Gunpowder, fantasy and you

[Hussar]

SkyOdin, the problem I have with that is that it gets harder and harder to believe. When EVERY attempt fails, not because it doesn't make sense that it might work, but because the DM wants to keep his faux Euro setting, it really hurts my suspension of disbelief.

Even outside of straight up magic, you have creatures made of living fire - Thoqqua in 3e for example, that would work perfectly fine. Brown Mold absorbs heat and would work perfectly for refrigeration. There's a bazillion options in the Monster Manual alone, never mind any spells or supplements.

Heck, a trapped fire elemental would work wonders.

 

[Wolf1066]

Even outside of straight up magic, you have creatures made of living fire - Thoqqua in 3e for example, that would work perfectly fine. Brown Mold absorbs heat and would work perfectly for refrigeration. There's a bazillion options in the Monster Manual alone, never mind any spells or supplements.

Heck, a trapped fire elemental would work wonders.

The D&D universe is indeed filled with a number of races and magic spells that, effectively remove every single hurdle on the path to progress that we've had to overcome throughout the centuries.

Cheap, easy non-polluting means of producing heat and light; non-polluting, readily available flight - as simple as domesticating a horse or saying a few words to your mat... Global navigation? No problem, there are spells that would facilitate it and races for which it is simple. Blowing up a curtain wall or raining fire on those behind it? Easy. Bombing an enemy city from above? No problem. Tunnelling through a mountain? Shouldn't take too long.

 

[pawsplay]

Ah... not so fast. Never cared for Tolkien's demographics. Think he got that wrong. Too much civilization without enough people. Case in point: the Rhohirrim. They are classic norse warriors ('cept for the horse centricity). Trouble is, for that type of warrior culture you need lots of other norse-ish tribes to rub-shoulders with and fight. A stand-alone Rohirrim doesn't actually fit.

Name one place dwarves, elves, hobbits, Rhohirrim, and Haradrim "rub shoulders." Heck, Gondor was a decidely foreign culture, and once upon a time, the Dunedan ruled over the whole region. Clearly, trade and communications were not running at full speed during the LOTR era. Even to a man of Bree, a rider of Rohan probably seemed almost as exotic as an elf.

 

[SKyOdin]

Providing said person thinks of all the possible ramifications of the magic they allow in the campaign well in advance.

Continuous light, as others have pointed out, means shifts can work around the clock. Fire magic that can be used to create heat/flame for any length of time with no more effort than a nth-level wizard yelling shazzam! is going to facilitate an industrial revolution faster than the replacement of charcoal with fossil fuels did here on Earth.

Think on it too much and pretty soon you've removed a lot of "easy" magic from the world as magic - of the wave the hands and say a magic word variety - is a lot easier than actually mining minerals, transporting them etc and would bring about an industrial revolution with greater ease than we've ever known.

If you don't think it through in advance, you'll find players saying "hey, we can use an "Eternal flame" spell or two to power a simple steam engine..." and could rightfully get rather testy if you try to hand-wave why they cannot.

You would need to come up with a coherent idea of how magic works and what limits it - i.e. set scientific rules that magic must follow - in order to prevent it from being used as "like coal, petroleum and natural gas, 'cept ya don't actually have to do any real work yourself."

I think it is a lot easier than it appears at first. You just need magic to obey a couple of central tenets. First: magic can't produce energy out of nothing. If magic requires some kind of finite or limited source of power to draw upon, even if it is as simple as the inherent magical energy of a spell-caster. Second: magic requires a significant amount of labor from trained mages in order to function and be maintained.

The core advantages brought about by the industrial revolution were that it allowed people to draw upon large amounts of cheap energy that gave the further advantage of significantly reducing the amount of labor and manpower required to preform all kinds of jobs. If magic can't replicate that, then it could never be used to emulate the industrial revolution.

For example, lets consider a steam engine powered by magic flame. If the flame is a source of free, infinite energy, then yes, it will be something that could serve as the backbone of an industrial revolution. If the flame works by drawing on the strength of a trained mage, then it would probably be cheaper to hire brute human labor to perform the task than it would be to hire a trained wizard to exhaust himself keeping a flame lit.

The possibilities of a magic-industrial revolution are completely dependent on the basic cost-benefit ratio of magic, which is something that can easily be adjusted to taste.

EDIT: Thinking about, the best way to explain this is in terms of efficiency and cost effectiveness. Sure, magic might be able to facilitate various forms of technology, but the important question is can it do so at a price cheap enough to be worthwhile? The continual light might give light indefinitely, but most people it would be far cheaper to just buy a few decades worth of candles for the same money. If magic is expensive, it would never replace more mundane forms of technology.

 

[Wolf1066]

I think it is a lot easier than it appears at first. You just need magic to obey a couple of central tenets. First: magic can't produce energy out of nothing. If magic requires some kind of finite or limited source of power to draw upon, even if it is as simple as the inherent magical energy of a spell-caster. Second: magic requires a significant amount of labor from trained mages in order to function and be maintained.

The core advantages brought about by the industrial revolution were that it allowed people to draw upon large amounts of cheap energy that gave the further advantage of significantly reducing the amount of labor and manpower required to preform all kinds of jobs. If magic can't replicate that, then it could never be used to emulate the industrial revolution.

For example, lets consider a steam engine powered by magic flame. If the flame is a source of free, infinite energy, then yes, it will be something that could serve as the backbone of an industrial revolution. If the flame works by drawing on the strength of a trained mage, then it would probably be cheaper to hire brute human labor to perform the task than it would be to hire a trained wizard to exhaust himself keeping a flame lit.

The possibilities of a magic-industrial revolution are completely dependent on the basic cost-benefit ratio of magic, which is something that can easily be adjusted to taste.

EDIT: Thinking about, the best way to explain this is in terms of efficiency and cost effectiveness. Sure, magic might be able to facilitate various forms of technology, but the important question is can it do so at a price cheap enough to be worthwhile? The continual light might give light indefinitely, but most people it would be far cheaper to just buy a few decades worth of candles for the same money. If magic is expensive, it would never replace more mundane forms of technology.

I fully agree. We both seem to be arguing for having "scientific cause-effect and energy conservation" laws in place that put the brakes on indiscriminate magic use.

However, "magic-how-she-are-done" in every D&D campaign I've ever played in has been "mage memorises spells and then casts them quickly and effortlessly". Add to this the plethora of natural fire creatures and flying creatures and other animals, plants, races etc that are able to be employed, exploited or otherwise pressed into service towards various ends and industrial revolution is pretty much guaranteed - but blatantly ignored in favour of arbitrary "candle-lit cold damp hovels" and "majestic curtain-walled castles" because "that's what you have in high fantasy, damn it!"

In no game that I've played has the DM ever said, "no, you can't just cast a continuous light spell by saying a couple of words" or set any other form of limiting factor. Magic is as free as speaking to anyone prepared to put in a bit of preparatory learning (to become a mage) and they can wield it with impunity thereafter. As they level up they get better spells but that does not take particularly long in game terms - the game world is apparently teeming with high-level wizards (compared with LoTR's handful) as party after party wanders around killing zombies, vampires and other beasties, becoming immensely powerful in the process.

If a village does not have at least two wizards capable of casting continuous light (and imagine what would have happened in the middle ages if flour mills had safe illumination for night time - they all shut down at dark as it did not take long to learn the dangers of mixing flour and naked flames...) and various other handy spells, then one must assume they are all less adventurous than hobbitses.

And if a neighbouring wizard with those abilities can't see the benefit of casting the spells for them in exchange for a percentage of their increased production from that point on, (s)he's just not thinking clearly.

Flying? Go out, catch a large flying animal, tame it and ride it. Can't do that? Don't worry, there are people who can - and now your mill is running 24 hours a day, you can afford to hire such people.

Flying steeds abound and it was trivial for us to get hold of a flying carpet on one of our raids (and ruin the DM's plan, I might add), fire elementals "draw energy from the elemental plane" and can be trapped and used.

So much wild, unregulated stuff about with none of the checks and balances you describe in your post - unless you, the DM, put them in place (and stamp hard on anyone who says "but the MM says they are very common and easily tamed")

You wind up having to rewrite the lot to make it impossible for a magical industrial revolution to occur and to prevent smart-arsed players from just flying to the top of the tower and snatching the goods.

If you want curtain-walled castles, you have to get rid of pretty much any flying threat - be it dragon or some easily-tamed flying animal large enough to carry an enemy soldier and a bucket of oil. And make any magic that is analogous to gunpowder or greek fire extremely hard to come by.

And then the players will say "Awww, why can't I have fireballs? I wanna throw fireballs at the baddies..." or "the MM says we should be able to find lots of dragons, I want to kill a dragon and keep its hoard."

It's a damned either way situation, really.

In our party we had Drow elves who wore darkened glass discs over their eyes when above ground. Thinking about it now, we could have had a hot-air dirigible propelled by steam if we had been inventive enough.

We could have had perpetually lit palaces, central heating that never goes cold (we retired from adventuring, filthy rich, at 14th level). Our lands could be miracles of the Magical Age with our villagers working day and night (and getting amply paid for it) to produce stuff to sell - we'd be the most powerful people on the continent until other people cottoned on... "hey, wait a minute, we've got powerful mages, too..."

Edit:
Now I feel like going out and joining a local AD&D game just so I can push their world into industrial revolution...

 

[SKyOdin]

Honestly Wolf1066, that logic reflects a pretty naive understanding of how technology changed the world. Nothing you described would have any use or significant impact on a society, let alone be enough to trigger an magic-industrial revolution. The problems with your arguments are the same as those made by numerous other people: they mistake the ability to emulate certain kinds of technology we are familiar with today with to be the same thing as being able to change the world. The difference between these magical tricks and an actual industrial revolution is in efficiency, economics, and far-reaching impact.

The first issue is that continual light would do very little to change the world. Being able to work long hours thanks to light was hardly one of the major benefits of the industrial revolution. Remember, the industrial revolution was lit by gas-lamps, which are just a slight evolution from a technology that has existed forever. The main change was the cost of the source of energy. On the other hand, a continual flame spell of everburning torch is a comparatively expensive source of light. In both 3E and 4E, it costs a minimum of 50 gold, compared to one copper for a candle. Besides, increasing the length of time you can run a mill is pretty pointless if you can't grow more crops to fill it with. Making the mill a water-mill would have a greater impact on its productivity than letting it run all night.

As for the flying mount issue, griffons are expensive. In 3E, the cost of a baby, yet to be trained griffon was 7,000 gold pieces, equivalent to an entire herd of horses. I don't think I have yet seen a price for a trained griffon in 3E or 4E, but it would be very expensive. At that kind of price, you might see one or two in the hands of royalty, but it wouldn't be economically feasible to field them in large numbers. Besides, castles are designed to kill things in their courtyards, so flying a handful of soldiers over the outer wall isn't likely to change the tide of battle.

Let me point out the importance of efficiency. Song dynasty China was one of the most advanced and wealthiest civilizations in the pre-industrial world. The Song were producing a quantity of steel every year that wouldn't be matched until the industrial revolution. Yet, they used human labor to haul barges up their canal network. It turns out that it was cheaper to hire human labor than it was to use donkeys or horses for the task. In short, the cheapest solution is the one that catches on.

Unless magic can do something for cheaper than mundane means, it won't see wide-scale use.

 

[Haltherrion]

Honestly Wolf1066, that logic reflects a pretty naive understanding of how technology changed the world. Nothing you described would have any use or significant impact on a society, let alone be enough to trigger an magic-industrial revolution...

As for the flying mount issue, griffons are expensive. In 3E, the cost of a baby, yet to be trained griffon was 7,000 gold pieces, equivalent to an entire herd of horses. I don't think I have yet seen a price for a trained griffon in 3E or 4E, but it would be very expensive. At that kind of price, you might see one or two in the hands of royalty, but it wouldn't be economically feasible to field them in large numbers. Besides, castles are designed to kill things in their courtyards, so flying a handful of soldiers over the outer wall isn't likely to change the tide of battle.

Wolf may or may not have made the case for a magic revolution but citing 3E costs is hardly an adequate counter argument. For starters, costs are setting specific. You have cited the costs for the 3E standard campaign setting. In this setting, such costs are set to be in line with the expected costs of items (mostly magical gear) for characters of a level where they are interested in the the mount of your example, which is perfectly reasonably given that it's a game. Even if the 3E authors were attempting to model the economics of their world, I frankly don't trust them to have done a strong enough job of that rather difficult task to take that as a baseline in such a discussion.

I agree that the adoption and prevalence of magic would be a function of attractiveness (aesthetics/utility), cost of materials and other availabilty issues. Most of these discussions start spinning around without resolution because these fundamental factors that drive adoption are hard to quantify and most often, those discussing it are making wildly different assumptions.

It is certainly possible to have a game world or other fantasy setting where the barriers to magic are such that it is never widely adopted and never causes a "magic revolution". I've never found the standard D&D settings to be such a world, to be honest. 3E did introduce the mechanic of requiring XP for item creation, which if strictly interpreted will likely limit magic items although there are still cast spells. But in general, the D&D systems have a lot of magic lying around for adventurers to find which if taken on face value could suggest sufficient prevalence and ease of access to allow it to start shaping societies.

The idea of mage cantrips introduced some editions ago just scratches the surface of using magic for convenience. The industrial revolution was focused more on convenience and basic necessities than war yet in the D&D settings, magic is mostly focused on war and the like and not convenience items. Is it because magic is not useful for convenience? Or is it because D&D is a game with a large amount of combat? I'd suggest the latter.

It's certainly fine for the game world. You could also put magic item prevelance into a whole category of game prevalence items that are "bent" for game enjoyment and would not necessarily be so easy to come by in a "real" fantasy world (I think random encounter rates and implied monster populations could also be considered rather high, but again those are useful for gaming.)

In any case, to take such discussions on whether the presence of magic results in magico-industrial revolutions and the like requires a better definition of the magic and its accessibility. This is separate from gunpowder weapons as generally treated. We have a pretty good idea how that can evolve.

 

[Haltherrion]

So, in other words, in order to get D&D to do what you want it to do, you strip out significant elements and house rule the rest. Or, to put it another way, you barely play D&D anymore.

Hardly so, Hussar. You do seem to like putting words in my mouth though. Please cease to do so.

My house rules are quite limited. As for "stripping out elements", official pubished D&D already has a number of fairly different settings. Clearly there is a place for other settings, published by WOTC or created by gamers. These published settings also come sometimes with... setting specific rules! So house-rules to support a setting is hardly against the spirit or letter of D&D. Is Dark Sun no longer D&D? Eberron? I don't care for either setting but would hardly claim they aren't D&D.

If you stepped to my table and joined my game, you would find it essentially a vanilla 4E campaign in my own setting. The stuff I strip out (Ithilids, planes, sometimes angels, deities); it's all setting material. Not rules. The line seems fairly bright and clear to me. If you don't believe me, you can read the house rules sections for my current campaign on the wiki in my signature.

I could make a sounder case than yours that anyone not playing 4E isn't playing D&D (which I don't care to, of course).

 

[Wolf1066]

Besides, castles are designed to kill things in their courtyards, so flying a handful of soldiers over the outer wall isn't likely to change the tide of battle.

I never said anything about landing, and I suspect a "handful" of soldiers flying far above bow-shot, dropping flasks of lamp-oil and lit rags, would make the battle quite "interesting" - especially in the vicinity of the castle's grain store and stables.

As to the rest, I never encountered any such restrictions - it's an enduring trope that every party has it's own mage and eventually they learn to do some pretty cool stuff. How common are they? Pretty much every tavern has at least one aching to sign up for adventure with a bunch of random strangers... that's another enduring trope.

I've never played 3E to my knowledge, I think 2E was the most recent I've played. We just wandered around learning how to cast spells that we found useful - never cost us anything. Why pay for it if your party already has someone who can do it and will do so for the good of the group?

And if you do have to pay for it, who says you have to save up the money? Money lenders have been around for almost as long as there's been money. I suspect that before that it was, "sure, I'll give you this net but I get one fish out of every ten you catch..." Cost is not a prohibiting factor when you're expecting to get filthy rich due to your initial investment - just like today, really. You borrow the money knowing that you will pay it back when the enterprise starts paying off.

As to mills working around the clock: What is more cost effective: Having one mill that can process all the output from your land by working around the clock or three mills in order to process that same output during daylight hours only. If a continuous light spell costs less in labour and materials and actual currency than building two more mills then, by your own argument, they are going to take the magic route.

If the local mill can't process your grain for a week because they can only work during the day and it's harvest season, everyone wants their grain milled but five miles further up the road is a mill that will do it tomorrow as they're working around the clock, which mill will be getting your money?

And by nature of the game, magic is easier and cheaper than the labour intensive/cost intensive ways because if you make magic so prohibitively expensive or labour-intensive (costlier for a "continuous light" spell than for two bloody-great stone mills, easier to throw some lamp oil and a burning rag than to cast a fireball spell, easier to do field surgery than a healing spell etc), you effectively remove it from the game - no one's going to do it at all and you're back to doing things the natural way - which means that, eventually, people are going to discover gunpowder or similar chemicals to do what they would have done by magic.

 

[SKyOdin]

I never said anything about landing, and I suspect a "handful" of soldiers flying far above bow-shot, dropping flasks of lamp-oil and lit rags, would make the battle quite "interesting" - especially in the vicinity of the castle's grain store and stables.

All it takes is a catapult with a flaming projectile to get fire over a castle's walls, so fire raining down from above is something that medieval castle design already had to take into account. I agree that if flying troops were introduced to be a common and widespread part of military combat, castle design would probably change to include more anti-air defenses. It probably wouldn't be a very significant change to the overall design unless the flying troops could drop actual high-explosive bombs though.

Anyways, my point has never been that it would be impossible for there to be a magic-industrial revolution in D&D. Rather, my point was that is a setting designer didn't want an industrial revolution, magical or otherwise, to take place in a setting, then it would be relatively easy to make some adjustments to make it true. I am a fan of Eberron, so I definitely am not fundamentally opposed to a magic-industrial revolution. However, I think that many people who argue for one often do so on weak grounds that rely on fridge logic. If you want to have a magic-industrial revolution, make certain that the magic in question is both cheap to use, and has a direct influence on agricultural output and industrial production.

To get this discussion somewhat back on track, lets look at firearms from the 16th century: the matchlock and the wheel-lock. The wheel-lock was superior performance wise to the matchlock, since the matchlock had to loaded immediately before firing and the wheel-lock could be loaded, then holstered to be fired later. However, the matchlock was the dominant weapon of war, while the wheel-lock was never mass-produced for military use. The reason was cost: the wheel-lock was significantly more complicated in design and harder to maintain, thus more expensive.

Building on that, lets exaggerate the difference with fantasy clockwork technology and maybe a little magic. It would be possible to justify having an advanced fantasy clockwork-magic self-loading firearm alongside near-medieval warfare. Since such a weapon would naturally be prohibitively expensive, it wouldn't see much use in warfare and would have little effect on military strategy, but would be useful to the comparatively wealthy, i.e. adventurers. So it is justifiable to have adventurers using repeating firearms in a near-medieval world, if a DM wanted to have effective guns without the minute loading times. (Credit for the idea goes to my brother.)