Training, gaming, and reality

[Aaron2]

Obviously, necessity is the mother of invention, which is why D&D adventurers have so many combat spells, but other people could use magic too. It makes sense not to include them in the core rules, because they're not as fun for adventures, but the world ought to take them into account. The only way I can see that there wouldn't be spells for things like, "Build a house," or "Locate the merchant who'll pay me best for my product" would be if the world follows D&D rules, and only people who go out and fight stuff ever get good enough at magic to create spells that powerful.

I tend to think of D&D magic use as self limiting. You can, for example, make a simple spell that creates a barrel. But wide spread use of said spell would devastate the barrel making guild which would fight to prevent such a spell. Medieval populations weren't nearly as job mobile as modern societies. Secondly, there isn't much in it for the wizard to create such a spell since, if it works, the value of a barrels would plummet and he'd become a meer worker bee instead of an all powerful wizard dude.

Also, wizard guilds could agree to divide up spells rather than let them all become common. For example, the Diviner guild may make an agreement with the Enchanter guild not to cross into the others field. By limiting supply you can keep the price up; who want to cast 20 spells a day at 10 gp a piece when you can cast one a day at 500 gp.

In modern times, someone can only make money from an invention by selling it to others. This isn't really true with Wizards who can use their own spells to create vast palacial estates (even in their own demi-plane) with all the luxuries they can dream of. Selling magic to the peeps serves little purpose.

The core books gloss over all that because its the DMs responsibility to decide how magic works. It seems like there is a trend now adays to base the campaign world on the rules rather than vice-versa. That's what bothers me about books like Magical Medieval Society.


Aaron

 

[Coredump]

Of course, in a setting that may be thousands of years old, there ought to be tons of magic items lying around that people made over the ages, though they might not have much in common with each other.

That is true only if you assume that all magic lasts forever.... This is not addressed (afaik) in the books, so you are on your own. But maybe that +2 sword was created as a +4 sword, hundreds of years ago. Or that pile of rust, used to be a +1 sword, the magic drained, and nature took over. Certain very powerful magics are strong enough to fight this entropy, which is partly why they are famous. Maybe the 'magic entropy' is lessened if the items remain in someones possession.