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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8178062" data-attributes="member: 6937590">If commoners with 4 HP are the most common type of people in the setting (otherwise why are they called that?), basically any magic user is deadly. As a commoner, meeting a 3rd level wizard on the street would be like meeting someone open carrying a revolver (6 spell slots); you know that that person can kill you and, even if you're confident nothing is gonna happen, the encounter is still slightly uncomfortable. You'd probably be extra polite to them.Most higher level spells are bigger but fundamentally similar versions of this, i.e. a 5th level wizard with fireball is open carrying a bazooka, a 7th level druid with stoneskin is a guy in body armor, and so on. The unseemliness of these things depends on culture--nobody bats an eye at a revolver in a wild west saloon--but, at the very least, a spellcaster is an obviously threatening and highly militarized person.Even spells that are huge game-changers from a PC's perspective aren't fundamentally different from this. A wizard that can fly or turn invisible is only one wizard, and is only locally significant. He/she doesn't matter very much to the wider world--just like one guy with a jetpack and a revolver doesn't much matter to us.From 3rd level on up, though, there start to be spells that would make or break whole countries (assuming pre-modern levels of technology).<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Plant growth (3rd), when cast as a ritual in a different place every day, is a doubling of a large region's agricultural output.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Revivify (3rd) and Raise dead (5th), drastically reduce the success rate of assassinations.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Sending (3rd), is a communications revolution, drastically improving central command and control.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Divination (4th), commune (5th), and contact other plane (5th) could significantly improve state decision making.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Scrying (5th, and as a consequence, mordy's private sanctum) is a revolution in intelligence gathering.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Teleportation circle (5th) is a transportation revolution for military logistics and maybe also commerce.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Transmute rock (5th) is a revolution in siegecraft.</li> </ul>In a place where casters of these spells are common and socially well integrated, they would be the equivalent of a doctor/engineer/programmer/navy seal--a person who possesses most of the society's most marketable technical skill sets at once, but who also happens to be a mother effing navy seal. Everyone would want their kid to become one.Around 7th level spells, the godlike powers and weapons of mass destruction start to come online; simulacrum (7th), teleport (7th), plane shift (7th), clone (8th), control weather (8th), demiplane (8th), earthquake (8th), mighty fortress (8th), meteor swarm (9th), storm of vengeance (9th), wish (9th). Each caster with these spells would be a nation unto him/herself, and would struggle to empathize with the human condition. I think they'd either be god-kings or insane dissociated hermits.I guess I vote 3rd level spells. 1st and 2nd are deadly to the typical person, but not powerful in a big picture sense.</blockquote>

Verification