Does magic change the world
Jul. 15th, 2016 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI was reading around about GURPS and found
http://ravenswing59.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/ggf-3.html
and
http://ravenswing59.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/magic-as-technology-take-ii.html
which postulate that on the whole magic does not change society, because maths.
But I think their math is wrong.
Take their example magic item that would change the world: Purify Water.
They make one frankly bizarre choice that makes it incomprehensibly expensive, when they make it self powering.
Power is a bloody expensive enchantment, costs 500 FP, meaning 500 mage-days.
But Purify Water is dead cheap, it's only 50.
A self powering Purify Water takes
Time to cast: Usually 5 to 10 seconds per gallon, unless a large container and ring are used. M184
So that's hours times minutes times seconds divided by five, (24*60*60)/5 gallons of water per day, 17,280 gallons. Or, given a big enough hoop and somewhere to put the water, maybe as many as 86,400 gallons, if you take 1 second to cast as the usual minimum.
I honestly can't see where he got 3,000 gallons from.
And that self powering Purify Water can take seawater or reasonably liquid sewage and turn it into fresh, clean, pure water. It will do that reliably, forever, or until the matter the spell was cast on gets destroyed.
A human needs ... okay, google says this is one of those complicated ones, but I haven't found one yet that says more than a gallon of drinking water per day. Though there's some complication of units, because GURPS didn't go metric like sensible people, and half this water needs stuff actually lists it in cups, which, what? But anyways:
That one Purify Water, self powered, taking 550 mage-days, can purify enough for a city of up to 17,280 people to drink, even if you use a small hoop with a slow flow rate.
A city obviously has uses other than drinking for water, but then a city in medieval times that isn't London is super unlikely to have 17K people.
One mage working alone could in less than 2 years solve the local clean water problem forever. I'm seeing that as pretty world changing.
But! That's with self powering. There's no reason for it to be self powering.
Quick and Dirty enchantment can make a hoop of Purify Water in half an hour or an hour max, with another hour for the mages involved to rest up and recharge. That's the same 5 seconds per gallon hoop. Except someone has to invoke it to make that gallon. And any single person is going to feel a bit tired after getting a gallon of water out, but that 1 fatigue point they spent will come back in ten minutes of normal rest. So now the Purify Water system is human fatigue powered, and no single human could make enough for the whole city. But, why would they want to? Stand in line! Queue up for your clean water like you would for well water, tip the clever whatsit so one gallon of liquid goes in one side, then tilt it so the water goes through the hoop and comes out clean. Have a sit down while you drink some of your nice clean water. Still have a lot more water for later. Carry on with your day.
Having to measure one gallon of dirty water at a time rather than keeping a continuous flow will slow things down. But an 8 hour day of getting out a gallon every 30 seconds - which seems pretty slow - is about a thousand people getting their daily requirements. Which, okay, is still only a tenth of the city, but your mages made that thing in one hour. They made four in a day if they were slacking. In that same 550 mage days they could make 2200 of the things, enough for 2,200,000 people, and guess what? That's the entire population of an early medieval country.
Which seems pretty world changing from here.
Especially since the magic lasts as long as the hoop its cast on does, which won't be forever because humans, but will be a really long time. You don't have to have one set of quick and dirty enchanters turning out only these things for a couple years, you can have quick and dirty mages making one or two whenever they're asked for centuries and it will add up.
And the objection that enchanters have better things to do than Purify Water? Well, yeah, arguably, if they're running things by Mage standards, they may well be needed for other things. But a Quick and Dirty circle can do a few low power items really really fast, so their priorities are (a) Powerstone, if that exists, and (b) items exactly like Purify Water or Ignite Fire, the kind of everyday things that everyone will want.
And they'll be reasonably priced. GURPS Magic does some math for TL3 that works out at $1 per fatigue point, so a Purify Water hoop costs $50. And that's including the chance of failure when producing it. And rounding up. In a rare magic setting the price goes way the hell up, but if a Journeyman Enchanter is making Average money and a Master Enchanter is Comfortable, you end up at $1 per point. If you can persuade them to take a couple hours to do Q&D instead of arriving at a time they're all engaged in some kind of magnum opus. But if you have a Master Enchanter they can make a lot more items faster than the slow and sure dudes, so why wouldn't they?
Enchanters doing Slow and Sure enchantment, meaning any circle with nobody with Enchant at skill high enough to do Q&D, learn on the job. They split the points between Enchant and whatever else they do. And to even learn Enchant they have a minimum of Magery 2. So the standard 800 hours for 1cp of job related learning gets doubled by the split focus, 1600 hours, but then M2 only takes 80% of the time, 1280 hours, and M3 takes 70%, 1120 hours. If they're Enchanting for a living 8 hours a day 5 days a week 50 weeks a year (with holidays) (which is a very lenient and modern set of assumptions), they can start Enchanting at skill 15, and need skill 20 to lead the circle Magic assumes exists for Q&D. That'll take them 9 or 10 years of daily Slow and Sure work. Quick and Dirty on the other hand doesn't say it counts as a job, but a generous and lenient GM could say it splits between an hour of enchantment and an hour of Recover Energy. That would again double the hours needed to become a Master Enchanter, to 18 or 20 years, but you'd get Recover Energy 20 in half that time, recover much faster, and be able to do more Q&D a day. So a job as an Enchanter means steadily getting better at your core skills, and eventually becoming a Master, with plenty of potential lifespan ahead.
Especially if Purify Water has basically eliminated waterborne disease. That would make a hell of a difference. Demographics would change immensely. From just that one spell.
So there are plenty of Master Enchanters around, leading circles of Journeymen Enchanters who are improving steadily. What are the Apprentice Enchanters doing?
Learning spells from 10 different colleges for their prerequisites, before they can even attempt to learn Enchant.
And that's where the objection that not all mages will even know, for instance, water magic, becomes a bit more tenuous. There's no such thing as a specialist Water Enchanter, in that under GURPS rules they must be familiar with 10/24 colleges. Enchant doesn't count towards its own prerequisites. Meta is pretty advanced, like Enchant, there's a lot of prerequisites before you can get any of it. Animal spells require Empathy as either an advantage or a college, making them fiddly if you are going for breadth. Tech is probably not available at TL3, more or less. Necromancy, Gate and Mind Control have suggested Magical Legality Classes that complicate things for mages interested in those topics, in ways that burn character points and time, which could be better spent on more innocuous but useful spells. So that's 17 colleges to choose between, if you're only going to get the base spell of each. And both Weather and Making & Breaking colleges require you to have multiple elemental spells to get at them. Which leaves 9 colleges you could get at without some kind of elemental magic, and that isn't enough to enchant. It is implied by the 10 colleges prereq that every enchanter knows at least one sort of Elemental magic, and given how obviously the 4 elements -> Making and Breaking -> Enchant spells go together, it seems likely they've got at least the base spell of each element. That's Ignite Fire, for magical matchboxes that never need renewing, though admittedly they need a ten minute sit down after use. But with one extra spell that's easily Purify Water, and two spells in a college is hardly a speciality.
It seems likely that Enchanters would be taught the same spells that can be done Quick and Dirty, as part of their breadth requirements, and because those are daily bread to their adult career.
http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=5813
says about 50 spells can be done Q&D, though many of them aren't suitable as magic items cause they'd just mess you up to try and carry them.
Also it points out that Alarm could bring about a navigation revolution, seeing as it involves precise timing, the basic requirement of some navigational calculations.
Nifty.
... the complaint that fantasy rpg settings tend to be medieval-ish plus age of sail ships, er, suddenly looking logical?
One of the Q&D items listed is a cooking pot that does its own cooking. Microwaves cost $30 to $60 at TL3 !
Their Inscribe item sounds a lot like a space pen that never runs out.
And Odor is definitely going to be a reliable money spinner. Given the example of perfume houses you'd get Enchanters who made their whole business just casting Odor.
Also it says "Preserve Food: This enchantment, $20 per pound up to three pounds of food protected, may be of little use in most circumstances"
... right, so a 3lb refrigerator at TL3 isn't going to be a game changer?
Okay.
I know they mean to adventurers and I know 3lb of food isn't much compared to household needs all week, but, that's several meals that aren't going to rot.
Quick and Dirty Enchantment plus this kind of small spell equals world changing magic.
The only glitch in that is demographics. If you can't get half a dozen Enchanters, you're back to only small amounts of world getting changed.
GURPS Fantasy p103 has some suggestions on demographics at TL3 that are actually not as helpful as they initially look, because there's a lot of wiggle room in them. It suggests "any medium or large city would probably have a single enchanter." And on F94 it handily defines city for you: 5,000 to 9,999,
10,000 to 49,999, and
50,000 to 99,999 inhabitants.
Okay, call that small, medium, large. A city of 10K people has a single enchanter? But then so does a 50K city if the same sentence applies. That looks like one enchanter in 50K people.
But medieval, TL3, low tech society was vast majority rural. There's a bunch of variation and quite a lot of argue on this specific point in the tiny amount of medieval demographics I've read, but GURPS has a rule on F93: "As a guideline, assume that 1/5 of the population is urban in a prosperous and well-settled land, 1/10 in a poorer land, and 1/20 in a barely civilized country." Okay, say only 10% of the population are in cities at all. That one enchanter per city? Could reasonably be read as one in 50K city dwellers.
At which point you've got a really small Enchanter count in England.
English population estimates for 1300 range between 4 and 6 million, depending how many they reckon are about to die of plague. Call it 5 million and 10% urban and you get 500,000 people in any sort of urban. One in 50K of them and you can end up with 10 Enchanters nationally. Which is probably actually an overestimate compared to cities above 10K. I mean in 1066 only London was above 10K. In 1377 the population had plummeted again and so that was true again. But somewhere in the middle then sure, maybe you'd get the whole top 10 that high. Maybe. *very dubious*
In which case you've got 10 Enchanters who theoretically live in a lot of different places, and they're supposed to change the world?
Maybe there's 50 Enchanters instead? That many could make circles.
50 seems like a lot, given the city sizes and assumptions thus far.
Or those 10 could all have studied at Hogwarts equivalent and be able to get together to work.
Really the sheer scarcity of people explains a lot about how the world doesn't get changed.
But as soon as you start changing the world you get more people. See Purify Water vs plagues, for one example. Cleaner cities equal bigger cities, possibly even people dying slowly enough they didn't depend on incomers from the country to keep their numbers rising. And as for anything that improves food yields... the assumptions in GURPS Fantasy p95 seem conservative, given that people would happily put the work in more for more than one spell if it would increase the yield, and Bless Plants it reckons will double yield. That might mean you double population. And that's off just 5 spells. Once you've doubled how many the land can support, you don't have a 5 million population Britain, you're up around 10 million. And that doesn't look medieval, that's the 1800s. More people equals more specialists, of every kind, and suddenly you get some interesting things happen to rate of innovation.
If and only if common magic can double the yield of everyone's fields, of course.
Basically, if you can get enough mages in one place to even teach each other a broad enough range of spells to make an Enchanter, and if those Enchanters understand the value of working together, and if they feel like making money on a regular basis through making simple enchanted items, then magic will change the world. Even the simplest items could make pure water for all of London in a few days. Even one Purify Water item could make clean water for a whole medieval sized town. And be made in an hour.
The only way for magic to not change the world is to mess with mages: make them too scarce, uncommunicative, uncooperative, or too unlikely to become Enchanters. If the basic GURPS assumptions for magic can be met, then Enchanted items will pile up and nudge the effective tech level upwards, starting a demographic upward spiral that puts more mages into the system.
Of course if demons are a serious and regular problem, you can also get a mage downward spiral, or outright crash. See 'too scarce'.
But OP's math is just peculiar, for someone who says they're using GURPS, and I disagree with their conclusions.
http://ravenswing59.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/ggf-3.html
and
http://ravenswing59.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/magic-as-technology-take-ii.html
which postulate that on the whole magic does not change society, because maths.
But I think their math is wrong.
Take their example magic item that would change the world: Purify Water.
They make one frankly bizarre choice that makes it incomprehensibly expensive, when they make it self powering.
Power is a bloody expensive enchantment, costs 500 FP, meaning 500 mage-days.
But Purify Water is dead cheap, it's only 50.
A self powering Purify Water takes
Time to cast: Usually 5 to 10 seconds per gallon, unless a large container and ring are used. M184
So that's hours times minutes times seconds divided by five, (24*60*60)/5 gallons of water per day, 17,280 gallons. Or, given a big enough hoop and somewhere to put the water, maybe as many as 86,400 gallons, if you take 1 second to cast as the usual minimum.
I honestly can't see where he got 3,000 gallons from.
And that self powering Purify Water can take seawater or reasonably liquid sewage and turn it into fresh, clean, pure water. It will do that reliably, forever, or until the matter the spell was cast on gets destroyed.
A human needs ... okay, google says this is one of those complicated ones, but I haven't found one yet that says more than a gallon of drinking water per day. Though there's some complication of units, because GURPS didn't go metric like sensible people, and half this water needs stuff actually lists it in cups, which, what? But anyways:
That one Purify Water, self powered, taking 550 mage-days, can purify enough for a city of up to 17,280 people to drink, even if you use a small hoop with a slow flow rate.
A city obviously has uses other than drinking for water, but then a city in medieval times that isn't London is super unlikely to have 17K people.
One mage working alone could in less than 2 years solve the local clean water problem forever. I'm seeing that as pretty world changing.
But! That's with self powering. There's no reason for it to be self powering.
Quick and Dirty enchantment can make a hoop of Purify Water in half an hour or an hour max, with another hour for the mages involved to rest up and recharge. That's the same 5 seconds per gallon hoop. Except someone has to invoke it to make that gallon. And any single person is going to feel a bit tired after getting a gallon of water out, but that 1 fatigue point they spent will come back in ten minutes of normal rest. So now the Purify Water system is human fatigue powered, and no single human could make enough for the whole city. But, why would they want to? Stand in line! Queue up for your clean water like you would for well water, tip the clever whatsit so one gallon of liquid goes in one side, then tilt it so the water goes through the hoop and comes out clean. Have a sit down while you drink some of your nice clean water. Still have a lot more water for later. Carry on with your day.
Having to measure one gallon of dirty water at a time rather than keeping a continuous flow will slow things down. But an 8 hour day of getting out a gallon every 30 seconds - which seems pretty slow - is about a thousand people getting their daily requirements. Which, okay, is still only a tenth of the city, but your mages made that thing in one hour. They made four in a day if they were slacking. In that same 550 mage days they could make 2200 of the things, enough for 2,200,000 people, and guess what? That's the entire population of an early medieval country.
Which seems pretty world changing from here.
Especially since the magic lasts as long as the hoop its cast on does, which won't be forever because humans, but will be a really long time. You don't have to have one set of quick and dirty enchanters turning out only these things for a couple years, you can have quick and dirty mages making one or two whenever they're asked for centuries and it will add up.
And the objection that enchanters have better things to do than Purify Water? Well, yeah, arguably, if they're running things by Mage standards, they may well be needed for other things. But a Quick and Dirty circle can do a few low power items really really fast, so their priorities are (a) Powerstone, if that exists, and (b) items exactly like Purify Water or Ignite Fire, the kind of everyday things that everyone will want.
And they'll be reasonably priced. GURPS Magic does some math for TL3 that works out at $1 per fatigue point, so a Purify Water hoop costs $50. And that's including the chance of failure when producing it. And rounding up. In a rare magic setting the price goes way the hell up, but if a Journeyman Enchanter is making Average money and a Master Enchanter is Comfortable, you end up at $1 per point. If you can persuade them to take a couple hours to do Q&D instead of arriving at a time they're all engaged in some kind of magnum opus. But if you have a Master Enchanter they can make a lot more items faster than the slow and sure dudes, so why wouldn't they?
Enchanters doing Slow and Sure enchantment, meaning any circle with nobody with Enchant at skill high enough to do Q&D, learn on the job. They split the points between Enchant and whatever else they do. And to even learn Enchant they have a minimum of Magery 2. So the standard 800 hours for 1cp of job related learning gets doubled by the split focus, 1600 hours, but then M2 only takes 80% of the time, 1280 hours, and M3 takes 70%, 1120 hours. If they're Enchanting for a living 8 hours a day 5 days a week 50 weeks a year (with holidays) (which is a very lenient and modern set of assumptions), they can start Enchanting at skill 15, and need skill 20 to lead the circle Magic assumes exists for Q&D. That'll take them 9 or 10 years of daily Slow and Sure work. Quick and Dirty on the other hand doesn't say it counts as a job, but a generous and lenient GM could say it splits between an hour of enchantment and an hour of Recover Energy. That would again double the hours needed to become a Master Enchanter, to 18 or 20 years, but you'd get Recover Energy 20 in half that time, recover much faster, and be able to do more Q&D a day. So a job as an Enchanter means steadily getting better at your core skills, and eventually becoming a Master, with plenty of potential lifespan ahead.
Especially if Purify Water has basically eliminated waterborne disease. That would make a hell of a difference. Demographics would change immensely. From just that one spell.
So there are plenty of Master Enchanters around, leading circles of Journeymen Enchanters who are improving steadily. What are the Apprentice Enchanters doing?
Learning spells from 10 different colleges for their prerequisites, before they can even attempt to learn Enchant.
And that's where the objection that not all mages will even know, for instance, water magic, becomes a bit more tenuous. There's no such thing as a specialist Water Enchanter, in that under GURPS rules they must be familiar with 10/24 colleges. Enchant doesn't count towards its own prerequisites. Meta is pretty advanced, like Enchant, there's a lot of prerequisites before you can get any of it. Animal spells require Empathy as either an advantage or a college, making them fiddly if you are going for breadth. Tech is probably not available at TL3, more or less. Necromancy, Gate and Mind Control have suggested Magical Legality Classes that complicate things for mages interested in those topics, in ways that burn character points and time, which could be better spent on more innocuous but useful spells. So that's 17 colleges to choose between, if you're only going to get the base spell of each. And both Weather and Making & Breaking colleges require you to have multiple elemental spells to get at them. Which leaves 9 colleges you could get at without some kind of elemental magic, and that isn't enough to enchant. It is implied by the 10 colleges prereq that every enchanter knows at least one sort of Elemental magic, and given how obviously the 4 elements -> Making and Breaking -> Enchant spells go together, it seems likely they've got at least the base spell of each element. That's Ignite Fire, for magical matchboxes that never need renewing, though admittedly they need a ten minute sit down after use. But with one extra spell that's easily Purify Water, and two spells in a college is hardly a speciality.
It seems likely that Enchanters would be taught the same spells that can be done Quick and Dirty, as part of their breadth requirements, and because those are daily bread to their adult career.
http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=5813
says about 50 spells can be done Q&D, though many of them aren't suitable as magic items cause they'd just mess you up to try and carry them.
Also it points out that Alarm could bring about a navigation revolution, seeing as it involves precise timing, the basic requirement of some navigational calculations.
Nifty.
... the complaint that fantasy rpg settings tend to be medieval-ish plus age of sail ships, er, suddenly looking logical?
One of the Q&D items listed is a cooking pot that does its own cooking. Microwaves cost $30 to $60 at TL3 !
Their Inscribe item sounds a lot like a space pen that never runs out.
And Odor is definitely going to be a reliable money spinner. Given the example of perfume houses you'd get Enchanters who made their whole business just casting Odor.
Also it says "Preserve Food: This enchantment, $20 per pound up to three pounds of food protected, may be of little use in most circumstances"
... right, so a 3lb refrigerator at TL3 isn't going to be a game changer?
Okay.
I know they mean to adventurers and I know 3lb of food isn't much compared to household needs all week, but, that's several meals that aren't going to rot.
Quick and Dirty Enchantment plus this kind of small spell equals world changing magic.
The only glitch in that is demographics. If you can't get half a dozen Enchanters, you're back to only small amounts of world getting changed.
GURPS Fantasy p103 has some suggestions on demographics at TL3 that are actually not as helpful as they initially look, because there's a lot of wiggle room in them. It suggests "any medium or large city would probably have a single enchanter." And on F94 it handily defines city for you: 5,000 to 9,999,
10,000 to 49,999, and
50,000 to 99,999 inhabitants.
Okay, call that small, medium, large. A city of 10K people has a single enchanter? But then so does a 50K city if the same sentence applies. That looks like one enchanter in 50K people.
But medieval, TL3, low tech society was vast majority rural. There's a bunch of variation and quite a lot of argue on this specific point in the tiny amount of medieval demographics I've read, but GURPS has a rule on F93: "As a guideline, assume that 1/5 of the population is urban in a prosperous and well-settled land, 1/10 in a poorer land, and 1/20 in a barely civilized country." Okay, say only 10% of the population are in cities at all. That one enchanter per city? Could reasonably be read as one in 50K city dwellers.
At which point you've got a really small Enchanter count in England.
English population estimates for 1300 range between 4 and 6 million, depending how many they reckon are about to die of plague. Call it 5 million and 10% urban and you get 500,000 people in any sort of urban. One in 50K of them and you can end up with 10 Enchanters nationally. Which is probably actually an overestimate compared to cities above 10K. I mean in 1066 only London was above 10K. In 1377 the population had plummeted again and so that was true again. But somewhere in the middle then sure, maybe you'd get the whole top 10 that high. Maybe. *very dubious*
In which case you've got 10 Enchanters who theoretically live in a lot of different places, and they're supposed to change the world?
Maybe there's 50 Enchanters instead? That many could make circles.
50 seems like a lot, given the city sizes and assumptions thus far.
Or those 10 could all have studied at Hogwarts equivalent and be able to get together to work.
Really the sheer scarcity of people explains a lot about how the world doesn't get changed.
But as soon as you start changing the world you get more people. See Purify Water vs plagues, for one example. Cleaner cities equal bigger cities, possibly even people dying slowly enough they didn't depend on incomers from the country to keep their numbers rising. And as for anything that improves food yields... the assumptions in GURPS Fantasy p95 seem conservative, given that people would happily put the work in more for more than one spell if it would increase the yield, and Bless Plants it reckons will double yield. That might mean you double population. And that's off just 5 spells. Once you've doubled how many the land can support, you don't have a 5 million population Britain, you're up around 10 million. And that doesn't look medieval, that's the 1800s. More people equals more specialists, of every kind, and suddenly you get some interesting things happen to rate of innovation.
If and only if common magic can double the yield of everyone's fields, of course.
Basically, if you can get enough mages in one place to even teach each other a broad enough range of spells to make an Enchanter, and if those Enchanters understand the value of working together, and if they feel like making money on a regular basis through making simple enchanted items, then magic will change the world. Even the simplest items could make pure water for all of London in a few days. Even one Purify Water item could make clean water for a whole medieval sized town. And be made in an hour.
The only way for magic to not change the world is to mess with mages: make them too scarce, uncommunicative, uncooperative, or too unlikely to become Enchanters. If the basic GURPS assumptions for magic can be met, then Enchanted items will pile up and nudge the effective tech level upwards, starting a demographic upward spiral that puts more mages into the system.
Of course if demons are a serious and regular problem, you can also get a mage downward spiral, or outright crash. See 'too scarce'.
But OP's math is just peculiar, for someone who says they're using GURPS, and I disagree with their conclusions.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-16 12:31 pm (UTC)techmagic, but it won't change humans being humans. Because "wizards!" is not that much different from "engineers!" and you'll notice how we don't actually.... talk much about engineering in day to day life. Even if it's in everything.I am being unclear. Will try to come back and be clearer later.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 02:11 pm (UTC)But yeah, humans would not necessarily act for the good of all. Because humans.
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Date: 2016-07-17 02:22 pm (UTC)PS
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Date: 2016-07-17 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-30 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-30 03:08 am (UTC)