What Spells Would a Commoner Want?

[Greenfield]

Okay, let's address a couple of points raised.

Plant Growth covers a circle a mile across, so for farmers with small plots, they would have to gather together and arrange for it as a group.

That being said, this discussion comes in two flavors:

1) What spells would commoners want to hire someone to cast?

or

2) What spells would commoners want to be able to cast themselves?

For question 1, the answer would be "Almost nothing". The cost for spellcasting services, as listed in the book, places any and all spells at a price range well over a month's pay even for the average skilled craftsman.

Version 2 is quite different. Now we're looking at things with a practical, non combat use, no Exp cost and low or non existent material costs.

To keep things sane, let's limit things to the lower level spells.

There aren't any pain relief spells in D&D. There are spells to relieve discomfort however, so let's start with Endure Elements. We'll ad Bear's Endurance and Bull's Strength for good measure. Both of these are short term, so they won't make a day's work any easier, but they will give you that edge when you need it.

Prestodigitation is an incredibly flexible and useful spell, with a very good duration for its level. You can warm food, clean a table or dust a room, season a poor meal, or sew up a torn garment. (It was detailed in 3.0 that you could use it to mend clothing, and if you provided needle and thread the work would be permanent.

Mage Hand is a bit less useful, but still worth having.

Light and Dancing Lights are also useful spells at the cantrip level.

Enlarge Person and Reduce Person would have their uses, like the Bull's Strength but like that spell it only lasts a short time.

Cure spells will be popular. For low level types, the Cure Light version would be more than enough.

Plant Growth would be incredibly useful for farmers, and for foresters as well. If the woods provide more food for the wildlife, there's more wildlife.

Wall spells are potentially useful, though Stone is free, and Iron costs 50 gp per use. Bottom line, however, you don't need to erect a building very often. They're also a bit high level for my "low level only" list.

Dimension Door is nice for short distance hops, but Teleport is what's called for to do any real travel. They're both a bit high level.

For merchant types, Shadow Walk might be better.

Shrink Item would be priceless for merchants. Again, the duration is a few days, so it's not for any kind of long term storage or long distance travel.

Detect Evil and Detect Chaos, as well as Detect Lie would be useful as hell for law enforcement.

 

[Samloyal23]

Every time I see someone mention Prestidigitation online I see new list of things it can do. If every servant on an estate new how to cast it the place would almost look modern. Just think about how efficient cleaning would be. A castle full of people could actually have good hygiene. That alone would change the whole society...

 

[Greenfield]

Actually, I skipped over a really obvious one: Unseen Servant. Completely unsuitable for heavy lifting, but perfect for around the house.

Then, for the man in the field: Floating Disk. Perfect for heavy lifting in the field or storehouse, it's the magical version of a pallet-jack. (For those unfamiliar with a pallet-jack, it's like a fork lift, but just moves things at ground level.)

 

[Aenghus]

It's weird, loads of good suggestions in this thread, and I'm stuck on the thought that in a pseudomedieval society based on historical precedent, this would end up yet another way to grind down the peasantry.

Peasants were often prohibited from owning weapons, forced to used the lord's mill and pay for the privilege, effectively discouraged from improving their holding in many cases by retroactive rent rises or eviction in favour of richer tenants, and generally opressed. In a fantasy society many societies would outlaw magic use by peasants, and perhaps force them to use the lord's magician and pay for the privilege.

There would be loads of room in such a scenario for the tacit toleration of underground peasant magic but opression of any knowledge of battle magic or magic deemed dangerous to the social order.

Obviously the average game doesn't portray the grinding opression of the masses, and it's can be depressing to contemplate the barriers to the adoption of improved methods and labour saving spells and devices. Often new ideas are seen as threatening the social order by the ruling classes, who are doing fine thank you, so there is less impetus from above to adopt them, more often neutrality or outright hostility.

 

[Greenfield]

In actual medieval society the peasants were property, Serfs who belonged to the land. Whoever owned the land owned the people.

As far as weapon ownership was concerned, it was more common than you might think.

First, the vast majority of "weapons of war" were farming tools wielded by peasant yoemanry drafted to service. Pitch forks, bill hooks, pruning hooks, picks, the list goes on.

In England, any man over the age of 14 was required by law to own a longbow, and to practice at least two hours per week. The local pastor had the right to call the men of the village together for archery practice.

Funny story: A few years ago the pastor of an English congregation discovered that this law was still on the books, and so notified her community (yes, "her": Some things remain, others change) that they should all bring their bows to the church that Sunday.

She was announcing a church picnic, and making fun of the old law, since it's now illegal to own a bow and arrow in England.
</funny story>

Consider the tale of Robin Hood, which would have been in the late 1100s. An archery tournament where commoners were invited to compete against soldiers and noblemen. In a part of the country where there was an uprising going on against the crown.

These tournaments were held to ensure that the folk had reason to practice. They had cash prizes, in a society that ran largely on barter and trade. Actual coin was something the common folk almost never dealt in, so this was a big thing.

The reason for laws like these was so that the King or local nobility could raise troops of archers on very short notice. It was part of their national defense strategy.

But serfdom is something that D&D seldom touches upon. To even be a traveling adventurer means that the PCs either have to be freedmen, or freeborn. Without that step up in social rank it's a crime for them to leave the farm, period. Robin Hood's men became outlaws the moment they abandoned their duties to the landowner and went into the woods.

The middle class, which provides all the "general store" scenes in the game, the armorers and weapon smiths, the apothecaries and herbalists, the scibes and the tanners and all of the other places where PCs buy gear and sell loot? Those didn't exist in any medieval town. You had to go to a larger city for those. The crafts existed, but the craftsmen would have been stationed within the keep or castle of the local nobility, who would be the main consumer of their craft.

Most peasants could patch tack and harness and do simple carpentry. They could also make their own arrows, as well as the simple longbows they were required to own. For anything else, any iron or bronze work, they had to go to their Lord's manor and trade for it. It was a way for him to control what they might assemble in terms of actual weapons or armor.

And, as broken as the D&D economy is, with peasants and commoners earning a scant 1 gp per week, it's vastly overstating their cash flow.

Coins of the time were made of silver or gold, period. No copper, no bronze, no pewter, no tin. Small change didn't actually exist. Most of the local economy ran on credit, with a man's reputation for repaying his debts being the major currency.

Yeah, barter and trade on credit. Hell of a way to run a nation. But they did and it worked.

The smallest coin in England was the Farthing, whose name literally meant "A fourth of a ting". It was silver, thinner than an American dime, and about the size of your little finger nail. When used during the Renaissance times they were so small that merchants never bothered to count them. They were valued by weight.

The introduction of copper and other alloys as coinage came well after the medieval period, and were one of the things required for broader trade: You needed small change when dealing in another town, since your reputation and credit meant nothing there.

Look at that, I've wandered so far off topic I should probably delete this whole thing. Ahhh, I'll let it stand, and you can ignore it if you like.

 

[gamerprinter]

Interestingly, despite my mentions in previous posts in this thread in how oppressive Kaidan society is, like Japan, there were no such thing as "serfs" in feudal Japan. The farmers are the land owners and not renters/tenants of the land. The taxes paid in rice, were so high that it might equate the land-owning farmers as treated virtually as serfs, but Japan never had serfs, nor does Kaidan. Also the majority of samurai, called jizamurai in old Japan, were farmers too, while some were fisherman. Except in times of war, like during the Sengoku period when the majority of samurai were employed by one ruler or another, only about 10% of the samurai were holding positions serving a lord at his estate, for the imperial court or in the army of the Shogun. Especially after the end of the Sengoku Period at the start of the Tokugawa Era, as many has half the existing samurai population were ronin - no wars meant no employment. There were stories of many bands of near starved ronin samurai trying to eek a living with the majority failing - with ronin bodies found everywhere and not killed due to violence rather disease and starvation.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The introduction of copper and other alloys as coinage came well after the medieval period, and were one of the things required for broader trade: You needed small change when dealing in another town, since your reputation and credit meant nothing there.

In the West, perhaps, but copper coinage dates at least back to 11th century BC in China- the tong bei being one example. The Chinese also had bronze coins just a few hundred years later.

India's earliest currencies- dating back 2400 years or so- were made with silver or copper.

And the Greeks and Romans had small-denomination currency that- like modern currencies- had no relation to the value of the metals used. These "token" coinages used mainly bronze, copper alloyed with tin, or simply copper. The Romans used a yellowish alloy of copper and zinc, a type of brass called orichalcum, for the higher token denominations and the redder copper for the two smallest denominations. Both Greeks and Romans sometimes added lead or used lead bronze, probably because lead made the blanks somewhat softer and easier to strike.

 

[Greenfield]

Well, I can't exactly complain about us wandering off topic, since I'm he one who started it, so I might as well jump in with both feet...

Japan's entire currency was based on rice. Their base coin, the Koku, was valued as a specific measure of rice, enough for a peasant farmer to surviv on for one year.

Each year, after harvest, one of the great houses, the Mitsui caln to be specific, had the duty of collecting that harvest and issuing to each farmer their Koku of rice, as well as one for each member of the family. This clan held the harvest in trust for the Emperor until planting season, when they distributed the seed needed.

In essence, they had the entire gross national product of their nation in their care for several months of the year. Interest free, in fact. Did you ever wonder how the Mitsui family got into banking?

Now this wasn't always the way, just during the Shogunate period, if I recall correctly. (And I probably don't, so feel free to correct me.)

Russia ended their Serf system under Czar Alexander, right around the time of the American Civil War. The Czar ordered it, against the wishes of the nobility, to show support for the Union efforts to end slavery in the US. Russia was just about the last of the great powers to have serfs.

As for the medieval system being oppressive, remember that to the nobles, the peasantry were the foundation on which their wealth and power were based. They needed their workforce, healthy and motivated, so unless there was actual unrest in the region the smart lords took good care of their people. It was the "obligation of the nobility to care for the lower classes in their charge". Literally Nobles Oblige.

If there was a blight or crop failure, it was in the lord's best interest to open his grainary and distribute food saved for emergencies, so his people wouldn't starve. It wasn't just kindness, he needed these people to work the fields in the following years. He hadto care for them. He needed them.

Remember that due to sharp differences in diet, particularly access to meat and other protein during childhood, as well as better health care, the nobility were taller, stronger, more intelligent and so strikingly different in appearance that they truly believed themselves to be a different breed, a better breed. The peasants believed the same, and social stratification was taught from a young age as part of the Divine plan. To rebel against the social order was rebelling against God, as far as they were taught. So the nobles tended to see their peasants as children left in their care, for they too were taught that God had placed them there for that very purpose.

Because so much of the day to day economy in most regions depended on barter and trade, credit and reputation, strangers were always viewed with suspicion. Travel was a rare thing, not only because horses were expensive and therefore restricted to the nobility, but also because most people were serfs, unable to leave the land. So someone who you didn't know, from another town or region, was viewed as possibly being a runaway or criminal, and certainly not deserving of credit.

If they arrived on horseback, of course, that said they had money, in which case the common folk were rightly afraid, since the nobility were essentially above the law, and such people could do pretty much anything they wanted.

 

[Samloyal23]

A noble with a caster in his employ could have not only his peasants buffed with Bull's Strength and Bear's Endurance, he could have these spell cast on his draft animals so they could do more work. They could haul more ore, grain, or whatever in less time, with fewer breaks.

 

[Greenfield]

Presuming that the caster had an unlimited number of spells of those levels, as well as the Persistent feat, so they'd last long enough to do any good.

Sorry to be the wet blanket, but for broad general use of spells, you need a broad general supply of spell casters. Permanent items like belts and amulets would be too expensive to distribute generally, and items like potions and scrolls are even more limited: I can create one such item in a day, which takes 8 hours. Or I can cast the spell several times in that period, and have seven hours and fifty five minutes to do something else.