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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CruelSummerLord" data-source="post: 3786321" data-attributes="member: 48692">One thing I think everyone has been overlooking in this discussion is the possible ramifications of not just magic being part and parcel of the setting, but also monsters and sentient non-human races, which can go a long way towards explaining the various anomalies, if you want to go in that direction.  Gary Gygax mentioned something along these lines in the 1E DMG-it turns out that there are some species of plants that grow extremely fast, and are the food supply of a superabundant species of animal that is a major link in the food chain.  Its presence helps to explain why there can be so many large predators, but none of them ever seem to go hungry.  It's a twist in the natural food chain in our real world-sometimes, if those large predators didn't exist, the population of (insert species here) would explode!  In real life, anthropologists and sociologists have written millions of pages of research on things like cultural influence, exchange, and evolution.  Who's to say that humans didn't get their concepts of individualism from the elves, or their organized states from dwarves, or their notions of gender equality from halflings?  What kind of cultural influences do the elves, orcs and humans have on each other?  Humans might motivate elves to become more martial, and might teach them metalworking, which they learned from the dwarves.  It might explain why the fantasy counterparts of real-world cultures that did not have metalworking-African kingdoms, the First Nations of the Americas, for instance-have things like the wheel or steel swords-they learned it from the dwarves, or the gnomes, or whichever fantasy race you substitute.  Similarly, the presence of sorcery and non-human creatures can explain why things have not developed the way they logically would in the real world.  Why are there no firearms, and no internal combustion engines, despite thousands of years of history?  Simple: Gunpowder and gasoline simply don't work the same way they do in real life.  Given that magic routinely violates the laws of physics, and these same physics are violated in other ways (logically, the skeletons of giant monsters should be crushed under their own weight ala King Kong, and yet they are not), energy is constantly being created and destroyed, I think we can tinker with science to get the results we want.  And you can also vary the power levels to explain just why or why not there are certain tropes in your world.  "There are magic shops because there are enough mages of high enough level around to be able to produce and manufacture these goods; magic isn't necessarily that hard to learn.  If most people aren't super-powered archmages, it's still relatively possible to learn enough to create and sell some basic devices.""No one has mass-produced continual light devices because to do so would be sheer lunacy.  Where are you going to find more than three or four wizards of high enough level to cast these things?  4th/5th/6th level actually stands out a fair bit, you know!  And besides, those wizards probably have better things to do with their time than cast the same spell over and over again...there aren't enough wizards of that level to cast the spells you need.  And as for magic shops, it's the same thing.  How many wizards make it to 7th level, much less 16th/18th, the level you need to create a permanent item?"  On the one hand, you have the power level of something like Eberron, and on the other you have the power level of a setting like mine, where magic items are an incredible pain in the neck to make, and you should consider yourself blessed by the gods if you have a +1 hand axe.  Again, these can make convienient explanations if your players ask why they can't spend any money on magical items, or why there are people selling continual light devices on street corners.</blockquote>

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