Quote from: daniel_ream;491148The problem I have with "creative" uses of spells is that they almost always involve an anachronistic understanding of physics on the part of the player.  Casting explosive runes on parchment and folding it into a paper airplane to throw at enemies is one of my "favourites", as is using fire spells to evacuate the oxygen from cave/dungeon complexes.

My own response to this would be that it's fine. I'm not entirely interested in trying to get so deeply into the mindset of a person living in pseudo-medieval, magical fantasy world, at least not when I'm playing D&D. The game is so full of anachronistic assumptions that trying to escape them seems like tilting at windmills. Hell, many of the component requirements for 1e spells amount to anachronistic gags. I say, go for it. Any high school level physics knowledge is fair game.

EDIT: Not to mention that, as Justin pointed out, it's way too easy to underestimate how much the ancients understood the cause and effect of the world, whether or not they dug the actual underlying physics.

Quote from: two_fishes;491382EDIT: Not to mention that, as Justin pointed out, it's way too easy to underestimate how much the ancients understood the cause and effect of the world, whether or not they dug the actual underlying physics.

Most of us aren't that smart now (;

I just found out about 2 months ago that if I throw a ball straight ahead, it takes the same amount of time to hit the ground as if I dropped it.

Quote from: Cranewings;491388Most of us aren't that smart now (;

I just found out about 2 months ago that if I throw a ball straight ahead, it takes the same amount of time to hit the ground as if I dropped it.

That seems counter-intuitive but when I think about it, it makes perfect sense. Of course, I imagine that the vast majority of throws are actually parabolas, not at all perfectly parallel to the ground.

Quote from: two_fishes;491382EDIT: Not to mention that, as Justin pointed out, it's way too easy to underestimate how much the ancients understood the cause and effect of the world, whether or not they dug the actual underlying physics.

I have a minor in classical studies.  Trust me when I say it's almost impossible to so underestimate.  For every Hero of Alexandria calculating the circumference of the Earth, there's a Pliny declaring that you can't break a diamond with a hammer and anvil.

It gets a lot worse when you have erstwhile engineers who can think big when they're trying to break your fantasy campaign with anachronisms.  For a relatively small amount of money, you can make a lot of Decanters of Endless Water - which you can use to drive quite large industrial engines.  Or just provide clean drinking water to all your citizens.

There's historical inference that concave polished bronze shields may have been used to set fire to ships with reflected sunlight.  Why stop there?  With a Continual Light spell and some basic optics, you can carry a laser cannon around with you.

I urge everyone who thinks you can make functional paper airplanes from either parchment or papyrus to actually fucking try it as you'll find it doesn't work.  Neither, I'm sad to say, do any of da Vinci's flying machines.  They only ever existed as sketches.  Their wingspan isn't large enough for the weight of the materials available at the time.

Quote from: daniel_ream;491397It gets a lot worse when you have erstwhile engineers who can think big when they're trying to break your fantasy campaign with anachronisms.  For a relatively small amount of money, you can make a lot of Decanters of Endless Water - which you can use to drive quite large industrial engines.  Or just provide clean drinking water to all your citizens.

There's historical inference that concave polished bronze shields may have been used to set fire to ships with reflected sunlight.  Why stop there?  With a Continual Light spell and some basic optics, you can carry a laser cannon around with you.

These things sound awesome. If your players get kicks out of coming up with these sorts of ideas, why not run with them rather than kibosh them?

I mean, I am sure that if magic (read: free energy) were as plentiful in the ancient world as it is in fantasy D&D campaigns, I'm sure that it would have changed the landscape enormously, and the erstwhile engineers of the day would have come up with all sorts of labour-saving devices. They might not have done it in the same ways as modern engineers, but they surely would have done something.

Here's a classic:

AD&D - I cast a reversed 1st level Enlarge on a crown, a helmet - any object that tightly encircles a vital organ. Instant death, no save, 1st level spell.

The spell description of Enlarge didn't include a proviso that said it didn't work if there was an obstruction. And the object didn't shrink - it just instantly became the new size according to the spell description, so it didn't slip off the head - it crushed it.

Quote from: two_fishes;491422These things sound awesome. If your players get kicks out of coming up with these sorts of ideas, why not run with them rather than kibosh them?

I mean, I am sure that if magic (read: free energy) were as plentiful in the ancient world as it is in fantasy D&D campaigns, I'm sure that it would have changed the landscape enormously, and the erstwhile engineers of the day would have come up with all sorts of labour-saving devices. They might not have done it in the same ways as modern engineers, but they surely would have done something.

Whether D&D-style magic would kickstart the industrial revolution is basically a question of wizard's psychology. If they are more or less normal people with special expertise, then it's inevitable. If they are odd, obsessive weirdos who no longer share the everyday concerns of ordinary people, it probably wouldn't.

I personally tend to hold the prior view, and thus I rarely create D&D settings much earlier in technical and political development than the early modern West or Ming-era China.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;491428Whether D&D-style magic would kickstart the industrial revolution is basically a question of wizard's psychology. If they are more or less normal people with special expertise, then it's inevitable. If they are odd, obsessive weirdos who no longer share the everyday concerns of ordinary people, it probably wouldn't.

I personally tend to hold the prior view, and thus I rarely create D&D settings much earlier in technical and political development than the early modern West or Ming-era China.

Sure, and a lot of the books seem to give the impression that the former is practically the case, with wizards available for hire and magic items readily available for purchase, and for a relatively small cost. I don't know if D&D magic would kick off an industrial revolution, but it would sure make things different.

Quote from: two_fishes;491431Sure, and a lot of the books seem to give the impression that the former is practically the case, with wizards available for hire and magic items readily available for purchase, and for a relatively small cost. I don't know if D&D magic would kick off an industrial revolution, but it would sure make things different.

It's reliable, replicable, and should be much cheaper than it actually is, since there is a very minimal cost to users. Most enchanted items never wear down, and are in fact more durable than comparable items.

Quote from: daniel_ream;491397I urge everyone who thinks you can make functional paper airplanes from either parchment or papyrus to actually fucking try it as you'll find it doesn't work.  Neither, I'm sad to say, do any of da Vinci's flying machines.  They only ever existed as sketches.  Their wingspan isn't large enough for the weight of the materials available at the time.

(1) Da Vinci's flying machines may not have worked, but the paper models he described, diagrammed, and tested would have glided around just fine. You can make them yourself and check it out.

(2) While I think it quite likely that "parchment airplanes" would be a spectacular failure, I'm less convinced that papyrus would be inherently incapable of gliding.

(3) Paper was invented in 105 AD. It explicitly exists in D&D. I'm not really sure where you're going with this.

In any case, this is why I find that the battle to fight anachronism in D&D campaigns generally results in hilarious and misguided efforts. For example, you get stuff like "paper airplanes are anachronistic" (when, in fact, they aren't). OTOH, you'll likely find the same people designing houses in D&D which feature dining rooms (totally anachronistic).

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;491428Whether D&D-style magic would kickstart the industrial revolution is basically a question of wizard's psychology. If they are more or less normal people with special expertise, then it's inevitable. If they are odd, obsessive weirdos who no longer share the everyday concerns of ordinary people, it probably wouldn't.

Cultural uptake of technology in a pre-scientific, pre-industrial, and pre-capitalistic world was surprisingly fickle: Egyptians take 2,000 years to pick up the wheel from neighboring Mesopotamia while the Americas only use it for children's toys until the Europeans show up. There are those strange Baghdad Batteries and the Antikythera Device.

Even after modern attitudes towards discovery and technology take root, it often takes a proper environment and infrastructure to exist before a good idea will find its time. Electric lights of various kinds and assortments existed for something like a couple hundred years before Thomas Edison got around to "inventing" the light bulb. (He didn't, actually. But he did have the wherewithal to create the infrastructure necessary for anyone to actually be able to use lightbulbs on any sort of meaningful scale, and that was probably the more impressive and important accomplishment.)

So you take a decanter of endless water and you use it to drive a millwheel. The result for most of recorded history? People say, "Great. Now we don't have to build our mills next to rivers." Assuming they don't just shrug their shoulders and forget about it within a generation.

The difference between magic and technology is very much one of infrastructure. One of the reasons, we both agree, that technological progress goes backward or dead-ends at many periods of history is a failure of an infrastructure capable of maintaining or developing technical advances.

By contrast, D&D magic requires very little infrastructure to create or maintain. Some of the higher-end stuff like teleportation circles does require a complicated process to manufacture and maintain, but the stuff that would most change ordinary people's lives by bringing in automation, sanitation, and material abundance doesn't. Unseen Servant needs a bit of wood and some string. Purify Food and Drink requires no material components. Plant Growth doesn't either. Fabricate is mid-level, but is exactly the kind of spell that breaks economies wide open and requires no material components except for the stuff you're transforming.

And of course, this stuff would have a feedback cycle. If less of your population is engaged in brutal manual labour, they have more time to devote to technical innovation, and fewer consequences for failures when their experiments don't pan out. Mass unemployment caused by economic and technical innovation is something we've seen a lot of in the West, and one of the things that it does is drive social change (whether for better or worse).

Plus, most magic items don't wear out. So over the course of a few hundred years from the discovery of arcane magic to the modern day of your D&D setting, you're mostly only accumulating more and more of them.

D&D's suggested explanation for why this is not the case is sensible - it's that there was such a civilisation (or possibly more than one as you prefer), that they were destroyed, and that their detritus is the magical treasure people are pulling out of ruins. But if one doesn't want that post-apocalyptic vibe, the other option IMHO is to set things at the point where that boom is about to take off, but hasn't yet - early modernity (the 16th and 17th century equivalents). Having run so many post-apoc D&D settings of the above type that I can't even keep track of them, I decided to do something different with Emern (though even in that there is a post-apocalyptic angle).

Quote from: two_fishes;491382My own response to this would be that it's fine. I'm not entirely interested in trying to get so deeply into the mindset of a person living in pseudo-medieval, magical fantasy world, at least not when I'm playing D&D. The game is so full of anachronistic assumptions that trying to escape them seems like tilting at windmills. Hell, many of the component requirements for 1e spells amount to anachronistic gags. I say, go for it. Any high school level physics knowledge is fair game.

EDIT: Not to mention that, as Justin pointed out, it's way too easy to underestimate how much the ancients understood the cause and effect of the world, whether or not they dug the actual underlying physics.

I really wish I could "Like" this post. +1.

Quote from: RPGPundit;491356I follow the strict descriptions of the spells, if a player can think of anything to do with the spell that doesn't in any way break those description guidelines then they can do it.

That's how I do it as well. The problem I've seen is mostly with inexperienced GMs who are running the RPG like a chess game:

They put PCs in a situation of which there are only so many obvious possible ways to act. They expect the players to take one of those ways so they can do their next move. When the players come up with a creative solution to the problem, they aren't prepared for it so they say, "You can't use the spell that way...."

Quote from: Cranewings;491160On the other hand, I'm a bit of a stickler when it comes to spell descriptions. A levitated enemy would control the spell and refuse to levitate. It isn't exactly antigravity.

Not sure what game system you're using, but that's not the case of AD&D.

"...If cast upon another creature, the magic-user can levitate it at a maximum movement of 10' per round...If the recipient of the spell is unwilling, that creature is entitled to a saving throw to determine if the levitate spell affects it...", PH, 1rst Ed, page 70

In most other games I've seen it's the same, though in Palladium/Rifts, there is no saving throw.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;491436By contrast, D&D magic requires very little infrastructure to create or maintain. Some of the higher-end stuff like teleportation circles does require a complicated process to manufacture and maintain, but the stuff that would most change ordinary people's lives by bringing in automation, sanitation, and material abundance doesn't. Unseen Servant needs a bit of wood and some string. Purify Food and Drink requires no material components. Plant Growth doesn't either. Fabricate is mid-level, but is exactly the kind of spell that breaks economies wide open and requires no material components except for the stuff you're transforming.

The expensive and/or naturally rare portion of that infrastructure, however, is the spellcaster themselves. Theoretically they require years of training.

QuotePlus, most magic items don't wear out.

Well, there's no mechanic for them to wear out. But that may be largely because the scale on which they wear out is sufficiently irrelevant to PC adventurers. Several early AD&D modules feature magic which has become faulty due to age, IIRC.

But, yes, if you want to look at where magic is going to have an effect, it'll be any place here you get a permanent duration. Particularly permanent durations you get on the cheap.

The campaign world I've been running since 2000 is not particularly advanced from a technological standpoint, but is remarkably cleaner and more comfortable than the historical Middle Ages and Renaissance. I don't worry too much about the details, but if you peel back the covers you'll find magical sewers; clerical orders that bless the fields (increasing crops as much as modern fertilizers do); other clerical orders that respond quickly to quash disease outbreaks; a proliferation of continual flame spells providing cheap and universal light throughout the night; and so forth.

The infrastructure (and societal structure) just doesn't exist to, for example, mass-produce magical cars (although you'll find noble families with magical airships). But there is enough magic in the world (and in society) to make people significantly more wealthy.

(With that being said, this campaign world also a short history of civilization. And things are definitely on a cusp where things might tumble into a magically-driven industrial revolution if given half the chance.)