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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3036856" data-attributes="member: 18832">Your personal political opinions completely aside, the fact remains that it's a somewhat complex but undeniably useful set of skills which, nevertheless, the vast majority of people never take the time to learn.Prestidigitation might be an incredibly useful spell to know, but where does a farmer find the time in his pre-dawn-till-well-past-dusk working day to receive the necessary training to take a level in a class that can cast it? We're not talking about a small investment of time, here: if you need to be a wizard or magewright or whatever in order to cast that spell, then we can presume that a thorough grounding in the basics of magic (taking 1st level in a spellcasting class) is required in order to learn how to cast a spell as simple as prestidigitation (adding it to that class's spell list).You can't take a feat or spend a few skillpoints and learn it, after all. It's not something just anyone can do without a large investment of time, and if you grow up on a farm and your middle-aged parents are looking to you to help them feed the family, where does the opportunity to skive off to wizard's school come in?If you can't learn to cast prestidigitation without an untenable upfront cost, why bother to learn how? In this case, the untenable upfront cost is likely to be both monetary (whatever your mentor would charge you to train you as a wizard or magewright) and temporal (if the harvest needs to be brought in so your family can make it through to the next planting season, where do you find the time to go off and be trained?).Your average commoner or expert in a D&D setting no more needs to know how to cast an undoubtedly very useful spell than I, in the real world, need to know how to fix my car. Indeed, in a world like Eberron which asks some of the same questions you're asking about the widespread use of minor magic, the answer is the same as it is in the real world: a class of professional workers (magewrights or mechanics) emerges to do the tasks (cast spells or fix a car) which people might need both badly enough to pay such a professional for but not often enough to bother investing time and money into learning how to do it themselves.It's not necessarily a massive investment of time and energy. People become reasonably proficient at playing instruments, and learn the basics of musical composition, via short weekly lessons with as much practice as they can fit in around the rest of their lives, all the damn time - and have throughout history, modulo that they probably didn't have regular weekly lessons. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The real reason:Exactly. Those people who can learn to play instruments or sing or write music - or all three - in a casual manner that fits in with whatever else they have to do in their daily lives are, nevertheless, those with the talent, the aptitude, the ability to do so. Why don't I play the guitar and write love songs for my fiancee? I'd surely like to. It's because I can't play, write music, or sing.Why doesn't your average D&D commoner study magic when he has time and learn to cast a few simple spells - in game terms, take a level of magewright? Because he doesn't have the aptitude. Maybe he can no more get his head around the thought patterns and components of even minor spells than I can prevent my voice from going off-key.Music isn't a bad analogy for spellcasting aptitude, as it happens. Your magewrights are akin to people who play in garage bands or mix electronica on their home PCs or sing in local choirs - they have talent, but perhaps not enough to really make a go of it as a professional performer, or perhaps they simply never had the time, opportunity, or desire to really seek out a way in which they could reach their potential as a musician.Those that do - mostly people from families either well-off enough to provide musical education or those who collectively pull together and tighten their belts in order to provide the talented kid with the opportunity to develop their gift - are analogous to full-blown wizards. The Juilliard School is in this analogy equivalent to a wizards' school renowned as one of the best in the world - the place where truly talented wizards/musicians are given a chance to develop to their fullest potential, but also the sort of place from which many deserving candidates are excluded because they can't afford to go or their families don't support them or they don't believe they could get in and so never try.Any or all of these options could explain why your average D&D NPC doesn't know how to cast spells.If you want to be frank, most low-level magic isn't that great of a help to your average commoner. Is it worth sending your eldest child off to learn how to be a wizard or magewright and cast unseen servant, leaving the farm bereft of a worker for however long it takes, or would it be better to just get along without the damn spell but with a pair of hands available to help out every day right here and now?That's a similar tradeoff that some parents in the real world have to consider when they balance the chance that their child will succeed as a musician and make good money in, say, five or ten years' time, as opposed to the money they could be making if they forgot about music and got an accounting degree right now. Some people will take the chance, sure. But I think it's not very many.It's not just music, it's anything that requires a great investment of time and energy for a distant and uncertain reward - or even a reward that would be nice and certainly very helpful but not exactly necessary, which pretty much describes all the cantrips in the book.</blockquote>

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