Tendo City

Exactly. I know you prefer total disclosure. I'm only saying that that is not the definitive "best" way to go about telling a story. There are others that are just as good, just different.

Sure, sometimes stories work just fine without a great explanation for the system. Just say "magic is" and leave it at that. Works quite well in lots of cases. But if you want to make the world more believable as a complete system, have some kind of explanation.

I'm not merely saying that a story can still be "good enough" without a full explanation. I'm disputing the claim that a story is ALWAYS better with a full explanation. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is BETTER to leave things in the dark, and not just because it might get tedious reading about it. What I am attempting to explain is that sometimes a sense of wonder and mystery is absolutely vital to the proper mood the story is trying to get across, and explanation of all facets of that world would kill that, yes, even if the explanations are added in some sort of index in the back it would do harm in those cases.

Of course, it depends on the quality of the writer... give a full explanation and be a bad writer and of course your story won't be as good as a good writer who doesn't explain things... but Feist and Jordan are pretty good writers too. :)

I like lots of fantasy works that don't have as comprehensive explanations as Jordan's. For instance, D&D. I like D&D a lot... does that have a great explanation? There is one somewhere, to some degree, but you don't need to know much of any of it to like the setting... understanding the gods and the planes is strictly optional.

You seem to be missing my point quite completely.... Are you doing this intentionally?

Wonder and mystery? I thought I addressed that by saying 'you haven't read any of these books so it's hard to explain what the result is'... I'd say any kind of magic has some amount of mystery involved. Feist has explanations of his magic/cosmology -- eventually, by the two or three characters in the book's world who understand it -- and there's definitely still a sense of mystery there... Jordan? He's just a great writer. The magic system is well explained and made clear, but because it is something impossible in the real world it's just that: a well-explained magic system. And 'magic' inherently involves some amount of mystery... though it depends. Is your magic something so common everyone is used to it and the only mystery is our own thoughts of 'that's cool', like it often is in D&D, or is it like David Eddings' works, where under ten people in the world can do magic and to just about everyone else it's impossibly mysterious and probably impossible...

DJ's point is that neither is universally better than the other; they both have their areas where one fits more appropriately than the other.

Exactly. I know you like explanation, and I suppose it's not explained to an utter degree like D&D, but that's hardly the point. Sometimes leaving out pretty much ANY detail on how it works at all, and explaining nothing more than the effect after the fact, makes for a much better read. SOMETIMES being the key here. For example, I love JRR Tolkein's work. Througout, "magic" is clearly meant to be something beyond mortal comprehension, and to really get that across, he makes no attempt at all to explain it. He goes into great detail on what the mortals actually end up SEEING, but not how it actually came to be. For example, he goes into a great description of the river of horses that wash away the ring wraiths when Frodo is being taken to the safe haveny place of the elvish elven. However, as to exactly how such a feat actually occured, it's left a mystery, and I like it that way. If something is to be beyond mortal comprehension, at the level he was attempting, it better be left unexplained. Oh of course I can come up with my own theories, but that's part of the charm right there. You have the freedom to interpret it as you will. The Silmarrilion really does a good job at leaving you speechless. Originally, The Hobbit was supposed to be part of a legend created about old England, but by this book, it had become something totally different and was now about a totally fictional world with it's own continental structure at that. Eh, anyway at the start the heavenly host sings a song to create the world. A vivid description of the song's beauty and scope was presented, but an explanation of exactly how the song became the World that Is was purposefully left out. I would hardly call that a failing of the author myself. It was just a purposeful thing to leave us in the dark there.

Again, this isn't ALWAYS the best method. I'm only trying to explain that it is SOMETIMES the best method. I don't want explanations for ALL the mysteries a story has to offer unless the story really does require it (for example, if the book is, oddly enough, a "mystery novel", I'd like a full explanation of everything that happened before to wrap it all up). So sometimes I love having things left mysterious with no real explanation, sometimes I don't, depending on how the story was written. It is not ALWAYS better to fully explain everything, that is all I'm trying to say, and a point you seem to be contending by simply ignoring it for some odd reason...

LotR magic... I noticed in the movies how annoyingly random it is. So you can control the weather across the continent, but not destroy some Ents at your feet? It's so weird... it badly needs some kind of rules, or limitations, or ... something... but as it is it comes off as a very weak magic system where the people have very limited real magic powers... long life, a few basic things like wind control and summoning animals and light... and not a whole lot more... really, at least as presented in the films LotR magic is unsatisfying. I would rather have some kind of rules for how it works (this is something all games MUST have -- you must deliniate what your magic system is, even if you just make a basic system with a list of spells that each cost X spell points or can be used X times per day.)

Note that here I'm not even asking for the 'how does it work', but just the 'what are the limits/powers of your system'... it's like Tolkein didn't know, he just gave them whatever powers he wanted, and then when he didn't want them to have powers he took them away at random or something...