Magic

Here is where the fairly straight route of logical weapons and fighting suddenly veers off down a dark and twisty road with many many different forks and junctions.

Magic is and always will be the hardest weapon to use effectively, properly and fairly. The realms of what you can do with magic is almost limitless and as such it can take almost any form and be used in almost any way imaginable. And that's the thing, Imagination. Magic is not something based off of a reality or a logical progression of mathematics and science. It is based off of the limits of imagination.

I will however try as best i can to give you people who feel the need for some extra advice/guidance some sort of help.

It's probably easier to start with the things you should try to avoid as a magic user.

Going gung ho is something to seriously avoid if you can. Magic versus magic can be baffling at the best of points without even bothering with the element types and strengths, If you complicate matters by firing off spells like a machine gun then things are gonna get messy and just damn complicated.

Something to remember is, all magic can be blocked. If the spell your using can't logically be blocked, then your probably god-modding. Examples would be sucking the entire galaxy into a crushing void, or exploding the earth in some stupid way or anything that can't be blocked. Of course, the other person could well just explode the world back at you and you end up with some stupidly OTT magic fight and as such it points out what i meant about being hard to use realistically.

Try not to be too flamboyant. I know that forum roleplaying is all about how eloquent you can be with words and how well you can portray what your doing as actually being a possibility, but there really is no reason the end up throwing a thesaurus at you fellow combatant. SO many times i've seen people use words the you could question even exist, in an attempt to make that spell seem even better than it is. Just try to explain yourself in a completely logical and progressive manor. By all means be descriptive, just don't don't act like the bigger and more complicated words you use will the magic bigger and better.

Try not to go OTT with you spells. I know you could very well go tearing up the world in an attempt to best your opponent, but i actually find that if you keep the spells relatively small on the area of effect the fight will be far more enjoyable and rather quick paced. Since roleplaying is supposed to be fun (more than anything else) making the playing ground as equal as possible is a good thing, cause the contest is then equal and can tilt in either direction, meaning it really is the "best man wins".

Now we reach the real "bone of contention" in the realms of magic. Elements.

Now anyone who's fought with magic knows that while the type of magic your using my be kick ass, it's always weak against another type of magic that's directly opposed to it elementarily. Below is a table with most of the basic elements and their weakness.

Element-Weak against

Fire-Water
Water-Electricity
Electricity-Earth
Earth-Air
Air-Fire

The above table is extremely basic, But useful none-the-less.

The real problem comes when using these types of magic against others which it is typically neither strong nor weak against. An example of this is water versus Earth. Now most people would say since water erodes the earth, that water would be stronger. But what if your using a particular variant of the magic element. Like say, earth magic in the style of nature and plants and such against simply water. Well plants need water to live, so simply put the water wouldn't really effects unless it massively overpowered it. But then perhaps the water magic style is ice, we all know frost kills plants. I wont continue onwards, but i think you get the idea that each branch of magic has several sub-categories that will make it more effective against some and yet weak against certain types of magic that it would normally be immune to.

It is with the above example that i would suggest the following: unless your a scientific type of person try not to dabble in magical elements that are far more complicated than the basic elements. You could very well end up in a long ass debate about magical elements that will probably leave you spitting feathers.

There is and always will be one argument that will rage on forever and no winner will ever be declared outright. Dark versus Light. It's a contest that can only be won by the strength of the cast magic, that's all. See they cancel each other out, without light there can be no dark, without dark there can be no light.

There is only one other type of magic that i've not talked about, conjuration. I'm only gonna say two things about it: Don't conjure endless supplies of minions, that kinda counts as god-modding. If you summon a weapon, try and stick to the outlines of close combat weapons above, obviously it's most likely gonna have magical elements but try and keep it reasonable. Those two rules kinda cover most of the bases, but if in doubt, ask a moderator if it's fair.

Well that's pretty much everything i can think of about magic. Again, as i had suggested with all other types of weapons, i would suggest that you do some background research of the particular magic branch you want to use, before you go throwing yourself into the deep end. It's a fairly elitist thing and unless your up to scratch, you can end up losing more than you win for a long time.