Unbreakable Vows are ridiculously broken, as Harry briefly observes in Ch. 74. They’re even more ridiculous in fanfictions where people can just grab a wand and swear something on their life and magic and thereby create a magically binding vow. I had to nerf the hell out of their activation costs just to make the MoR-verse keep running. I can’t depict a society with zero agency problems, a perfect public commitment process and an infinite trust engine unless the whole story is about that.
I mentioned this in the TVtropes thread, but Merlin did not think through his interdict all that well—If you are going to compromise everyones mental integrity to end a cycle of magical destruction, then limiting information spread is an asinie way to do it—it would make infinitely more sense to subject all wizards to a magical prohibition against large scale destruction and killing. Phrasing it so that it wards agaist Dunning-Kruger fueled magical accidents without shutting down experimentation entirely is an interesting exercise, but should be possible.
Frankly, we don’t know enough about why Merlin did what he did to judge his action either way—we don’t know what danger was being foreseen, we don’t know the limitations of his own powers. There’s really no sense in criticizing him or praising him at this point of time—we lack crucial information.
It’s possible that the Interdict is a natural property of the Source of Magic, and was swept up in the legend of Merlin as time passed. We have no real evidence for a time when people could record spells indefinitely, AFAIK.
I understood Merlins Interdict to be interfering with The Source of Magic, not with “everyones mental integrity”, which would seem much much harder to do. Magic seems to function by checking prerequisites, like “waved magical active stick in spatial pattern X”, “said wingardium leviosa with exact pronounciation Y”- Just add to this list of prerequisites of sufficiently powerfull spells a call of a function which checks wether the user is authorized; if not, check wether user should be authorized. If ve is, add to list of authorized user, if not, deny.
Doesn’t work. It’s not that powerful spells are known but can’t be cast, the function of the Interdict somehow causes powerful wizards’ notes to be unintelligible to the uninitiated.
Not just notes. - All written instructions on how to do spells above a certain level just flat out fail unless someone explains the spell to you in person at least once. Which has to be a mind hack, and if you are willing to alter peoples minds to remove the risk of idiots or madmen blowing up the planet/opening the gates of hell/ect, then picking this specific modification is very.. odd.
Hold up.. checking assumptions. Can anyone think of a way for the edict of merlin to do what it does without tampering with peoples minds?
Back up one step further: what evidence do we have that the Interdict actually exists? As opposed to, say, all powerful wizards simply having the same inclination toward secrecy and self-discovery. How did Quirrell put it...
The fools who can’t resist meddling are killed by the lesser perils early on, and the survivors all know that there are secrets you do not share with anyone who lacks the intelligence and the discipline to discover them for themselves! Every powerful wizard knows that!
I’ve never received the impression that wizards powerful enough to be subject to the Interdict have actually tried to circumvent it. If all known examples of written instructions for powerful spells were gibberish to begin with, would the world look any different? Not to mention, why would it be necessary to cast a huge mind-altering spell to make people do what they were inclined to do anyway?
Hold up.. checking assumptions. Can anyone think of a way for the edict of merlin to do what it does without tampering with peoples minds?
Trivial.
Someone explaining to you in person is the same as someone authorizing you to use a piece of software. You can still speak the words of the spell, still do the sacrifices, but the computer is just not going to listen to your commands unless you’ve been given those privileges.
Yes, that would be a possibility for controlling distribution of powerful spells, except that the Edict of Merlin explicitly doesn’t do that: you can’t speak the words because you can’t understand the writing. If you could read and speak the spell (and whatever else the spell requires) presumably you could cast it. (Otherwise Merlin needn’t have bothered making the texts unintelligible as well.)
Can anyone think of a way for the edict of merlin to do what it does without tampering with peoples minds?
If by “tampering” you mean just “permanently modifying”, the Source of Magic (TM) could just watch wizards’ minds(1) to detect when they’re writing in sufficient detail(2) high-level(3) spell descriptions, and enchant the written artifact.(4)
(1:) I can’t think of a way it would act the way it does—i.e., trigger wand-less and wordless spells, as well as accidental magic—without reading wizards’ minds at all times (or tampering with their minds at birth), anyway, at least not while following Harry’s genetic marker theory.
(2:) It needs to act only when the description tells you what to do, not what it does. Presumably it lets a historian describe what wondrous feats Merlin did as long as he didn’t describe how the spell was cast.
(3:) I’m really curious how that works. It’s clear that some spells are “harder” to cast, and some are “more powerful” than others (not sure if the two are perfectly correlated), but AFAIK it’s never described what that really means, except for trivial things like complex wand patterns and not-really-helpful stuff like “only first-year student magic level”.
(4:) Basilisks turn you to stone when you look at them, the Mirror-of-I-can’t-remember-who-it-was showed you what you wanted when you looked at it, so it’s clear that magic effects can be triggered by looking at the magical item.
(4b:) Exactly what “written artifact” means would be kind of hard to figure out. If it also applies to non-textual artifacts—sound recordings, encoding a description with smells and colors, planting a row of trees of two species to spell the description in ASCII—then it’s really complicated.
It might just look at what people intend to do, but then it would be vulnerable to complicated attacks like encrypting the description with a key, giving the encrypted text to a scribe who knows the described spell but doesn’t know the key nor what the encrypted text is, and asking them to write the encrypted text, then writing the key separately—or even unintentional recordings. Then again, we have no evidence it isn’t vulnerable to all that, there would have been little opportunity centuries ago. Harry’s pouch does respond to languages neither the caster nor the user knows, but then again it doesn’t answer for simple encodings like “1+1” for “2”...
With Unbreakable Vows, the… arbitrator?… sacrifices a portion of their magic permanently yes? One issue is that, after you die you might need that magic for something, like the more magic you have the more pleasant (or less!) magically created heaven is. In any case, even if magical society was fine with sacrifices, they might reason thus, and not use unbreakable vows. Such a society would make investigation (magical!) into potential afterlife a top priority, so lack of use of such a ritual might be compensated by finding out there is a heaven (or hell).
This is a society that has no problem using dementors as prison guards. I’m sure they would be willing to compel each criminal to act as the binder for one other criminal. It seems like a very small price to pay.
Since there seems to be some confusion on this point: in canon, at least, an “Unbreakable” Vow didn’t actually stop you breaking it, it just killed you if you did. If a person is willing to sacrifice their life—and if you resurrect using a horcrux, that could easily be worth it—you can still commit crimes.
And if you swore to obey the law—is being found guilty is now an automatic death sentence, even if you honestly thought it was legal? I doubt a working legal system based on Unbreakable Vows is trivial to come up with.
That said, they are unquestionably broken in canon. Very, very broken. Few are willing to stake their life over, say, business deals, but there are loads of situations in which they would be a massive game-breaker.
Not to mention perfect self-motivation.. Actually I still don’t understand why it is not used that way. Unbreakable Vows only require energy until said vow is fulfilled right?
Seems to be a lot more effective than A. Robbins...
Now we can make the Death Eaters bind trivial Unbreakable Vows over and over again until they lose all of their magic. So now Azkaban is unnecessary and the initial problem with Unbreakable Vows allowing for easy solutions to the prison vs. execution dilemma resurfaces again.
Trivial vows might not trigger the ritual correctly. Remember one of the participants has to have had the option of trying to trust the person in question and choose not to. A vow over something that they’d have no reason to trust the person on otherwise may not work.
The initial statement seems plausible but not the reason you gave for it. Even trivial assertions involve trust. Your statement “a vow over something that they’d have no reason to trust the person on otherwise” reverses the burden of proof/trust that must be overcome. You still have to choose to trust someone even if you don’t have evidence saying that they break promises, lacking evidence proving them distrustful does not preclude having to choose to actively trust them.
One major problem concerns the legal rights of magical criminals; what if you’re later found to be innocent? There’ll be no way to reclaim their magic. Hence I doubt Harry would prefer this solution.
That reminds me—at some point in canon, Dumbledore says “There are worse things than dying”, and my original thought was that Voldemort could be turned into a Muggle. As it turned out, Dumbledore presumably meant the consequences of creating Horcruxes, but I do wonder how Voldeort would manage if he were turned into a Muggle.
Thank you; I even managed to figure that out myself (with the help of our ever vigilant and watchful google); as seen in my response to Desrtopa (24 seconds before you clicked the comment button apparently).
Not to mention perfect self-motivation.. Actually I still don’t understand why it is not used that way. Unbreakable Vows only require energy until said vow is fulfilled right?
I don’t think this is ever stated, and I’d err on the side of assuming not, because that would make them easier to abuse, which would be narratively inconvenient.
Makes sense. I was confused so I looked it up:
“And the third wizard, the binder, permanently sacrifices a small portion of their own magic, to sustain the Vow forever.”
I guess the self-improvement part is out of the question then...
Still; it’d be a pretty hardcore thing to do for an ambitious dying grandfather. Make his grandson, age 3, swear the vow (something along the lines: “I will never spend an awake moment on anything except improving my abilities or the situation of my family”—it could be phrased better) and then die happily.
Still; it’d be a pretty hardcore thing to do for an ambitious dying grandfather. Make his grandson, age 3, swear the vow (something along the lines: “I will never spend an awake moment on anything except improving my abilities or the situation of my family”—it could be phrased better) and then die happily.
Age three? Does the vow actually impel you adhere to it or does it just kill you when you are about to break it? (I thought the latter.) Didn’t he just kill his grandson?
Unbreakable Vows are ridiculously broken, as Harry briefly observes in Ch. 74. They’re even more ridiculous in fanfictions where people can just grab a wand and swear something on their life and magic and thereby create a magically binding vow. I had to nerf the hell out of their activation costs just to make the MoR-verse keep running. I can’t depict a society with zero agency problems, a perfect public commitment process and an infinite trust engine unless the whole story is about that.
I mentioned this in the TVtropes thread, but Merlin did not think through his interdict all that well—If you are going to compromise everyones mental integrity to end a cycle of magical destruction, then limiting information spread is an asinie way to do it—it would make infinitely more sense to subject all wizards to a magical prohibition against large scale destruction and killing. Phrasing it so that it wards agaist Dunning-Kruger fueled magical accidents without shutting down experimentation entirely is an interesting exercise, but should be possible.
Frankly, we don’t know enough about why Merlin did what he did to judge his action either way—we don’t know what danger was being foreseen, we don’t know the limitations of his own powers. There’s really no sense in criticizing him or praising him at this point of time—we lack crucial information.
It’s possible that the Interdict is a natural property of the Source of Magic, and was swept up in the legend of Merlin as time passed. We have no real evidence for a time when people could record spells indefinitely, AFAIK.
I understood Merlins Interdict to be interfering with The Source of Magic, not with “everyones mental integrity”, which would seem much much harder to do. Magic seems to function by checking prerequisites, like “waved magical active stick in spatial pattern X”, “said wingardium leviosa with exact pronounciation Y”- Just add to this list of prerequisites of sufficiently powerfull spells a call of a function which checks wether the user is authorized; if not, check wether user should be authorized. If ve is, add to list of authorized user, if not, deny.
Doesn’t work. It’s not that powerful spells are known but can’t be cast, the function of the Interdict somehow causes powerful wizards’ notes to be unintelligible to the uninitiated.
Not just notes. - All written instructions on how to do spells above a certain level just flat out fail unless someone explains the spell to you in person at least once. Which has to be a mind hack, and if you are willing to alter peoples minds to remove the risk of idiots or madmen blowing up the planet/opening the gates of hell/ect, then picking this specific modification is very.. odd.
Hold up.. checking assumptions. Can anyone think of a way for the edict of merlin to do what it does without tampering with peoples minds?
Back up one step further: what evidence do we have that the Interdict actually exists? As opposed to, say, all powerful wizards simply having the same inclination toward secrecy and self-discovery. How did Quirrell put it...
I’ve never received the impression that wizards powerful enough to be subject to the Interdict have actually tried to circumvent it. If all known examples of written instructions for powerful spells were gibberish to begin with, would the world look any different? Not to mention, why would it be necessary to cast a huge mind-altering spell to make people do what they were inclined to do anyway?
Trivial.
Someone explaining to you in person is the same as someone authorizing you to use a piece of software. You can still speak the words of the spell, still do the sacrifices, but the computer is just not going to listen to your commands unless you’ve been given those privileges.
Yes, that would be a possibility for controlling distribution of powerful spells, except that the Edict of Merlin explicitly doesn’t do that: you can’t speak the words because you can’t understand the writing. If you could read and speak the spell (and whatever else the spell requires) presumably you could cast it. (Otherwise Merlin needn’t have bothered making the texts unintelligible as well.)
If by “tampering” you mean just “permanently modifying”, the Source of Magic (TM) could just watch wizards’ minds(1) to detect when they’re writing in sufficient detail(2) high-level(3) spell descriptions, and enchant the written artifact.(4)
(1:) I can’t think of a way it would act the way it does—i.e., trigger wand-less and wordless spells, as well as accidental magic—without reading wizards’ minds at all times (or tampering with their minds at birth), anyway, at least not while following Harry’s genetic marker theory.
(2:) It needs to act only when the description tells you what to do, not what it does. Presumably it lets a historian describe what wondrous feats Merlin did as long as he didn’t describe how the spell was cast.
(3:) I’m really curious how that works. It’s clear that some spells are “harder” to cast, and some are “more powerful” than others (not sure if the two are perfectly correlated), but AFAIK it’s never described what that really means, except for trivial things like complex wand patterns and not-really-helpful stuff like “only first-year student magic level”.
(4:) Basilisks turn you to stone when you look at them, the Mirror-of-I-can’t-remember-who-it-was showed you what you wanted when you looked at it, so it’s clear that magic effects can be triggered by looking at the magical item.
(4b:) Exactly what “written artifact” means would be kind of hard to figure out. If it also applies to non-textual artifacts—sound recordings, encoding a description with smells and colors, planting a row of trees of two species to spell the description in ASCII—then it’s really complicated.
It might just look at what people intend to do, but then it would be vulnerable to complicated attacks like encrypting the description with a key, giving the encrypted text to a scribe who knows the described spell but doesn’t know the key nor what the encrypted text is, and asking them to write the encrypted text, then writing the key separately—or even unintentional recordings. Then again, we have no evidence it isn’t vulnerable to all that, there would have been little opportunity centuries ago. Harry’s pouch does respond to languages neither the caster nor the user knows, but then again it doesn’t answer for simple encodings like “1+1” for “2”...
With Unbreakable Vows, the… arbitrator?… sacrifices a portion of their magic permanently yes? One issue is that, after you die you might need that magic for something, like the more magic you have the more pleasant (or less!) magically created heaven is. In any case, even if magical society was fine with sacrifices, they might reason thus, and not use unbreakable vows. Such a society would make investigation (magical!) into potential afterlife a top priority, so lack of use of such a ritual might be compensated by finding out there is a heaven (or hell).
This is a society that has no problem using dementors as prison guards. I’m sure they would be willing to compel each criminal to act as the binder for one other criminal. It seems like a very small price to pay.
Since there seems to be some confusion on this point: in canon, at least, an “Unbreakable” Vow didn’t actually stop you breaking it, it just killed you if you did. If a person is willing to sacrifice their life—and if you resurrect using a horcrux, that could easily be worth it—you can still commit crimes.
And if you swore to obey the law—is being found guilty is now an automatic death sentence, even if you honestly thought it was legal? I doubt a working legal system based on Unbreakable Vows is trivial to come up with.
That said, they are unquestionably broken in canon. Very, very broken. Few are willing to stake their life over, say, business deals, but there are loads of situations in which they would be a massive game-breaker.
Not to mention perfect self-motivation.. Actually I still don’t understand why it is not used that way. Unbreakable Vows only require energy until said vow is fulfilled right?
Seems to be a lot more effective than A. Robbins...
Nope, ritual magic = permanent sacrifice.
Now we can make the Death Eaters bind trivial Unbreakable Vows over and over again until they lose all of their magic. So now Azkaban is unnecessary and the initial problem with Unbreakable Vows allowing for easy solutions to the prison vs. execution dilemma resurfaces again.
Trivial vows might not trigger the ritual correctly. Remember one of the participants has to have had the option of trying to trust the person in question and choose not to. A vow over something that they’d have no reason to trust the person on otherwise may not work.
The initial statement seems plausible but not the reason you gave for it. Even trivial assertions involve trust. Your statement “a vow over something that they’d have no reason to trust the person on otherwise” reverses the burden of proof/trust that must be overcome. You still have to choose to trust someone even if you don’t have evidence saying that they break promises, lacking evidence proving them distrustful does not preclude having to choose to actively trust them.
One major problem concerns the legal rights of magical criminals; what if you’re later found to be innocent? There’ll be no way to reclaim their magic. Hence I doubt Harry would prefer this solution.
That reminds me—at some point in canon, Dumbledore says “There are worse things than dying”, and my original thought was that Voldemort could be turned into a Muggle. As it turned out, Dumbledore presumably meant the consequences of creating Horcruxes, but I do wonder how Voldeort would manage if he were turned into a Muggle.
Thank you; I even managed to figure that out myself (with the help of our ever vigilant and watchful google); as seen in my response to Desrtopa (24 seconds before you clicked the comment button apparently).
FTFY. Show proper reverence, heathen!
I don’t think this is ever stated, and I’d err on the side of assuming not, because that would make them easier to abuse, which would be narratively inconvenient.
Makes sense. I was confused so I looked it up: “And the third wizard, the binder, permanently sacrifices a small portion of their own magic, to sustain the Vow forever.” I guess the self-improvement part is out of the question then...
Still; it’d be a pretty hardcore thing to do for an ambitious dying grandfather. Make his grandson, age 3, swear the vow (something along the lines: “I will never spend an awake moment on anything except improving my abilities or the situation of my family”—it could be phrased better) and then die happily.
Age three? Does the vow actually impel you adhere to it or does it just kill you when you are about to break it? (I thought the latter.) Didn’t he just kill his grandson?
In canon at least, you just die if you break the Vow.