What Magic Would Be Most Realistically Most Impactful?

[uzirath]

If magic were real, I've often thought that there would be a lot of spells covering areas that most RPGs don't touch on. One area that I haven't seen mentioned yet is sex, sexuality, and reproduction. Love potions, of course, are an area in the real world where "magic" has been prominent. In a fantasy world, I assume there would be strong demand for magical means of fertility control. (You could add in the ethical and political dimensions that go along with this... clerics picketing the Planned Parenthood Guildhall.)

Considering the rise of household appliances in the modern world, I also imagine there would be many more spells and magical devices that simplify time consuming domestic tasks. I imagine mass-produced Wands of Cleaning and Disinfecting and things like that. I think about the simple band-aid too. In our world, they are almost magical already in their psychological effect on young children. If they actually had some minor healing magic, that would be great too. Perhaps the wealthy can afford bandages for their children that involve both healing magic and fun animated scenes on them tied to popular entertainment.

Speaking of which, popular entertainment! Communication magic is useful, but I imagine that theatrical performances would be augmented with illusions, lights, and sounds. Maybe an enterprising wizard could figure out a way to "record" such performances to be played back later. Maybe you can buy crystals that display such performances. Maybe homeowners aspire to buying large crystal balls that can display carefully choreographed performances by artists far away...

It's easy to get bogged down in trying to make it all realistic. I tend to think it's more fun to just pick a few wild ideas and run with them.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The question becomes, "Are casters capable of doing things like that around in sufficient numbers to dominate all military thinking?" Seriously, in the campaign world that I've been running there is only one 10th level wizard in the whole nation the players started in, and yes, he's notable and his name is known to the enemies of that nation, but one Earth elemental might not turn the war and all military strategy on its head all on its own and - as Rawlings noted - the enemy has wizards too.

I’m assuming the enemy has spellcasters.

The very first aircraft carrier changed warfare. Once one was fielded, everyone realized their potential and either started research (if they hadn’t already) or working out how to neutralize them.

So, after the first wizard (or sorcerer, cleric, etc.) went to war, others would be recruited. War colleges might quickly add a few new buildings. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, any aggressively expansionist power might even make certain spells part of the training for any soldier, sailor, marine or airman capable of learning them.

Going back to AD&D, that means any literate person with an Int of 9+. A few sailors casting Magic Missile, Sleep or Burning Hands could quickly turn the tide of a naval encounter that comes to boarding.

Consider how some of D&D’s attack spells would fare in a fantasy analog of the tunnel fighting in the Vietnam War. Especially the AoE & line effect ones.

 

[Celebrim]

If magic were real, I've often thought that there would be a lot of spells covering areas that most RPGs don't touch on.

Agreed.

Considering the rise of household appliances in the modern world, I also imagine there would be many more spells and magical devices that simplify time consuming domestic tasks.

This is controlled by the cheapest transferable permanent magic item that can be created in the setting. Suppose your cheapest permanent transferable magic item costs 2000 days wages, or $100,000 then such items might be very rare toys or baubles but they won't in fact revolutionize house work. Most families can't afford them and those that can would often prefer to employ human domestic help. Your mass produced wand of cleaning and disinfecting if it costs 40 or 80 days wages probably won't ever get mass produced, as the amount of labor that it saves (a few score hours of light cleaning) doesn't pay for the amount of labor that it costs. A few might exist as a bauble for the wealthy bachelor who preferred to be left to their own devices or the like, but you wouldn't expect an industry to exist to create them. Domestic labor would replace them better, and you have to remember that in societies before our own it was excessively rude to the point of being a flaw worthy public condemnation and shunning for the wealthy to not employ significant domestic labor and spread the wealth around. One didn't just deserve the servants owed to ones station, one also had a corresponding responsibility to employ them. Thus, a wealthy person who employs 'Unseen Servants' to do the chores might not be well liked, while the poor person he employs to the chores likely can't afford the 'Unseen Servant' to help them at the job. And again, that's assuming you can make a practical Unseen Servant powered transferable and permanent device cheaply.

And keep in mind that a wand, by being spell completion, only passes the test of transferable if basically everyone in the society has magical training. And if that is the case, why buy the wand when they can cheaply do the spells themselves?

Speaking of which, popular entertainment! Communication magic is useful, but I imagine that theatrical performances would be augmented with illusions, lights, and sounds.

This I fully agree would be a thing by the D&D rules. Every large town is likely to have one or more theaters where illusionists tell stories augmented by their magic as a normal and respected artistic tradition. Smaller towns will likely look forward to the arrival of the travelling illusionist or troupe thereof. This is however I think more likely to be like Shakespearean theater or Homeric story telling where the players don't need to complain to the audience that they can't recreate the scope of the Battle of Agincourt on the stage than it is to be like modern TV or streaming services. And again, the reason for that is the base cost of permanent transferable magic devices. Crystal balls will cost more than TV's and economies of scale don't seem likely to bring that cost down. Your base line D&D crystal ball with no extra features costs the equivalent of $2,000,000 dollars. Only the very wealthy can afford such devices, and the are unlikely to consider them just toys for transmitting illusions to their friends. Indeed, the scholarly class of wizards that can afford such devices probably scorns the travelling illusionists and the hedge wizards making anti-fraud devices for merchants.

It's easy to get bogged down in trying to make it all realistic. I tend to think it's more fun to just pick a few wild ideas and run with them.

This comes down in large part to what you are trying to achieve. If you are going for the comedy of the Disc World or Harry Potter, then such magic as technology fare perhaps ought to be promoted by rules changes that make it reasonable. If you fear that a magitech world were magic items are just a sort of Clarketech will ruin your mythic setting then you'll probably want to tweak the rules so that their aren't Quartz Shacks selling clairvoyance to the masses if the rules would otherwise provide for it.

 

[Celebrim]

Going back to AD&D, that means any literate person with an Int of 9+.

Does it? I think you are making a huge assumption that any literate person with an Int of 9+ can become a wizard. The rules don't actually say that. They say that any Player Character with 9 Int and literacy can become a wizard, and any NPC which is a wizard must have 9 Int and literacy, but they don't actually say that any literate person with an Int of 9+ can become a wizard. That's goes back to how magic works and what are your demographics.

And it's even less clear that you could decide to turn every person with Wis of 9+ into a cleric, since who gets to be a cleric doesn't seem like something you can just decide and order done. And again, it is clear that not every person need have sorcerer blood in them unless you wanted things to work that way.

Honestly, I have my game tweaked such that low level wizards barely impact warfare and certainly aren't worth the cost to upkeep them. In some cases that comes from tweaking the rules, and in some cases tweaking the culture, but a few magic missiles or burning hands would scarcely impact a boarding action in my game - certainly no more so that a few sailors with bows and crossbows and other such weapons. Summon Swarm maybe or fireball maybe, but then what you'd typically find in a boarding action is both sides had low level caster parity and the expectation that they'd be facing them, and sailors trained and with a duty to counter the actions of opposing spellcasters. But even had I not tweaked the rules, magic missile and burning hands have a reasonable parity with longbows, two-handed swords and halberds. Sleep or True Strike might be more on point choices, but I've done boarding actions as a low level caster in D&D and sleep while it certainly helped did not win out on its own.

It's not at all clear one earth elemental will consistently change warfare as much as the aircraft carrier did, or that just because you wanted a bunch of tame wizards that could conjure earth elementals for you that you could order it done. It's hard enough for a nation to field aircraft carriers just because they want one, and that's technology - transferable, repeatable, portable, etc.

Could it work that way? Sure. If you rule that magical colleges can turn out 9th level wizards after 4-7 years of magical training, and that any reasonably intelligent young person can in fact complete such training, then you have some interesting questions to ask about how your world works and how culture and society developed. But that's a ruling, not something in any way forced on you by the rules.

 

[Derren]

Create Water. Low level, so lots of casters and access to clean water everywhere is huge.

 

[uzirath]

This is controlled by the cheapest transferable permanent magic item that can be created in the setting.

Definitely.

And keep in mind that a wand, by being spell completion, only passes the test of transferable if basically everyone in the society has magical training.

Is this a D&D thing? I'd forgotten that. I was being system agnostic in my answer, as I assumed the OP placed the post in this forum intentionally.

This comes down in large part to what you are trying to achieve.

Absolutely.

Note, also, that a world with rarer and more expensive magic than D&D standard raises some of its own questions about why a wizard might adventure. I would think that the demand for a naturally talented magical practitioner would be nearly boundless and there would be a real economic incentive to develop new magic along more industrial lines. The first nation that could figure out how to produce cheaper healing potions would have a real edge. A hedge wizard who manages to enchant charms (even if they aren't permanent) that prevent pregnancy will be set for life without ever needing to risk waltzing into a gelatinous cube in some urine-scented dungeon corridor. The rarer the magic, the more opportunity for even a mediocre magician to live comfortably without risking life and limb on dubious ventures to save the world.

This is not to say that we can't have standard fantasy worlds with adventuring wizards and magic items in every murky hole. I just don't worry as much about trying to have a logical answer to every question from my economist players. My answer these days is, "because it's fun that way."

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Does it? I think you are making a huge assumption that any literate person with an Int of 9+ can become a wizard. The rules don't actually say that. They say that any Player Character with 9 Int and literacy can become a wizard, and any NPC which is a wizard must have 9 Int and literacy, but they don't actually say that any literate person with an Int of 9+ can become a wizard. That's goes back to how magic works and what are your demographics.

The only other relevant RULES- which is all we have to work with- are:

1) whether the character in question has another class or not. IOW, a Demihuman who already has a class or is multiclassed and not aready a spellcaster cannot later become one, and a Human could only dual class into it if he or she had a 17 in the class’ primary stat.

2) whether the character is barred from being a MU (or other PC or NPC spellcasting class) by race.

Anything else is a houserule. Nothing wrong with that- everyone had them. But we can’t really consider a bar to class entry based on houserules and conjecture.

Now, could someone choose not to become a wizard, even if qualified? Of course! Just because you have the smarts and are literate, it doesn’t follow that you would wish to engage in that field of study. Besides the nature of the study itself- long hours poring over dusty books around funny smelling ingredients- some of the practices themselves might be a turnoff. You might have a religious reason or taboo against studying arcane magic. And reading the descriptions of how some spells are cast...some aren’t too savory. As I recall, casting Spider Climb involved eating a live spider as part of the process. There are people who have left culinary school for refusing to eat more mundane ingredients.

And it's even less clear that you could decide to turn every person with Wis of 9+ into a cleric, since who gets to be a cleric doesn't seem like something you can just decide and order done. And again, it is clear that not every person need have sorcerer blood in them unless you wanted things to work that way.

It's not at all clear one earth elemental will consistently change warfare as much as the aircraft carrier did,

...a sailing ship that never loses propulsion? That is consistently faster than any other ship around?

...or that just because you wanted a bunch of tame wizards that could conjure earth elementals for you that you could order it done. It's hard enough for a nation to field aircraft carriers just because they want one, and that's technology - transferable, repeatable, portable, etc.

The draft. It works. Carrots & sticks work, too.

We have evidence in the real world of countries that scour their territories to find anyone- child or adult- with a glimmer of talent to be agents of the state, and take them away to serve their countries. (A friend of mine married a Russian woman who was taken from her parents and raised by the state to be a ballerina...until puberty gifted her in a way that made pursing said profession virtually impossible.)

England’s law mandating learning the bow was similarly effective.

And also, nowhere did I say you needed “a bunch” of tamed wizards capable of bringing elementals to the field. You just need more than your enemy.

Likewise, not all the casters need be powerful. Like massed archers or crossbowmen don’t need to be marksmen, a bunch of low-level casters- even with only one attack spell in their arsenal- could be deadly effective if used properly. Even moreso if some non-trivial number of your “Caster Corps” are devoted to making things like wands of some of those spells. (Conscientious objectors- if they exist- might be trained with Mending or other utility spells.)

See also Harry Turtledove’s Darkness novel of a (non-D&D version) WW2 style conflict in a fantasy world.

Could it work that way? Sure. If you rule that magical colleges can turn out 9th level wizards after 4-7 years of magical training, and that any reasonably intelligent young person can in fact complete such training, then you have some interesting questions to ask about how your world works and how culture and society developed. But that's a ruling, not something in any way forced on you by the rules.

Like I said, I’m not assuming large cadres of high level casters in the service of king and country. A few, used the right way, plus a bunch with some rudimentary training (as little as 1st only) could be brutally effective.

 

[Celebrim]

The only other relevant RULES- which is all we have to work with- are:

1) whether the character in question has another class or not. IOW, a Demihuman who already has a class or is multiclassed and not aready a spellcaster cannot later become one, and a Human could only dual class into it if he or she had a 17 in the class’ primary stat.

2) whether the character is barred from being a MU (or other PC or NPC spellcasting class) by race.

Oh really? I assume you are going to stick with AD&D, so let's examine that.

Page 30 of the DMG: "A captain is nothing more than a capable leader, a fighter of 5th, 6th, 7th or 8th level... but NOT capable of working upwards."

Page 31 of the DMG: "All serjeants are 1st level fighters but incapable of progressing further."

What rules from the Player's Handbook - a book explicitly about PC's - suggest a reason why a character could be fighter classed but can't advance past 1st level as a fighter?

You act like I'm making up the concept of being barred to class entry or progression for NPCs. Doesn't the DMG suggest repeatedly that most NPCs use different rules than PCs? In particular, most NPC humans appear to be incapable of being more than 0th level fighters. There is no reason to suppose that this is because they all have 5 INT, but rather that there is something particular to PC's and other extraordinary persons that allows them to gain levels in player classes. As page 80 of the DMG says, "The bulk of the people met on an adventure in an inhabited area...will be average folk, with no profession as the adventurers know it..." You can round up all the zero level men-at-arms you want in AD&D, but by the rules you can't turn them into 3rd level fighters. They do not have a class and are incapable of advancing to one. The majority of ordinary humans in the world do not have a class at all. It's not that they are 1st level commoners or whatever. They just don't have a class. And there is no reason to think that things are different with respect to M-U's and that just anyone can take the class, because the majority of ordinary folk don't have special abilities in the way PC's do. Heck, based on the discussion of rebellions by peasantry on page 94, it's not even clear most peasants can ever obtain the status of 0th level "men-at-arms".

No where I'm aware of in the DMG does it explicitly state what percentage of persons are extraordinary enough to become M-Us (it does imply that of those extraordinary enough to advance as a class, 20% of those will be M-Us). Any statement regarding that percentage that can become M-Us is therefore a house rule. There is plenty of reason to suspect though that if the majority of people can't even be trained to become 1st level fighters after months of warfare, that training up something as esoteric as M-U's in AD&D is no easier.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

1) I don’t have my DMG handy, but I’ll note none of the rules you just cited bar class entry, just advancement beyond a certain point. It would be interesting to see if a reason or broader context is offered for why their progression is capped. I doubt one is, but if one exists, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it based in mechanics or just by proclamation...probably for game balance reasons. I would also note that a good bit of the material published in campaign settings and modules didn’t follow demographics & limitations put forth in the DMG. Even the line about the majority of people being zero level types is subverted by products like T1 Hommlet.

(FWIW, I seem to remember a bit of demographic breakdown in the DMG that covered mundane professions and classed individuals, but I could be wrong.)

Why does this matter? Well, as I pointed out several times, I am not suggesting huge numbers of high level wizards. A few here and there in service of king & country are sufficient. A decent number of 1st level magical sergeants and captains- perhaps organized into special forces teams*- would do just fine.

2) AD&D also has NPC classes, including casters like the Witch, Shaman, Incantrix and probably others, detailed in TSR’s official periodical, Dragon. IOW, there’s probably more casters out there than are usually accounted for.




* The Octarine Berets? Divinatuon Evocations Abjurations Transmutation Hoodoo Squads?

 

[MGibster]

A spell like 'Charm Person' as some have pointed out would have a huge impact on a setting. But the impact is so large and so wholly negative that it's likely to just result in everyone known to be or believed to be capable of casting 'Charm Person' murdered in their sleep, and society feeling that it had not done ill by ridding the world of such a monstrous power.

I can't count the number of player characters I've seen use Charm Person flippantly over the years. In one game I had a villager raise a hue and cry when a PC tried and failed to charm him. The villager didn't know the PC was cast Charm Person but he knew some spell was attempted against him. The PC was surprised the guy made a stink about it saying, "It's not like I cast a violent spell."

If we had people who could use spells like Charm Person there would be some very strong institutions created to control their behavior. Or, as you say, we'd be murdering them in their sleep.