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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6404319" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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