D&D 5E How common are "petty" spell casters?

[bloodtide]

I go the other way. More then half of the world population has access to magic. I dislike the idea that magic exists and 99% of the world sticks their head in the sand and says "nope it does not exist". It's like someone in 2022 saying "electricity does not exist" so they live without it for everything.

It does not mean that the world has a trillion arch spellcasters. Most only have a little magic and they don't have the intelligence, wisdom, willpower or skill to do much. Though some have some powerful, but highly focused magic. Also like all magic, it's wild and dangerous. A lot of them also have "non standard" magical abilities, and most of those have a drawback or even a curse.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I dislike the idea that magic exists and 99% of the world sticks their head in the sand and says "nope it does not exist". It's like someone in 2022 saying "electricity does not exist" so they live without it for everything.

To be clear, for myself anyway, when I say 1 in 100 creatures can "do magic" doesn't mean in ANY SENSE that the other 99% think magic does not exist, etc.; just that only don't know how to do it. Most people understand that there is electricity but the vast majority don't know how it works or understands really what it is, let alone know how to produce it!

So, in my games all (or 99.9999% or so LOL) know magic exists / believe in it/ etc., but the vast majority can't do it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I know this is a 5e thread but...I don't run it and still feel like blabbering about my home game, which is Dungeon World.

"Petty" casters make up the vast majority of spellcasters in the Tarrakhuna. I would call them capped at level 3, maybe level 5 for the notably powerful ones. Truly archmage-level spellcasters are rare and significant.

Thing is...many important magical effects aren't spells in the standard sense. They're rituals. Some rituals are arcane in nature (e.g. teleportation circle usage, putting an enchantment on an existing magical object), some are primal (putting down the spirits of the unquiet dead, enriching the land, binding native-plane spirits), some are divine (resurrecting the dead, creating food and water, purging poison/disease), some are no particular school (creating magical traps/sensors, divinations, purifying materials/alchemical reagents.) You don't need to be potent in the "archmage" sense to be an excellent ritual spellcaster. The party has an ally, Hafsa, who is a gifted artificer-type Waziri mage; she's big on theory, analysis, and engineering, but weak on regular spellcasting. They've worked with druids and shaman who were similarly ritualists WAY more than they were spellcasters.

Refining your magical senses, learning to read and manipulate the flows of magic, developing the intuitions necessary to identify sources of power and exploit them...these are skills almost anyone can learn, they just take a lot of time or dangerous exposures. The vast majority of humans cannot "directly observe" magic--they might feel a weird vibe in areas where magic is super strong, but to most people, a fireball just seems to sprout out of the fingers of a wizard casting it. To someone actually trained in magic, who has awakened their magical senses and developed them sufficiently, the actual "mana" or "aether" dynamics that lead to the fireball happening can easily be identified. Such training takes several years for most folks, and even the gifted still need multiple years to truly reach proficiency.

Experience can certainly help as well. I've leaned into the Druid having a better idea how spirits work, while the Bard is more in tune with things that affect, or arise out of, people because that's what Rawuna (aka Bard) magic does, it's all about the ebb and flow between people. A Wizard will be generally good at identifying the components of something, the "what" and "how," but less adept at identifying "who" or "why" unless it's fellow-wizard magic (in which case certain signatures are identifiable.)

Our party Battlemaster--who explicitly did not have any magical training prior to our adventures--has just recently embraced a dark power that touched him in the past. This is allowing him to awaken his magical senses in a dramatically faster way than most folks, but it also means his intuitions will be weak because....he just doesn't have the experience yet. Learning to master this skill will be a growth process for him, and I'm looking forward to how that plays out as we develop his Compendium Class.

 

[Maxperson]

Before we start, I would like to preface this by saying there is no right answer - this is a "world design" consideration, and of course different DMs will come to different conclusions. But it's still useful to talk about it.

5e has given us several means to generate "petty" casters:
1: Someone who is a very low level caster and has "peaked" (ie won't go up in level and is "stuck" at that low level)
2: Someone who has a bit of magic via another mechanism - racial magic, or the magic initiate feat (a great way to make a "hedge mage" or priest), or a number of other feats that grant magic via a number of mechanisms - a peasant could be fey-touched for example!
3: NPCs don't have to follow precise rules. If you want a local fisherman to have a seagull familiar and not bother to explain how, go for it!
4: Someone could have an "external" source of magic they use - perhaps a magical item, or a magical being that can use magic on their behalf.

So these aren't people who are slinging fireballs and summoning angels - they just have a bit of magic that is useful to them and/or their community.

Personally I think it would be a mistake to have everyone have a bit of magic, but having every village have a local petty caster can be pretty interesting flavor. Of course once heroes reach tier 2 these will fade into the background, but they could be important NPCs at low levels. Just with magical initiate you can craft a great number of casters, who's style/flavor is based upon the spell list and the spell taken: "the ice mage" - someone with prestidigitation (for cooling and food preservation), ray of frost and ice knife, who's a rival of the red mage - a wandering tinker with mending, a raven familiar and firebolt. In an urban setting, there could be dozens of these. The Red Mage might have found employ at a petty noble, who wanted to emulate the king and get his very own "personal wizard".

Lastly, I'll mention that when I started writing this post, I had forgotten about racial magic, which would really change the dynamics in a community where this race is prevalent, but also how they are perceived. If there is one mage per village but every (high) elf knows magic... elves are magical beings!

Anyway, thinking about these "lesser casters" and how prevalent they are can really inform your world design and how the common people react to magic. Personally I like the "1-2 per village" level, as it helps with my personal "the PCs are not special at first but will become special" taste -at low levels you can cast firebolt, cool I guess, but when you start flinging fireballs people notice.

Per the DMG the default assumption is that spellcasters are relatively few in number and a remote village may not have seen a magic spell used in generations. This of course only lasts until you change it to what you desire, but that's the default.

 

[Shiroiken]

Not counting those with racial magic, such as the elves, likely only one percent of one percent of civilized populations are low level casters. This number gets skewed, however, once you start adding up all the races that get some form of magic, but it's still going to be less than 1 percent.

 

[cbwjm]

Depends a lot on location. A small village or hamlet might have only a single spellcaster, likely a druid or cleric who tends a small shrine a tends to the needs of the locals.

A larger town or small city might have a few petty casters, as well as maybe a few more powerful practitioners. I'd figure they'd have a few rituals or spells that aren't of much use to adventuring but are helpful in a civilised environment, less attack magic and more make your life easier magic.

 

[Thunder Brother]

While it's nice and easy it means that you need a population of TEN BILLION to have ONE person who can cast 9th level spells? So most worlds (including our own) would never have anyone who can do it.

Working as intended, at least for my purposes.

 

[Plaguescarred]

I'd say about 1% of the population in my campaigns are spellcasters, meaning a thorp don't likely have any, a small village might have 1 or few, a city a couple and larger town many.

 

[Ancalagon]

Per the DMG the default assumption is that spellcasters are relatively few in number and a remote village may not have seen a magic spell used in generations. This of course only lasts until you change it to what you desire, but that's the default.

I used to think this was viable, but now with racial magic...

A lot of people are saying "oh 1% that's pretty rare" but that means that a small hamlet of 80 people is more likely than not to have a someone that can cast some magic.

 

[Oofta]

People that can do magic with a snap of their fingers is rare, but ritual magic that people may not even realize they are doing is fairly common. For that matter, people heal magically fast from injury as well, they just don't realize they're healing magically fast because they've never known otherwise.

Humans have evolved and adjusted to local climate so that we have people like the Inuit who can handle freezing temperatures that would disable most people. I assume humans have evolved and integrated magic into their lives as well. That doesn't mean many people can cast cantrips, it's the blacksmith chanting as they hammer out a piece of iron so that it doesn't rust or the farmers that sing a traditional song as they plant their crops that give the plants a bit of a boost.

There's not really any industrial magic as in Eberron, almost all magic is still personal and requires effort and intent on the part of an individual.