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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Al'Kelhar" data-source="post: 1706030" data-attributes="member: 7884">A very interesting thread, but premised on the demographic rules as per DMG.  Nothing wrong with that, other than the demographic rules as per DMG are designed to give the D&D game a pseudo-medieval Tolkein-esque fantasy world flavour.  In reality, access to 1st level spells would change the world in deeply fundamental ways within a century or two of their "discovery".Let's take cure light wounds as an example.  The argument seems ot have been that the local cleric won't cast his spells except in dire emergency, for special people, or for a price well above the capacity of most commoners to pay.  Let's take the "dire emergency" option.  Farmer's wife is having a difficult labour.  Farmer's son runs to local cleric asking for help.  Cleric consults his god's teachings and, assuming that his god is good-aligned, somewhere he'll undoubtedly find something about protecting/nurturing/caring for mothers and children.  Irrespective of whether the farmer has been attending church, the cleric will attend upon the stricken woman having a difficult labour.  Cleric uses a cure light wounds plus a healthy dose of his heal skill and saves mother and child.  The cleric is responding to a real emergency and saving two lives - but of course, he wouldn't use one of his daily allotment of 1st level spells doing so, would he?  NOT!In your typical medieval world, childbirth was the most dangerous thing a woman ever did.  Women in childbirth died in their droves.  Now, woo hoo, thanks to the miracle of 1st level spells, childbirth is as routine and life threatening as it is in the 21st century First World.Now extrapolate a bit further.  Every life threatening injury is treated by a cleric provided one gets there in time.  So we have most babies being born alive to live mothers, and death by accident only occurs when the death follows closely (in time) upon the accident.  Populations start to creep upwards - actually, they increase exponentially.  What you have occurring is the exponential increase in population which occurred IRL from the end of the 18th Century.  Human capital increases exponentially.  With that additional human capital the human race progresses in all fields of endeavour exponentially - including magical capability - unless you place some artificial limitation on it, like "the gods wouldn't let that happen".  Without such a contrived limitation, "magic as technology" naturally occurs.  And pretty soon, those little hamlets with less than 100 people in which "most" of the population live disappear and "most" of the population live in highly urbanised environments surrounded by all of the benefits of magical transportation, communication, health care, defence, law enforcement etc.So let's imagine your "commoner" 300 years after the first cure light wounds is cast...  Little Johnny has just got cursed by the evil outsider he was playing with through his magical Summon-o-tube (TM), so you call up "Clerics'R'Us" on your Sending-o-phone and they teleport a 15th level Cleric specialising in removing curses from evil outsiders into your living room, who charges the reasonable fee of 150gp for the service.  Your annual salary from the world-spanning Government is, of course, around 50,000gp, less taxes, and the price is so low because of competition from "Heal-2-your-Door" and the effect of rulings of the Ecclesiastical Services Consumer Protection Tribunal...P.S.  You also send the Summon-o-tube to the local service centre to have its Abjuration Circuit fixed, 'cos summoned evil outsiders shouldn't be able to curse your children.Cheers, Al'Kelhar</blockquote>

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