Samloyal23
Adventurer
Yes, but only if you get caught. Which brings up another topic, how do you tell if someone has been charmed or otherwise influenced through magic?
What Spells Would a Commoner Want?
- Thread starter Samloyal23
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Yes, but only if you get caught. Which brings up another topic, how do you tell if someone has been charmed or otherwise influenced through magic?
(Psi)SeveredHead
Adventurer
3e and 4e allow Sense Motive/Insight checks to determine this. It's hard to do if they're charmed, easy if they have been dominated, and even things like Detect Magic will give you a clue (not to mention more powerful divinations).
Of course, stealthily charming an important person is difficult. The king doesn't go anywhere alone, and indeed is probably accompanied by a chaplain (cleric of his favorite religion) and court mage at all times. That's a lot of people who will notice the spell being cast, even if it's Silent, Still and so forth.
Samloyal23
Adventurer
A merchant casts a suggestion at a random customer ("Buy something already!") and the customer fails his save. Unless someone sees this happen they are going to get away with it. As far as I know there is no spell that detects the effect of a spell that is no longer active...
gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
Except in Kaidan like old Japan, the Ministry of Onmyodo is responsible for all training and licensing of arcane casters. So at least for the onmyoji wizards, they can only be employed by the imperial court, office of the shogun or for the provincial governments. There are no official arcane spellcasters outside of the onmyodo. Thus all non-onmyodo are criminals with death sentences for being caught using magic. There certainly are non-onmyodo wizards, including mahoutsukai witches and jugondo sorcerers, but they practice their arts in secret while avoiding the gaze of any official that might witness them. Fireball might be more useful, but unofficial arcane casters are rare in Kaidan.
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(Psi)SeveredHead
Adventurer
Merchants usually sell stuff in public. Any character with a little knowledge of magic would insist on bringing friends, and not going into a room where there's just the merchant and maybe the merchant's cronies. You don't need Spellcraft to know that a spell has been cast.
Also, magic leaves "residues", so you can cast Detect Magic even after a spell has been cast. It's in a rarely-consulted part of the rules.
Detect Magic said:
Of course, spells like Charm Person last a long time. If someone starts acting oddly, you could cast Detect Magic, and unless that spell has been hidden somehow (I'm not sure of a way to do so in the core rules beyond also casting Misdirection on the victim) the detector can figure out not just that a spell has been cast on the victim, but what school. People rarely use Enchantment spells as buffs on themselves, so they'd be suspicious.
Samloyal23
Adventurer
Maybe one of the most common magical tokens the average Joe would wish for would be an alarm that goes off when a spell is cast. Hmm...
Samloyal23
Adventurer
That would be the equivalent of wearing a bracelet to ward off the evil eye in some cultures...
Celebrim
Legend
Briefly, outside the highly advanced healing magic available to clerics, the sort of magic that an average person would want doesn't exist in D&D.
Think about your real life. How often would you use a fireball even if you could? The ability to commit mass murder is almost never useful to you. Fireball is not even a particularly great mode of self-defense in real world situations.
The sort of magic actually practiced by a magical society has never been focused on by D&D, which tends to laser like focus on what is useful in a dungeon. Additionally, to the extent that things would be highly useful to the average person but only marginally useful to the average adventurer - say something like 'Mount' or 'Fabricate' - D&D has tended to balance those spells not by complexity, difficulty, or overall societal and economic impact, but by perceived utility in a dungeon/adventure situation. Magic items like Lyres of Building tend to be radically underpriced compared to their impact on the economy and society of a world.
So I think there is a dual set of concerns here.
First, if you want to actually flesh out a society as being pervasively magical, most of the spells such a society would use will have be created.
Secondly, to the extent that you intend or don't intend to make your setting pervasively magical, you'll have to be careful about the accessibility you provide to such magic so that the setting you intend to describe matches the one created by your rules. Magic like charm person, fireball, invisibility, and fly already exerts strong pressure on the structure of the society. Charm person means 'witches' are real, and that witchcraft - that is mind-control at the very least, but probably also diabolism and necromancy - needs to be strongly suppressed or regulated if anyone is to enjoy any security in their persons. Fireball means military formations need to have defenses against artillery, and magical fire in general means naval vessels have to be relatively invulnerable to fire by some means. Invisibility means that security check points have to be designed with the unseen in mind, and fly means castles have to be designed with resisting aerial attacks in mind. Once you start providing spells for every day use and ordinary purposes, you'll have to think hard about what society is going to look like in consequence.
As for the spells in D&D with the most important impact on the every day lives of people, far and away the most important is 'Continual Light'. By vastly decreasing the cost of light, this spell has an impact on society far exceeding that of any other spell in the game. In general, I think it is basically impossible for a modern person used to buying hours of light for pennies and who generally has never known darkness to imagine the impact of perpetual free clean light.
Think about your real life. How often would you use a fireball even if you could? The ability to commit mass murder is almost never useful to you. Fireball is not even a particularly great mode of self-defense in real world situations.
The sort of magic actually practiced by a magical society has never been focused on by D&D, which tends to laser like focus on what is useful in a dungeon. Additionally, to the extent that things would be highly useful to the average person but only marginally useful to the average adventurer - say something like 'Mount' or 'Fabricate' - D&D has tended to balance those spells not by complexity, difficulty, or overall societal and economic impact, but by perceived utility in a dungeon/adventure situation. Magic items like Lyres of Building tend to be radically underpriced compared to their impact on the economy and society of a world.
So I think there is a dual set of concerns here.
First, if you want to actually flesh out a society as being pervasively magical, most of the spells such a society would use will have be created.
Secondly, to the extent that you intend or don't intend to make your setting pervasively magical, you'll have to be careful about the accessibility you provide to such magic so that the setting you intend to describe matches the one created by your rules. Magic like charm person, fireball, invisibility, and fly already exerts strong pressure on the structure of the society. Charm person means 'witches' are real, and that witchcraft - that is mind-control at the very least, but probably also diabolism and necromancy - needs to be strongly suppressed or regulated if anyone is to enjoy any security in their persons. Fireball means military formations need to have defenses against artillery, and magical fire in general means naval vessels have to be relatively invulnerable to fire by some means. Invisibility means that security check points have to be designed with the unseen in mind, and fly means castles have to be designed with resisting aerial attacks in mind. Once you start providing spells for every day use and ordinary purposes, you'll have to think hard about what society is going to look like in consequence.
As for the spells in D&D with the most important impact on the every day lives of people, far and away the most important is 'Continual Light'. By vastly decreasing the cost of light, this spell has an impact on society far exceeding that of any other spell in the game. In general, I think it is basically impossible for a modern person used to buying hours of light for pennies and who generally has never known darkness to imagine the impact of perpetual free clean light.
Samloyal23
Adventurer
Even if the common man cannot afford magic, an adventurer at home or in retirement would have the same needs. The lich still needs the linens washed, the hearth stoked, the trash taken out, and the library of human skin covered grimoires lit at night. He can have a coterie of servants but they just get in the way and he keeps eating their souls when he is in a bad mood. It is easier to just use magic. Whether magic is rare or common it is going to be used for things besides killing dragons and invading dungeons.
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