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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 425018" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think there is a tendancy here to mean one of two things when you say 'magic'.  Either you mean, 'as practiced in my campaign world' or else you are defining magic in terms of a particular set of religious beliefs.But, since we don't know what magic is, we can go ahead and say magic is anything that people have said it is.  We don't have to say magic is a life force.  We don't have to say magic is the exclusive providence of mages.  In fact, if we are playing D&D, we don't often say these things.  We don't often say what magic is at all beyond defining what it can do.  Whether you think this is good for a setting or not is pretty much your opinion.  Magic can be given all sorts of flavors and still be 'magic'.I think D&D sets up a situation where high magic could become ubiquitious.  It is not necessary for the common man to understand or be able to create 'wondrous items'.  The common man does not understand a microwave or a television set.  Increasingly, the common man does not even understand a car.  (I can fix quite a few things on a car built 40 years ago, but almost nothing on one that is built recently.)  All that is necessary is that the common man have the usage of the wonderous item.There was recently a discussion provoked by my assertion that permanent Teleport Circles broke the social dynamics of standard D&D fantasy worlds.  There existance should cause a D&D world to not look like anything in human history.  But similar assertions can be made for an almost limitless list of D&D items that we insert without a blink.What sort of world would it really be if we could make Decanters of Endless Water?  Would sanitation and running water develop much earlier and in a greater number of cultures?  Surely a couple Decanters of Endless Water make no more of a daunting construction challenge than the Aqueducts that watered ancient Rome.  What sort of world would it be if you really could make Clay and Stone golems?  Imagine you could make a tireless, unthirsting, beasts of burden?  Forget uber-guards.  Imagine you could replace cranes with stone men!  What advances would this encourage and what would it discourage?  The invention of the waterwheel, windmill, gear box, and the block and tackle were all inhibited by the precense of abundent slave labor in the ancient world.  How much more so if the King could command the alligence of 400 Stone Golems?  And of what value would an army be in the field against the King if he could?  Of what value is the Phlanyx when one man with wand of fireballs can consume the whole line?  Are wands of fireball and 5th level wizards really rarer than armies of hundreds of men?  What is the point of a mass cavalry charge if a Wall of Fire can be errected between you and the foe?I almost hesitate to keep this up because we are starting to get into my setting, but seeing how it is unlikely I'll ever have time and oppurtunity to publish...If there are potions of youth, do aristocrats ever really need to die?  If you really have vampires and liches, how likely is it that they _would not_ rule empires openly or in secret?  If you really have half-celestials and demi-gods, wouldn't you really have divine right of Kings?  Consider the effect of druidic spells on agriculture.  The development of hay did not occur until sometime in the 7th or 8th centuries.  Hay!  Consider just how much more it would have been delayed if someone could walk around making plants grow or changing the weather!  Crop rotation wasn't really widely implemented in Europe until the 11th and 12th centuries.  How much latter would this science have been discovered had magical means of gauranteeing bountious crops existed?  Contrarily, perhaps it would have been intuitive considering someone could just ask a plant (or a god!) about how it felt about things.  Would pestilance be as much of a problem in a world where the gods daily cured disease?  Any disease.  Would you have leperousy colonies if the curing of lepers was not the most miraculous of signs?  (consider how much of the Jewish legal code revolved arround preventing the spread of leperousy and other skin ailements (like small pox))First edition D&D had the problem of explaining why low level magic items were so common given how hard they were to create.  Third edition solved that problem, and now the question is 'Why are they so rare?'.And imagine what items would really have economic value to the common person.  Forget wands of magic missiles.  How about wonderous items of 'clean', 'chill', 'heat', 'spice', 'gather', etc.? (all duplicatable by the Prestidigtation cantrip).  Once you make one, it doesn't go away.  If your campaign world is thousands of years old, and the population is stable (or reduced from the glory years of the past!) as it so often is, why aren't these things everywhere?  Why aren't all lords drinking out of cups that chill the wine with ice and mugs that warm the cider and tea?  Why aren't there ice cream vendors if you can summon cold with a simple spell?  At what point is it reasonable for a wealthy neighborhood to start installing everburning street lights?  (This was an even more serious question back when continual light was free, something that I think the 3rd ed. designers realized.)I could go on forever in this vein probably, but you get the point.  Magic could become technology without duplicating the technology of our world.  Something that we do would seem wonderous and 'impossible' to them, and vica versa.  We need not imagine that a wizarding world would look like Harry Potter with magical crystal ball television sets and other silliness.  But, nothing stops  wizards from networking over thier crystal balls, and nothing stops them from setting up teleport circles to facillate the business ventures that fund thier research, and so on and so forth.</blockquote>

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