D&D General D&D, magic, and the mundane medieval

[pemerton]

While things have changed, in Ad&d, you rolled your ability scores (Method 1) 3d6, in order.

I think you're describing AD&D 2nd ed (2nd ed AD&D PHB p 13).

In the original AD&D DMG, the following options are given (p 11):

Method I is 4d6, drop the lowest, six times and arrange in order. (This is 2nd ed Method V.)

Method II is 3d6, rolled 12 times, keep the best 6 and arrange in order. (This is 2nd ed Method IV.)

Method III is 3d6 rolled 6 times for each ability in order, keeping the best in each set of 6 rolls. (Method II in 2nd ed is like this, but with the best of 2 rather than best of 6.)

Method IV is what you describe, done 12 times, with the player than choosing which set of ability scores they want.

 

[Hussar]

Of course all this talk about education ignores a couple of things. One, the student might have a lifespan measured in centuries. Two, the teachers might not be human and again might have lifespans measured in centuries.

Makes an awful difference. For a human, with an expected lifespan of say fifty or sixty years to spend fifteen or twenty years to get educated to the point of an advanced university degree (presuming becoming a wizard is equivalent to getting a phd) is going to be pretty rare.

But do that when your life expectancy is two or three hundred years? That’s pretty common.

Of course it’s also all tied together. I read recently that a 1000 AD farmer would produce about 4000 calories per day. So you needed about half your population farming. Today that same farmer produces over a million calories per day. Meaning that a huge population can be supported by a tiny percentage of farmers, leaving the majority to pursue other professions and education.

So the proposed wizard farmer would mean a complete end to a medieval society. You can be medieval when 90% of your population isn’t farmers.

 

[Oofta]

This is false. Again, the advanced levels of basketball skill are just as out of most people's reach as advanced mathematics. The fundamentals are available to everyone. You talk of insults is odd, since no one has claimed that you've insulted anyone.

I'm saying it's not an insult to recognize that no matter how much effort you put into things there are just some things you are never going to be good at. I'm not talking about forum postings at all. My friend Randy from high school worked hard, had great attitude but he was ecstatic if he got a B. Nice guy, as I said a friend, but he simply wasn't very bright. I never thought less of him because of it. Saying that he did not have what it takes to be a physicist (which is far different from understanding rudimentary physics) would not be an insult, just reality.

I don't care about your campaign, as I've pointed out many times before. A discussion here is generally about the game in general.

The point is there is no standard so we can only talk about what we do. About the only standard is that some magic is relatively common such as potions of healing if you can afford it.

 

[J.Quondam]

Makes an awful difference. For a human, with an expected lifespan of say fifty or sixty years to spend fifteen or twenty years to get educated to the point of an advanced university degree (presuming becoming a wizard is equivalent to getting a phd) is going to be pretty rare.

That brings up a good potential motive for becoming a spell caster. One of the big tropes of wizened wizards is that somehow they manage to live for centuries. Of course, exactly why this is in a game world might not be clear: perhaps it's the magic? The wizard's blood? A divine blessing? But no matter what it is, just that prospect of near-immortality could be tempting reason for ambitious apprentices to devote so much study to magic, despite the hardships.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm saying it's not an insult to recognize that no matter how much effort you put into things there are just some things you are never going to be good at. I'm not talking about forum postings at all. My friend Randy from high school worked hard, had great attitude but he was ecstatic if he got a B. Nice guy, as I said a friend, but he simply wasn't very bright. I never thought less of him because of it. Saying that he did not have what it takes to be a physicist (which is far different from understanding rudimentary physics) would not be an insult, just reality.

I still don’t know where insults come into it, but okay.
Again, there is a gulf between a wizard that can cast level 3 spells and a character with 1 or 2 spells they’ve managed to learn. The physicist is the first, not the second. The second is either in the realm of professional competence or not. If it is not, then things fall apart rationally. If basic competence requires the equivalent of being someone who can easily grasp and work with complex advanced math at a genius level, not just an average working scientist, then it strains basic credulity that there are apprentice wizards at all. The default should then be that every wizard has invented most of their own spells, having only thier own intellect, the writing of theorists, and the unintelligible scrawlings from the one spellbook they could find.

Then that person has to actually survive to adulthood and have not only that aptitude but also the desire to actually spend their whole life becoming a wizard.

Yet every town bigger than a breadbox has proffessional spellcasters you can hire to cast a first level spell for you, there are Spellcasting sidekicks, and apprentice wizard NPCs.

The point is there is no standard so we can only talk about what we do. About the only standard is that some magic is relatively common such as potions of healing if you can afford it.

We can extrapolate from the actual rules, as I’ve been doing.

 

[pemerton]

I read recently that a 1000 AD farmer would produce about 4000 calories per day. So you needed about half your population farming. Today that same farmer produces over a million calories per day. Meaning that a huge population can be supported by a tiny percentage of farmers, leaving the majority to pursue other professions and education.

So the proposed wizard farmer would mean a complete end to a medieval society. You can be medieval when 90% of your population isn’t farmers.

This is the sort of thing I had in mind when, upthread, I posted about changes to labour markets following from the application of magic.

Mediaeval society isn't just a trope, or an enthusiasm for feudalism! It's driven by particular pressures - like, how can an agragrian society with the sort of efficiency you (Hussar) describe field a cavalry army that can defend fixed population centres?

Change the social and economic constraints and the society will look wildly different, in ways that are not easy to extrapolate.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Which patterns? The ones that tell us that industrial society will look like the US? The ones that tell us it will look like Japan? Like Norway? China? Nigeria?

You look at how society changed when three field rotation supplanted two field rotation. That might give some insight as to what impact plant growth would have. If there was a massive influx of wealth from plundering a megadungeon or through magical acquisition, you can look at what happened to Alexandria when King Mansa Musa when on hajj. If you want to know what clerical magic can do to life expectancy, you can look at population distribution curves when childhood vaccines are introduced into an area.

There are brilliant scholars who devote their lives to accumulating data and trying to see patterns. And they struggle with even simple extrapolations (I'd rank Weber perhaps the highest, but he saw fossil fuel depletion, rather than climate change, as imposing the limit on industrial economies).

Yes, they're looking at living systems trying to predict results for the benefit of millions if not billions of people.

This is for a game; your extrapolating for the amusement for up to, what, a dozen people? This isn't something you can get "wrong". You apply your imagination and intellect after cracking open a couple of books to come up with something interesting. This should be well within your talents. You make choices, and if they suck you go back to the beginning and make different ones.

 

[pemerton]

This is for a game; your extrapolating for the amusement for up to, what, a dozen people? This isn't something you can get "wrong". You apply your imagination and intellect after cracking open a couple of books to come up with something interesting.

This is why I describe it as imagining and making up, rather than extrapolating!

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is why I describe it as imagining and making up, rather than extrapolating!

Imagining and making up implies no actual basis for your choices. That's not what's happening here.

 

[Maxperson]

That default position makes no sense. It's inconsistent with the insanely magical state of every D&D world.

It makes perfect sense if you want it to make sense. I run a low instance of spellcasters in the Forgotten Realms and it works out very well. It's just that thousands of years of a small number of wizard making constructs, permanent spells, magic items, etc. leaves a lot of those things around the world. It makes the world seem high magic, but spellcasters are still rare. Works out just fine.