Is Magic a Setting Element or a Plot Device

[mmadsen]

I'm referring to the stuff that is accessible at a local level. Whether it's flora and fauna that could be tamed/bred/enslaved/assimilated or magical/fantastic effects with long lasting consequences.

Incidentally, one of the key points of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that the vast majority of potentially useful flora and fauna are not easily tamed, bred, enslaved, or assimilated. Horses worked out wonderfully. Zebras? Not so much.

As I said, infravision is a poster child here. The ability to have a workforce that works 24/7 has an enormous impact on every level of society.

Having half your workforce work at night is less than transformative. It just means that half of them work during the day and half at night, rather than all at the same time. This isn't useful unless you also have, say, an expensive factory that would go to waste without a night shift.

If you're building roads, walls, aqueducts, etc., it doesn't boost productivity.

When you take all these things together, they don't add up to Feudal Europe in my mind.

The key is whether these magical technologies are cheap and easy to use. Human labor costs roughly one silver penny per day.

 

[Hussar]

Sorry, wasn't clear about Roman=Evil Empire. I meant most modern observers don't consider Rome to be the Evil Empire. I wasn't talking about contemporaries.

Most Commoner Japanese farmers actually owned the land they worked - they weren't serfs, and did not pay rents to their lord, however, most paid an annual rice tax of 40 - 70% of their annual crop. In this sense they were serfs, but as said, unlike serfs they actually owned their land...

What time period are you referring to here? It took the Americans to give the vast majority of Japanese farmers back their land, which had been taken from them long before the Meiji reformation, although, I admit, I'm not sure when.

Most Japanese farmers, at least up until the late 20th century did not own their land.

/snip
If you're building roads, walls, aqueducts, etc., it doesn't boost productivity.


The key is whether these magical technologies are cheap and easy to use. Human labor costs roughly one silver penny per day.

What? I just doubled the work hours of the day and that won't boost productivity? Or, are you saying I'd just have half as many workers during the daylight hours? Again, why? I no longer am required to stop work when the sun goes down. I can now construct anything in half the time it would have taken otherwise (more or less).

 

[JamesonCourage]

What? I just doubled the work hours of the day and that won't boost productivity? Or, are you saying I'd just have half as many workers during the daylight hours? Again, why? I no longer am required to stop work when the sun goes down. I can now construct anything in half the time it would have taken otherwise (more or less).

I think the thought process was that you can work only during the day with 100 workers, or day and night with 50 on each. Just because you can work at night, it doesn't mean your workforce increases. Supposedly, in most settings, basically everyone is already employed anyways, and that's assuming most only work during the day. However, I am just taking a guess at what he was trying to communicate, and I might be way off base.

However, I can see how empires might take advantage of this to some degree. Of course, it depends on the size of the project. If you've got 10,000 slaves and you want a small-ish monument built, only so many of them can work on it at once during the day, and the night becomes too dark to work the others effectively. However, if you can light up the night with magic, then it becomes much easier to use another portion of those slaves.

On the other hand, if you're building a road from one city to another, you can definitely already put those 10,000 slaves to use during the day by having them mine materials, transport materials, dig up areas all along the way, build all of the path simultaneously, etc. By the time night rolls around, you need to let them sleep so that they can keep working the next day.

I think it really boils down to what you expect to free up. Yes, lighting up the night frees up 33-50% more time to work for some people, but does it give those people 33-50% more labor? Like I said, most people are probably assumed employed, and the really massive projects can basically be worked on already. The smaller projects open up, but you need more workers than you can use for that to become useful, and I'm not sure how many people that will apply to. Just my thoughts. As always, play what you like

 

[mmadsen]

What? I just doubled the work hours of the day and that won't boost productivity? Or, are you saying I'd just have half as many workers during the daylight hours? Again, why? I no longer am required to stop work when the sun goes down. I can now construct anything in half the time it would have taken otherwise (more or less).

You and your friend need to dig a 100-yard trench. Does it go faster if one of you brings out a light and digs at night instead of during the day?

The constraint is the number of laborers, not hours in the day.

 

[gamerprinter]

Sorry, wasn't clear about Roman=Evil Empire. I meant most modern observers don't consider Rome to be the Evil Empire. I wasn't talking about contemporaries.

Can't say for sure, but most modern observers don't consider empires to be anything, but evil as far as governments go. I don't think historians generally judge the good/bad in historical empires, but put on the spot, I'd hardly think they thought the Roman Empire was a benign entity.

What time period are you referring to here? It took the Americans to give the vast majority of Japanese farmers back their land, which had been taken from them long before the Meiji reformation, although, I admit, I'm not sure when.

Most Japanese farmers, at least up until the late 20th century did not own their land.

Not true, perhaps land division post Meiji (1868+) might have changed land ownership, but prior to that, all farmer's land was owned by the farmer - Japanese farmers were always land owners and never serfs, their lands being hereditary properties. This has been true at least from the Heian period 790 AD, up to the Meiji Restoration 1868 AD.

What? I just doubled the work hours of the day and that won't boost productivity? Or, are you saying I'd just have half as many workers during the daylight hours? Again, why? I no longer am required to stop work when the sun goes down. I can now construct anything in half the time it would have taken otherwise (more or less).

I'm saying short of extreme circumstances as in prior to an immediate war that is known to be happening soon so that a gear up of defenses, arms, etc are needed on short notice, there is nothing that requires 24 hours of labor to support a feudal society. The people would have too much leisure time on their hands and feudal society can't support masses of vacationers for example - keep the people working 6 days a week at normal work hours and everything gets done on time anyway.

The lack of a 24 work day did not inhibit feudal society growth - it's not something that is needed. Only in a post industrial revolution world requires the kind of manufacturing output that a 24 hour workday enhances.

 

[gamerprinter]

Let's put it this way. Right now, I run a graphic design/digital print studio in NC Illinois. I have electricity - so I have the benefit of being able to operate my business 24 hours a day. I happen to live in a post industrial world so there is more labor productivity today than in past centuries. Despite that, I have no needs for second shift (or third shift). Even when the economy was better a few years ago, there were days (many) that I would find myself with no work to do - we were essentially caught up and the next prospective job was hours or a day away. I can operate 24 hours a day, but I don't because I don't have such needs.

I don't think my business example is anecdotal. I'd go as far as saying that 95% (99% even) of modern business has no needs to work a 24 hour day. Its well within our technological ability, but not in our financial nor productivity needs. There are some factories and utility services where 24 hour work days provide a benefit, but they are a fraction of the work force - most do not need 24 hours of labor to get things done.

Now all the above is within a post industrial revolution era. In any period before that the work force needs were even less, so what benefit would 24 hour work day productivity provide? Pretty much no benefit. As stated previously there are circumstances to justify faster production - on a war footing, etc, but for the most part the only thing 24 hour work force will do for you is spend your limited funds twice as fast. Sure you get things done faster, but that in of itself is not necessarily a benefit. It's only helpful if you need to get it done faster. And mostly that was unnecessary.

 

[S'mon]

L
I don't think my business example is anecdotal. I'd go as far as saying that 95% (99% even) of modern business has no needs to work a 24 hour day. Its well within our technological ability, but not in our financial nor productivity needs. There are some factories and utility services where 24 hour work days provide a benefit, but they are a fraction of the work force - most do not need 24 hours of labor to get things done.

I remember I once (1999) temped to a contractor for the UK Land Registry, erasing pencil marks on paper land deeds so the tens of millions of maps could be electronically scanned & uploaded. Lots of maps to be scanned in ASAP. So the contractor ran 3 shifts, I worked the twilight shift 2pm-10pm. The labour itself was not hard, but we worked in very poor conditions and were treated badly.

Eventually the Land Registry dropped the 10pm-6am night shift - productivity was too low, too many errors were being made. It just wasn't worth it.

 

[gamerprinter]

I remember I once (1999) temped to a contractor for the UK Land Registry, erasing pencil marks on paper land deeds so the tens of millions of maps could be electronically scanned & uploaded. Lots of maps to be scanned in ASAP. So the contractor ran 3 shifts, I worked the twilight shift 2pm-10pm. The labour itself was not hard, but we worked in very poor conditions and were treated badly.

Eventually the Land Registry dropped the 10pm-6am night shift - productivity was too low, too many errors were being made. It just wasn't worth it.

My local courthouse sent me a job once, a bid request actually to do a digital scan of all their 'dead beat dad's' list behind on child support. I gave them my bid to convert a 10,000 sheet listing of names into a searchable PDF.

Then the court realized if they tried to schedule even a fraction of that list, it would tie up the court system for years to come and not even serve other criminal hearings under normal 'business conditions'. It wasn't feasible to try, so they didn't have me do the work.

As long as there is a bottleneck somewhere in the workflow of any activity, that's as fast as things will ever need to get. 24 hour work days don't help most activities, so its not an inherent benefit that would change society just because you could.

Getting away from Darkvision, and looking at Wall of Iron. If you can produce many walls of iron there is no need to dig holes in the earth to get it - you've just put the mining industry out of work. There is some labor required to transport and breakdown walls of iron into usable chunks, so some industry is created, but not the needs from mundane iron production.

Just looking at Darkvision and Wall of Iron as an influence of society, I see the ability to put people to work 24 hours a day, yet at the same time create vast unemployment, because nobody has to work anymore to get anything done - everyone is unemployed except the spell casters and the skeletal mundane force need to handle the arcane created objects for use in the world. Now you need to create incentives to attend church 7 days a week to keep the masses occupied and in some control. If not, you have chaos.

It would seem that introducing arcane technology into a feudal world would change it certainly, it would destroy it and cause an enormous amount of social problems. I think the precursor thinkers prior to the start of the industrial revolution had the same optimistic intentions as Hussar has in this thread. One can say all our problems today are connected to the world we've built with our technology.

Somehow I don't see a utopian world resulting from D&D technology changing society.

 

[mmadsen]

I remember I once (1999) temped to a contractor for the UK Land Registry, erasing pencil marks on paper land deeds so the tens of millions of maps could be electronically scanned & uploaded. Lots of maps to be scanned in ASAP. So the contractor ran 3 shifts, I worked the twilight shift 2pm-10pm. The labour itself was not hard, but we worked in very poor conditions and were treated badly.

Eventually the Land Registry dropped the 10pm-6am night shift - productivity was too low, too many errors were being made. It just wasn't worth it.

You were manually erasing pencil marks on paper? Why would they have you do that late at night, if you could just do it during the day, right along with the rest of the day shift?

 

[MichaelSomething]

Well the topic isn't just about darkvision and 24 hour shifts. I think the key thing Hussar is trying to get across is that a magical world has magical things and those magical things should affect the world in some way.