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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 4652746" data-attributes="member: 694">The assumptions do vary depending on the edition of the game.  Take original/basic D&D, for example.  In this version of the game world, most of the people in the world are just 0-level humans.  Adventuring humans of 1st level or higher (and demihumans in general) are already just plain rare.  And among those 1st level characters, who can cast spells?  Magic-users and elves.  Even clerics won't cast spells until they reach 2nd level.  Furthermore, these magic-users and elves, who are already "mighty sorcerers" compared to the rest of the world, can only cast one 1st level spell a day, and that's it.  It's enough: such a character could amble into town and put everybody in a tavern to sleep with just a few words and gestures, or kill you dead with the certain shot of a single magic missile (because you have 4 hit points, and the magic missile is causing 1d6+1 damage).  Once this magic-using hero reaches 2nd level, now the character can perform two such supernatural feats in a day!  What power!  And now a cleric of that level can actually bind wounds with a prayer... but he won't be curing diseases or poisons or death for quite a long time yet.  OD&D assumes that characters are "heroes" when they reach 4th level.  So that mage who wields mighty 2nd level spells (in the game world, these might be considered "greater enchantments," while the 1st level spells are "lesser enchantments") and casts a whole four spells in a day, he's already an epic hero compared to a commoner.  He's Gandalf.  He's as badass as the most badass fantasy hero you've ever read about in a novel.  On this same scale, 8th level characters are *super*heroes.  They're as good as Batman or Hercules.  Any higher level than that (after 9th level, when the characters reach "name level" and stop rolling hit dice, when fighters become lords, magic-users become wizards, clerics become patriarchs, etc.), and the characters are lords among men.  The stuff of myth and legend.  Effective demigods.  And they're truly one-in-a-million.  Magic at this level can only affect society if it's dime-a-dozen.  When maybe four or five clerics the whole world over can cure disease or neutralize poison, never mind raise the dead and regerate limbs, the standard medieval/renaissance assumptions can hold.  Likewise for any arcane magic 3rd level or above (fireballs, haste, polymorphs, teleports)---these should be considered so rare that most people in the game world might not know that they exist (or still exist, or ever existed).===========Now, things change somehwat for later editions of D&D.  Already, by AD&D 1st edition, clerics can cast spells at 1st level, and they get as many as two bonus spells.  That means that an AD&D cleric could already miraculously cure a wound thrice in a day (while a mage of that level still only gets his one spell per day, with no bonuses!).  A typical AD&D world feels like a world chock full of gods and priestly magic (Forgotten Realms, anybody?), so the whole medieval setup does start to break down.  AD&D also seems to assume that high-level characters and demihumans are commoner, so they start to feel less special.  2nd and 3rd edition are pretty much the same as 1st in this respect (I can't comment on 4th), but 3rd edition is especially egregious in its "anything goes" feel.  It used to be that you had to roll a Charisma 17 doing 3d6 in order to be a paladin, or three separate 15s in Dex, Con, and Wis to be a monk.  With that rule discarded, rare and special character classes became "ordinary," and you can expect them to be common enough to affect the game world.  A monastery full of adventuring monks and paladins?  Sure.  (Not saying this a good thing or a bad thing, just a particular assupmtion of the typical 3e game world.)</blockquote>

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