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| - ==Effects==
Experience Effect: One’s ability to use faith to work magic depends on their experiences. Living in a society where a certain type of magic is worked will help to convince a person that this particular form of magic works. Living in a society where a certain type of magic is not used, and people claim it not to exist, will convince a person that this particular form of magic doesn’t work.
Imposing Effect: The more imposing one seems - the more authority a person acts/speaks with, the more regal and noble one seems, the more pomp one has, the more supporters one leads - the more likely others are to ascribe power to them, and thus to believe that they are capable of wielding magic. The more pathetic one seems, the less likely this is the case. And by the axiom of derogation of faith, this has an actual impact on one’s ability to wield magic.
Feedback Effect: “Success begets success, failure begets failure.” If you attempt to will magic and you succeed, your subconscious becomes convinced that you can will magic; if you attempt to will magic and you fail, your subconscious becomes convinced that you can’t will magic. Likewise, if your magic draws upon rituals, success of those rituals in casting magic will convince you of the efficacy of those rituals when you cast them again later on; while failure of those rituals would make you disbelieve in them later on. Likewise, if your magic draws upon deities, success in invoking a deity strengthens your faith in those deities; failure to invoke them makes you believe that either they are incapable or that they don’t care about you.
* Also called the “baby-steps” rule, as it essentially says that if you start by willing for a small effect, then you’re more likely to succeed; and so one should start off trying to work lesser magic to build up confidence.
* The more practice you have with minor magics, the more memories of your success you build up, and the more sure of yourself your subconscious becomes, hence the more likely your next willing succeeds. Hence, a good way to build up toward grander magic is to practice on the lesser magics and gradually increase the subjective grandness of the magic you attempt to will.
* Your subconscious will remember your failures. Time doesn’t wash away the memory, since the memory of your last, devastating failure will linger on and fester. Even if you are able to succeed thereafter, the memory of failure will place doubt in your mind, making failure more likely going forward.
* And the more you fail, the more improbable it is that you will ever successfully will a wish.
* At the most extreme, if you attempt very minor magic and fail, your subconscious believes you have lost all your power. Once impotent, always impotent. If however you were attempting something you hadn’t attempted before then your subconscious would excuse that as due to you hitting your limit and not losing any power.
* If you fail on your first attempt at willing, the only memory for your subconscious to draw upon is your one failure. Which means that on your next attempt, you will have almost no chance of success.
Seasoning Effect: Older people have had more opportunity to attempt to will for something at some point in their lives - maybe without even realizing its significance. People may not even consciously notice when they’ve willed something and failed. The vast majority of people’s first attempt at magic, historically, has been failure, just because they see that practically everyone they’ve met are unable to will magic. As a result, for most people their first attempt is failure. Of course, if they have attempted and succeeded, then they are magically potent as “willers”. But among the rest, the untested – as you look at older populations you see that a greater proportion of them have attempted, and failed. Older people are highly unlikely to successfully will a magic, because they have already failed. Hence, the “willers” are primarily drawn from the younger ages.
Believed Consensus Effect: If a person believes in the axiom of summation of faith, and believes that others believe his magic will succeed , then he is more likely to succeed. Also called false consensus effect, if he only believes that those other people believe in his magic but they actually don’t. For various sects this may manifest in similar ways, ie the axiom of summation of faith may be replaced by a belief that others praying for the success of your prayer will bolster the success of your prayer. Hence such sects often march to war as a big group, so that the believed consensus effect strengthens their faith.
Disempowering Effect: One can strip another of their powers by a contest of faith or “contest of wills”, by having the target’s faith be overridden by the other’s, without them knowing that it’s because someone is actively trying to sabotage their powers. Of course the target has to be attempting to use their power in order for them to experience failure. The more memorable or traumatizing the experience the more severe the disempowering; ie. especially so with rape or torture.
Propaganda Effect: The more people become exposed to a claim, the more likely they are to believe it, if for no other reason than it sounds familiar, which makes it similar to the feeling of withdrawing some fact from memory that you know to be true. Eventually - unless one is not paying attention or is actively telling themselves that the claim is false - one would become more and more convinced of its truth - and even if they know it’s not. This is a long-term force that gradually wears away at the self-derogation rule; and eventually, even those who knowingly create their own memes and religions, may come to believe it after being bombarded by propaganda sufficiently.
Classical Conditioning Effect: Classical conditioning can be used to convince people of things that aren’t really true. For example, if you say a particular word, and then shock a captive , and do this over and over again, eventually you can get to a point where you can say that same word, and the captive’s belief that they’ll be shocked will be enough to elicit the shock without you needing to do anything. However the effect will be weaker without you having the faith as well; if you know you’re not doing it this time around your faith will directly contradict the captive’s, so this experiment would work better if you weren’t around and someone else showed up and said the trigger word.
Noncontingent Conditioning Effect: To a lesser extent, noncontingent conditioning can convince people of superstitious things that aren’t really true, ie “if you behave in a certain way, some certain thing will happen”, based solely on natural consequences and irregular intervals. Certain people associate certain behaviors or situations with certain results, even if it had nothing to do with it; and because of the way faith works, their belief in this will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. So if they invoking a local deity and lightning strikes, they may come to hold the faith that invoking their local deity will prompt a lightning bolt - even if the real reason for the lightning is due to storms . But for this particular group of people, their faith could eventually build up to a point where they can summon lightning at will by merely invoking a local deity. As a result this breathes the life of reality into their deity, and even though it was but a figment of the imagination, now it is turned real. Most of the early religions, before the codification of the rules of faith, arose in this way, and are called ‘fortufacted’ religions.
Knowledge of Faith Effect: Knowledge of the Foundation of Reality is actually a mixed blessing. It allows people to work with faith in ways that they may otherwise not even imagine. It is a very flexible faith, more flexible than any other, including all the faiths that seem to be based on it; and hence it has power and flexibility. It is a system that encompasses all other faiths, and thus gives it power over them all.
However, this knowledge is poison to magic. For the very knowledge that your magic only works because you believe it to, means that it’s not at all reliable, and that it can fail you at any moment, should you or others have enough doubt - and faith and doubt are not easy things to control. And since you now know this to be true, you know you have at least some doubt already, which only magnifies your doubt. Hence a person who’s aware of the Foundation of Reality is far more likely to lose his power. For this reason - and because this knowledge gives one power of a much different and more dangerous kind - those who know about it rarely tell others about it. And so very few people know of the Foundation.
Geographic Nexus Effect: People living in different regions will become familiar with different sects’ magic. The presence of each sect and their magical accomplishments generally is known by the locals and so the locals readily believe that the sect’s magic works - and the locals will come to understand the telltale signs of the local sect’s way of spellworking. This increase in the ambient faith in the local sect’s way of magic boosts the local sect’s ability to work their way of magic, giving them a ‘home field’ advantage in defensive wars. The locals are thus the "nexus" for the local sect's way of magic. The locals in each region will also tend to disbelieve the efficacy of other ways of magic , since they are notably different from the local sect’s. This is only an ‘advantage’ or ‘disadvantage’ and not a hard limit; those spellers who have sufficient faith will still be able to make their magic work, though they may choose to take less risk by working lesser spells. This also only applies to sects whose faith paradigms would allow it; so for example a sect that believes that all magic is the same would not have any disadvantage striking into enemy territory, but neither would it have any advantage on home territory.
Faith Support for Invading Sects: This disbelief works to make it more difficult for foreign mages to work their magic, disadvantaging any sects that go on the offensive. This geographic effect can be reduced and used to the attacker’s advantage by bringing in a large cohort of peoples from the attacking sect’s lands, such as an army of mundane troops, who will believe in the attacking sect’s way’s efficacy and thereby empower the spellers of the invading sect. This tactic is called "bringing your nexus".
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