I know, right! There’s so much detail here that’s beyond the scope of the review, like spell components, the law of sympathy, and what it means when a spell fails in various ways. For the latter, if the caster is very far from having a working spell, the energies poured into the casting will normally just dissipate harmlessly. An explosion or another catastrophic result, on the other hand, means the spell is actually close to its intended form.
As for Medivh sneering at attempts to describe magic with math, yes, as you say, it’s his opinion, not necessarily objective truth. I have some headcanon here — and what follows is only my interpretation.
Arcane magic is not literally math. It is, however, lawful and reproducible — otherwise it would be impossible to scribe spells in books and give them to other mages to learn. If you do A in the correct way, then B reliably happens. And what’s reproducible can be generalized, and the generalizations can be described with math, even that math is only an approximation for our convenience, not something the universe fundamentally cares about.
In this sense, it’s similar to real-world physics, which is not literally math either. Our universe simply works this way, knowing nothing about numbers, functions, or matrices; these are just what we use to describe our best guesses at how our universe works. We can study emergent laws and realize that they’re a consequence of more fundamental laws, but where the fundamental ones come from, we simply don’t know yet, and might never know from inside our universe.
But just because our current understanding of physics is described with math doesn’t mean we have to use math for all physical effects we exert on the surrounding world. We are intuitively aware of many physical properties of our environment: the strength and flexibility of our own bodies, the weight and textures of objects around us, the heat and humidity of air and water, the force that pulls everything down, etc. We don’t need to solve equations to walk down the road, to eat and drink, to fight and hunt, or to make pottery. But if you’re trying to, say, build a railway bridge, then you better do the math, lest it collapses under the weight of a passing train.
But imagine if bridge engineering came as natural to you as breathing. Then you would never have to formally study strength of materials, rigid body dynamics and other involved fields. You would simply build a bridge based on what felt right, and it would work, even if you couldn’t explain your intuition to others.
This, I think, is what separates Medivh from more typical mages. As the Guardian and the son of Aegwynn, he has inherited vast natural aptitude for magic that lets him cast it intuitively, on a scale that typical mortal mages can only dream of. And from his perspective, those paper-pushers in the Kirin Tor are putting too much effort into trying to mechanize and codify what to him is more of an art than an exact science.
That doesn’t mean he’s objectively right or wrong. It means he has options that others don’t, and those others have to formally reason about the arcane and craft spells the hard way — with math.
I’m actually planning to change things a bit for WC3!
For now, I’ve been writing one mammoth post per week. For WC3, my plan is to instead write shorter but more frequent posts. By my estimation, that game will take about twenty posts to cover:
- 2 for the manual
- 1 for the prologue campaign (including the extra missions)
- 8 for the RoC campaigns, two per campaign
- 1 for an interlude
- 8 for the TFT campaigns
Hopefully, I’ll be able to write two posts per week, or perhaps more often on a good week. After that it’s another interlude, then one to three posts about the first edition RPG, and then vanilla WoW.
