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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5392147" data-attributes="member: 18253">I think that's grossly overstated. For starters, you seem to be assuming that the wizard only undertakes his profession for combat reasons. In a magic world, it would seem that there would be those studying to practise these arts for reasons of convenience or aesthetics since, from our own world example, we know people pay for that. Do they pay as much as for an attack spell? No but the market for convenience is much larger than the market for mayhem, at least in certain settings; certainly was the case for much of earth history. Our lighting-mage could learn his art from these kinder, gentler folks. Also, in general D&D, you know the spell, you can cast it. You yourself have allowed for only 2 years of apprenticeship in the lower bound. That isn't a horrible investment in time for access to useful magic (think cantrips for starters). How long it really takes and whether there are other barriers to studying the magic arts are setting specific. Also setting specific is how close to subsistence the society is. In a low population, low agriculture capability world, you could imagine many bright lads and lasses having to weigh helping the family eat versus studying magic. But that's not the case for many settings (or even certain places in the same setting). In some versions of D&D, continual light will last forever. Forever is a long time. Makes that spell quite useful. Makes it worth something. Could feed a lot of family members casting that spell. That said, it isn't clear to me that continual light alone would cause a revolution. But factor in other spells, especially clerical healing and curing spells and one could see an extremely powerful attraction for acquiring these arcane and divine arts. But how much can this really change a world? It depends on so many other factors related to uptake, availibility, aptitude required, even world history and time. The barriers presented in most standard D&D rulesets and settings never seemed so high to me that were magic really available on the terms described people wouldn't use it more, especially for non-combat purposes. But does that mean your game must have a magic revolution? No, of course not. As always, you can simply ignore the issue, you can introduce other barriers that don't affect the players but inhibits spread (requiring a 10 year apprenticeship could certainly do it and with a long apprenticeship, what mage is going to take anyone without a really high int, say 16+; similarly, the gods might not have the bandwidth and/or inclination to take many priests), you can introduce a timeline and state of the world that hasn't achieved a magic revolution yet, you name it. These arguments about whether D&D magic would spread are pointless without a mutually agreed upon set of assumptions (and I've been in more than one <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />). As a side note, sometimes people try to use the D&D standard spell costs to decide these matters. Aside from the fact that all D&D prices are mostly driven by the need to run a game (some editions even stating that their prices reflect inflated prices of an adventuring area for instance IIRC), it seems plain silly to me that all spells of a given level will cost the same. Like anything else, the prices will be driven by supply and demand. Know alignment is likely to sell for a lot less than continual light, assuming they are the same level, for instance.</blockquote>

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