D&D 5E What high-level spells could warp society?

[Maxperson]

Sure. So let's cut those in half and compare to jobs that people have a feel for their frequency

• 5% - all the active and former members of the military, minus the coast guard, or the entire healthcare industry (physician down to medical record specialists)
• 2.5% - every physician, nurse (nurse practictioner, RN, LPN) and nursing assistant in the US
• 1.25% - every physician, nurse practitioner and registered nurse (essentially everyone who can officially make a diagnosis)
• 0.6%: every physician, nurse practitioner, pharmacist and pharmacy tech in the US.
• 0.3% - every physician in the US
• 0.1% - every pharmacist in the US

Now cut out every nurse, tech, etc. Wizards would be doctors and specialists. So about .3% of the population outside of superwizardville would be capable of being wizards. And the vast majority of those would never get taught.

 

[kigmatzomat]

That doesn't work in my game. Well, it did and then the first wizard to figure it out used his infinite wishes to make sure no one else could do it and rival him. The PCs, being far from the first wizard to get there, are prevented from being able to cheese that way.

So Gandalf (wiz23) agreeing to teach Dresden (wiz13) Maginificent Mansion but requiring Dresden to create a Gandalf-Simulacrum as payment is verboten?

So about .3% of the population outside of superwizardville would be capable of being wizards. And the vast majority of those would never get taught.

That last part is a setting decision. There's no benefit to not leveraging those people with potential. I see no reason there wouldn't be regional annual festivals where anyone can go through the trials of competency. I mena, elves may need a couple dozen tries to figure out they are wizards. They are kind of slow that first century.

 

[Maxperson]

So Gandalf (wiz23) agreeing to teach Dresden (wiz13) Maginificent Mansion but requiring Dresden to create a Gandalf-Simulacrum as payment is verboten?

No. The spell works just fine. The infinite wish thing doesn't, though.

That last part is a setting decision. There's no benefit to not leveraging those people with potential. I see no reason there wouldn't be regional annual festivals where anyone can go through the trials of competency. I mena, elves may need a couple dozen tries to figure out they are wizards. They are kind of slow that first century.

That's true. I'm going off the spellcasters being relatively few in number as the default for the game, as well as how most settings that have been put out are set up. You could do something like Xanth where every person born has magic.

Edit: Kudos by the way, for being one of the very few people here other than myself that has Gandalf higher than like 5th level like he should be.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Gandalf pretended to be low level and avoided casting powerful magic to keep Sauron from noticing. He had to punt when the Balrog showed up.

The Gandalf-simulacrums can cast Wish, being a copy of full-strength Gandalf. Those could try to do the stress-inducing uses of Wish without repercussions because simulacrum. As they were cast by people other than Gandalf, there can be multiples at any time.

Even Dresden wouldn't know for sure if he was talking to Gandalf or a Gandalf-icrum, once they both leave his sight, unless he uses True Sight or the like.

 

[Set]

I am surprised by how much Purify Food & Drink would change things. The sheer amount of food wastage. The lack of a need for ships to carry water, at all. "Haul up some seawater. I'll purify it. After I've refreshed that shipment of meat and milk and fresh fruit that have spoiled to inedibility, for the seventh time, in the hold. It'll all be fresh as daisies when we reach the new market!"

Mending and Prestidigation (to change colors or warm food) could also hugely revolutionize things, allowing badly worn or soiled items to be maintained for decades (the shoes alone!), but also allowing one to survive in various climates without having to burn fuel to cook or heat your home or bathwater, or, for desert or arctic dwellers burn dung because there's no wood! "Hey, did you use magic to heat this? It doesn't taste like poo!" The costs and techniques for dying clothes, or using cosmetics, or spicing foods, all huge industries, with salt worth almost as much as gold in some places, just trivialized by a cantrip.

Other cantrips that could really change stuff. Acid Splash. Need acid for tanning or etching? No need for the usual ecologically ruinous and expensive mundane supplies. Ray of Frost. Need a 'refrigerator?' Freeze a tub full of water in the basement and use it as an 'icebox.' Or to store your victims. Whatever. Control Flames. We don't need wood to fuel the cooking / heating / forge-fires. We just need someone to recast this cantrip every hour, sort of the household 'lamplighter.' Want to demonstrate almost anything visual or aural as part of a lesson? Maps, anatomy, what a missing relative looks like so that your agents will recognize them? Minor Illusion has the goods. Mold Earth makes all sorts of tiresome physical earthmoving, from tilling fields to constructing earthworks to flattening roads to digging graves go by in a snap. Druidcraft could seriously mess up the perfumery industry (you want to smell like roses? Boring. Try jasmine! Or vanilla!), or seriously help agricultural planting / preparation with it's weather prediction utility, or even just allow picking fruit before it's ripe, and trusting to Druidcraft to ripen it at the point of sale (rather than have it be soft and squishy and fragrantly attracting bugs through it's long journey to market, pick it while it's firm and green and 'travels well!').

1st level Sorcerers might be specialists, roaming around maintaining people's 'iceboxes' with Ray of Frost, for a monthly 'subscription' (or pay for a one-time visit, cheaper in the long run to buy the regular service!). 1st level Wizards would have the flexibility to be able to swap out their spell choices for 'today's commissions,' and not be stuck with just the one market niche.

But every sailing ship would want to have someone on board (and, ideally, more than one!) who can cast Purify Food & Drink! No need for barrels full of fresh water = More room for cargo! No fear of food spoiling, even the hardest-travelling of produce? Nothing squiffy like how sometimes medieval era ships would keep live goats or chickens in the hold and butcher them mid-journey because they couldn't preserve meat that long.

Animal Friendship and Speak with Animals would utterly transform domestication. Just, ridiculously. And that's long before magic gets to the point of Awakening animals and plants, which would be another quantum leap in societal transformation! "Yes, these are my lead sentry dogs, in the fine chain barding and spiffy tabards. This is Maxwell and Percival. Please don't get them mixed up, Percy's a union rep, and they both have levels in Barbarian, and no sense of humor..."

If only 5e still had Shrink Item. Now there was a society altering spell! "Yeah, gnolls got the entire caravan. Ate the horses and everything. Mount spells aren't free! Well, yeah, they are, but still, it's the point of the thing! Anywho, they also burned the fake cargo. But I got away with my underwear! Which, let me just, there we go!" Toss underwear on the ground and mutters a word, and it transforms into a chest full of gems. "Your family jewels were in my underwear, which was not meant to sound like an off-color joke, but here we are..."

And yes, Simulacrum. Just ridiculous. "1500 and a days work to make a red dragon to assault his keep. The look on his face? Priceless! The spell to color it white was just icing on the cake, and pretty much free, so his artillerists, of course, started with fireballs! Total waste of time! I was considering making a simulacrum of myself, and having it create another simulacrum of me, and that one create another simulacrum of me, and so on, for a month, until there were 30 of me, and bum rush his castle with an army of me, but an Augury gave me the cryptic hint that 'The GM will say, Rocks Fall, Everybody Dies' if I do that..."

 

[TwoSix]

No. The spell works just fine. The infinite wish thing doesn't, though.

That's true. I'm going off the spellcasters being relatively few in number as the default for the game, as well as how most settings that have been put out are set up. You could do something like Xanth where every person born has magic.

Edit: Kudos by the way, for being one of the very few people here other than myself that has Gandalf higher than like 5th level like he should be.

What I'm thinking right now, to limit the amount of "turn the entire setting into magitech", that while LEVELS are high, being born with the gift of magic, especially high level magic, is very uncommon.

It doesn't impact the PCs (because PCs can always be the rare talents), but NPCs have natural limits on the amount of magic they're capable of.

 

[Maxperson]

Gandalf pretended to be low level and avoided casting powerful magic to keep Sauron from noticing. He had to punt when the Balrog showed up.

The Gandalf-simulacrums can cast Wish, being a copy of full-strength Gandalf. Those could try to do the stress-inducing uses of Wish without repercussions because simulacrum. As they were cast by people other than Gandalf, there can be multiples at any time.

Even Dresden wouldn't know for sure if he was talking to Gandalf or a Gandalf-icrum, once they both leave his sight, unless he uses True Sight or the like.

I understand the concept. What I am saying is that the first person to do the infinite wish thing isn't going to want competition or the power to get into the wrong hands, so they used their first several thousand wishes to make sure that didn't happen.

When the PCs try that simulacrum/wish cheese in my game, they will find that after 3 wishes the simulacrums never again duplicate with the wish spell in their minds. Nor can the power of 3 wishes overcome the power of thousands of wishes preventing it, so they can't wish for the prevention to be gone.

 

[WayneLigon]

The game rules and the worlds that these game rules are meant to be used within are not one and the same. The people within these worlds do not live via the game rules. Even dungeon masters who make and place things within these worlds do not use game rules for everything, they just use their own imaginations.

But be that as it may... I still claim that even if these worlds did in fact work only via the game rules as presented... all of these societies would still be different and more advanced than how they get presented by the game. If people learned that even the simplest magics could Create Food And Water and Cure Wounds... millions of people over all these thousands of years would have studied magic and thus brought these spells into ubiquity. I mean... it's not like in our world someone invented the steam engine and then only a select handful of "adventurers" after that ever learned how that technology was created and then recreated it. Nope... that technology flourished... thousands of other people learned how to use it, thousands of businesses took that technology and created product out of it, and thousands more of each learned how to make it better and create new things out of it. That's how learning works. That's how business works.

The fact that most of the worlds of D&D are still written that these grand magical spells are invented but then no one ever bothers to learn them except for a select few is silly (from a world-building and world-evolution perspective.)

The 'everyone can go to wizard school' idea is a bit silly;' it's like saying everyone can just be a successful CEO or get an PhD in Aerospace Engineering. 'Going to wizard school' should be like pursuing a degree in high-level theoretical physics - a vanishing small percentage of the population are capable of handling it even if they want to do so.

This is one reason I liked and still use the old rule of 'you can learn spells up to the limit of your INT'; most people would have a 10 or 11 INT and thus no matter how much they studied, they'd never be able to comprehend more than cantrips or first level spells. Almost no-one would ever be able to master 9th level spells, ever. A handful of people in the world, perhaps, and they're still bound by how many times you can do that per day.

Things like Cure Wounds and Create Food and Water are not learned - they are granted by gods to their favored servants. You can study all you want and you'll never cure a single hit point. So the supply of medical magic is likely very, very limited and sometimes simply doesn't work at all if the god doesn't want it to work.

 

[Maxperson]

I am surprised by how much Purify Food & Drink would change things. The sheer amount of food wastage. The lack of a need for ships to carry water, at all. "Haul up some seawater. I'll purify it. After I've refreshed that shipment of meat and milk and fresh fruit that have spoiled to inedibility, for the seventh time, in the hold. It'll all be fresh as daisies when we reach the new market!"

That does not work in 5e. All the spell does is remove poison and disease. Saltwater is not poisoned, so it would remain seawater. While the food in the hold would no longer make you sick, natural decay is not a poison or disease. It would be rotten food that won't make you sick.

The spell is 1st level, so it's only as powerful as a Magic Missile or Mage Hand and can't do what you are ascribing to it.

Mending and Prestidigation (to change colors or warm food) could also hugely revolutionize things, allowing badly worn or soiled items to be maintained for decades (the shoes alone!), but also allowing one to survive in various climates without having to burn fuel to cook or heat your home or bathwater, or, for desert or arctic dwellers burn dung because there's no wood! "Hey, did you use magic to heat this? It doesn't taste like poo!" The costs and techniques for dying clothes, or using cosmetics, or spicing foods, all huge industries, with salt worth almost as much as gold in some places, just trivialized by a cantrip.

You can't cook food with prestidigitation. You can slightly warm or cool it. Read warming leftovers, but the initial cooking requires fuel like wood or the afore mentioned dung.

Other cantrips that could really change stuff. Acid Splash. Need acid for tanning or etching? No need for the usual ecologically ruinous and expensive mundane supplies. Ray of Frost. Need a 'refrigerator?' Freeze a tub full of water in the basement and use it as an 'icebox.' Or to store your victims. Whatever. Control Flames. We don't need wood to fuel the cooking / heating / forge-fires. We just need someone to recast this cantrip every hour, sort of the household 'lamplighter.' Want to demonstrate almost anything visual or aural as part of a lesson? Maps, anatomy, what a missing relative looks like so that your agents will recognize them? Minor Illusion has the goods. Mold Earth makes all sorts of tiresome physical earthmoving, from tilling fields to constructing earthworks to flattening roads to digging graves go by in a snap. Druidcraft could seriously mess up the perfumery industry (you want to smell like roses? Boring. Try jasmine! Or vanilla!), or seriously help agricultural planting / preparation with it's weather prediction utility, or even just allow picking fruit before it's ripe, and trusting to Druidcraft to ripen it at the point of sale (rather than have it be soft and squishy and fragrantly attracting bugs through it's long journey to market, pick it while it's firm and green and 'travels well!').

Conjured magic doesn't stick around after the casting of the spell any longer unless the spell says so in the description, so Acid Splash wouldn't last long enough to be used for etching or tanning. You might be able to damage the metal, but it wouldn't be controllable to the point where you could do fine acid etching. Ray of Frost only makes things cold for 1 round, so unless that caster is standing there 24/7 casting it every few seconds, it's not going to do anything for an icebox or freeze water.

I'm not going to talk about the rest of the spells in your post, because my point is already made. You are ascribing more to many of these spells than they can do. While there are spells that would have impact, there are not nearly as many spells as you are suggesting and the impact isn't as great as you are suggesting.

 

[SkidAce]

What I'm thinking right now, to limit the amount of "turn the entire setting into magitech", that while LEVELS are high, being born with the gift of magic, especially high level magic, is very uncommon.

It doesn't impact the PCs (because PCs can always be the rare talents), but NPCs have natural limits on the amount of magic they're capable of.

I played a game for about a year in Korea where the PCs had to roll 2d10 to see how many levels of magic user they could have for their character. i.e. their "innate magic potential".