Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wolf1066" data-source="post: 5390016" data-attributes="member: 88680">I fully agree.  We both seem to be arguing for having "scientific cause-effect and energy conservation" laws in place that put the brakes on indiscriminate magic use.However, "magic-how-she-are-done" in every D&D campaign I've ever played in has been "mage memorises spells and then casts them quickly and effortlessly".  Add to this the plethora of natural fire creatures and flying creatures and other animals, plants, races etc that are able to be employed, exploited or otherwise pressed into service towards various ends and industrial revolution is pretty much guaranteed - but blatantly ignored in favour of arbitrary "candle-lit cold damp hovels" and "majestic curtain-walled castles" because "that's what you have in high fantasy, damn it!"In no game that I've played has the DM ever said, "no, you can't just cast a continuous light spell by saying a couple of words" or set any other form of limiting factor.  Magic is as free as speaking to anyone prepared to put in a bit of preparatory learning (to become a mage) and they can wield it with impunity thereafter.  As they level up they get better spells but that does not take particularly long in game terms - the game world is apparently teeming with high-level wizards (compared with LoTR's handful) as party after party wanders around killing zombies, vampires and other beasties, becoming immensely powerful in the process.If a village does not have at least two wizards capable of casting continuous light (and imagine what would have happened in the middle ages if flour mills had safe illumination for night time - they all shut down at dark as it did not take long to learn the dangers of mixing flour and naked flames...) and various other handy spells, then one must assume they are all less adventurous than hobbitses.And if a neighbouring wizard with those abilities can't see the benefit of casting the spells for them in exchange for a percentage of their increased production from that point on, (s)he's just not thinking clearly.Flying?  Go out, catch a large flying animal, tame it and ride it.  Can't do that?  Don't worry, there are people who can - and now your mill is running 24 hours a day, you can afford to hire such people.Flying steeds abound and it was trivial for us to get hold of a flying carpet on one of our raids (and ruin the DM's plan, I might add), fire elementals "draw energy from the elemental plane" and can be trapped and used.So much wild, unregulated stuff about with none of the checks and balances you describe in your post - unless you, the DM, put them in place (and stamp hard on anyone who says "but the MM says they are very common and easily tamed")You wind up having to rewrite the lot to make it impossible for a magical industrial revolution to occur and to prevent smart-arsed players from just flying to the top of the tower and snatching the goods.If you want curtain-walled castles, you have to get rid of pretty much any flying threat - be it dragon or some easily-tamed flying animal large enough to carry an enemy soldier and a bucket of oil.  And make any magic that is analogous to gunpowder or greek fire extremely hard to come by.And then the players will say "Awww, why can't I have fireballs?  I wanna throw fireballs at the baddies..." or "the MM says we should be able to find lots of dragons, I want to kill a dragon and keep its hoard."It's a damned either way situation, really.In our party we had Drow elves who wore darkened glass discs over their eyes when above ground.  Thinking about it now, we could have had a hot-air dirigible propelled by steam if we had been inventive enough.We could have had perpetually lit palaces, central heating that never goes cold (we retired from adventuring, filthy rich, at 14th level).  Our lands could be miracles of the Magical Age with our villagers working day and night (and getting amply paid for it) to produce stuff to sell - we'd be the most powerful people on the continent until other people cottoned on... "hey, wait a minute, we've got powerful mages, too..."Edit:Now I feel like going out and joining a local AD&D game just so I can push their world into industrial revolution...</blockquote>

Verification