Magic & Social Development

[Catullus64]

If you've been on the D&D-centric internet for any length of time, you've probably encountered some variant of this argument:

"D&D worlds have real magic that can drastically change people's ways of living. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to have societies in a fantasy RPG that mostly resemble Medieval European ones, because magic would drastically change things."

I'm going to pose an alternate perspective on this issue: historical peoples who believed that magic was both real and effective did not find that belief to be inconsistent with the world that they saw around them. Therefore, an RPG world with plentiful magic can be narratively consistent with a society that resembles a real-world medieval or ancient one, if that kind of society is portrayed as only being possible in the first place with the assistance of said magic.

Take, for example, a spell that I often see brought up in arguments like this: Plant Growth. More than once I've seen people argue that a spell which can reliably double crop yields on command should drastically accelerate social and technological development compared to real history; but this is only true if you assume that crop yields without spells like this one would be similar to those on Earth! Whereas, if the average plot of farmland in Fantasyland is half as productive as a similar plot on Earth, then you would need something like Plant Growth to sustain similar population and civilizational development.

Using this different perspective, I'm curious what others think about potentially world-changing magic!

[Batcathat]

I'm going to pose an alternate perspective on this issue: historical peoples who believed that magic was both real and effective did not find that belief to be inconsistent with the world that they saw around them. Therefore, an RPG world with plentiful magic can be narratively consistent with a society that resembles a real-world medieval or ancient one, if that kind of society is portrayed as only being possible in the first place with the assistance of said magic.

First of all, most of the magic people historically believed in had very little in common with D&D magic. An occasional witch ruining her neighbors crops or putting a curse on someone can exist without altering the setting too much, but the number and power level of magic users present in most D&D settings is something quite different.

Take, for example, a spell that I often see brought up in arguments like this: Plant Growth. More than once I've seen people argue that a spell which can reliably double crop yields on command should drastically accelerate social and technological development compared to real history; but this is only true if you assume that crop yields without spells like this one would be similar to those on Earth! Whereas, if the average plot of farmland in Fantasyland is half as productive as a similar plot on Earth, then you would need something like Plant Growth to sustain similar population and civilizational development.

It seems like it would take a lot of work to justify everything ending up as in the real world despite the presence of D&D magic and I don't think the end result would feel any better for the people who complain about such things in the first place. If my suspension of disbelief is hurting from a setting being more or less like the real world despite magic, it wouldn't hurt less from a setting being more or less like the real world because of magic.

Personally, I think it's also kind of missing the point of including something like magic if it's just gonna end up the same as the real world with more fireballs.

[Catullus64]

It seems like it would take a lot of work to justify everything ending up as in the real world despite the presence of D&D magic and I don't think the end result would feel any better for the people who complain about such things in the first place. If my suspension of disbelief is hurting from a setting being more or less like the real world despite magic, it wouldn't hurt less from a setting being more or less like the real world because of magic.

Personally, I think it's also kind of missing the point of including something like magic if it's just gonna end up the same as the real world with more fireballs.

On the first paragraph's point here, you're probably right. This may not change too many hearts and minds, but for those who do like more grounded-feeling settings, I think it's an ok defense.

As to the second, I don't feel like a game which ends up feeling like the real world is losing out, because to so many people throughout real history, the world was full of magic; and because that's 'real' in terms of being the lived reality of so many real people, it's a compelling fantasy for me to play in a world that's really like that.

[Anymage]

On the first paragraph's point here, you're probably right. This may not change too many hearts and minds, but for those who do like more grounded-feeling settings, I think it's an ok defense.

The issue isn't whether or not people believe in magic. It's that the kinds of magic are different. People in the middle ages could believe wholeheartedly that their local priest could bless the fields for a more bountiful harvest, but none of them were expecting someone to make a golem to till the fields. Unquiet dead could bring illness and misfortune, but wouldn't comprise an armed unit to storm the city gates. A magic system designed to match what real medieval people believed would necessarily have to be more subtle than what we have in D&D.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Personally, I think it's also kind of missing the point of including something like magic if it's just gonna end up the same as the real world with more fireballs.

Yeah. It feels like "why have magic if it doesn't change anything of note."

Let's let fantasy be fantastic. Let's start with new premises and follow them where they lead.

Also, it's not just magic in isolation. It's things like monsters, long lived races, magic items, very obviously active gods, etc.

[Anonymouswizard]

People tend to assume 'like (my view of) reality unless noted'. The existence of the spell Plant Growth is explicitly noted, wheat only being half as productive as it is on Earth is not.

Which is secondary to the fact that, culturally, these settings generally aren't actually like medieval Europe (or whoever), particularly in TTRPGs. Oh sure it might look like it on the surface, but depending on the setting it can be anything from 'the Wild West with swords' to practically a science fiction [u/dys]topia (hello Tippyverse).

[PhoenixPhyre]

People tend to assume 'like (my view of) reality unless noted'. The existence of the spell Plant Growth is explicitly noted, wheat only being half as productive as it is on Earth is not.

Which is secondary to the fact that, culturally, these settings generally aren't actually like medieval Europe (or whoever), particularly in TTRPGs. Oh sure it might look like it on the surface, but depending on the setting it can be anything from 'the Wild West with swords' to practically a science fiction [u/dys]topia (hello Tippyverse).

The second paragraph is right on. Published settings for D&D, for example, are not medieval in any real sense. They're all anachronistic melanges, each with their own specific weirdness.

[NichG]

The issue isn't whether or not people believe in magic. It's that the kinds of magic are different. People in the middle ages could believe wholeheartedly that their local priest could bless the fields for a more bountiful harvest, but none of them were expecting someone to make a golem to till the fields. Unquiet dead could bring illness and misfortune, but wouldn't comprise an armed unit to storm the city gates. A magic system designed to match what real medieval people believed would necessarily have to be more subtle than what we have in D&D.

Yeah, basically this.

Now, you could absolutely make such a game. And you could even turn D&D into such a game with a few added conceits to tuck the high level stuff behind the scenes or in exotic far away locations. If you had D&D but only one in a hundred thousand people had the potential and opportunity to gain levels at all and a global population in the range of a hundred million, then you've got an elite group of ~1000 'levelers' hanging around and performing various miraculous deeds at different scales. But not enough to really form a bulk of institutional knowledge or practice. So add to it an explicit call-out that 'people are not aware of character build options at all, things like feats or automatic spells gained are effectively impossible to anticipate or plan for in advance'.

Similarly have monsters and such be extremely rare, and remove those monsters that tend to rapidly self-replicate (or add constraints to that) - so the opportunity for rapid XP gain is very limited unless you actually make it a point to travel the world in search of such challenges to defeat. A dedicated leveler might gain a level every year for the first 5 levels, then a level every 5 years for the next 5, then a level every 25 years for the next 5, and so on. Unless they happen to party with a wizard or cleric and literally go raid hell or something, in which case they could have a meteoric rise, but again most of the time would just die. (And honestly, to avoid the 'hell invades the world and no one can fight it' scenarios, maybe just make it seriously much much harder to return from a planar jaunt - leaving the material is easy and you can just Planeshift, but getting from the conceptual planes back to the Material world actually would require Gate, and it would have to be cast from the Material side.) So to get to say Lv17 naturally for 9th level spells, you're looking at a ~400 year adventuring career.

Someone who isn't 'dedicated' like this who just hangs around and helps their community or seizes control of a small town and just rules over it in their power might peak at Lv5 after forty years of experience.

A given leveler might create a region with untold prosperity, during fifty of their seventy years of life, a given dragon might create a 50 mile diameter territory where settlements are inevitably razed to the ground, etc. But eventually you're going to have problems of scale - especially if you remove those things from the rules that let you create things that create things, etc. You can supply the iron needs of a small country with daily Wall of Iron castings, but you can't systematize 'wall of iron is how everyone gets their iron worldwide' because out of the 1000 levelers, maybe only 10 of them are of the level and class to have Wall of Iron, and you can't systematically change that. Maybe there are a hundred people wandering the world who can cure any disease, but only a few cases per day and only where they happen to be - enough that everyone will have heard the story of a saint passing through, but not enough to put a real dent in the Black Death. Even if you're a warrior who cannot be defeated by any army, if you want to rule a big territory you're going to have to personally go around and bust heads because you can't really form a feudal hierarchy who can propagate your personal power at all. If you're an artificer, the massively reduced XP gain means that yes you can hand out powerful toys but you can't afford to make more than one or two a year.

[Vahnavoi]

I could copy-paste entire paragraphs of 1st Edition AD&D books, where Gary Gygax discusses and explains this. Because I don't want to spend entire night manually copying text to you, I will paraphrase: you cannot imagine what a world would "really" be like. Actually crafting, in detail, a setting entirely different from the real world would require you to be a master in several fields and the end result would be too complex and too alien to be relatable to the typical player.

Hence, fantasy meant to be playable uses real history and other existing information as inspiration and groundwork. It achieves a sense of a living world by taking elements from the world that has actually been lived in, from histories, mythologies and religions (etc.) people actually created and believed in.

Of course this won't end up with worlds looking like they're derived from the game rules, because they aren't. The game rules aren't a reality simulation. They're tool to have fun games in worlds that are crafted largely independent of them. D&D rules aren't meant to lead to an authentic medieval setting any more than they are meant to lead to authentic feodal Japan, post-apocalyptic sci-fi, Westerns with magic, gothic horror or any of the other settings D&D has been adapted for throughout the years. Regardless of implied setting of the base rules, a game master is always the supreme author of their own, and can cherrypick the rules to suit their theme of the day.

Now, can you do harder speculative fiction where game rules are, in fact, meant to create a medieval authentic setting from the get-go? Yes. But D&D's not that game.

All of that said, I do have a laundry list of reason why this or that magic spell does not lead to what nerds in year 2023 think they would lead to. Most often, these explanation start with "because the actual makers of these things were not nerds in year 2023". They did not have pre-existing examples of industrial revolution or global information networks to use as models for what they could do with their inventions. The other common element is "it could happen, it hasn't happened yet". Nerds in year 2023 have this weird idea that because something is possible, it ought to already be a thing. Of course, as the last common explanation, sometimes it was a thing. Then the world ended. One of my favorite fantasy settings is that of Praedor, which is exactly in that last category. It described a post-apocalyptic Tippyverse before Tippyverse was even a thing. Yes, mages created a society founded on planar travel, where everyone was immortal and impossible wonders existed in every street corner. Then it died. The feodal society you live in is a nature reserve in the middle of the ruins of a society you can never copy and never comprehend. The few immortal wizards who still exist live in their own reclusive circles and don't share their secrets. No, you don't get to play a wizard in Praedor, you don't get to pick at their brains and see why things really are the way they are. You can complain things don't make sense, but then you have to look at Borvaria, where things really don't make sense. Just be happy you have a society left at all.

[KorvinStarmast]

The second paragraph is right on. Published settings for D&D, for example, are not medieval in any real sense. They're all anachronistic melanges, each with their own specific weirdness.

This is what makes for better D&D campaigns: embracing this.

I could copy-paste entire paragraphs of 1st Edition AD&D books, where Gary Gygax discusses and explains this. Because I don't want to spend entire night manually copying text to you, I will paraphrase: you cannot imagine what a world would "really" be like. Actually crafting, in detail, a setting entirely different from the real world would require you to be a master in several fields and the end result would be too complex and too alien to be relatable to the typical player.

Primary world (the medieval, sort of setting)+ secondary world (magic works, gods behave as various pantheonic deities from various mythologies do and in one way or another get too involved with the lives of people in that primary world).

Hence, fantasy meant to be playable uses real history and other existing information as inspiration and groundwork.
It achieves a sense of a living world by taking elements from the world that has actually been lived in, from histories, mythologies and religions (etc.) people actually created and believed in.

The bolded part is key.
We've tried "very simulationist" more than once at the tables where I have played. It ends up running into its own limitations.

No, you don't get to play a wizard in Praedor, you don't get to pick at their brains and see why things really are the way they are. You can complain things don't make sense, but then you have to look at Borvaria, where things really don't make sense. Just be happy you have a society left at all.

Heh, in 5e's Curse of Strahd, there is a petty noble whose rules include "be happy, or else!"

[Anonymouswizard]

The second paragraph is right on. Published settings for D&D, for example, are not medieval in any real sense. They're all anachronistic melanges, each with their own specific weirdness.

This is what makes for better D&D campaigns: embracing this.

Yep. My favourite published setting is Midnight, which is mostly about guerilla warfare against an authoritarian regime (with a backdrop of 'the evil god is trying to form a new body and return to heaven). Most of its societies seem to be 'cool idea X as fantasy races' and there's clearly more work gone into making a thematically consistent apocalyptic fantasy than a realistic one, but man do I like those sea elves.

Like in the original version 'I am the Chosen One' was literally a character option. As was playing the servants of the dark god, I'm kind of sad the 5e version removed it. But as a setting it's first goal is 'play a ragtag bunch of misfits fighting back against the shadow' and consistency is actually a secondary goal.

D&D has druids because somebody thought they'd make a cool enemy. D&D druids have scimitar proficiency because that edition didn't have a sickle weapon. That process is basically how D&D settings and rules were created.

'Hey Geoff, wouldn't it be fun if the druid class could like make plants grow?' <- probable reason for the Plant Growth spell

[False God]

Well, not to sound flippant, but yes. If your goal is to create a world that resembles IRL, but includes magic that has always been, then yes you can accomplish that by adjusting what the underlying IRL world looks like. If the Fantasy World needs magic to reach what we consider "normal" then you're dealing with an inherently harsher world.

[Quertus]

I think, if you tried to nerf the mundane to the point where magic was necessary to pull society up by its boot strings to medieval standards, you'd still have problems.

Like, if you reduce harvest yields to mandate Druids, then a group of peasant farmers simply starve to death without the intervention of Druids. Which means that Druids have societal power, in addition to Power power.

If labor and the economy cannot work without spells like Wall of Stone, Wall of Iron, Wall of Salt, and Fabricate, then society falls apart without Wizards. Wizards now wield innate societal power, in addition to Power power.

If wounds accumulate too fast / don't heal fast enough without the intervention of Clerics & Druids with their Cure spells, then society collapses without religion, and religions hold societal... well, I guess that's nothing new. But "Atheistic societies" are now an impossible oxymoron.

And let's not even get started on the mandate undead labor force, how wars can be waged simply by removing these necessary linchpins, or the requirement for immortal beings to be able to learn / remember things. "Geez, c'mon, I'm only 50, I can't be expected to remember all the alphabet, mom!"

Point is, making these changes makes society even more dependent upon magic, making them (presumably) even less like what I expect is the intended result, of something that looks familiar, rather than a mandate magocracy / magitocracy.

[KaussH]

I think what people tend to forget/overlook is that if you are making a full setting for your use, you in fact dont need to follow any real life rules. Water can run up waterfalls, Mammoths can have a divine culture with cleric powers, you can walk through a tunnel and reach another plane, ect. You are the creator of the world and while you want to make sure all the Mechanical rules work, you dont have to follow lore rules. As long as you tell the players at least. Heck I have a world where 3 flat plane settings are connected by oceans that you can sail from one to the other (If you do it right) All the rivers on mid world flow tword the center, and all sorts of other little weirdness.
Yes, it is more work. In same cases a lot more work.

But you are not limited by real world physics, science, social structures, ect. And yes, it is impossible to do some cribbing from the real world since we kinda live here, but you dont have to follow "Well this culture did X in real life" You can say they did Y, and for the most part all you need to say is "Yep, thats how it works"

That said I dont think I have run a proper Medieval setting in ages. I tend to just go on what fits the rest of my setting. Some Medieval restrictions (Tech for the most part) but far from classic Medieval.

[Mechalich]

I think what people tend to forget/overlook is that if you are making a full setting for your use, you in fact dont need to follow any real life rules. Water can run up waterfalls, Mammoths can have a divine culture with cleric powers, you can walk through a tunnel and reach another plane, ect. You are the creator of the world and while you want to make sure all the Mechanical rules work, you dont have to follow lore rules. As long as you tell the players at least. Heck I have a world where 3 flat plane settings are connected by oceans that you can sail from one to the other (If you do it right) All the rivers on mid world flow tword the center, and all sorts of other little weirdness.
Yes, it is more work. In same cases a lot more work.

But you are not limited by real world physics, science, social structures, ect. And yes, it is impossible to do some cribbing from the real world since we kinda live here, but you dont have to follow "Well this culture did X in real life" You can say they did Y, and for the most part all you need to say is "Yep, thats how it works"

That said I dont think I have run a proper Medieval setting in ages. I tend to just go on what fits the rest of my setting. Some Medieval restrictions (Tech for the most part) but far from classic Medieval.

The setting has to be functional in support of the type of game that is being run and the type of players who are going to be utilizing it. Both of these have a profound impact on the kinds of things that are acceptable, because they, working together, set the boundaries of verisimilitude that the setting needs to sustain to allow the game to remain functional and the systemic boundaries that prevent the players from breaking the setting and derailing the story completely.

Many, probably most, games, especially using D&D (a low immersion system not intended to support robust fictional worlds) have rather minimal demands in this regard and therefore allow the sort of flexibility you mention. Likewise, settings meant for a single table have immense flexibility because the GM knows the players, their tendencies, and whether or not they will test the boundaries of the setting. This is a massive handicap in terms of the amount of stress a setting is liable to endure. By contrast, settings intended for widespread publication need to operate on the assumption that players will do literally anything and everything possible to break, exploit, or otherwise destroy the setting in pursuit of even the most ephemeral of advantages (and we know this because that behavioral pattern is what occurs, consistently, in multiplayer video game scenarios).

The OPs initial question interrogates a sort of Civilization-style worldbuilding what-if. Specifically, it's what if you take a world that is basically a starting play of Civilization on Turn One but instead of the iterative alternative versions of earth postulated by Civilization or some other 4x game, various supernatural elements are added in? That's the social development question, and it's predicated on world-building in a certain fashion with effects projected out assuming otherwise normal feedback loops, impacts, and natural processes remain.

Now, lots of people don't world build that way and their answer to this question is "I don't care, it works the way it does because it does." And, that's fine, especially in the context of single-table settings where the GM can answer all 'but why?' questions with 'because it doesn't, shut up' (and a great deal of single author fiction utilizes a variety of literary devices and techniques to steer the audience away from ever breaking suspension of disbelief far enough that they bother asking such a question). Additionally, it's possible to have an answer that is entirely meta. For example, in video games as common answer to questions of this kind is 'because the mechanics demand it.' However, this has consequences of its own. Skyrim, for example, presents a world that is basically immune to the actions of the player outside of a small number of on-rails quest lines. Enemies will always respawn and as such it is completely impossible to make any long term impact on the province's banditry problem. And some players find that kind of thing frustrating and damaging to their suspension of disbelief (certainly in the late game it creates weird distortions since suddenly the province is filled with high level baddies who came from nowhere and should be capable of slaughtering all the townsfolk).

Ultimately, in order to project out the impact of some supernatural element in the full 4x approach, there are fairly strict limited on the quantity, power, and scope of such elements. In many cases it suffices to make a substantially alternate universe based on one, singular supernatural ability or out of place technology (whole science fiction franchises are built this way).

[Anymage]

But you are not limited by real world physics, science, social structures, ect. And yes, it is impossible to do some cribbing from the real world since we kinda live here, but you dont have to follow "Well this culture did X in real life" You can say they did Y, and for the most part all you need to say is "Yep, thats how it works"

I don't think it's that people are feeling compelled to do something vaguely medievalish when they don't want to. (Except insofar as you'll probably get more people signing up for stock D&D than you would for something a little more out there like Spelljammer or Ravenloft.) I think it's that a lot of people happen to like the vaguely medievalish aesthetic, and are looking for ways to square that with all the ways that D&D style magic would cause transformative shifts to society.

[Mechalich]

I don't think it's that people are feeling compelled to do something vaguely medievalish when they don't want to. (Except insofar as you'll probably get more people signing up for stock D&D than you would for something a little more out there like Spelljammer or Ravenloft.) I think it's that a lot of people happen to like the vaguely medievalish aesthetic, and are looking for ways to square that with all the ways that D&D style magic would cause transformative shifts to society.

A key fact about setting design: in order to be viable to the average TTRPG player, the setting must be explicable within <1000 words, preferably <500. Ideally, the setting, and the primary type of gameplay within it can be explained in a one-sentence pitch, or even better, the game title. Given these limitations, grafting the setting onto a set of aesthetics, concepts, themes, and tropes that are broadly understood within the common culture of the player-base is a massive advantage.

Licensed games have it easiest. If your pitch is just 'Star Wars' you're already done. Or a pitch that combines two known commodities together, like: 'Pathfinder Star Wars,' which is the pitch of Starfinder. D&D, because of it's first-mover and market-share advantages, exerts an influence on the hobby in this way, as a lot of settings, whether they use the d20 system or not, are broadly pitched as 'D&D, but X' or 'X D&D' (for example Eberron, which was pitched as 'pulp D&D' though how well that claim's holding power is rather dubious). Vampire: the Masquerade, was a testament to the power of this, the title contains the pitch, a game about vampires who live in secret, and the setting can, broadly, be explained in a single sentence.

Overall, the broader TTRPG player-base has a small number of generalized settings/gameplay/trope/theme combos that pretty much everyone is familiar with. Quasi-medieval adventuring is at the top of the list. Other biggies include space opera, superheroes, and urban fantasy/horror. Anyone trying to do something other than that is going to have to work really hard to get buy in and needs a bunch of dedicated players willing to read through a lot of material just to make the setting playable. A good example of such a setting would be Eclipse Phase, which contains all the gnarly science fiction ideas of 1990-present and is liable to leave a prospective player's head spinning just trying to figure out all the things a starting character is capable of doing, ex. 'wait, I can make limitless copies of my own mind, send them out to search the internet, and then merge them back inside my brain to assimilate that knowledge all without ever leaving my couch? The f---?'

Spelljammer, likewise, was a failure. Yes it has some cool ideas and a few dedicated fans, but it went nowhere. When TSR tried a similar idea a few years later with Planescape, they took pains to make it approachable as possible, with all sorts of advice on how to take a bog-standard D&D party and gradually bring them into the greater multiverse and also to allow players uninterested in reading the setting material to play ignorant primes alongside the more seasoned planars played by players would did do the homework. That worked better, but it still had only niche appeal. Meanwhile the quasi-medieval but verisimilitude-bereft Forgotten Realms keeps on trucking as the most popular TTRPG setting ever.

What this general means is, if the intent is to explore the impacts of some supernatural element on social development in a serious way and still have people interested in playing that game, the setting designer gets one supernatural element. This is similar to how, in writing alternate history fiction, the author gets one big change to the timeline.

[Quertus]

Meanwhile the quasi-medieval but verisimilitude-bereft Forgotten Realms keeps on trucking as the most popular TTRPG setting ever.

What this general means is, if the intent is to explore the impacts of some supernatural element on social development in a serious way and still have people interested in playing that game, the setting designer gets one supernatural element. This is similar to how, in writing alternate history fiction, the author gets one big change to the timeline.

I'll second that exploring a single change is much easier to do in a way that, y'know, actually makes sense. That said, I'm personally biased by being more interested in settings with multiple changes, and ones that are not yet integrated into society, and letting the players choose how to interact with whichever ones interest them.

What about FR makes it "verisimilitude-bereft", especially in ways that are relevant to this topic? I ask because you set it as opposed to being able to be eased into gently vs doing your research, which seemed an odd juxtaposition of concepts.

[Ionathus]

I think it's partially because most setting creators aren't anthropologists, and would have no idea where to start with any sort of fundamental change to human behavior caused by magic. It's too much work and they don't want to start over from the beginning of civilization (or even further back, depending on how the magic works).

I think another reason is because the people who grew up in a society shaped by access to magic, truly shaped by it and not just "having a light veneer" of it, might not even be people to us in the traditional sense. We're talking alien-level cultural shift here, maybe even all the morals are different. That's a hard book to read, I'm not sure anyone's ever written anything even close to that. Maybe the final few far-far-future scenes of "The Last Question" by Asimov are the closest comparisons I can think of.

The Temeraire series is a perfect example: "The Napoleonic Wars Except with Dragons." I defy you to tell me that makes even an iota of sense. Tell me that any 19th century European nation evolved into a recognizable form given the widespread existence of dragons alongside humans for thousands of years. Hell, tell me that humans survived the widespread existence of dragons for even the first fifty. It just doesn't compute.

Now, Novik does make some interesting changes. She explores how the playing field would be leveled if every traditionally oppressed and conquered group (Indigenous Americans, Africans, Australians, etc.) also had access to dragons. That part is a fun alternate history. But the boundaries are drawn at that, no further questions. Because it made me wonder "okay, so these things changed, but how did any of these other things stay the same? Hell, how did we still get Napoleon as a real dude who exists in roughly similar form?" And there's no good answer for that. We just collectively accept that the story she wants to tell is "Napoleon + Dragons" and everyone looks the other way when the anthropology questions crop up.

Relevant quote from The Giant:

EDIT: What it comes down to is that the existence of a known, provable, observable, game-able afterlife system of any sort—OOTS version, D&D version, or any other type—would so thoroughly change human behavior in the living world as to render all of society and personal interaction unrecognizable to us, the real people reading the story. It is in any author's interest, therefore, to not think too much about it, lest these sorts of questions overwhelm whatever actual relatable human story they want to tell. Maybe if that sort exploration is the point of the work, that would make sense, but for anything else? The only reasonable option is to handwave it and get on with the work of telling a good tale.

[Vahnavoi]

What about FR makes it "verisimilitude-bereft", especially in ways that are relevant to this topic? I ask because you set it as opposed to being able to be eased into gently vs doing your research, which seemed an odd juxtaposition of concepts.

Forgotten Realms as it is in detail and Forgotten Realms as it is commonly experienced are two different things.

Forgotten Realms as it is in detail is as unforgiving as Planescape, or superhero comic book continuity. Only lunatics would take it seriously.

Which is why Forgotten Realms as it is commonly experienced, like superhero films based on the comic books, does not bring that detail to the table. It brings in a collection of tropes and recognizable character types. Anybody who has ever been exposed to the incestuous genre of post-D&D high fantasy can find at least something familiar... and it works as long as you don't make them look at it in detail.

[Catullus64]

I don't think it's that people are feeling compelled to do something vaguely medievalish when they don't want to. (Except insofar as you'll probably get more people signing up for stock D&D than you would for something a little more out there like Spelljammer or Ravenloft.) I think it's that a lot of people happen to like the vaguely medievalish aesthetic, and are looking for ways to square that with all the ways that D&D style magic would cause transformative shifts to society.

This is exactly my feeling on the subject. Not that trying to make your setting match real-life examples is necessary or morally correct, but that it's my preferred taste and can be done in a way that makes sense with the presence of powerful magic. Though with D&D in particular, the magic system isn't super friendly to this kind of world, I'll admit. Ars Magica is probably one of the best examples of a game that really goes hard on creating a magical world that matches the way real people thought about their magical world.

[Anonymouswizard]

Personally if I had to pick an ideal tech level and aesthetic it would be somewhere between bronze age and early iron age Europe (wow that's a large period of time, but I'm thinking of two specific looks). I've kind of gone off the 'high middle ages' look, but sadly it's the popular one.

Which sucks when 5e features two classes* which mechanically support charging into battle butt naked (but the Barbarian clearly does it better). I want a setting where painting myself in woad, grabbing a big ass sword, and charging into battle screaming is only considered mildly eccentric. I dunno, maybe I should play orcs more.

Which is a tangent to the thread, but honestly some people might feel better with magic not changing much at a lower tech level. Of course the biggest things in D&D that cause such 'issues' are really the mixture of widespread literacy plus relatively versatile and unrestricted nature of magic, without the first magical knowledge becomes a lot harder to pass on, and if magicians were more limited or rarer they'll have less impact.

I also suspect this is the general reason for locking up mages in guilds and/or priestly orders away from the common folk. But that's something D&D has kind of been dropping for a while now.

* Not counting cheating with Mage Armour.

[Mechalich]

I think another reason is because the people who grew up in a society shaped by access to magic, truly shaped by it and not just "having a light veneer" of it, might not even be people to us in the traditional sense. We're talking alien-level cultural shift here, maybe even all the morals are different. That's a hard book to read, I'm not sure anyone's ever written anything even close to that. Maybe the final few far-far-future scenes of "The Last Question" by Asimov are the closest comparisons I can think of.

There are people who get closer than others. Brandon Sanderson, to give him due credit, really does think about magic systems and the impacts that they would have on the worlds he builds. I wouldn't say he goes all the way, and some of his systems makes more sense than others, but when you read his books you can definitely tell that he's trying to grapple with the issue even if he doesn't always succeed. Asimov, as you noted, was also a very systems-focused author and did in fact grapple with questions like this, just often scientific ones as opposed to magical ones. The best example I can think of his would be Nightfall, which is entirely about the consequences of a planet where night only occurs once every few centuries and the massive cyclical social upheaval this causes.

One of the reasons a lot of authors don't do this is because they aren't interested in telling stories about systems. Modern creative storytelling (whether it's movies, books, games, etc.) has a notable character-focus bias, to the point that many authors can't be bothered to get real world systems that can be easily googled correct (the Questionable Content threads in the webcomics section contains numerous remarks by various posters regarding errors of this kind), never mind trying to balance fictional ones against anthropology and biology and so on. Lots of authors and setting designers simply don't want to consider how society is shaped by anything at all, never mind fictional forces, they just want to write stories about people in society as they imagine it being.

That's fine, so far as it goes, but problems arise when the amount of supernatural stuff in a setting, whether in quantity, power, or abundance makes it impossible to maintain suspension of disbelief that these elements would not drastically reshape society. Temeraire, as mentioned, completely fails this test, and I made it only halfway through book one. Novik, to her credit, seems to have learned from this and structured later works in dark fairy tale realities where it was very clear that the fictional setting was never meant to hold together at all.

The trick, in setting design, is precisely how much supernatural stuff can be added to a setting while still managing to maintain the 'a light veneer' dodge with underlying social systems broadly unchanged so that the setting retains verisimilitude, assuming that is a goal. Unfortunately, from the TTRPG perspective, the answer to that question is 'not very much at all' which fights against the publication impetus to cram as much stuff into a setting as possible. For example, the initial publication of VtM, with just a handful of clans of vampires all respecting the masquerade and a fairly modest list of powers available, was just on the edge of plausibility, but once additional supplements came out with mighty elders, crazy Sabbat serial killers, bizarre multi-layered conspiracies, and world-spanning magical rituals the Masquerade idea quickly became a joke.

[Quertus]

Of course the biggest things in D&D that cause such 'issues' are really the mixture of widespread literacy

Ah, that’s not a D&D thing; that’s unique to 21st century D&D. Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, dirt was young, and the best edition was the game to play, “literacy” was the exception, not the rule.

Seems likely the 3e devs changed that for the same reason they removed all the weaknesses from Wizards: they thought it would be more fun that way.

[Ionathus]

There are people who get closer than others. Brandon Sanderson, to give him due credit, really does think about magic systems and the impacts that they would have on the worlds he builds. I wouldn't say he goes all the way, and some of his systems makes more sense than others, but when you read his books you can definitely tell that he's trying to grapple with the issue even if he doesn't always succeed. Asimov, as you noted, was also a very systems-focused author and did in fact grapple with questions like this, just often scientific ones as opposed to magical ones. The best example I can think of his would be Nightfall, which is entirely about the consequences of a planet where night only occurs once every few centuries and the massive cyclical social upheaval this causes.

One of the reasons a lot of authors don't do this is because they aren't interested in telling stories about systems. Modern creative storytelling (whether it's movies, books, games, etc.) has a notable character-focus bias, to the point that many authors can't be bothered to get real world systems that can be easily googled correct (the Questionable Content threads in the webcomics section contains numerous remarks by various posters regarding errors of this kind), never mind trying to balance fictional ones against anthropology and biology and so on. Lots of authors and setting designers simply don't want to consider how society is shaped by anything at all, never mind fictional forces, they just want to write stories about people in society as they imagine it being.

That's fine, so far as it goes, but problems arise when the amount of supernatural stuff in a setting, whether in quantity, power, or abundance makes it impossible to maintain suspension of disbelief that these elements would not drastically reshape society.

Excellent points here. I'm not sure why, but it reminded me of Ursula K. Le Guin's foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness -- the part I bolded in particular. It's a stellar foreword and even though it's about science fiction in particular, a lot of it holds true for me in this context too.

Spoiler: Excerpt from foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness

Show

Oh, it’s lovely to be invited to participate in Futurological Congresses where Systems Science displays its grand apocalyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be like in 2001, and all that, but it’s a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.

This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it’s set in the “Ekumenical Year 1490–97,” but surely you don’t believe that?

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

(emphasis mine)

Temeraire, as mentioned, completely fails this test, and I made it only halfway through book one. Novik, to her credit, seems to have learned from this and structured later works in dark fairy tale realities where it was very clear that the fictional setting was never meant to hold together at all.

The trick, in setting design, is precisely how much supernatural stuff can be added to a setting while still managing to maintain the 'a light veneer' dodge with underlying social systems broadly unchanged so that the setting retains verisimilitude, assuming that is a goal. Unfortunately, from the TTRPG perspective, the answer to that question is 'not very much at all' which fights against the publication impetus to cram as much stuff into a setting as possible. For example, the initial publication of VtM, with just a handful of clans of vampires all respecting the masquerade and a fairly modest list of powers available, was just on the edge of plausibility, but once additional supplements came out with mighty elders, crazy Sabbat serial killers, bizarre multi-layered conspiracies, and world-spanning magical rituals the Masquerade idea quickly became a joke.

Admittedly, this also depends on tone. Even though all the characters in Temeraire take themselves entirely seriously, I as the reader am never going to. "Napoleonic Dragons" is a cool thought experiment and she does some fun legwork with the logistics of it, but it's still a patently absurd phrase and the whole audience is basically destined to approach it on those terms. If the author expects people to willingly turn their suspension of disbelief up to 11 and enjoy the fun buzzwords she's crammed together into a setting, then we can all get along as audience & author.

If an author expects their audience to take something unbelievable seriously, though, that's where the tonal dissonance can really start to cause problems. I recently finished the first Mistborn book and boy howdy, the pathos of the Skaa's oppression did not hit for me. It started off fairly believable and I definitely got what Sanderson wanted to do with it. I don't even question the brutality of oppression because the real world has so many terrible examples. But the fixation on how badly the Skaa were treated spilled over into cartoonish territory to me -- I started wondering how they could even logistically be as oppressed as they are, because it didn't feel like there were enough hours in the day for all the horrible things the nobility did to them!

[False God]

Ah, that’s not a D&D thing; that’s unique to 21st century D&D. Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, dirt was young, and the best edition was the game to play, “literacy” was the exception, not the rule.

Seems likely the 3e devs changed that for the same reason they removed all the weaknesses from Wizards: they thought it would be more fun that way.

My experience with illiterate characters is generally negative, and they were IMO, often played by the worst sorts of obnoxious minmaxers who would use "I can't read derp de derp!" as some kind of self-amusement tool and get in the way of other characters actually trying to resolve situations that didn't involve punching.

I'm glad it was removed for the simple fact that those people are almost non-existent now.

[KorvinStarmast]

Personally if I had to pick an ideal tech level and aesthetic it would be somewhere between bronze age and early iron age Europe (wow that's a large period of time, but I'm thinking of two specific looks).

If you posit a Feudal Age Europe (just before Charlemagne) you have hit my sweet spot for preferences. And it's roughly where the Three Little Brown Books were set into.

I've kind of gone off the 'high middle ages' look, but sadly it's the popular one.

Yeah. And most of what I see of late is borderline Rennaissance.

Of course the biggest things in D&D that cause such 'issues' are really the mixture of widespread literacy plus relatively versatile and unrestricted nature of magic, without the first magical knowledge becomes a lot harder to pass on, and if magicians were more limited or rarer they'll have less impact.

Magic being a bit too common is a shortcoming of a lot of SFF stuff. It is more impactful if it is rare, powerful, and dangerous.

I also suspect this is the general reason for locking up mages in guilds and/or priestly orders away from the common folk. But that's something D&D has kind of been dropping for a while now.

Sad but true.

The trick, in setting design, is precisely how much supernatural stuff can be added to a setting while still managing to maintain the 'a light veneer' dodge with underlying social systems broadly unchanged so that the setting retains verisimilitude, assuming that is a goal.

back to Tolkien's point about the Primary and Secondary Worlds in Fairy Stories. Getting that balance is tough, in Fantasy as well as in Sci Fi. (And speculative fiction in general).

My experience with illiterate characters is generally negative, and they were IMO, often played by the worst sorts of obnoxious minmaxers who would use "I can't read derp de derp!" as some kind of self-amusement tool and get in the way of other characters actually trying to resolve situations that didn't involve punching.

I'm glad it was removed for the simple fact that those people are almost non-existent now.

Feel the same way.

[Hurrashane]

I think a lot of the "the world would be entirely different" things fail to realize a couple things: Magic is rare and monsters exist.

Like yeah, a druid's plant growth would be a boon for farming... But druids of 5th level and above are pretty rare. And they're more often than not recluses. And they concern themselves with natural balance. So one might swing by and plant growth some land that was desolated by some kind of disaster but it's not like normal people have them on call.

Same with wizards and clerics. Like, any big sweeping world changing magic the user of likely has better things to do with it than helping out the locals. They're off preventing demon lords from invading the land, or stopping Tiamat from being brought into the world. Or they're secluding themselves to focus on their studies.

Healing magic is a boon, but a lot of people will die in one hit with a dagger. And spells that cure diseases don't stop people from being re-infected. Sure a cleric of third level can cure, what? Two people a day? But without addressing the root of the disease, or figuring out a wildly available cure, they're just doing patch jobs. And most of that is probably being used on like, the ruling class, or people trying to cure the thing. Resurrection magic is high level, and expensive, so to get raised from the dead you need to know a sufficiently powerful caster -and- also have enough money to afford the material cost... and also then after you die you need to be willing to return which if you go to some kind of paradise... will you?

Sure would be nice to have gunpowder or advanced machinery, too bad the place got burned down, overrun by zombies, invaded by evil forces, etc etc.

Like, in my mind it's a wonder the world and it's populace -survived- to get to a sort of post medieval society at all.

[Batcathat]

I think a lot of the "the world would be entirely different" things fail to realize a couple things: Magic is rare and monsters exist.

Like yeah, a druid's plant growth would be a boon for farming... But druids of 5th level and above are pretty rare. And they're more often than not recluses. And they concern themselves with natural balance. So one might swing by and plant growth some land that was desolated by some kind of disaster but it's not like normal people have them on call.

Same with wizards and clerics. Like, any big sweeping world changing magic the user of likely has better things to do with it than helping out the locals. They're off preventing demon lords from invading the land, or stopping Tiamat from being brought into the world. Or they're secluding themselves to focus on their studies.

Healing magic is a boon, but a lot of people will die in one hit with a dagger. And spells that cure diseases don't stop people from being re-infected. Sure a cleric of third level can cure, what? Two people a day? But without addressing the root of the disease, or figuring out a wildly available cure, they're just doing patch jobs. And most of that is probably being used on like, the ruling class, or people trying to cure the thing. Resurrection magic is high level, and expensive, so to get raised from the dead you need to know a sufficiently powerful caster -and- also have enough money to afford the material cost... and also then after you die you need to be willing to return which if you go to some kind of paradise... will you?

Sure would be nice to have gunpowder or advanced machinery, too bad the place got burned down, overrun by zombies, invaded by evil forces, etc etc.

Like, in my mind it's a wonder the world and it's populace -survived- to get to a sort of post medieval society at all.

The size of the coincidence necessary for the magic and the monsters to basically balance each other out perfectly, so that neither really impacts civilization (not to mention having done so throughout the setting's entire history) feels like it would be bad for the suspension of disbelief.

To me, it also seems like such a waste from a world-building standpoint to add all these supernatural elements, only for them to have basically zero impact on the world. Like adding ten different spices to a dish that end up canceling each other out to the point that you might as well not have added spice at all.

[icefractal]

I think the most implausible thing about most D&D settings is the stability. Like, "these kingdoms have stayed roughly the same for the last 800 years"?! That's a lot more stable than most RL history, when if anything a D&D world has a lot more reasons to not be stable.

Because on the one hand you have the possibility of very rapid advancement, and on the other hand you have lots of forces that could collapse civilization outright. So "a constantly in-flux world, where some kingdoms are hard-scrabble settlements growing from the ruins of the past, others are better established and starting to advance, others are high-magic empires, and still others are crumbling high-magic remnants in the process of falling into ruin" would make more sense IMO, and also means that you very plausibly could have a particular kingdom at the "generic pseudo-medieval" level of advancement - it just wouldn't be all the kingdoms being like that. And also it explains why there are so many ruins filled with valuable stuff.