Yora
Maester
While revising the setting for a story I have in mind, I ended up drastically cutting down the magic. Both in the amount to which it is accessible to characters, and in the amount of technical details that define how it works.
A lot of words have been said and written about how to make a magic system work self-consistently and not become an arbitrary plot device that fixes things whenever convenient. But I am also curious about why people make the choices they make when it comes to defining how magic works, what it can do, and how much of it will be present in the story. People have been using everything from practically nothing to fully magical societies, and I suspect that perhaps more often than not, it really just comes down to the creators' personal tastes. But if you do approach it more technically and make a deliberate choice of how much magic is the best match to fit with the themes and also the plot of the work, what are the major factors that go into this decision?
A lot of words have been said and written about how to make a magic system work self-consistently and not become an arbitrary plot device that fixes things whenever convenient. But I am also curious about why people make the choices they make when it comes to defining how magic works, what it can do, and how much of it will be present in the story. People have been using everything from practically nothing to fully magical societies, and I suspect that perhaps more often than not, it really just comes down to the creators' personal tastes. But if you do approach it more technically and make a deliberate choice of how much magic is the best match to fit with the themes and also the plot of the work, what are the major factors that go into this decision?