Jasper Thoughts: Lessons From Pop Culture
There's an interesting pattern in the pop culture sources I draw from. I'm going to ramble and highlight at random. I am going to separate this into chunks using dividers from both jasper-graphics (another of my blogs) and the blog of firefly-graphics (go support them).
In The Elder Scrolls, specifically Skyrim, you have to actually use spells from the class of your choosing in order to level up the skill and unlock more features that will make those spells easier, including perks that reduce the cost of the spells or boosts to your Magicka. You can't cast a spell that costs more Magicka than you have and you have to wait for the bar to refill to the correct amount before casting another spell. There are potions and magic items that can increase your amount of Magicka (temporarily for potions or as long as you're wearing them for magic items), potions to restore a certain amount of Magicka, magic items to increase your Magicka regeneration rate, and magic items to reduce the cost of certain classes of spells.
And while there are skill books to boost a skill by one whole rank instantly, there are only five books for each skill. That means, ignoring racial bonuses to skills from the get-go, the most you can get a skill to without training under teachers (either by paying them or by finishing quests for them) by reading books on the subject, you'd only get the skill to 20. Even with racial bonuses, that's either 25 or 30 max without training or using it.
So in short, in order to get better at magic (and other skills) in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, you have to actually...do magic. And study (under teachers or through books) can give you a boost, but you're not going to max out any skill just through that.
This is fascinating when you think of magic in our world. Everyone hounds the importance of study, and I don't disagree, but at some point, you have to actually do magic in order to learn about it. Striking the balance between study and practice is hard, but eventually you'll find the right balance for your magic.
In Magic: The Gathering's tabletop form, you play out Land cards from your hand - one Land per turn. These represent the energy that you use to cast spells that summon Creatures or Planeswalkers, make Sorceries and Instants happen, create Enchantments or Artifacts, and so on.
An important note here is that once you tap a Land (turn it sideways) to make a play and actually use that energy, you can't untap it (turn it back up) until the untap step of your next turn. You can tap on your opponent's turn to cast Instants or cards with the Flash mechanic, but otherwise, all of your spellcasting has to happen on your turn.
As you may have guessed, the key point here is that even if you know your energy limits (say, five Lands), you can't just use it all (tap it) and cast a whole lot more spells (...casting spells) than you have the energy for (how many you have access to). The energy may come back or refill (untap on your next turn), but you have to keep an eye on it (make sure you leave some untapped in case you need an Instant or Flash keyword).
Dungeons and Dragons! We're familiar with spell slots. Some people even use spell slots to describe their energy already.
They are, functionally, similar to Lands in Magic: The Gathering, so I won't cover these in-depth. But these function quite similarly: You only have so many spell slots per level, and they won't be restored unless you take a long rest (basically an 8 hour break).
And Pokemon. As our final example of limitations, let's discuss this in terms of what all someone can juggle at once.
In the games, a team of Pokemon can only have six members at once, and each of those Pokemon can only learn up to four moves. So even with the widest range of move types, a single Pokemon can only use up to four different types across its four attacks.
So while you can potentially cast any number of spells, I would like to gently put forward the fact that hey, we can only keep track of so many things at once. Don't overfill your plate - you can always go back for seconds.
