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

[Paul Farquhar]

I disagree with this, actually. This assumes that magical processes can be industrialized.

No, it doesn't. Simply having a cleric in the village who can cast Lesser Restoration completely rewrites medicine, expected lifespan, and the balance of power.

Actually, you don't even need a cleric in every village. It's enough to have one in the city, ensuring the nobility don't get sick and have long healthy lives (at the cost of being under the thumb of the cleric). Consider Rasputin. He had enough power, and he was a fraud. Consider if his powers had been real.

The common/rare argument is a red herring. The rarer magic is, the more powerful those who can wield it become. One real spellcaster changes everything.

Unless, of course, you handwave it away rather than try and work your way through the consequences. Which is what D&D generally does, and works surprisingly well.

 

[Baron Opal II]

I disagree with this, actually. This assumes that magical processes can be industrialized.

No, it doesn't. Simply having a cleric in the village who can cast Lesser Restoration completely rewrites medicine, expected lifespan, and the balance of power.

Having a third level cleric would definitely have a profound effect on the health and well-being of the people there. Absolutely. Being able to effectively cast cure disease twice a day would be a big change. (Because a third level cleric can cast two second level spells a day, correct?) It has a bigger effect in 5e than in AD&D or 3e.

That isn't industrializing magic, however. That's about magic item manufacture, not the simple presence of a spellcaster. Apples / Oranges.

As an aside, working with infant mortality rates, advantage of bleeding prevention, mitigation of post-partum infection, and the presence of monsters, I calculated that the birth rate would increase significantly, leading to an increase of the adult population. However, with the increased mortality secondary to monster attacks, the surplus population doesn't extend past 40 years of age. Therefore, there is a significant number of surplus population that goes out and gets themselves killed, in the hopes of being one of the few that returns wealthy.

The common/rare argument is a red herring. The rarer magic is, the more powerful those who can wield it become. One real spellcaster changes everything.

Yes, but the rarer they are the less societal impact they can have. Having a midwife that can case cure wounds will have a tremendous impact to that village, but a minimal one in a town and a negligible one in a city. Word will certainly get around about the success of her patients, and she'll likely become rather wealthy, certainly highly respected. But one person can't stop a plague, unless they're high level maybe.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That isn't industrializing magic, however.

No it isn't. But magic doesn't need to be on an industrial scale to change society beyond all historical similarities.

Yes, but the rarer they are the less societal impact they can have.

The rarer they are, the more power is concentrated in the hands of the few spellcasters that do exist.

You only need one 3rd level cleric to keep the ruling family free of disease. Hardcore protestant Edward VI died of "sweating sickness" aged 15, allowing Catholic Mary Tudor to seize the throne. One Lesser Restoration would have killed the counterreformation dead in its tracks.

 

[Umbran]

But, in our Tolkien worlds, the elves and the dwarves and the orcs and the humans and the halflings all live in an area about the size of Europe (and maybe a bit smaller), have no real physical barriers to trade or mingling, but, inexplicably all stick to their own. Why aren't there Halfling communities in Gondor? Why aren't there human houses in the Shire? Fantastic farming land, right beside human lands, but, no one goes and buys a farm in Hobbiton? Ever? No enterprising dwarf heads into Laketown and sets up a smithy? Or Bree? On and on.

Look, there's a giant elephant in the room reason for why early and mid-20th century fantasy is written like this. We all know exactly why it was written this way. It's not exactly a secret.

I'm not about to do a whole research paper to figure out how many colleges existed in Europe by then, some dataset to try to extrapolate how many Catholic clergy outside of institutes of higher learning were in Europe in a given decade,

So, let us consider - Newton went to Trinity College, in Cambridge.
Even today, that college takes a whopping 200 students a year, and only some of them are mathematicians.
In 1650, the population of Europe was about 74 million people.

If European colleges were putting out a thousand mathematicians a year, it would still take 700 years for mathematicians to be one in a thousand people. Ergo, pre-Renaissance, mathematicians were not a one-per-village kind of thing.

The thing you miss is not that mathematicians need to be plentiful for people to learn and extend mathematics - what you need is for them to record mathematics, and pass it along. Mathematics was passed on and was advanced because they communicated through books, and then through colleges, not because you could easily meet a practitioner on the street.

 

[MGibster]

this smacks of BS gate keeping "your too dumb to learn what I know"
it may come easier to some and harder to others (and to be fair a lot of people give up on hard things) but I doubt short of a major mental issue there is any thing that CAN be taught that someone can't learn.

At work, we have a call center, and we tend to hire people to fill those positions 30+ people at a time and send them to training together. When we hire those folks, we do so with the understanding that not all of them will be able to make it through training. Some of them end up figuring out the job isn't for them and they quit, there are those who get fired they're just stop showing up or are constantly late, and still others who simply can't grasp the material and wash out. So there are a lot of reasons why someone might not be able to code, or learn how to cast spells, not because they're dumb but for other reasons.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Here's a scenario: a PC cleric grows to say, 3rd level, and the player decides that the PC is moved by the idea that their clerical powers could be used to help society as a whole rather than fight monsters. They decide to retire the PC to a community with the intention of using their abilities to help improve their quality of life, including training new acolytes as circumstances allow.

This could happen in any campaign, as it's a player decision. How would you, as the DM, extrapolate that retired PC's effects going forward?

 

[Maxperson]

No it isn't. But magic doesn't need to be on an industrial scale to change society beyond all historical similarities.

One of the problems is that clerics don't work on the clock for the village. A cleric of a god of compassion or healing might sit around casting cures all day, but others would follow their gods tenets and goals. The cleric of Oghma that lives on the edge of town will likely ignore requests for healing. He might, if offered some significant new information, book, etc. cast a spell for the village, but it's going to be rare for them to have something he wants every time someone needs healing.

The rarer they are, the more power is concentrated in the hands of the few spellcasters that do exist.

This is absolutely true. And not just power, but influence.

 

[Baron Opal II]

You only need one 3rd level cleric to keep the ruling family free of disease. Hardcore protestant Edward VI died of "sweating sickness" aged 15, allowing Catholic Mary Tudor to seize the throne. One Lesser Restoration would have killed the counterreformation dead in its tracks.

Interesting point! Thanks!

 

[pemerton]

The problems raised by @Hussar and @Paul Farquhar follow from applying magic to an assumed real-world baseline. It seems that the obvious solution, therefore, is to change the baseline:

Thus, in a faux-mediaeval world with clerics who can perform miracles, it seems to me that the better framing is that something like historical mediaeval society is what you get as a result of that magic use. Without it, who knows how terrible the fantasy world would be!

 

[Ancalagon]

D&D pretty much ignores the religious aspect, with it being polytheistic and very eligitarian (in general), even though religion had a gigantic effect on western medieval and renaissance history. Especially for Europe the effect of having one person in power of a religion (the pope) shaped politics a lot.

As for nobility, as you mentioned D&D and also many other fantasy settings, ignore it. Or rather, their idea of nobility is similar to a disney movie. You have a king, queen, their direct children as princes and princesses and maybe another noble with undefined power and responsibility as required, mostly as BBEG (or BNGG, Big Nice Good Guy, in case the king is evil).

But an actual feudal structure? Nobles with their own domains and especially responsibilities attached to their titles? No.
And also every noble (and their spouse) are insular, meaning there is no connection between them. Intermarriage between noble dynasties? Or having dynasties that span multiple noble titles in general? Again no. You hardly find anything like the Habsburgs in fantasy settings.

I was a player in a campaign (level 1-9) in the Great Kingdom of Aerdy in greyhawk that incorporated all of this - nobility, allegiances, a new religion trying to displace an old one, dynastic issues.... I'm trying to find the sourcebook for this - aha, Ivid the Undying.