All this stuff basically can be controlled by sound limitations.
FrankTrollman wrote:
- Telekinetically lift a book, open a door or do anything else you could do with one hand.
Only if you can affect stuff inside them and accurately. The actual force involved isn't the issue as to how small a surface you can exert pressure. Otherwise you're just like pushing on them and not cutting or affecting them.
About all you could really do is maybe choke someone with sustained force to the neck. But this requires that you sustain the spell and may be subject to stuff like line of sight, or require aim. For instance, it could just be like a ranged force ray. Lets say you could shoot a beam that did 15 lbs of force to whatever you struck. The beam affected a pretty wide area so you couldn't tune the pressure to really cut anything. To choke someone you'd have to hold it on a moving target, and they could block it with their hand (which would then take the insignificant pressure).
Yet you can use that ray to push stuff. Maybe the ray can even pull too.
[*] Raise or lower temperatures to any significant degree. Like not even necessarily boiling or freezing water, just changing temperatures to the point where you notice.
Again, depends on what volume you can heat up. The body can deal with temperature change. Touch something hot and you get burned, but you don't die instantly. Now it's true if you had the power to raise the body's temperature directly, that'd be powerful, but nobody is necessarily saying you can do that. Just creating hot/cold spots won't do much.
I mean again, you can have an infrared laser, and you can burn people with it, but it's not instantly lethal. In fact, you're probably going to be better off shooting them.
[*] Effect any physiological change on someone at all.
Depends on to what extent and how you're doing it.
[*] Transform anything into anything else.
Yeah, polymorph magic is basically going to be an instant kill, since it becomes like disintegration. But you can still throw some limits on it, like it may not be an instantaneous change, or it may require touch.
[*] Teleport anything of any size over any distance.
Similar to poly you can throw limits on it. Teleportation inside an existing object may just push the existing object out of the way, depending on how teleporting works, or the rematerialization may fail.
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If you want to use the effects of your sorcery in a "logical" manner, you pretty much have to accept that people in your world are extremely fragile. Because in the real world, people are incredibly fragile. We spend years and years learning how to keep them alive, and teaching people how to kill is something that people do over a weekend.
Humans are actually a bit less fragile than most give them credit for actually. I mean people have been shot right in the head and lived. I know one such person. In war there were plenty of weapons explicitly created for mass murder, yet war produces lots of injured as well as killed.
Now, the main difference is that unlike RPGs you're going to be dealing with possibly permanent wounds. Get hit by a fireball and that shit is going to leave permanent burn scars. But I mean it may well not even be as effective as dousing someone in burning napalm.
But honestly, unless you allow magic to have an insane targetting system that allows it to produce force that bypasses solid objects, like squeezing the aorta or clamping down directly on someone's brain. It's just not going to be nearly as deadly as you seem to think.
In fact, it need not be better or even equal to a gun.
