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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 6077737" data-attributes="member: 6669384">In many ways the problem is scale.  Create Food and Drinkis a neat spell, but it isn't a 1st level one and the amount of food you can produce is limited.  As in, it would take a dozen solid leveled casters to even begin to feed a small village.  Feeding a city?  Not really an option, at least not with that spell.  A fifth level Cleric could cast that spell once per day, maybe twice.That's 15 people per casting.  According to the World Builder's Guide, the distribution of casters will never be enough.  The percentage of 5th level or higher level casters just isn't there, no matter how large or small a population center you have.  We considered this issue in planning my group's current campaign, where widespread crop failures are part of the ongoing plot line.  To my mind, mass production in general would be kind of hard to see developing, as would an "Age of Enlightenment".  The Scientific Method depends on reproducibility:  If I mix compound A and compound B in a 3 to 17 ratio I should get the same result every time, and it shouldn't matter if I'm the one doing it or if it's someone else.  But the Alchemy rules of D&D make it clear that it does make a difference.  If I'm a spell caster and the other guy isn't, mine will work and his won't.The fact that reproducibility is not consistent may well keep people from developing the scientific method itself.  When D&D magic works, reproducibility isn't, well, reproducible.  And because of the EXP cost of creating magic items there isn't a way to run an assembly line for those, unless that line happens to include human sacrifice to power the enchantments.So there may be a Gnomish renaissance, when steampunk comes into its own, but magic will always be rare and special.  In fact, as an Industrial age draws the better minds to engineering, there will end up being a smaller percentage of people with "the right stuff" to be spell casters.  You would essentially be creating a new subdivision of "spell casters", the Technomancers.  Remember that World Builder's Guide (or even just the DMG) distribution of higher leveled people in a population center doesn't say what class, profession or trade they'll be.  It just tells you how many of level X there will be in a city with a population of Y.  And if more of them study physics, fewer will be studying metaphysics.</blockquote>

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