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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6153911" data-attributes="member: 6681948">I find various editions have moved magic from Mystery to Commodity.  Wizards, for example, learn 2 new spells per level.  Those must come from somewhere, but can at least be explained by Wizardly Research (ie innovative discovery, rather than learning the spell from someone who already knows it).   But we then get the "MagicMart".  The player wants more spells, so he goes out and gets some scrolls to learn from.  The presumption that the Wizard has the right spell for every occasion implies ready access to such spells.  Are the commoners familiar with all this magic?  Probably not, unless we've pushed this commoditization to an extreme.  But who cares?  The PC's opposition isn't typically a bunch of commoners anyway.  It seems wholly reasonable to expect the PC's enemies will be as competent as they are (often, their major opponents are more experienced than they are), so assuming the PCs are the only ones aware of all of these tactics, strategies and spell combinations seems unreasonable to me.If magic is rare and mysterious, and PC spellcasters are near-unique, how is it we can buy spellbooks, magical ink and even scrolls of any spell one can imagine (which are obviously well known enough for the PC to enquire about a scroll of that spell in the first place)?  Where do those enchanted arms and armor, and other items that the opposition seems to have in abundance, come from?A setting where magic is rare, mysterious and unknown seems fine to me, but that's not the baseline assumption in 3e, based on the ease of accessing magical objects, spells, etc.  "Magic is rare, mysterious and unknown" and "Another +1 weapon - throw it in the Bag of Holding so we can sell it for another thousand gold back in town, and pay to upgrade Sir Rodney's magical battle axe to a +4 effective bonus.  Hey, Rodney, have you gone over the price list and figured out what you want from your upgrade?" seem, somehow, less than consistent with one another.I also expect our games wouldn't look terribly unfamiliar to each another - and that the martial characters aren't all quitting because the wizards are so much more powerful, useful, and fun to play.</blockquote>

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