This thread has moved quickly. Anyway, after some clarification, I think it is perfectly fine to have a setting where the assumption is that everyone will have some level of magic. If the mechanics have a flaw system of some sort, you could have a non-magic/magic adverse flaw, like some systems set in the modern day have a flaw about technology use. This kind of setting will not appeal to some players, but that is pretty much the case for any setting really.
Yeah that is definitely an option, I just wonder if there might be value in finding a place that makes sense without a “magical Luddite” flaw or whatever. At this point I may have to make a different thread for the idea of having to eschew magic in order to train and maintain the ability to shut magic down and be especially resistant to it.
In my world I do have an order of knights who serve the Red Dragon of Wales, who specialize in countering magic. Right now they have allies who are part of secret orders that preserved what they could of the old Druidic traditions and adapted them over the centuries, I could make the dichotomy much clearer and have the Knights rely entirely on the Druidic Orders for magical work.
The question is, would that provide a good basis for fully mundane characters for the people who want them, or would it be a waste of effort I could put elsewhere. I don’t know.
Most fantasy authors are not sociologists, or experts in human behavior. They tend to write monocultures and sketches of cultures, and do not have time for nuance as their character tries to defeat Gororath the acid-spewing great wyrm, or whatever it is.
That’s bad writing. Like…even mediocre authors do a little research and spend
some time thinking about how to make their world make sense, and features some noticeable degree of nuance.
When you say that no group has ever tried, I think you are mistaking "tried" for "succeeded". Maybe groups have tried, but didn't manage to have an impact, for social, political, technical, or economic reasons, and so don't really bear mentioning as Gorgorath melts the city walls with its caustic emissions. An extended discussion about how one group tried, but failed, to teach magic broadly a hundred years ago, and if they'd succeeded, today Gorgorath would be met with an onslought of a thousand fireballs, but since they didn't the hero's love interest got swallowed whole, may not be a great story beat.
I’m probably not mistaking the intent of my own words, but skipping past that, being threatened by a big monster wouldn’t stop people from trying to develop better weapons, and vanishingly few fantasy stories I’ve ever read feature societies that are constantly under threat.
This seems pretty tangential, as well. Why are we arguing the fine particulars of fantasy worldbuilding instead of discussing the question of why characters in a world where they could learn magic would choose not to, what might allow such characters to exist and make sense for the benefit of players with that preference in spite of magic being generally learnable and not evil or dangerously erratic, and why in worlds like Eberron do we not see more magic in the use of “mundane” warriors?
In my Eberron any “professional” soldier/mercenary/whatever will generally spend the time to learn a couple rituals and cantrips so they have enough magical grounding to use a combat wand or stave, and every nation has soldiers who can perform some apprentice level magewright tasks, at least, because every martial tradition recognized the practical benefits of doing so, outside of maybe ancient Dakaan.
Also, the world not viewing magic as evil of inherently dangerous sounds like a generalization eliding into a mono-cultural trait. What does it mean that "the world doesn't view" things a certain way? What percentage of the population does that mean? How reasonable is it to expect a very high percentage of the population to share the same belief and be correct at the same time?
Does the world view electricity as inherently dangerous or evil? No. There being pockets of groups who do doesn’t make the general statement false. We are not obligated to constantly provide caveats and addendums to every general statement we make.
I feel like there are a number of assumptions that many people default to in these discussions, which all boil down to "magic is just like technology":
- Magic is generally safe to use.
- Magic can be used by anybody.
- Magic is not shackled to a particular scarce resource.
- Magic offers practical benefits in every sphere of human life.
Take any one of these away, and there's no question why you'd have non-magic-using people. Arcane magic in Dark Sun, for example, violates #1 and #3: Magic is very unsafe, and it depends on a scarce and dwindling resource. (A lot of early D&D fiction also implies that magic requires inborn talent, violating #2; but I'm not sure if that's ever been explicitly stated in Dark Sun.)
I think you can take 4 away no problem, as long as it provides practical benefits to some common facets of life. 2, is also a matter of degree but also of things like “is it inherited?” and “is it purely inherent or do people without the spark or whatever just have to work harder and are more limited?” and especially “how common is the spark or whatever?”
But of course in the OP I do assume everyone can learn at least some magic, in hopes of giving the thread a little bit of direction.