Today’s random gaming thought

[swan_tower]

(Non-gaming thing first: one week left to pre-order Maps to Nowhere!)

I’m playing in two Pathfinder games right now, and keep running up against the fact that nobody in those worlds ever uses magic sensibly.

This post is brought to you today by a tongue-in-cheek discussion with one of my GMs about how my PC wants to get an NPC to leave the city faster, wherein I joked about hitting her over the head with a Rod of Concussionless Incapacitation. Which is a solution to a problem we pretend doesn’t exist: in fiction people get knocked unconscious all the time, often for hours, and yet somehow wake up without concussions and permanent brain damage the way you would in reality.

But let’s take problems we do admit exist. The equipment list for Pathfinder includes a collapsible (and therefore semi-portable) bathtub, but there’s no magic item for a bathtub that fills itself with hot water — even though that would be dead easy to make. (Two cantrips would do it: prestidigitation and create water.) The GM for one campaign has a homebrewed cantrip/orison of birth control. The other campaign is Kingmaker, with its “SimKingdom” rules; those include sewer systems, but we built continuous-use wondrous items of purify food and drink into ours so we’re not just dumping our sewage into the lake. And I recently figured out that if we make a command word item of plant growth and use it on all the farms in the kingdom, we’re boosting our crop yields by 1/3 for the year, allowing us to feed our population with less encroachment on wild spaces and less risk of famine, for the low investment of a few thousand gold.

This is a utility approach to magic that you almost never see, whether it’s in D&D or novels. Even when magic is abundant in the setting, it rarely gets applied to the basics of day-to-day life. But if we really had these methods available to us, you damn bet we’d use them to make our lives simpler and more comfortable; just look at what we do with technology! Somebody would set up shop marketing self-filling heated magic bathtubs and command word items of prestidigitation to clean your house with. Sure, it’s a less lucrative market than selling swords and armor to adventurers — but your customer base is orders of magnitude larger.

You don’t see this in Pathfinder because ultimately, the game does not give a flying damn about anything that isn’t pertinent to making yourself a better adventurer. And you don’t see it in fiction because it won’t influence the direction of the plot. But there’s no reason it couldn’t be there as a background detail, a way to make the world feel lived-in and believable. For a while I was reading a serialized online story called Tales of MU, which was basically the urban fantasy evolution of a D&D-style world; that’s one of the few stories I can think of where magic really did get used in all these kinds of ways and more. But I can think of perishingly few others.

So, recs? Either of stories that do this, or other magic items D&D ought to have and doesn’t. 🙂 If I were a game publisher, I would so be tempted to put out a sourcebook of utility and luxury items . . .

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[thornsilver]

Harry Turtledove "The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump". I have started it two times and have gotten absorbed by something else, so I never finished it. But it is a showcasing of magic-as-technology society.

[swan_tower]

I've heard that title before, but never tried to read it. Thanks for the rec!

[landofnowhere]

So this is only tangential to your post, but I recently realized that all the fantasy birth control I've seen has been targeted at the woman. "Take these herbs/wear this charm and you won't conceive." I don't think I've ever seen a magical condom or magical contraceptives used by the man or by both partners equally.

[thornsilver]

Anne Bishop's "Dark Jewel" books has a contraceptive that men drink.

[swan_tower]

Our homebrew cantrip/orison works on people of all genders, so there's that.

I suspect magical contraceptives are aimed at female characters for two reasons:

1) It's more frequently female authors who bother to include them in the story.

2) In real life, contraception is frequently thought of as the woman's responsibility. I know there are attempts underway to develop a male pill; I know one of the obstacles to that pill going into use is that men complain about side effects. Y'know, like the side effects women put up with ALL THE DAMN TIME from their birth control.

[mindstalk]

Women's responsibility, also women's self-protection. Say the world only had pill-like male birth control, the use of which could not be easily verified by the woman (unlike a condom). I think that would have a big effect on behaviors, relative to female-controlled contraception.

[cgbookcat1]

Patricia Wrede's Frontier Magic series includes the use of magic to help with household tasks. The protagonist's sister & husband joins a group who avoid magic and she describes how much harder their housework is.

That whole alternate history US is very interesting. There's also a giant magical wall down the middle of the continent to keep prehistoric wildlife out of human settlements.

[swan_tower]

Huh, that's interesting -- sort of the magic equivalent of Amish?

[cgbookcat1]

Yes, very like that, only it's easier to join or leave.

[mindstalk]

Eberron has more utility magic, and a class to create it. The old Glantri Gazetteer had some too, including continual light streetlights. (A no-brainer in Basic, which didn't use material components, unlike the gem cost in other editions.)

The "Tippyverse" was someone's online effort at maximizing rational exploitation of D&D 3e item magic. It gets weird fast.

I think even your magic bathtub would still be too expensive for ordinary people, and players don't have to worry about things like that for their PCs. (Thus going around in smelly armor all day, we're not smelling it.) Relatedly, I was in a desert-based Pathfinder Eberron game, and we soon realized the 'create water' as an at-will cantrip pretty much broke the chief resource constraint of going out into the desert.

Fiction: I think most settings don't have as broad and as powerful magic as D&D. But the Dragaera books certainly have people with magic using it to make their lives better, including rain avoidance and commercial teleports or resurrections. The King's Peace had widespread healing and birth control magic. God Stalk has ordinary people with minor talents using cleaning or bread-rising magic. Magic in the Sharing Knife is exclusive to the Lakewalkers, but they use it practically. Harry Potter had various magic items for sale.

[swan_tower]

Harry Potter is sort of vaguely interested in using magic for practical stuff . . . and at the same time very much not. Her worldbuilding is bizarre.

As for bathtubs being too expensive for ordinary people: I forgot the constraint that create water only makes two gallons unless you're higher level (which would raise the cost). But if you fill it with water normally, you could have it be self-heating for only 180 gp, if it's usable once per day. Nobility of course would have them, and I suspect it would be the kind of luxury item a middle-class household aspires to/passes down through the generations as a treasured possession.

I am intrigued by this "Tippyverse" thing -- I'll have to check it out!

[the_rck]

You might find this post interesting: https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3119242.html

It's a discussion of how an easy purify water spell changes a society. All of beccaelizabeth's posts under the 'magic' tag or the 'gurps' tag might be of interest, too.

[swan_tower]

I'll check them out, thanks!

[genarti]

Sherwood Smith's Inda series does some very interesting stuff along these lines!

[swan_tower]

That's been on my "to read" list for . . . an embarrassingly long time.

[ladybird97]

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho has a wonderful depiction of how practical magic intersects with the stratification of gender and class.

[varidog]

When I wrote "Weeds Among Stone," I had fun with exactly that sort of thing. I had dwarf farmers of magical magicalness producing enough food to sustain all those city dwarves that don't farm plus all the refugees from a famine. For yields, I assumed modern mechanistic yields and multiplied out the numbers. A small population of 50,000 farmers could sustain a city of a million, along with all the pollution and water contamination. Dump in vast sewage sewage of class and race prejudice, and you've got a fine mess.

[mindstalk]

What kind of magic? It's struck me that to get a modern non-agrarian society, you need not just good yields but some sort of automated harvest. China and India had high yield per acre relative to the US, but if it takes the same effort/food to harvest, that just gives you more farmers per acre, not many more people per farmer.

Weather control or "repel pests" or generic 'bless crops' give more reliable food production, and more yield per seed, which does help, but don't replace the combine harvester.

(Though now I'm thinking of a semi-urban society where the population migrates out to the countryside in the fall to help with the harvest.)

(Twelve Kingdoms reversed that; a magical China that was mostly agrarian, but in winter people moved from farm-adjacent villages to more central towns, giving a part-time urban experience.)

[varidog]

The Loam, the farming dwarves, are the chosen people of the agricultural goddess. Their magic of agriculture is more knowledge, technique, and a way of life rather than casting explicit spells. Think of it as implied rather than overt magic, integrated into life, done over the entire course of the year, where plows and seeds and songs all contribute to the overall effectiveness. And when things do go wrong, you get in a specialist in pests, or trees, or some other specific topic.

The feeding people problem came on with a refugee crisis. The extra labor for harvest first came from human POWs, but eventually worked into its own food-for-labor system. Because of this, the transport system is stretched to the breaking point because the Ironmongers dwarves are only at early steam and won't work with dirt plowing dwarves. Much of the wagon transport comes from long lines of wagon leading to warehouse towns where heavy human barge traffic takes the food downriver. A legion of human operated barges take the crops to the city, where the crops go into the agricultural administration which also administers the very corrupt food distribution program, which is at the crux of the book.

So there is a system, it just doesn't work well, and there's no more brute force to be had. (I enjoy writing systems that don't work well because that creates problems, which gives my character something to do and lets the readers scream "everything there, they just have to talk to each other." Just about everything that you see is stolen from somewhere in history.)

Fortunately, the farming dwarves are also the best cooks ever, and that gives an opening to our protagonist, a cook whose family once worked for emperors and kings.

[swan_tower]

In the case of our situation, it's more yield per seed, so doesn't vastly increase the labor: you're still harvesting the same number of plants, they just produce bigger grains etc, or more grains per plant. Threshing might take a little longer, but it isn't the same increase of labor as bringing more land under cultivation, which historically has been one of the major ways to boost production (since then you have to prep the land, do more planting, do more weeding, do more harvesting, etc).

Harvesting magic can be our next infrastructure improvement. :-)

[mindstalk]

Or needing to reserve less grain as seed, which would save planting labor. I'd been thinking of more seeds becoming plants to be harvested, but it can run the other way.

[swan_tower]

Good point.