Putting poison on the cats.

lol. Paradox? What's that? And thanks for the reassurances on Advantage. Mine should arrive tomorrow or the day after.

Short version: it's the price you pay for power.

Long version: In the old _Mage_ game from White Wolf (if you're not familiar with White Wolf, they make a bunch of supernatural-type role-playing games), if you used magic to change reality and you went too far, you'd often experience an effect that reflected either reality pushing back at you, or the consequences of the kind of reality you created. So, say you use magic to create this powerful poison that kills fleas, and you screw up or go too far. One the one hand, you might poison stuff you never intended to poison (like, in my case, myself). On the other, your poison might just make the fleas angry. And hate you. And follow you around, exhibiting their hatred in their flea-bitey way, for weeks. Hopefully, your magical poison didn't also make them huge.

Paradox is one of the more useful and widely applicable ideas in gaming I've encountered. For example, the environmental damage resulting from unwise energy policy could be viewed as a giant Paradox effect. Wanna move around in giant boxes of metal at sixty miles an hour and light up the night like it's daytime? Okay, but your boats now have to sail through gluey brown goop and your daytime air will be darkened with smog. There's a potential fallacy built into that point of view -- not every action will necessarily have some catastrophic result -- but giving some thought to the unexpected long-term repercussions of apparent shortcuts is generally a good thing.

I guess it's really just another way to look at karma, or the threefold law from some flavors of Paganism, though with a more direct cause-and-effect relationship.

That said, sometimes, the magic is worth it. (Like it was for me.) I hope all goes well with the cats.