Ghost story heavily implied or outright stated, that mort was actually strong enough to count as a wizard. He had simply fudged his test results in the same manner as Elaine to avoid be long pulled into the War.
 So the Mort vs Harry example would seem to be a heavily specialized wizard compared to a generic wizard. A focused practitioner vs a generic wizard might play out differently.

Normally the city (and to a lesser extent the character) is a collaborative effort between the players and the gm. If there is no group then there is no one to complain if you do it yourself. I would suggest you check out some of the city creation topics in the Play by Post thread.

Thirded

This is a Woj that seems relevant to the discussion of "intent".


 jimbutcher
Friendly Neighborhood Writer-Man
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Posts: 346
 

Re: DF: Theories on who Cowl and Kumori really are.
« Reply #56 on: July 16, 2006, 11:50:26 AM »
Quote from: GraevD on July 09, 2006, 03:40:44 PM
  Likewise, you are attracted by a smell of pie, that's normal.  But, someone manipulates the timestream to guarantee that pie isn't the nice fresh cherry pie it was supposed to be, that's just wrong!   Heh, pies aside, my focus is on the controlling of the free will of another person, not on just changes in the environment using magic. 

Man.  The existential morality of using PIE to shape the course of reality.  GOOD or EVIL?  That's . . . one of those discussions I never really thought I'd listen in on.

Quote
"Actually, Molly's intentions when she broke that particular law twisted her."  Here's where I think you hit the nail on the head Lightsabre.  It's the intentions of the caster that matter.  Time Travel, Nercomancy, and Mind Control are all tools that can be used to do *bad* things.  I'm fairly sure what we see in the laws of magic is a sort of wizard gun control, trying to limit the existence of these problematic classes of spells.

But if the substance of the consequences of the act itself does not have its own inherent quality of good or evil, then how can the /intentions/ behind it determine a similar quality?  "Really, I was only trying to provide a better quality of life for my family and my employees.  It wasn't my intention to destroy that particular species of flower in the rain forest that cures cancer."  "I was just trying to give those Injuns some blankets.  It wasn't my intention to expose them to smallpox and wipe out hundreds of thousands of innocent people."  "I just wanted to get that book finished while working two jobs and finishing a brutal semester of grad school.  It wasn't my intention to screw up the name of Bianca's personal assistant whose death had motivated her to go all power hungry to get revenge on Harry."

There's some old chestnut about good itentions serving as base level gradiant on an expressway that goes somewhere, but I can't remember the specifics right now.    While I agree that the /intentions/ of the person taking action are not without significance, they carry far less weight than the /consequences/ of that action. 

"I meant to shoot him in the leg and wound him, not hit the femoral artery and kill him, so I should not be considered guilty of murder," is not something that stands up in a court of law /or/ in any serious moral or ethical evaluation.  You had the weapon.  You knew it was potentially lethal, even if you did attempt to use it in a less than fully lethal fashion.  (Or if you DIDN'T know that, you were a freaking idiot playing with people's lives, something really no less excuseable.)  But you chose to employ the weapon anyway.  The consequences of those actions are /yours/, your doing, regardless of how innocent your intentions may have been.

Similarly, if you meant to drill that ^@#%er through the eyes, if you had every intention of murdering him outright, but you shot him in the hand and he survived with minor injuries, again the consequences overshadow your intentions.  You might have made a stupid or morally queestionable choice, but it isn't like anyone *died* or anything.  He's fine (at least in the long term), you're fine, and there are fewer repercussions--regardless of your hideous intentions.

The exercise of power and the necessity to consider the fallout from your actions isn't something limited to wizards and gods.  Fictional people like Harry and Molly just provide more colorful examples.

As for violating the laws of magic themselves turning you good or evil, well.    There's something to be said on either side of the argument, in the strictest sense, though one side of the argument is definitely less incorrect than the other.  But it's going to take me several more books to lay it out, so there's no sense in ruining the fun.

Jim

(PS--Murphy can't be Kumori, obviously.  Kumori is a powerful and dangerous necromancer with the personal will to hold a knife to a wizard's throat.  And more to the point, she was TALL ENOUGH to do it.  If she was 5' 0" Murphy, she'd have had to be wearing freaking STILTS to hold a knife at 6' 7" Harry's throat from behind.  To say nothing of the fact that Harry has touched Murphy's skin on multiple occasions and never picked up a ripple of /any/ of the aura of a practitioner, much less the utterly obvious one of a fellow heavyweight.  I try to follow my own rules, guys.  )

Incite emotion and emotional vampire are different powers so IMO being poor food wouldn't protect you from incite.

Edit: inserted the words "different powers"

^ nailed it.

The point is that according to the rules of magic it is never the right thing to kill a mortal with magic.

It is a perversion of the energies of creation to use it to snuff out one of the "free agents" of creation. (Mortals being the group than can use "free will" to choose outside of their blueprints).