Harry Potter+Narnia=Me Caring

[Dean]

So I realized tonight that if you bolt Narnia onto the Harry Potter world you end up with a setting that basically fixes both setting's problems and is more interesting than either one separately.

The problem with the Harry Potter world is that the world does not exist outside of the school. There are hundreds of student wizards being trained in many schools all over the world. That's literally thousands of new wizards every year and where do they go!? There are no jobs or institutions for them. The Wizarding world is like a republican nightmare, it's just an endless train of people in schools graduating and getting jobs within or around those schools. It is a world where every important thing that ever occurs happens in ones High School because there is literally nothing to do outside of it. It's like a jocks worry about their future. High school is every wizards glory days and the only thing after is owning a shop or possibly becoming the school's P.E. teacher or something.

And Narnia is just static and boring. It's a world full of magic that no one cares about because there is nothing to do and no one to do it. There are like 2 sentient and interesting people in Narnia that actually move the plot forward. The world is so stagnant that 3 children completely change it basically by wandering around making declarations and occasionally stabbing someone. A world where badgers talk and centaurs roam and gryphons fly through the wilds is badass and it's few characters are cool but there's absolutely nothing for anyone to do and no one to do it.

If you just bolt Narnia onto Harry Potter you get a setting cool enough that I might write an RPG for it. It's a world in three parts. There's the mundane world, the halfway house of the magical schools, and the wild west of a magic alternate dimension. Humans come from the mundane world and are taught magic in schools full of wonder and danger in well supervised amounts. Once they've been taught they're allowed to stay in the mundane world if they wish keeping the Statute of Secrecy of course. Or they may leave to try to make their mark on the magical world of Narnia, or Amber or whatever the fuck you call it.

It's a magic world. In fact it's a place with all the magic in the world condensed into one realm though it leaks into the real world from time to time. It would be morphic and slightly unstable so technology with combustibles or too many moving parts doesn't work there reliably. So it would be an Iron age setting in many ways. There are only a couple hundred thousand people so real empires or nations just couldn't be. You'd have city states each with their own power structure and leaders and identities. A young wizard could find the place that suited him best and try to make his way in the world through might and magic. He could tame wild beasts, settle wild lands, create new magics and just generally have adventures while occasionally heading into a tavern to find someone who might have gone to the same school he did. And if you also had the same house it'd be like finding out you were both Oxford men or something. Fast friends.

If you staple the setting's onto one another you get a Voltron like combination that works better than either entity separately.

[darkmaster]

That's literally thousands of new wizards every year and where do they go!? There are no jobs or institutions for them.

Wizards have no piratical need for money, why do we even see wizard with jobs at all?

[Dean]

Wizards want money for the same reason people do. They mention that you can't conjure up edible food. So you need money to live on just like people and like people you can use it to trade. I might make good potions and you might make good flying brooms. A means of monetary trade allows specialization so you and I can both have better potions and brooms and still buy things to eat. It's a sensible societal evolution as long as one assumes a single wizard can't do everything he needs himself.

[Lokathor]

Yeah, "you can't make something from nothing with magic", but you can make something 1,000 times bigger than normal sized and then split it up again, which is basically the same thing.

So wizards are post-scarcity except for magical goods. Like, damn, who needs all those gold coins when they can just make them bigger and re-mint them into 100 new coins?

[darkmaster]

Yeah, "you can't make something from nothing with magic", but you can make something 1,000 times bigger than normal sized and then split it up again, which is basically the same thing.

So wizards are post-scarcity except for magical goods. Like, damn, who needs all those gold coins when they can just make them bigger and re-mint them into 100 new coins?

This. Wizards learn to make animals out of inanimate objects like their first year of wizard school and they can make inanimate objects out of basically nothing at all because they don't have a law of equivalent exchange in the potterverse. Fabricating buildings takes basically no effort, making food is not a problem. So since both food and shelter are trivially easy to come by the only thing that matters is magical swag. Your example was potions and brooms but then there's no reason not to just give those things away because you're a wizard and therefore don't need money.

At most you get a system of barter instead of a utopian society where everyone is provided for because magic is fun and easy to use. But it makes no logical sense for wizards to need actual minted money.

[Username17]

You're never going to make sense out of the specific spells used in a set of books, because in a book you can have the setting not get destroyed by the ramifications of a spell being available by simply having no one do it. An RPG is going to have to have very much tighter definitions on what magic can or can't do because they can't rely on implicit limitations.

Obviously, you're going to have to come up with some sort of system by which magic people need to have incomes if you want to have magic people taking regular jobs. The books get away with wizards having jobs because mind caulk will fill in implicit limitations on magic once you simply declare that wizards need and have jobs and incomes. But for an RPG, the players will ask "why" and you have to give them an answer.

But then, in actual Narnia Lion Jesus is literally omnipotent, so you have to ask why the fuck anything happens. Obviously, in an RPG form, things would be toned down somewhat.

-Username17

[darkmaster]

Not necessarily. Seriously go the Full Metal Alchemist route. To make a thing you need all the ingredients in the proper amounts. To make bread you need wheat and water and salt and eggs. To make meat you need all the components of meat in the proper amounts or you won't get meat at the end of your spell. There question answered. Just because the writer didn't bother to think of it doesn't mean they shouldn't have.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Not necessarily. Seriously go the Full Metal Alchemist route. To make a thing you need all the ingredients in the proper amounts. To make bread you need wheat and water and salt and eggs. To make meat you need all the components of meat in the proper amounts or you won't get meat at the end of your spell. There question answered. Just because the writer didn't bother to think of it doesn't mean they shouldn't have.

That's pretty clearly not at all even remotely how magic works in Harry Potter.

Or (much less clearly) Narnia, for that matter.

[deaddmwalking]

The problem with the Harry Potter world is that the world does not exist outside of the school. There are hundreds of student wizards being trained in many schools all over the world. That's literally thousands of new wizards every year and where do they go!? There are no jobs or institutions for them.

This is not strictly true. The Ministry of Magic, for instance, is not completely devoted to the schools like Hogwarts. Although they're important institutions, there are other functions that they perform. If I remember the name correctly, Charlie was in Romania studying dragons. There are things for people to do in the wizarding world - but it wasn't the focus of the novels, which were about Harry and other students.

We know that wizards defend the world from dangerous threats (like Dementors) and deranged wizards (Azkaban).

The Harry Potter universe (as described) includes the government and essentially a school tightly aligned with the government (like a state university for our purposes). Outside of that are wizarding equivalents of everything you and I do. There are wizard police, wizard sports teams, wizard bankers, wizard shopkeepers, etc. The two societies move in parallel but tend to be rather distinct.

I don't know if the Harry Potter universe would be that much fun to adventure in. It'd end up like a TTRPG version of a LARP - where everyone who is in on what's happening gets confused looks from the 'normals'.

[ishy]

You're never going to make sense out of the specific spells used in a set of books, because in a book you can have the setting not get destroyed by the ramifications of a spell being available by simply having no one do it. An RPG is going to have to have very much tighter definitions on what magic can or can't do because they can't rely on implicit limitations.
-Username17

This. If I were adventuring with harry potter magic, the first spell I'd learn is invisibility and walk around virtually untouchable to everyone all the time.

[Chamomile]

You're never going to make sense out of the specific spells used in a set of books, because in a book you can have the setting not get destroyed by the ramifications of a spell being available by simply having no one do it. An RPG is going to have to have very much tighter definitions on what magic can or can't do because they can't rely on implicit limitations.
-Username17

This. If I were adventuring with harry potter magic, the first spell I'd learn is invisibility and walk around virtually untouchable to everyone all the time.

There are problems with the Harry Potter universe. Most notably the problem where they hand out time machines so people can make their classes on time, but don't use this to solve every conceivable problem that has ever occurred ever. That said, invisibility is explicitly an extremely difficult, rare, and powerful enchantment. Harry Potter has it from his first year because he inherited one of the three most powerful artifacts in the entire setting, on par with a ring that lets you contact dead people at-will and a wand that will defeat literally any opponent in a straight fight. Ron Weasley mentions that even the regular kind of invisibility cloaks that wear out after a few months are really rare, and really valuable.

[Avoraciopoctules]

There was a Harry Potter fanfic that put some thought into fixing the ramifications of transmutation.

"Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts," said Professor McGonagall. There was no trace of any levity upon the face of the stern old witch. "Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned."

Her wand came down and tapped her desk, which smoothly reshaped itself into a pig. A couple of Muggleborn students gave out small yelps. The pig looked around and snorted, seeming confused, and then became a desk again.

The Transfiguration Professor looked around the classroom, and then her eyes settled on one student.

"Mr. Potter," said Professor McGonagall. "You only received your schoolbooks a few days ago. Have you started reading your Transfiguration textbook?"

"No, sorry professor," Harry said.

"You needn't apologise, Mr. Potter, if you were required to read ahead you would have been told to do so." McGonagall's fingers rapped the desk in front of her. "Mr. Potter, would you care to guess whether this is a desk which I Transfigured into a pig, or if it began as a pig and I briefly removed the Transfiguration? If you had read the first chapter of your textbook, you would know."

Harry's eyebrows furrowed slightly. "I'd guess it'd be easier to start with a pig, since if it started as a desk, it might not know how to stand up."

Professor McGonagall shook her head. "No fault to you, Mr. Potter, but the correct answer is that in Transfiguration you do not care to guess. Wrong answers will be marked with extreme severity, questions left blank will be marked with great leniency. You must learn to know what you do not know. If I ask you any question, no matter how obvious or elementary, and you answer 'I'm not sure', I will not hold it against you and anyone who laughs will lose House points. Can you tell me why this rule exists, Mr. Potter?"

Because a single error in Transfiguration can be incredibly dangerous. "No."

"Correct. Transfiguration is more dangerous than Apparition, which is not taught until your sixth year. Unfortunately, Transfiguration must be learned and practised at a young age to maximise your adult ability. So this is a dangerous subject, and you should be quite scared of making any mistakes, because none of my students have ever been permanently injured and I will be extremely put out if you are the first class to spoil my record."

Several students gulped.

Professor McGonagall stood up and moved over to the wall behind her desk, which held a white wooden board. "There are many reasons why Transfiguration is dangerous, but one reason stands above all the rest." She produced a marker seemingly from thin air, and sketched letters in bright red; which she then underlined, using the same marker, in blue:

TRANSFIGURATION IS NOT PERMANENT!

"Transfiguration is not permanent!" said Professor McGonagall. "Transfiguration is not permanent! Transfiguration is not permanent! Mr. Potter, suppose a student Transfigured a block of wood into a cup of water, and you drank it. What do you imagine might happen to you when the Transfiguration wore off?" There was a pause. "Excuse me, I should not have asked that of you, Mr. Potter, I forgot that you are blessed with an unusually pessimistic imagination -"

"I'm fine," Harry said, swallowing hard. "So the first answer is that I don't know," the Professor nodded approvingly, "but I imagine there might be... wood in my stomach, and in my bloodstream, and if any of that water had gotten absorbed into my body's tissues - would it be wood pulp or solid wood or..." Harry's grasp of magic failed him. He couldn't understand how wood mapped into water in the first place, so he couldn't understand what would happen after the water molecules were scrambled by ordinary thermal motions and the magic wore off and the mapping reversed.

McGonagall's face was stiff. "As Mr. Potter has correctly reasoned, he would become extremely sick and require immediate Flooing to St. Mungo's Hospital if he was to have any chance of survival. Please turn your textbooks to page 5."

Even without any sound in the moving picture, you could tell that the woman with horribly discolored skin was screaming.

"The criminal who originally Transfigured gold into wine and gave it to this woman to drink, 'in payment of the debt' as he put it, received a sentence of ten years in Azkaban. Please turn to page 6. That is a Dementor. They are the guardians of Azkaban. They suck away at your magic, your life, and any happy thoughts you try to have. The picture on page 7 is of the criminal ten years later, on his release. You will note that he is dead - yes, Mr. Potter?"

"Professor," Harry said, "if the worst happens in a case like that, is there any way of maintaining the Transfiguration?"

"No," Professor McGonagall said flatly. "Sustaining a Transfiguration is a constant drain on your magic which scales with the size of the target form. And you would need to recontact the target every few hours, which is, in a case like this, impossible. Disasters like this are unrecoverable!"

Professor McGonagall leaned forwards, her face very hard. "You will absolutely never under any circumstances Transfigure anything into a liquid or a gas. No water, no air. Nothing like water, nothing like air. Even if it is not meant to drink. Liquid evaporates, little bits and pieces of it get into the air. You will not Transfigure anything that is to be burned. It will make smoke and someone could breathe that smoke! You will never Transfigure anything that could conceivably go inside anyone's body by any means. No food. Nothing that looks like food. Not even as a funny little prank where you mean to tell them about your mud pie before they actually eat it. You will never do it. Period. Inside this classroom or out of it or anywhere. Is that well understood by every single student?"

"Yes," said Harry, Hermione, and a few others. The rest seemed to be speechless.

"Is that well understood by every single student?"

"Yes," they said or muttered or whispered.

"If you break any of these rules you will not further study Transfiguration during your stay at Hogwarts. Repeat along with me. I will never Transfigure anything into a liquid or gas."

"I will never Transfigure anything into a liquid or gas," said the students in ragged chorus.

"Again! Louder! I will never Transfigure anything into a liquid or gas."

"I will never Transfigure anything into a liquid or gas."

"I will never Transfigure anything that looks like food or anything else that goes inside a human body."

"I will never Transfigure anything that is to be burned because it could make smoke."

"You will never Transfigure anything that looks like money, including Muggle money," said Professor McGonagall. "The goblins have ways of finding out who did it. As a matter of recognised law, the goblin nation is in a permanent state of war with all magical counterfeiters. They will not send Aurors. They will send an army."

"I will never Transfigure anything that looks like money," repeated the students.

"And above all," said Professor McGonagall, "you will not Transfigure any living subject, especially yourselves. It will make you very sick and possibly dead, depending on how you Transfigure yourself and how long you maintain the change." Professor McGonagall paused. "Mr. Potter is currently holding up his hand because he has seen an Animagus transformation - specifically, a human transforming into a cat and back again. But an Animagus transformation is not free Transfiguration."

Professor McGonagall took a small piece of wood out of her pocket. With a tap of her wand it became a glass ball. Then she said "Crystferrium!" and the glass ball became a steel ball. She tapped it with her wand one last time and the steel ball became a piece of wood once more. "Crystferrium transforms a subject of solid glass into a similarly shaped target of solid steel. It cannot do the reverse, nor can it transform a desk into a pig. The most general form of Transfiguration - free Transfiguration, which you will be learning here - is capable of transforming any subject into any target, at least so far as physical form is concerned. For this reason, free Transfiguration must be done wordlessly. Using Charms would require different words for every different transformation between subject and target."

Professor McGonagall gave her students a sharp look. "Some teachers begin with Transfiguration Charms and move on to free Transfiguration afterwards. Yes, that would be much easier in the beginning. But it can set you in a poor mold which impairs your abilities later. Here you will learn free Transfiguration from the very start, which requires that you cast the spell wordlessly, by holding the subject form, the target form, and the transformation within your own mind."

"And to answer Mr. Potter's question," Professor McGonagall went on, "it is free Transfiguration which you must never do to any living subject. There are Charms and potions which can safely, reversibly transform living subjects in limited ways. An Animagus with a missing limb will still be missing that limb after transforming, for example. Free Transfiguration is not safe. Your body will change while it is Transfigured - breathing, for example, results in a constant loss of the body's stuff to the surrounding air. When the Transfiguration wears off and your body tries to revert to its original form, it will not quite be able to do so. If you press your wand to your body and imagine yourself with golden hair, afterwards your hair will fall out. If you visualise yourself as someone with clearer skin, you will be taking a long stay at St. Mungo's. And if you Transfigure yourself into an adult bodily form, then, when the Transfiguration wears off, you will die."

That explained why he had seen such things as fat boys, or girls less than perfectly pretty. Or old people, for that matter. That wouldn't happen if you could just Transfigure yourself every morning... Harry raised his hand and tried to signal Professor McGonagall with his eyes.

"Yes, Mr. Potter?"

"Is it possible to Transfigure a living subject into a target that is static, such as a coin - no, excuse me, I'm terribly sorry, let's just say a steel ball."

Professor McGonagall shook her head. "Mr. Potter, even inanimate objects undergo small internal changes over time. There would be no visible changes to your body afterwards, and for the first minute, you would notice nothing wrong. But in an hour you would be sick, and in a day you would be dead."

"Erm, excuse me, so if I'd read the first chapter I could have guessed that the desk was originally a desk and not a pig," Harry said, "but only if I made the further assumption that you didn't want to kill the pig, that might seem highly probable but -"

"I can foresee that marking your tests will be an endless source of delight to me, Mr. Potter. But if you have other questions can I please ask you to wait until after class?"

"No further questions, professor."

"Now repeat after me," said Professor McGonagall. "I will never try to Transfigure any living subject, especially myself, unless specifically instructed to do so using a specialised Charm or potion."

"If I am not sure whether a Transfiguration is safe, I will not try it until I have asked Professor McGonagall or Professor Flitwick or Professor Snape or the Headmaster, who are the only recognised authorities on Transfiguration at Hogwarts. Asking another student is not acceptable, even if they say that they remember asking the same question."

"Even if the current Defence Professor at Hogwarts tells me that a Transfiguration is safe, and even if I see the Defence Professor do it and nothing bad seems to happen, I will not try it myself."

"I have the absolute right to refuse to perform any Transfiguration about which I feel the slightest bit nervous. Since not even the Headmaster of Hogwarts can order me to do otherwise, I certainly will not accept any such order from the Defence Professor, even if the Defence Professor threatens to deduct one hundred House points and have me expelled."

"If I break any of these rules I will not further study Transfiguration during my time at Hogwarts."

"We will repeat these rules at the start of every class for the first month," said Professor McGonagall. "And now, we will begin with matches as subjects and needles as targets... put away your wands, thank you, by 'begin' I meant that you will begin taking notes."

Half an hour before the end of class, Professor McGonagall handed out the matches.

At the end of the class Hermione had a silvery-looking match and the entire rest of the class, Muggleborn or otherwise, had exactly what they'd started with.

Professor McGonagall awarded her another point for Ravenclaw.

[ishy]

That said, invisibility is explicitly an extremely difficult, rare, and powerful enchantment. Harry Potter has it from his first year because he inherited one of the three most powerful artifacts in the entire setting, on par with a ring that lets you contact dead people at-will and a wand that will defeat literally any opponent in a straight fight. Ron Weasley mentions that even the regular kind of invisibility cloaks that wear out after a few months are really rare, and really valuable.

Potter has it in the first year, because Dumbledore doesn't consider the cloak to be a big deal. Since Dumbledore doesn't need a cloak to turn himself invisible.
Not sure how the later books have changed that. But the vibe I got, was that the cloak was really nothing special, just an item that allowed newbies to turn invisible too.

[Username17]

That said, invisibility is explicitly an extremely difficult, rare, and powerful enchantment. Harry Potter has it from his first year because he inherited one of the three most powerful artifacts in the entire setting, on par with a ring that lets you contact dead people at-will and a wand that will defeat literally any opponent in a straight fight. Ron Weasley mentions that even the regular kind of invisibility cloaks that wear out after a few months are really rare, and really valuable.

Potter has it in the first year, because Dumbledore doesn't consider the cloak to be a big deal. Since Dumbledore doesn't need a cloak to turn himself invisible.
Not sure how the later books have changed that. But the vibe I got, was that the cloak was really nothing special, just an item that allowed newbies to turn invisible too.

In the seventh book, the cloak is retconned into being one of the three great artifacts that let you overcome Death himself. Yes, really. It's kind of stupid.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

That said, invisibility is explicitly an extremely difficult, rare, and powerful enchantment. Harry Potter has it from his first year because he inherited one of the three most powerful artifacts in the entire setting, on par with a ring that lets you contact dead people at-will and a wand that will defeat literally any opponent in a straight fight. Ron Weasley mentions that even the regular kind of invisibility cloaks that wear out after a few months are really rare, and really valuable.

Potter has it in the first year, because Dumbledore doesn't consider the cloak to be a big deal. Since Dumbledore doesn't need a cloak to turn himself invisible.
Not sure how the later books have changed that. But the vibe I got, was that the cloak was really nothing special, just an item that allowed newbies to turn invisible too.

In the seventh book, the cloak is retconned into being one of the three great artifacts that let you overcome Death himself. Yes, really. It's kind of stupid.

-Username17

Only, it's never satisfyingly defined what "overcoming Death" means, and the book tries to torture it into meaning "laying down and dying without a fight when your time comes" as opposed to "NOT DYING".

[Chamomile]

Ron's comment about invisibility cloaks being really rare and really valuable comes from the first book. They would not be that rare and valuable if it was expected that a wizard could just turn himself invisible whenever he wants. Of course, JK Rowling's never let something not making sense stop her before, so maybe there is an explicit reference to wizards turning invisible at-will later in the series, but the implication of the invisibility cloak on its own is that invisibility is something you buy for a mountain of gold, not a trick that everyone knows how to do by the time they leave Hogwarts. With the retcons of the seventh book, invisibility is something you buy for a mountain of gold and it still only lasts for a few months before it needs to be replaced.

[Voss]

The problem with the Harry Potter world is that the world does not exist outside of the school. There are hundreds of student wizards being trained in many schools all over the world. That's literally thousands of new wizards every year and where do they go!? There are no jobs or institutions for them.

We know that wizards defend the world from dangerous threats (like Dementors) and deranged wizards (Azkaban).

For a very weird value of defend. They employ the former and try to pretend the latter aren't running around. It isn't even limited to a particular administration- they were happily employing dementors during the previous adminstrations, and leaving combating death eaters to the Order. And Hogwarts wasn't the only school casually employing death eaters.

[ishy]

Ron's comment about invisibility cloaks being really rare and really valuable comes from the first book. They would not be that rare and valuable if it was expected that a wizard could just turn himself invisible whenever he wants. Of course, JK Rowling's never let something not making sense stop her before, so maybe there is an explicit reference to wizards turning invisible at-will later in the series, but the implication of the invisibility cloak on its own is that invisibility is something you buy for a mountain of gold, not a trick that everyone knows how to do by the time they leave Hogwarts. With the retcons of the seventh book, invisibility is something you buy for a mountain of gold and it still only lasts for a few months before it needs to be replaced.

in the first book, in front of the mirror Dumbledore tells Harry he needs no cloak.

[darkmaster]

Not necessarily. Seriously go the Full Metal Alchemist route. To make a thing you need all the ingredients in the proper amounts. To make bread you need wheat and water and salt and eggs. To make meat you need all the components of meat in the proper amounts or you won't get meat at the end of your spell. There question answered. Just because the writer didn't bother to think of it doesn't mean they shouldn't have.

That's pretty clearly not at all even remotely how magic works in Harry Potter.

Or (much less clearly) Narnia, for that matter.

I wasn't saying that that was how magic worked in the potterverse, I was saying that it is in fact possible to make the existence of transmutation not mean a setting shouldn't exist in the form it does.

[name_here]

in the first book, in front of the mirror Dumbledore tells Harry he needs no cloak.

Dumbledore has the Elder Wand, which is also one of the three great artifacts, and he obtained it by beating the previous owner in a straight fight. He is not a typical example of wizardly strength.

[darkmaster]

in the first book, in front of the mirror Dumbledore tells Harry he needs no cloak.

Dumbledore has the Elder Wand, which is also one of the three great artifacts, and he obtained it by beating the previous owner in a straight fight. He is not a typical example of wizardly strength.

If he beat the previous owner in a straight fight, then it couldn't have been the Elder Wand.

[Grek]

It's implied but never stated that he got it by seducing Grindlewald or otherwise playing on their past relationship.

[TiaC]

It could also be a really literal meaning of defeat. Like, Grindlewald disarmed him and then passed out from blood loss before he could kill him.

[Voss]

Given the convoluted bullshit that happens when the MacGuffins actually exist as MacGuffins, it could be literally anything. Since apparently a school fight in a bathroom counts for a change in Master status, but actually killing someone doesn't. I don't care if they do magically come back from the dead later, when you've put someone out on a forest floor to the point that they are out, in a coma, and completely at your mercy, they are defeated

Though if it were me, and my-never-fail-to-kill-people spell inexplicably fails, I wouldn't use it on the same brat a second time. A simple beheading and burning the body seems more practical.

[spongeknight]

Given the convoluted bullshit that happens when the MacGuffins actually exist as MacGuffins, it could be literally anything. Since apparently a school fight in a bathroom counts for a change in Master status, but actually killing someone doesn't. I don't care if they do magically come back from the dead later, when you've put someone out on a forest floor to the point that they are out, in a coma, and completely at your mercy, they are defeated

Though if it were me, and my-never-fail-to-kill-people spell inexplicably fails, I wouldn't use it on the same brat a second time. A simple beheading and burning the body seems more practical.

Yeah, but Voldemort was insane and had a fixation on death, which really was a major plot in the series. It's why he and his Death Eaters relied on the killing curse so much. "Practical" isn't his main motivation.

Also, didn't the wand backfire on Voldemort because he obtained it without defeating the current owner? Like, the wand said "Fuck you guy, you don't own me" and refused to work properly?

But anyway, yeah, the rules for the Deathly Hallows are mostly unexplained and mostly crap. Rowling was good at a lot of things, but a functioning and logical magic system was not one of them.