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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1681809" data-attributes="member: 6533">A question:If you are going to have DnD level magic in battle are you also going to have DnD style balance?Because Burning Hands is a lot less scary when you know that any first level human fighter is probably going to survive an application.  Same with magic missile.Hmm, the odd thing about magic on a battle field is that it's really going to disturb medieval notions of military hierarchy.It's going to be a lot harder to look to your local lord as the sole source of authority when you have a learned guy who can heal you and make you fight far more effectively.As a result, I would expect the following potential adaptations:1.) The development of formal officer levels at a far earlier stage than historically occured.  This would allow for a level of complexity that would still give the lords control but would also give the clerics some level of authority.2.) Lots and lots of 'multi-classing' among the nobility and military elite.  With the actual social strangeness that results.  Out of this I would expect that the church and nobility would arrange some form of bastardized holy orders.  The trade-off would be that nobility would gain access to miracles and the church would gain access to a stronger moral authority over the nobility.3.) Sub-cultures develop that educate people in magic.  When you get longbows you don't get training camps that train people in the longbow you get villages that develop it as part of their local culture and economy.  A lot of magic is essentially a long bow advantage so you would develop sub-cultures that trained in it.  Two variants on this:-Gypsy style sorcerors.  They really on their wits, charisma, and valuable skills to live in between the lines of medieval society.  They are frequently hired as mercenaries by various military bands.  Probably on a band by band basis as scouts would have been.-Actual sub-cultures.  You would probably have to make most arcane magic-users take a feat to describe where they got their training from: hermit types who live in the wilderness with small enclaves of apprentices, student types who pick it up in various odd schools, eastern types who study with noted and pedigreed scholars.   This sort of phenomena would be very Ars Magica-esqu.  But I could equally picture their being provinces in each empire who specialized in creating wizards out of their surplus population.  Older mercenaries would retire to the village and train whole classes in the basic skills of war-magery.As a side note, you would certainly develop 'rugged' variants on the magic using classes which would represent the first few levels where you get more practical training in moving about in the world with the trade off that you only learn very vanilla version of a very few well known and easily taught spells.4.) Given the lack of specialization in any medieval society.  I would expect that there would be a common pool of magical knowledge that anyone could potentially draw off of.  Basically, you would have to have a feat that gave away some flexible spell like prestidigitation as basic peasant knowledge of magic.  Peasants are clever, smart, and capable they just don't have time to go into a lot of specialized knowledge.  So comprehensive knowledge of writing isn't that applicable a skill to generally living and surving, but their are plenty of low level spells that are going to be of much greater interest.5.) Potions, scrolls, and other low level and generally useable spells are going to develop their own manufacturing industry.  Tremendous mega-monastaries will make their fortunes off of this and represent tremendous strategic assets and their will be arcane, scholarly, and magical versions of the smithing villages that used to provide things like mail and arrow heads to marching armies.As the period progress you might see a very scholarly like Cordoba or Bologne picking up the economicly robust nature of Milan as they become the equivalent of industrial knowledge makers.Also note that all of the above is only related to Western Europe.</blockquote>

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