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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8421140" data-attributes="member: 6937590">This is the main point that I'm pushing you on. It's easy to imagine a lot of deviations from the standard medieval fantasy in which wizarding is not the domain of elitists and the power-mad. Your interpretation makes sense and is reasonable, but many others are as well.Perhaps the time is significantly greater, but that's never really been quantified, at least not in 5e. Places like Xanathar's say "It takes years of study, instruction, and experimentation to learn how to harness magical energy and carry spells around in one's own mind." (p. 58) And that could mean 30 years of study, but maybe 7 is reasonable, or maybe it's highly variable. The DMG (p. 23-4) encourages individual DMs to come up with their own answers for things like this. And, without seriously nailing down the all the assumptions of a secondary world, it's hard to have meaningful arguments about its plausibility.Well, take a look at the material components of various spells, even at the lowest levels.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">comprehend languages--a pinch of soot and salt</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">find familiar--10 gp worth of charcoal, incense, and herbs</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">illusory script--a lead-based ink worth at least 10 gp</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">jump--a grasshopper's hind leg</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">sleep--a pinch of fine sand, rose petals, or a cricket</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">witch bolt--a twig from a tree that has been struck by lightning</li> </ul>Who do you think would be collecting the perishable soot, herbs, grasshopper legs, and rose petals, grinding the ink, and finding the lightning-struck trees? Not an archmage, surely. And it'd be useful to train someone to know enough about magic that they could find the right type of twigs, rather than relying on an untrained slave. I'm not cherry picking overmuch here, suggesting these particular spells are a big deal, or asserting that you can't just handwave the whole thing by saying the archmage has an arcane focus, I'm just illustrating that these type of apprenticeships can make some kind of sense in a D&D setting.Sure, that would occur in some cases, but remember that the elite are also the people who created and uphold the status quo. It's them that would need to be enforcing wizardly persecution for it to succeed; most of them will be invested in the persecution of wizards such that they don't practice wizardry themselves. Most aristocrats are not gonna be analogs of Elizabeth Bathory or the Marquis de Sade, in terms of shirking moral convention.And yes, you could say that all the aristocrats in a setting are cynical hypocrites who break their own rules--but then we're recreating the Darksun setup, which is entirely different to the hypothetical--I dunno, Dragon Age setup (don't hold me to that)--which I suggested earlier. And, again, each of these types of settings can be verisimilar and internally consistent.------But hey, you have a strong view of what wizards are. That's cool. It makes sense and probably leads to fun games of D&D. I've disputed it enough and will stop doing so from here.I am, however, still curious what part of my first post reads as being about eugenics. Please let me know, if you can be asked. Ty.</blockquote>

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