Hello!
I’ve never done mage RP and I feel some things are a bit tricky in how to approach. Like conjured food, it seems like a basic ability for mages but if they can make food at any given time, why is there still starving people in the world? Same with portals, how do you avoid being the solution to every problem when you have magic? 
How should you / how do you go about this?
The Executors BUNS are the BEST!
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/417016290339979264/649565287540326425/IMG_20191128_115050.jpg?width=493&height=513
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I assume the logistics are a bit tricky when it comes to the food. Seeing as (probably) not every community has a mage (who is also capable of using the spell), conjured food would have to be transported from one place (a central hub) to another, after which it should be immediately eaten.
I’m not sure if it is just a game mechanic, but I headcanon that conjured food decomposes fairly quickly, making it impossible to mass produce and store them.
As for portals, I also assume not every mage can do them. That aside, they’ve already been stated to be impractical for moving armies. They can probably also be countered by other magic, causing the mage and their party to be unable to escape etc.
Edit: in short, your mage doesn’t have to know, or be equally good at every spell in the spellbook. You can set boundaries and weaknesses or expertise in certain areas.
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Well, first of all, magic has a cost.
It could be straining the willpower of the caster, their vitality, and also expend reagents and mana.
One can only conjure so much food before they run out of mana or maybe even pass out. And in RP, you also have freedom over the quantity of food you conjure.
Drinks may also not restore your mana, if you choose not to. I think it’s just an OOC mechanic, and treat it as such. But even if drinks do restore mana in your RP, you still have all the other factors to worry about.
Portals though? You could subscribe to the more widespread belief that “opening such rifts in time and space strain the leylines” of a particular planet, because… look at what Ner’zhul did when he opened too many dimensional gateways. Draenor blew up.
Further expanding on this concept of “the leylines should be managed carefully!” players incorporate… authoritative figures, such as the Kirin Tor or other Mage societies which constitute the “majority” of the Mages on Azeroth, and therefore they all have portal licenses or such redtape to stagger the use of portals.
But bad guys don’t care about loicenses and permits do they? No. Neither do most players, but you still could pretend that the majority of the use of portals is tightly regulated, and all the players and baddies are just in the minority.
But that is up to you, my mage was pretty unencumbered when it came to those type of spells, could use portals and teleports at any time… it was only a matter of having the right reagents on him (I.e. Rune of Portals, Rune of Teleportation).
There was some little piece of lore from recent “Elegy” novel, where conjured food somewhat worked as a fuel to someone’s body during exhaustive portal casting. And as quote follows;
The magi had not slept for days, keeping the portals open. They subsisted on conjured food and drink and the priests’ continual blessings.
Portals themselves, based on a recent lore we see again in Elegy, seem to be a channeled spell that has to be maintained by a mage, rather than what we see as a OOC mechanic;
The refugees just kept coming . Anduin has ordered that the portals be constantly open throughout the city, but the magi had to sleep and eat, as did every one of the stoic but emotionally wrung-out refugees.
equally with the fact that they exhaust you like any other channelling spell;
Night elves were pressed in tight lines, waiting to escape the city through the portals - the only means available. The magi operating them looked exhausted , their arms trembling as they kept the gateways open.
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Added on to what Aeílmar posted, energy has a cost. Sure, you could conjure up a feast, but it takes away your own stockpile of energy. That’s often why the food conjured is simple.
It is made for nourishment, to help restore energy.
Now, one mage could effectively conjure enough food for people to munch on.
But unfortunately, most mages are too busy to conjure food for the people because they have other duties to attend to, such as maintaining portals, enchanting things and combat.
They don’t have the manpower and energy to also feed an entire city. If they were at peace, mages could effectively conjure food for the people, and then once farms are working again, could focus on other improvements.
There is also the element of time. How fast can a mage recover their energy? One could say that they could sleep and be ready to cast again, but I say that’s not possible.
After all, doing an intense workout every day would take a toll on the body. You need downtime and that downtime is what I’d attribute to what mages need.
…Honestly, Warcraft magic never really seems to have a limit. I try to avoid it. Otherwise you have cases like Jaina who is able to freeze a whole battlefield, but then becomes useless elsewhere.
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My mage loves the giddy thrill of adventure so much that he doesn’t want to undermine it with portal magic.
Mages can be quite eccentric, aloof and detached characters, so them having irritating explanations as to why they won’t cast certain magic when it’d be very helpful can create some fun dialogues.
Otherwise, your mage could struggle with certain magic because they might be fatigued, might not know the incantations, etc.
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Because that magic schools. Not every mage is great at all of them . A guy who can effectively use translocation might be very very bad at conjuring.
Now let’s say you got 5 mages. 2 are great at enchanting, 1 is good at illusions, 1 is super good at enchanting and 1 is a very great conjurer. Now keep in mind all mages learn other schools too and probably have a lot of duties to attend to. Just there is no time to feed the world since they are also probably understaffed due to Legion.
You don’t and it comes down to narrative. “Oh no! I can’t portal out because Queen Aszhara blocked my teleportation!” does the human mage scream while in another raid freezes an entire ocean. The same is said by a nightborne who is older than 10000 years.
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I think a lot of it comes to reading the room. Will a cheeky portal rob the current RP/story of tension and impact? Don’t do a portal then. Same with conjured food, or any other of the endless convenient mage tricks.
With conjured food in particular, my headcanon is that while it’s nourishing and will keep you going, it’s not as nutritional/healthy as real food, and long-term you’re gonna feel like you’ve only eaten fast food for months. Maybe even have side-effects of constant arcane exposure?
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On my Telemancer I’ve taken some inspiration from Oculeth and his portal antics. During one of the intro quests in Suramar you have to wander through some portals and end up in a cave (or other dimension, not sure) with low gravity I believe.
My headcanon here is that, if a portal is not sufficiently stable it’ll cause temporal and/or spatial anomalies, such as that low gravity. Portals should be dangerous and a luxury thing, not something that everyone can just do. Most of the portals that are made in-game are for gameplay purposes, sufficiently stable (through telemancy beacons or constant channeling from mages) or temporarily created by (powerful) mages that disappear in a moment’s notice, thus not being able to support larger numbers.
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I like this idea!
I forgot you can still implement them in your RP even though they’re gone from the game, thank you
Also very interesting
Thanks to all who replied, I have a bigger understanding now 
Edit: @aeílmar How did I not remember this, I’ve read it myself 
thanks for putting these quotes here, they were very helpful 
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Imagine portals as driving. It´s not that hard to do it, anyone can learn it, but despite of how convenient it is, not everyone does. And those who do end up controlling machine that can be really dangerous, so there are many rules on how to do it right, with severe punishments if you do something wrong.
Even if you do something that would be punishable, it doesn´t mean you get caught, after all, cops get to control only small portion of roads at any point. Still, most drivers don´t drink before driving, they don´t drive 100 km/h through the town and don´t ignore red lights because it can result in something really bad happening.
Of course, when the road is good, you know there are no cops there, you have great visibility, know both capabilities of you as a driver and the car you are driving and are in a hurry, going 20 km/h above limit is something many drivers wouldn´t see as bad. Rules are there for good reason, but it´s not like people are going to die when you break them just a little bit every once in a while, right?
Make portals responsibly, kids.
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When I deal with conjured food I often describe it as bland and tastless and its only saving grace is that it keeps the hunger at bay
but it is also something I wouldn’t feed to anyone but myself.
or other mages/spellcasters
part the tastlessness comes from his poor skill in the conjured spellcraft
Portals I often keep them unstable and unpredictable
when cast nilly willy like, if me and the boys have to escape from danger and we open a portal its not likely a safe trip as if it had been a stable one such as the ones found in the portal rooms.
To add further to the discusion.
There are also two other angles in telemancy which have to be remembered: Culture and Training.
The magic is a skill. Skill is best developed when it is directly practiced. It is natural that the more you practice, the better you become at it. Now if we apply this to aspiring mages telemancers, they first require general training in magic and then they can start to specialize. It takes years upon years of study to master the subjects of magic and much like in any skill, the journey never ends.
The proper theory is important but it all comes down to chances to practice. In case of portals consider how often do the mages have chance to practice it. One of the most important factors in answering this question is culture.
Let’s look at three Azeroth cultures of magic. Dalaran, Sin’dorei and Nightborne.
Dalaran has strict regulations on what is proper portal creation and where portals should be created and what you shouldn’t do with portals(Such as thorw polymorphed items which combined with portals create bomb.). Dalaran is strict about it and I doubt they leave much room for unrestricted practice of telemancy.
Let’s look at the Sin’dorei. The Magisters most likely all can use portals in some degree and none of them really would be as restricted as Dalaran magi unless the two groups agreed to uphold the same regulations. But the problem with Sin’dorei is that their culture and enviorement made it so that telemancy must have been limited to the regional level. They wouldn’t bump down and forth to every place on Azeroth en masses, but they would use teleports throughout Quel’thalas and perhaps Dalaran.
But then again, Sin’dorei actually don’t need skilled Transmuters since they have Translocation Orbs which are clearly seen being the case in Undercity-Silvermoon connection.
Then we have Nightborne. The Nightborne have most developed telemancy as the Horde race, no doubt about that. They had far more years to practice than Quel’dorei and weren’t restricted in magic practice at all. However, unlike the Sin’dorei and Dalaran they didn’t have much of a Kingdom to begin with. Only one large city and region in which they could strengthen ‘leyline infrastructure’ for telemancy.
If anything, Nightborne use of telemancy must have been more of from one corner of the city to the other.
Lastly, we have two groups which use telemancy on cosmic scale. The Demons and the Ethereals.
The Legion demons wanted to conquer many planets, the Fel is far more capable of opening larger portals than the Arcane and so the Legion culture demanded the easy methods of transportation between points in space. They also had at least 25k years + Time Dilation in Nether to master their telemancy. They have literal scepters and keystones which can with ease open portals from planet to planet, so it isn’t far-fetched to say that not only they had unlimited chance to practice, but they also are the best at it.
Then we have the Ethereals, which due to circumstances of their planet descturction and need to survive in the Cosmos HAD TO master ways of telemancy. By nessecity they had to master ways of using it. Because unlike the Draenei, they didn’t have space ships.
Culture and enviorement affects your chance to develop a skill. Especially when it comes to magic.
Now to a bit of headcannon about portals and teleports. I believe that there are three ways that telemancy works.
- A mage must actually travel first to the location they want to later use as teleport and memorize all parameters regarding the said location for ‘safe portal usage’. So it can be good motivation for a mage to travel around the world to find proper anchors.
- Mathematics and physics allow for one to use ‘blind’ telemancy from one place to another, but the maths can only get you as far when it comes to safety.
- A mage must actually find anchor before properly teleporting, be it by assistance from other side like summoning or just large telemantic activty in the area.
So yeah, hope that adds to perspective.
Thank you for giving some perspective to it from various angles 
I’m sure it’s already been explained but what the hell.
The general assumption, from what little we know about the topic in lore, portals take a while to open and require an immense amount of energy. We also know they put a great deal of strain on the leylines, one of the ‘fake books’ for the Dalaran higher Learning achievement mentions a recommendation for ‘portal pooling’ place to place rather than opening your own every time.
Personally I restrict portals on my battle-mage to only be locations he is familiar with or has previously been given coordinates for. And for the latter he can only get to the same rough location, not an exact pin point. Additionally he’s no portal mage, so they take a while for him to open, not handy as a GTFO of dodge option.
With conjured food, we know it can sustain you and keep you alive if nothing else is available, but it probably won’t be an ideal long term solution. And as others have mentioned, the energy the food provides has to come from the mage. One mage could make a feast, but then they’ll probably be comatose for a while. To feed an army or town on conjured food alone you’d need a whole army of mages rotating to keep things going. Which is probably more hassle than just getting normal food.
There’s also the matter that not every mage can conjure food. I’m not sure if it still holds up but in the past there was a general agreement that a single mage can probably be advanced in up to three schools of magic without significant issue. Darianuth here focused heavily on combat casting and swordplay, leaving little room for utility schools such as conjuration.
Thank you for your response
True or not it makes sense imo and if nothing else helps in giving your character strengths and flaws, will figure out what schools I want Vel here to be stronger in
Kosak mentioned back in the day that given enough time, effort and resources, anything is possible with arcane magic. Thing is that in most situations, the mage either doesn’t have the time or the resources to pull off all sorts of godly stuff.
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For food, the simple answer is scale: there are much, much too few mages in the world to be a long-term food source; every mage in Dalaran working all day to exhaustion wouldn’t be able to conjure enough food to feed everyone. Not to mention they’d completely drain the mana in their surroundings if they tried that, especially long term.
I also quite like the idea that conjured food is just… bland. It’s like fairly bland bread, so while it’s fairly filling, you wouldn’t want to eat nothing but conjured food every day. Additionally, I imagine conjured food might satisfy basic caloric needs, it might not have a lot of the vitamins and minerals you’d need long-term to stay healthy… yes, I’m saying mages get scurvy if they only eat mana buns.
As for portals, different people seem to RP them differently, but I like to say it’s generally fairly difficult to open a portal to a precise target without preparation, and even then it’s a fairly energy-intensive process, so you won’t be transporting huge armies over long distances. It’s also a spell that requires quite a lot of concentration, so you are unlikely to open a portal in the middle of an active battle. And of course, portals are difficult to establish at the best of times, so interference in the area can make it impossible: you generally won’t be portalling in and out of demonic strongholds without some serious preparation (or risk).
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My headcanon is that conjured food only works as a short-term solution. It disappears, and if you’ve eaten it, it eventually disappears in your stomach, leaving you hungry. You will need regular food eventually.
As for portals, everything said above. They’re channeled, straining, too small and short-timed to move whole armies through, are only castable by experienced mages, and can only be opened to locations for which properly calculated coordinates are available. In addition to that, my headcanon is that capital cities are warded against teleportation everywhere except for the sanctioned portal exit points that we see in-game. In Stormwind, for example, all portal traffic goes through the mage tower, and that place is a high-security checkpoint that’s warded as heck against, say, attempts to smuggle in restricted magic items.
As for “magic can in theory accomplish anything”: in real life, engineering can in theory accomplish anything permitted by the laws of physics, but it’s a matter of having 1) the design, 2) the materials, 3) the tools, 4) the people to build the device, and 5) the energy to power it. With magic, it’s the same principle. Something may be technically possible, but require a very carefully crafted ritual where even the slightest mistake would result in failure, and fifty mages channeling their power at once for twenty-four hours, also uninterrupted.
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