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

[Paul Farquhar]

The thing about the D&D rules is that they are not based on science, they are not based on economics, they are not based on history. They are based on literature.

If you attempt to model a medieval society based on Mallory, you are inevitably going to get strange results!

If you want to create a medieval setting for D&D I think the most important thing to do is ignore the rules. Use historical sources. Treat the D&D rules as a special case that only applies in the vicinity of the PCs. The rest of the world follows real world rules, and so real world historical models can apply.

 

[Hussar]

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

Well, kinda?

The point is, the game was never written with the idea of being a world building engine. Every design decision is based 100% on playing the game, not building a world. Why is Continual Light a 2nd level cleric spell (or Continual Flame in later editions)? Well, because for the first three levels, messing about with torches and lanterns is kinda fun, but, now, you're third level (or higher) and you can't really carry enough light sources if you're actually tracking time carefully.

So, we get a world changing spell at a pretty low level and, until 3rd edition, zero cost.

Same goes for Cure Disease, Create Food and Water, etc. etc. The levels of these spells is 100% based on the dungeon crawl, not about what this would mean in a world building sense. So all the absolutely culture shattering spells are all fairly low level. Because, well, that's when they would be useful for adventurers in a dungeon. That these spells would completely revolutionize the world isn't a consideration.

Of course, that's ignoring, again, what the monsters would do to the world as well. Imagine what a single Treant could do.

My next campaign is based really strongly on making a world where the magic in D&D would be integrated into the world. The people in the village get their primary source of food from Giant Bees (which also provide a source of healing as well) where the giant bee queen is always an Awakened Giant Bee and is included in the governance of the village. Most of the tools and whatnot are either grown from various sources or straight up fabricated by Forge Priests. So on and so forth. Ren-faire Europe it most certainly is not.

 

[pemerton]

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

No it doesn't. JRRT made up his languages. He had actual bases for his choices: his beliefs about the "laws of language" coming out of 19th century philology.

Extrapolation implies correctness-conditions. There are no correctness conditions here. People imagine some things - a mediaeval(ish) world, and D&D magic. Then they imagine something that seems to them consistent with that first bundle of things. There's no basis for choosing between any of a (in practical terms) infinite number of imaginings.

Probably none of them are actually plausible, insofar as the only evidence we have, as @Hussar mentioned upthread, is that increases in labour productivity will spell the end of mediaeval(ish) societies. But almost no one plays D&D like that, not even Eberron to the best of my understanding of it.

 

[pemerton]

The thing about the D&D rules is that they are not based on science, they are not based on economics, they are not based on history. They are based on literature.

If you attempt to model a medieval society based on Mallory, you are inevitably going to get strange results!

If you want to create a medieval setting for D&D I think the most important thing to do is ignore the rules. Use historical sources. Treat the D&D rules as a special case that only applies in the vicinity of the PCs. The rest of the world follows real world rules, and so real world historical models can apply.

All this!

 

[Maxperson]

again, that is time thing. any 5 year old can LEARN to understand quantum physics... its just an advanced skill and one they don't yet have the foundation for.
You can't line up 10 5 year olds and pick out "That one is smart enough to learn physics"

Magic require aptitude in order to even learn it is a common trope in fantasy, and was even around during 3e. In the Shining South supplement, Halruaa the nation of wizards where everyone loves the art, only 1/3 of the population has the gift of magic. Of that third, 2/3 of them never learn more than a cantrip or two(take the magic initiate feat). So in a nation of wizards where they are practically bred for it, only about 10% of the population can learn anything past cantrips.

Not only does 5e not show anything to indicate that has changed, it actively indicates that it is true by stating flat out that the default assumption is that spellcasters are rare.

 

[Maxperson]

Not really. It's a suggested bit of advice in the manual for building worlds to use as a state to work from. It's the basic world, upon which DMs are expected to add if they wish. The actual rules of the game directly contradict it by being very free with magic, and by providing rules for the crafting of magic items.

The DMG unequivocally states that the DEFAULT assumption is that spellcasters are rare. Then it gives advice on different ways to handle magic. The default of D&D is to have rare spellcasters, though. So while yes, the DM can build off of that default and change spellcasters to be more common, if he doesn't, they aren't. No change = default.

Spell books aren't sturdy, first of all. Secondly, a person cannot just find an ancient master's spellbook (miraculously in a language they understand) and go from not knowing what an integer is to understanding calculus. Even Da Vinci, Newton, Galileo, all learned the fundamentals from teachers and from books made for the purpose of instruction. Third, if "person who can learn to cast literally any arcane spells at all" is as rare as you insist, then the few people who can are going to hoard their tomes against rivals, and people who don't want Mage-Emperors are going to burn the libraries of dead mages to prevent some young bastard from finding it and becoming the next best thing to a god.

Spellbooks are not written in languages. They are written in some sort of magical runes or something. We know this because wizards without a roll or spell can copy a spell out of literally every spellbook they find, no matter where in the world, or even found on another world in another universe. That would not be possible if they had to be able to read a language that they don't know.

It's exceptionally cheesy. It's cheesier than He-Man.

Prove that it's cheesy. Casters needing to be born with a rare talent for magic is a common trope in fantasy and in D&D.

And please, if you are going to insist that you're just pointing out the defaults, at least provide quotations with page numbers, or screencaps, or something else people can use to fact check you without having to dig through a book you insist says exactly what you claim.

DMG page 9 under Core Assumptions about the game world.

"The World Is Magical. Practitioners of magic are relatively few in number, but they leave evidence of their craft everywhere."

DMG page 23 under Magic in Your World.

"What normal folk know of magic depends on where they live and whether they know characters who practice magic. Citizens of an isolated hamlet might not have seen true magic used for generations and speak in whispers of the strange powers of the old hermit living in the nearby woods."

If magic were as common as you make it out to be, that bolded part would not be true.

DMG page 24 under the same heading.

"Consider these questions when fitting magic into your world: Is some magic common? Is some socially unacceptable? Which magic is rare?"

The reason you have to ask yourself if some magic is common, is because by default it isn't.

 

[Maxperson]

Assuming there is no spark/bloodline/mutation/whatnot required, the rarity of classical magic-user/wizard type magic in a campaign world feels like it would be related to:

• How much it takes mentally to do it - is it multiplying fractions, algebra II, calculus, undergrad real analysis, measure theory, category theory, advanced differential geometry, or theoretical mathematical logic?
• How dangerous it is to fail - is it writing stuff on paper and risking headaches and suffering stress, or is it like a chemistry lab with unstable explosive chemicals or nuclear materials?
• How expensive the materials to learn it are - does it take pencil and paper, or does it require a super-computer or expensive lab?

Focussing on the 1st, at some point in math it seems like folks (with support who are actually given the opportunity) top out at what they can manage in any reasonable amount of time. There are plenty of people who put in hundreds or thousands of hours to get to a given level in graduate school and have support to get there... and it apparently isn't doable in the months or years they put into it. Seemingly in the same way it isn't doable for some folks to make a college baseball team, or a minor league baseball team, or get out of the minors to the pros.

If first level spells are multiplying fractions then it feels like most people would get there in a reasonable amount of time and would learn it if the opporutnity to do so was actually given and the rewards for doing so were vaguely reasonable. If casting a first level spell is like mastering Spivak's Defferential Geometry or Hungerford's Algebra (let alone the things that build on those) then it feels like society might starve to death if most people were trying to learn 1st level earth moving things instead of actually plowing fields and planting stuff.

This was a very well written post that it seems a lot of people ignored for some reason.

 

[Hussar]

There's another thing that people tend to leave off. World population. My quickie look through Google pegs the world population during 1200 AD at about 500 (ish) million. Total. That's it. Most of the world would be unbelievably empty (at least of humans anyway).

Yet, we look at these fantasy settings where there's major population centers all over the place. And, let's posit for a moment that the humanoid population of the world is similar to Earth's at the time - so, again about 4-500 milion. What percentage of that would be human, what percentage humanoid? Elves, dwarves, etc. Given medieval food production levels, you can't have a much bigger population.

The point being, the fantasy worlds that we have are MUCH too big and far too populated. The Sword Coast, for example, has several major cities -with populations in the hundreds of thousands. It makes basically no sense.

 

[chaochou]

Imagining and making up implies no actual basis for your choices.

This is absolutely false.

 

[chaochou]

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

I'd posit that they are impossible to extrapolate, and take a great deal of knowledge and insight to even partially understand in retrospect.

Take something like James Burke's seminal 1970s BBC documentaries Connections and you can see just how unlikely and unpredictable a lot of the drivers of societal change have been. For example, it was rising global temperatures that drove nomadic hunter gatherers to settle the Nile Valley in search of regular food and water, from where processes of agriculture and the domestication of animals began. Why there, and not in Wales, or Iberia? There is no answer.

It was, by chance, the fact that the Normans had knowledge of the stirrup from the Arab world that allowed them to field cavalry at the Battle of Hastings. Why was it not the Saxons, or both sides? There is no answer.

When it comes to creating an imaginary society it literally can't be derived. It can only be made up.