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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alex319" data-source="post: 7542287" data-attributes="member: 45678">I'm interested in D+D setting sourcebooks or other material that focuses on how the world works and how the existence of magic and other special abilities affect the world. What I mean by this is questions like:- A 1st level Druid with the Goodberry spell can provide nourishment for 20 people each day. (10 goodberries * 2 spell slots) Thus, a community consisting of only 5% druids would no longer require any other source of food to survive. (If this were widespread, it would drastically change social structures: e.g. farmland and irrigation would become much less important). Similarly, an army with a small number of druids brought along for this purpose would have a drastic strategic advantage as it would require much less logistical support. Is the number of druids significant for this to happen? If not, there would likely be a major effort to teach more people how to be druids, or to identify people who might grow up to be able to be druids, etc. to gain this advantage. Has this been tried? What are the barriers to it? What were the results?- The heat metal spell is very powerful against targets with metal armor because they can't easily stop the damage by taking it off. Presumably, if this spell was well-known, people might try developing techniques to mitigate it, such as putting an insulating layer under the armor, developing armor made of non-metal materials, or having some sort of quick-release mechanism to easily remove it. Is the heat metal spell well enough known/used often enough that a typical leader of a military force would know about it and know to plan for it? Have techniques like the ones I have talked about been tried, and if so what were the results?- The wide variety of abilities in D+D used for rapid healing, escape, and teleportation makes it very difficult to safely accept surrender. If a party is losing a battle and agrees to let themselves be captured rather than killed, it is almost impossible for the opponents to imprison them - if the opponents turned their eyes away even for a few seconds, that could be enough for them to cast a spell, slip out of their bonds, use bluff/diplomacy to trick someone into releasing them, and so on. (Even if the party does not have any of these powers or does not intend to try to escape, they have no way of proving this to their opponents.) How does this change how campaigns are waged and how battles are fought? Does the D+D world have an equivalent of the Geneva Conventions rules against perfidy, to deal with this kind of situation? Have they tried to create one, and if so how well has it worked?- Even low level abilities like Minor Illusion and Minor Alchemy are very useful to do things like make fake noises to trick enemies into thinking that reinforcements are coming, or turn silver pieces into gold pieces temporarily to rip off merchants, and so on. How has the possibility of illusions in combat affected military training and tactics? Do combatants frequently receive training on what effects magic can create, so if they see, e.g., a gout of flame with a certain shape coming up out of the ground, they will likely know "there's a real spell that does that, best stay away" versus "there's no spell that looks like that, it's probably an illusion?" (Even a combatant that didn't know or have any intention of casting any spells might still benefit from focused training specifically at identifying whether something might be an illusion or not.) What sorts of scams have people come up with and how do people try to protect themselves. (For instance, is it standard practice to make someone wait an hour for large transactions, to see if their pile of gold coins turns back into silver coins, before giving them their item and letting them leave?)To clarify this question:- I'm less interested in the specific items mentioned above than in that general category of question - how has all this magic and powers affected how systems work?- I'm less interested in visible but "decorative" aspects (e.g. "the streets of Eberron are lit with magical lamps with light spells on them") and more on underlying systems and behavior ("if healing is so easy to accomplish, how does that affect how they think about risk?")- I'm less interested in "how you would run this in your games" - I'm more interested in actual written fiction or setting material that goes into these kinds of details.What sorts of setting material exists for D+D that talks about this?</blockquote>

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