The Mother Of Invention: Spell Resistance?

[RUMBLETiGER]

I still think it comes down to the availability of magic within a particular gaming world.

If someone designed a series of portals that spanned nations for instant travel, then no need for locomotives.

If no one has made readily available public teleportation to unite the world, people would still desire to travel quickly, and so mundane methods would develop.

Either way, someone will see a need and then find a way to fill a need. If Magic is readily and reliably available, Magic is going to pull it off. If Magic is more rare or less reliable, somebody is going to do it mundanely.

Take the Eberron Campaign Setting. Magic has been meshed with machinery. Airships fly, living constructs are forged, guild houses based around Dragonmarks abound and facilitate the majority of life. This is all magic based, technology need not apply.

Compare that to (and I'm about to speak from a certain degree of ignorance, so anyone correct me if I'm wrong) Forgotten Realms, which has some people frowning on magic (Something to do with the Spellplague?), and so there is more mundane technology.

 

[trancejeremy]

I think at the worst,it would be like the development of magic and the occult in the real world.

Like, used to entertain at children's partys, things like 1-800 scientist numbers for advice on lottery numbers and your love life, stuff like that.

Seriously though, as long the world/universe has laws of physics, people will study them, just because they can and are curious. Not to mention, magicians and the like would study it as a sub-set of magic. Newton was heavily into Alchemy, for instance.

Isaac Newton's occult studies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Sekhmet]

The Forgotten Realms is pretty magic friendly as a whole. Even with the wizards going to town during the Time of Troubles (no Clerics), even with Thay (a tyrannical magocracy). They still have the friendly, household names of Elminster and a host of lesser mages they know have saved their world countless times (through Volo's "factual" biographical stories).

Some areas of Faerun have less magic because non-elven demihumans are less likely to become wizards and sorcerers. You'll find most of the technology is made by dwarves and gnomes.

 

[Samloyal23]

Someone once said that sufficiently advanced technology is the same as magic. To flip that around, any sufficiently advanced form of magic can become a form of technology...

 

[emoplato]

Yeah, I am going to have to majorly disagree with this premise. If you take into consideration the average starting age of spellcasters we are talking someone who has studied half of their life(assuming human) just so they can start to develop spells. They don't even have the spells yet to conjure materials or items that they have no idea how to make themselves. People like blacksmiths or weavers..etc though often were brought up with it or take a couple of years as an apprentice. As for beings like elves while they may rely more off of magic and do not waste as much of their life in proportion they do not have the general expertise nor ingenuity of other races. Their low constitution scores would also suggest more vulnerability to disease and extended periods of manual labor.
Also the system for 3.x magic is a prescribed allotment of spells. They have very little capability of being able to make more low level spells for an equivalence of less high level spells even though the market would want the different lower ones more. Blacksmiths, weavers,...etc on the other hand could more easily accommodate whether the town needs more weapons and rugs or kettles and clothes.

 

[Greenfield]

Our group doesn't play in the published worlds of WOTC/TSR, and I know of quite a few others that freelance it as well.

In most worlds though I'd imagine that the acceptance of magic is a variable depending on where you are at the moment.

I've seen any number of players who proposed setting up a transit web to facilitate quick and easy travel. I've also seen DMs shoot it down, in character, through the voices of various royalty who don't want to provide an invading army instant transport into their major cities. Yeah, we all know that an army of any size can afford to hire the spellcaster to set up a Teleport Circle, but the nobility want their enemies to at least have to work for it.

People have a natural fear of anything they don't understand, anything unfamiliar, and for a lot of common people magic falls solidly into that category.

It's kind of like knowing that a neighbor has the only collection of assault weapons in the city. You may know, like and trust the guy, but it's still disturbing. And if you don't happen to like the guy... it's bad.

In game, our Druid just offered to perform the Blessing of the Fields for a small town (i.e. cast Plant Growth). They were hesitant. Not that they didn't want the security of a good harvest, but it worried them that there were spell casters in town powerful enough to consider this a small public service, one so minor that they didn't demand pay. (The local Druids usually charge, but they've gone missing within the past year, so we aren't undercutting their business.)

To the people of this area we're unfathomably rich, so rich that many are afraid to even talk to us. People with the kind of money and power we have can usually order someone flogged for looking at them funny, which ironically causes everyone to look at us funny, then look away quickly, lest we notice.

So, are folk like this afraid of magic? Unless it comes from their local priest, or a traveling entertainer? You bet they are. They see it as strange and potentially very dangerous. And they certainly aren't rich enough to afford magic items of their own (going back to the economy thing.)

If we were in a major city it would be another matter. Where there's enough money to pay for spell casting services (as priced by the table in the book), people who can fill that need will tend to gather. And even then, the actual market for such services is very limited.

In the economy of the game world, even in a major city there's a hard dividing line between adventurer class people and civilians. Consider that a +1 dagger costs over 2,000 gp. A skilled craftsman can make a gold piece a day. That simple item would cost that craftsman about five and a half years' pay. A +3 longsword? Over 50 years of labor to pay for that.

So magic items are effectively priced far beyond the reach of almost anyone you'd see on the streets.

An Everburning Torch (50 gp.)? Several months' pay for the skilled craftsman. About a year to a year and a half's pay for a common worker.

And pocket change for any PC over 3rd or 4th level.

Now, like I said, the D&D economic model is badly broken in 3e. (It's broken even worse in 4e, but that's another story.) But, like it or not, broken or not, it's the only documented model for the game worlds, and it dictates a lot about how that world works.

 

[Drowbane]

Not everybody has the chutzpah to be a Wizard (sorc, psi, whatever). Some are instead gifted with minds that find complex math easy or have strange ideas that lead to new inventions. Maybe the world's magic users can't be bothered with helping the masses travel, or spread news. Thus some Dwarf (my hat of Gnomes gnows gno limit) invents a steam locomotive or printing press.

 

[Samloyal23]

Not everybody has the chutzpah to be a Wizard (sorc, psi, whatever). Some are instead gifted with minds that find complex math easy or have strange ideas that lead to new inventions. Maybe the world's magic users can't be bothered with helping the masses travel, or spread news. Thus some Dwarf (my hat of Gnomes gnows gno limit) invents a steam locomotive or printing press.

But unless there is a real need for an invention it goes nowhere. The steam engine was developed by the ancient Greeks but they used it as a toy because they had so much cheap slave labour the idea of using a machine for useful work just never occured to them...