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Message: <blockquote data-quote="2WS-Steve" data-source="post: 671957" data-attributes="member: 3289">For the primarily magical effects on the arms race:I'd assume that the tribal warriors are mainly Warriors, with the elite being Barbarians and perhaps the odd Ranger or Fighter. It seems that these guys could be higher level than the shamans since magic is still poorly developed. As such:Damaging effects like magic missle wouldn't have too great an effect other than hurting a few guys and awing the masses. But the masses shouldn't be too awed because magic is a part of their world after all. Sleep would be devastating if we assume small tribes and low level warrior types but I think even stone age tribes would include high level warriors. After all, they spend their entire life killing things and taking their loot  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Charming effects would likely be directed at the leader types since they'd be fairly vulnerable even to low powered magic, especially if the shamans had a bunch of talent, albeit lacking skill. In the first conflict this would be devastating since all of the sudden the tribe's leaders would be ordering their followers to do all sorts of crazy things. It wouldn't take too long though for the tribes to realise that they cannot rely on their leaders when fighting magical opponents; this should make them suspicious of anything their leaders say in a fight and make the battles more chaotic with everyone just making their own decisions. Upshot: formation of warrior-leaders is slowed because you can't follow them in a fight. Who can you trust? Unfortunately the spellcaster, even though you don't normally trust him, is the only one you can have some confidence in during a battle. Since wars make kings of generals, early stone-age tribes should tend towards theoracies or magocracies, at least until the warrior types gain some means of protecting their minds against magic (perhaps with the discovery of divine magic and clerical spells). Other effect: Tactics develop even more slowly than they did in the real world since tactics go out the window when you can't trust your leadership.</blockquote>

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