An article at mythcreants explores the consequences of high magic and how it would logically tear any pre-modern setting apart.

I figured that a simple way to prevent the situations listed in the article would be to limit the availability of magic (such as reducing the population of magic-users and forcing them to specialize in a particular theme to be competent) and have the universe run on magic wholesale (rather than real physics with magic tacked on) so that technology either cannot exist or is another brand of magic.

What solutions would you suggest?

Not worrying about it.  It's just a stupid game.

Please god not this stupid subject again.

I like playing in Wilderlands of High Fantasy, where the setting is already 'overturned' and rather resembles a post-apocalypse nightmare a la Way of the Exploding Fist. For more medievalesque settings there's my Realm of Law, Realm of Chaos approach I used for running Yggsburgh - http://simonyrpgs.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/realm-of-chaos-realm-of-law.html

Edit: 4e D&D & Runequest use the "Universe Runs on Magic" approach which is good, but doesn't itself explain "medieval society + fireball".

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;966934It's just a stupid game.

Well, to be fair, it's not the game that's stupid.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;966933An article at mythcreants explores the consequences of high magic and how it would logically tear any pre-modern setting apart.

The author misses important points

A pre-industrial society can't support a large number of people not making clothes, producing food, or building shelter. Let's take Rome as an example when it all goes well, around 14 AD the empire had about 40 to 50 million people. Out of that they were able to support a single city, Rome, with a population of 750,000. Alexandria had a population above 200,000 beyond that it rapidly drops. If you are being generous you may be able to say that 1.5 million lived in various towns and cities throughout the empire. Of those how many were not involved in vital occupations like transport and general labor? It get narrow and except for place like Rome and Alexandria very diffuse.  In short there going to be a bottleneck in training people to read and learn magic for the decade or so of apprentice that been standard trope.

Once they are done with this training are the individual going to be content in casting Create Food or Create Iron all day? Probably not, there will far more valuable uses of their magic skills that will earn than far more than a hot meal or a chunk of iron will fetch.

Finally Industrialization is as much philosophy as it is technology. Pre-industrial are several foundation steps removed from the idea of ganging up people in a factory. At best they may think of it as herding a ton of people into what amounts to dozens of individual workshops under a single roof. The Roman did that with Pottery and certain other crafts.

Finally if you don't have your shit together like the Romans, then the margins become really thin.

Finally there are magic granted by supernatural entities with an agenda, like gods. They got their own axes to grind and maybe a handful will go for uplifting the masses but the rest as sure as fuck will care about their goals. Either you get with their program or they strip you of your powers.

It not that the author's scenario will never come to pass, rather it will take time, centuries and millennia for it to come to pass. If it bother you, then think of it that your D&D is set in the time before all that happens that a few centuries from now the magical revolution will sweep the setting. But that day is not present of the campaign.

I suppose I should this out there. Any magic system is an arbitrary design unless you are trying to model some historical idea of how magic is supposed to work. It quite possible to cook up a system where the magical revolution will happen in decades. I don't feel D&D, Runequest, and most general fantasy RPGs have this issue. There is generally enough if, buts, and by the ways, that if you laid out a plausible timeline from the Stone Age to the Magical Revolution that it would take a few millennia.

Maybe I'm wrong, but this sounds like the kind of stuff people debate online instead of actually playing games. :rolleyes:

Quote from: Dumarest;966964Maybe I'm wrong, but this sounds like the kind of stuff people debate online instead of actually playing games. :rolleyes:

Ding!  Winner!

There's a thought (maybe medieval historian Norman Cantor but don't remember for sure) that mid to late 1300's Europe was well on its way to achieving the conditions that led to the Enlightenment, but that the black plague set it back two or three centuries (depending upon how you want to count things).  Since that argument can at least be plausibly made, for a game I don't have any trouble seeing a society with wizards that is capable of similar setbacks, thus leading to the playable period that estar discusses.  Even changes that we think of in hindsight as more or less inevitable, don't have inevitable due dates.

Quote from: estar;966958The author misses important points

Finally Industrialization is as much philosophy as it is technology...

Articles like the OP which decry Unrealism while assuming All Humans Are Connecticut Yankees are pretty damn annoying. Reminds me a bit of GW Bush's exhortations about how The Desire For Freedom Lives In Every Human Heart.

No, no it doesn't. Not unless Freedom means Driving a Shiv Into My Wrong-thinking Neighbour's Heart Without Fear of Reprisal.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;966973There's a thought (maybe medieval historian Norman Cantor but don't remember for sure) that mid to late 1300's Europe was well on its way to achieving the conditions that led to the Enlightenment, but that the black plague set it back two or three centuries (depending upon how you want to count things).  

Seems unlikely to me - 'progress' in the sense of an Enlightenment-style paradigm shift tends to be the result of punctuated equilibrium, not a Steady State we're-all-doing-fine situation. It's notable how for instance Western society transformed far more in the few decades after the Second World War (say 1945-1980) than in the decades subsequent (1980-present). And the transformation in Europe between 1914 and 1920 was an order of magnitude higher still. The Black Death ended the flourishing High Medieval society, and the turmoil of the 14th century set the grounds for the post-medieval modern period.

Quote from: S'mon;966986Seems unlikely to me - 'progress' in the sense of an Enlightenment-style paradigm shift tends to be the result of punctuated equilibrium, not a Steady State we're-all-doing-fine situation. It's notable how for instance Western society transformed far more in the few decades after the Second World War (say 1945-1980) than in the decades subsequent (1980-present). And the transformation in Europe between 1914 and 1920 was an order of magnitude higher still. The Black Death ended the flourishing High Medieval society, and the turmoil of the 14th century set the grounds for the post-medieval modern period.

Me too, though I think he meant by achieving the conditions that it would have been in a state of prosperity to have freed up people to learn things.  It's not even the same Enlightenment that would come about under that scenario.  You'd still need some kind of social disruption to kick it into high gear, but maybe not Black Death level of social disruption (never mind the various wars).  When you've got cultivated land going back to wilderness, it tends to be a setback to having that extra scientific-minded person doing science.

From the point of the topic, though, I was thinking the other way around:  It's relatively difficult but possible to make an argument for improvements happening faster.  It's easy to make an argument for improvements being slowed or stalled--merely use the massive disruption of your choice.  Or a set of smaller but frequent disruptions.  Like, I don't know, maybe a critical but small set of people with magical power, no real oversight, and egos to go with it.

Quote from: S'mon;966986It's notable how for instance Western society transformed far more in the few decades after the Second World War (say 1945-1980) than in the decades subsequent (1980-present).

How are you measuring that?

Quote from: Dumarest;967015How are you measuring that?

Mostly fashion.

My old school had photos of the girls' hockey team on the wall, ca 1900-1990. The picture from 1920 looked more like the 1990 picture than like the 1914 picture.