Is Magic a Setting Element or a Plot Device

[S'mon]

You were manually erasing pencil marks on paper? Why would they have you do that late at night, if you could just do it during the day, right along with the rest of the day shift?

They had one big warehouse-like vault close to the map stacks available for the shifts doing the erasing. Space in there was limited, although I think they probably could have crammed more people in - but that would have raised error rates again.

 

[mmadsen]

Well the topic isn't just about darkvision and 24 hour shifts. I think the key thing Hussar is trying to get across is that a magical world has magical things and those magical things should affect the world in some way.

What the darkvision tangent inadvertently illustrates is that new, cheap, widely available technologies (magical or not) have effects that are hard to predict.

Sometimes the effects are quite counterintuitive. For instance, if all these magical technologies that improve productivity aren't new and have been around for centuries, then the vast majority of the population won't be any better off. There will simply be more peasants living at subsistence -- because the economy is not continuously growing faster than the population. Everyone will remember a Golden Age, when these magical technologies were new, and the economic surplus hadn't been converted into more people.

In fact, if clerics routinely rescue people from death, then the peasant population will be even more miserable (and numerous) than otherwise.

The aristocrats could wield amazing power though.

(See A Farewell to Alms.)

 

[Hussar]

It would seem that introducing arcane technology into a feudal world would change it certainly, it would destroy it and cause an enormous amount of social problems. I think the precursor thinkers prior to the start of the industrial revolution had the same optimistic intentions as Hussar has in this thread. One can say all our problems today are connected to the world we've built with our technology.

Ok, for the umpteenth time, I never brought up the idea of utopianism OR Industrial Revolution. That was entirely someone else.

My entire point has been that a world with the fantastic would look different than Feudal Europe.

Let me turn it around. What is it about the fantastic that would lead the world to devoloping into Feudal Europe?

 

[Hussar]

What the darkvision tangent inadvertently illustrates is that new, cheap, widely available technologies (magical or not) have effects that are hard to predict.

Sometimes the effects are quite counterintuitive. For instance, if all these magical technologies that improve productivity aren't new and have been around for centuries, then the vast majority of the population won't be any better off. There will simply be more peasants living at subsistence -- because the economy is not continuously growing faster than the population. Everyone will remember a Golden Age, when these magical technologies were new, and the economic surplus hadn't been converted into more people.

In fact, if clerics routinely rescue people from death, then the peasant population will be even more miserable (and numerous) than otherwise.

The aristocrats could wield amazing power though.

(See A Farewell to Alms.)

This is EXACTLY my point. If the fantastic is a setting element, and not a plot point, then it will have some effect on the world. That effect might be bad or good, but, at no point will it have a zero effect.

 

[JamesonCourage]

This is EXACTLY my point. If the fantastic is a setting element, and not a plot point, then it will have some effect on the world. That effect might be bad or good, but, at no point will it have a zero effect.

What D&D setting have you run across where "the fantastic" has "zero effect" on the setting? I ask curiously, as someone who is far from familiar with any D&D setting. I was under the impression that this wasn't the case, but if it is, I see more where you're coming from.

 

[Hussar]

Really, JC, most base D&D settings are like this. Ok, if you want to get intensely pedantic about things, none of the settings have "zero" effect. But, you should still be able to see the point. In Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, just to name three, the fantastic is just a veneer. We have a faux-medieval Europe where all the fantastic elements are there, but very few of them are ever utilized.

Or, if they are, it's done by some ancient culture and no one can do it anymore (Myth Dranor anyone?).

There are a few settings where the fantastic isn't a plot device - Dark Sun, Planescape, Spelljammer. But the big ones tend to simply ignore any implications of what these fantastic elements could do.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Well, I've only got a very minor idea of how the settings are based on that reply. I've always been under the assumption of wacky economics due to a "goldrush-like era", adventurers being an actual profession, frontier towns dealing with fantastic threats, etc., have been a normal part of D&D's settings. I'd personally consider those things to be the fantastic deeply affecting the setting.

Mind you, I do agree that the kitchen sink style of fantasy embraced by D&D should probably have a larger impact, but like people have stated in the thread, just because you can do something with the fantastic, it doesn't mean it's going to be readily attainable to most (high level spells), logistically sound (to work 24/7 you need enough workers, etc.), and not so disruptive that governments or individuals don't shut you down (I think most governments would hire adventurers to take out entrepreneurs as of the time their undead workforce causes 50% of the surrounding nations to go unemployed and start rioting in the streets).

So, I can really easily see settings based on medieval settings like we're used to seeing. It just needs a reason. You don't like the "society in decline" reasoning. You don't like my reasons too much, probably. You're not at all wrong to prefer settings where the fantastic deeply affects the entire setting on most levels. That's just preference, like you've stated. Personally, I'm glad they have both, so that people can play to their tastes (I'm sure you probably agree). Like you've said, no one is right or wrong in this, and I'm not trying to say anyone is.

I think it makes enough sense to have that setting (as long as there's a reason why it's that way). You don't like it as much, and that's understandable, and cool with me. Thanks for the answer, though. I hope you don't think I'm being argumentative, as that's not my goal. As always, play what you like

 

[Hussar]

Perhaps it would be better to give an example where I have seen it done well. I'm a big fan of Scarred Lands. In SL, in pretty much all the setting books, the fantastic makes large changes in how each place works.

For example, in Mithril, City of the Golem, you have a 60 foot Mithril Golem, created by the gods to battle the titans, sitting in the middle of the city. At one point, one of the fingers fell off. The locals then started using the mithril to make weapons and armor to defend themselves against their neighbours.

Off shore, you have a spreading blood stain in the ocean of the dead titan Kadum who is chained to the bottom of the ocean. The blood mutates fish and whatnot and makes it possible that anyone who eats the mutated sea life might become mutated as well. Makes for an interesting challenge to the city to feed itself.

On the other side of the continent, you have Hollowfaust, City of Necromancers where, well, it's not a big shock, the local rulers animate cadavers to do all sorts of taskings.

To the south, we have Shelzar, City of Sin, where halflings, the whipping boys of Scarred Lands, eke out a living as diminuative prostitutes nicknamed "whorelings".

Those are just a few examples. There are lots more.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Perhaps it would be better to give an example where I have seen it done well. I'm a big fan of Scarred Lands. In SL, in pretty much all the setting books, the fantastic makes large changes in how each place works.

That's some cool stuff. I don't exactly how huge of changes most of those are (maybe the undead stuff), but you know better than I do. Don't some modules deal with this sort of thing? I've never used any, and, again, I was under the impression that modules incorporate this sort of stuff often.

EDIT: Also, spam reported.

 

[S'mon]

My entire point has been that a world with the fantastic would look different than Feudal Europe.

I have to say, I do tend to find the not-like-high/late-medieval-Europe settings to be generally a lot more plausible, less straining of my disbelief.

It's very easy for me to look at 1e-3e Greyhawk, or C&C's Yggsburgh, and see 'cracks' - places where the high-feudal world depicted appears to be a logical impossibility given the magic system. In these worlds, cities and nations field masses of feudal infantry and cavalry, who appear to be utterly useless vs the numerous mid-to-high level Wizards detailed as existing in these worlds. They require a hell of a lot of handwaving. There's a fortress siege at the start of Gygax's "Artifact of Evil" BTW which demonstrates this nicely - the mundane soldiery are almost irrelevant compared to the enormous magical powers in play.

I have not had this problem with the non-feudal-Europe 'Points of Light' settings, like the 4e D&D World, or the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, though. These settings resemble the post-apocalypse genre more than they do Gygaxian medievalism. In eg the Wilderlands, a super-empowered individual typically carves out a realm from the howling wilderness limited to the extent of his reach; there is no complex interlocking society based on the predominance of heavy cavalry for him to 'break', as IME happens in Gygaxian-medieval worlds.