understand" each other.

>>52689944

I've personally never liked the whole "magic is so mysterous but we can use it reliably" type of setting.

That said, what form does the magic take and what sort of magic items are you looking to have? Magic charms that help ward lesser spirits for example can be a thing but also something you pick up from a street peddler who says it was made by an ancient sage or some shit

>>52689499
>>52689709
I'm not entirely clear on what role you want magic items to play. Are you saying that you want magic users to create magic items only in response to magical problems?

>>52690043
>I've personally never liked the whole "magic is so mysterous but we can use it reliably" type of setting.
Well, it's not exactly an unlikely scenario. Science works like that. There's a whole bunch of things we know about the world, and we know that certain procedures will yield consistent results if done properly, but there's also a lot of things we don't understand about the universe.

It's not hard to imagine a setting where this applies to magic; a wizard knows that if you do X and Y under Z conditions you can make a small object levitate across the room and into your hand, but if he comes across a ghost or an interdimensional portal he won't know what's going on because those things are outside his body of knowledge. Just because it works on consistent rules doesn't mean you know what they are.

>>52690043
The idea is that it was really well understood in the past but everything went to shit to a certain degree and after many years the magic users don't really understand it anymore. Not because magi has changed or because it is so mysterious that nobody can comprehend it but because they only have certain knowledge that wasn't destroyed when everything went to shit. Some clever magicians have tried nice theories that work, but they are far from really understanding it like former generations of magicians did.

Magic items are only build by those who can use magic, so the magic charm you metion would be a thing, but if someone tries to sell you something that was made by a ancient sage or something like that he's 100% trying to scam you.

>>52690044
Mostly I want magic items to help people in ther daily lives with mundane problems, thus the problem with creating a balance between a "fair usage" and a "uncrontroled usage". There would also be items used to deal with magic problems like magic beasts, but they would be less common and restricted to certain groups like city guards, militia, hunters or armies.

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>>52689499
>Any ideas? How would you make it work?

Art.
Do it like how Art has always been done.

Like, look around you and notice how almost everything around us is made possible or otherwise bearable due to artists: television shows, books, the fucking logos and designs on anything from soup to what your computer looks like.

Yet despite how common Art is; not a lot of people can into art, even less people understand or are even consciously aware of how important it is to a functioning society or how much of an actual trade it is.

I'd imagine the parallels between an Artist and a Wizard would sort of write themselves in a "magic is common, but misunderstood", given you'd have the same sort of situation where people would be asking both of these individuals to basically do WORK without getting PAID because they never see the inbetween, they just see the "end product".

>>52690269
So you want magic items that people can use in basic everyday tasks like cooking, cleaing, or bathing, but you want them to be uncommon enough that most people can't depend on them and instead rely on regular non-magical methods? Like if one person had a cooking pot that heated itself, but the average citizen would have to use an ordinary stove because the self-heating pots aren't common enough to be ubiquitous, but they might have other magic items that helped them with different tasks instead?

>>52689499
read Ars Magica