Veeky Forums, how do you handle the level of average magic competence of your commoners?

>If they're 1 in 10,000, it's already on the level on half-true half-legends.

Not really. If that were true, we would hold professional female firefighters to the half-true-half-legend standard, as less than 1 in 10,000 of our glorious country is a professional female firefighter. It takes considerably more than that to amaze people.

7. Depends on power levels that people in the setting are used to. Weather control? Large-scale levitation? Or just small sparks and purification rituals? (People might be used to handguns, but walking around with a grenade launcher will turn some heads. If people regularly see howitzers fire off, they won't be surprised when someone rolls a personal one through town.)

Mechanically referring to the feel of the game. So I should have just said gamefeel, but I didn't think Veeky Forums really cared too much about /v/ design terms.

I think these are two good answers. Though, I don't really know how to handle it. Most of the adventures I read through generally have maybe one, maybe two magic users per every 3 or 4 adventures, so I'm not really sure of a good base to put things at.

>This is flat-out false, even within the the same edition of D&D. Take 4e Dark Sun, for example, and compare it to the stock "points of light" setting.
I still disagree. I think it's more of a matter of what is a good balance vs what you advertise. I think a lot of Veeky Forums in general agrees that forgotten realms is a bad setting, but I think a lot of that has to go to inconsistencies, like how the world is extremely high magic, but 80% of the adventures or lore there barely even involve calling in a magic user. It just seems contradictory.

I think those are really good questions to ask going in, but I think the general issue is much larger than "Whatever your setting is".

They aren't /v/ design terms, using "mechanics" to talk about game rules is standard parlance. Even the game's actual designers do it that way.

No D&D setting is truly low magic, even in Dragonlance the most backward hillbilly should at least be aware that magic exists even if he has never seen it before himself

How common is said magic depends on the setting and the area you are in, even FR is inconsistent as fuck, you can walk into a town where hotels maintain themselves through magic, then walk into the next one and everyone is afraid of your party's wizard

But we have TV, books, the net and shit user. Also going from male to female firefighters isn't such a "holy shit noboby could do that" thing.

Hrm. Let's say for the 1/10.000 is like peasants thought of high nobles? Not out of this world but pretty awe-inspiring nontheless.

Gamefeel is a /v/ term though, which is why I avoided it.

Also, it was to my understanding that when referring to Veeky Forums, mechanics meant both the game rules and also the reflection of the gamefeel through gameplay as opposed to fluff, as if you're stubborn and hard headed enough, you could essentially force any type of feel for your setting with appropriate fluffing.

>I think the general issue is much larger than "Whatever your setting is".
What's the issue? Wasn't the question how to handle magic in settings?

In Shadowrun, awakened are rare. Everybody KNOWS that magic is real, but seeing a mage at work, or seeing a magical creature is uncommon, surprising, and usually distressing because magic is regulated and if you see magic, it's probably because someone is going to die.

D&D has so many different settings that the question is meaningless. It's handled differently because it is inherently different.

However, there are no mechanical effects. It's all just fluff. Even if mages are one in a million, a party could be composed entirely of mages, and that would work. There's no mechanic for drawing attention to yourself because of magic. Even in D&D the average commoner's awareness of magic means nothing to your ability to do magic. If the GM wants to offer situational bonuses for creative applications of magic, then that is within the GMs purview, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule! I'm not including things that literally affect commoners (mind control stuff or things a magical bard might do), because it works even if literally nobody is surprised.

> I don't really know how to handle it.

In most D&D settings, assume that no NPC would be impressed by a spell 2nd level or lower. Less well-travelled NPCs might be impressed by 3rd and 4th level spells, most NPCs are impressed by 5th and 6th level spells, and all NPCs are impressed by 7th level and above unless they can cast spells of 6th level or higher themselves. There, you have a rule of thumb.

Wouldn't it also be something that depends on general population though? I mean, if you were to live in a village with only a few dozen people and even larger towns outside of things like capitals only reached 3-5k then that 1 in 10,000 becomes a much more impressive number.

>Wasn't the question how to handle magic in settings?
Yes, but to add onto that, how to handle it in a meaningful way that doesn't come off so contradictory or wishy-washy like Forgotten Realms or "Generic Fantasy" seems to treat it.

Which, again, I don't think is really a setting specific thing. Shouldn't it be more based on how accessible magic is in general? I think a high magic setting should have roughly the same magic-competence as any other high magic setting, otherwise, logically, wouldn't it just start to fall apart?

puts it in a good way. It feels logically and internally inconsistent to walk through a city that has magic detecting systems in place that teleport council mages to your location to force you to pay a fine, but then maybe one, even two cities away, they treat magic as though you are literally a god for being able to cast Charm Person.

Also this guy I think gets what I'm getting at. Thanks auto-update.

So, while that's a good rule to go by, how suspicious do you think an average person might be of magic trickery then? Is it like Computer technology where someone clicks something they didn't want and now assumes they have a virus? Just spitballing ideas at this point.

I will assume a world where magicians are rare, and work in isolation, alone or as small groups. No elemental powered locomotives, no "magic shoppes" on every main street, no armies of battle wizards launching fireballs like artillery, no crystal ball telephones.

>commoners know vaguely that magicians can kill with a touch, fly, create bursts of flame, etc, but have not actually seen this happen.
>they can't tell a real magic potion from a folk remedy
>even beneficial magic will seem spooky, and depending on the culture, might draw fear and retribution
>Outside of first hand exposure, their only knowledge comes from lay people like themselves telling stories with no more precision than myth or folklore.

Bear in mind most magic users ought to be low level, and might be employed as apprentices or in the service of a lord. They don't actually cast spells that often, and when they do, they're working discreetly for somebody else. Their bread and butter is divination and research.

The adventuring wizard who wanders around popping off high level spells is an extreme rarity, even in a setting where magic is relatively common and accepted.

In my OSR games, the average NPC wizard is level 1-4, has only the spells gained automatically by level progression, and those are rarely direct attack spells. If he's 4th level, he's as wealthy and powerful as a successful mercenary captain because he can provide services that are otherwise unreachable, and has little incentive to risk his neck. It's also very much to his benefit to keep his patron(s) guessing about the extent of his power, and dress his magic up with a bit of bullshit to make a good show.

This is true, in a modern large city you could have a few hundred mages, even with the 1/10000 odds.

>how suspicious do you think an average person might be of magic trickery then?

Always. Cow milk tastes sour? The neighbour's mother-in-law cursed it again, I'm sure of it! Best get me lucky charms out, that'll fix er' up.

Just think of all the kooky pseudoscience people believe in in real life, and the superstitions. That's in a world without spellcasters operating in the open! In a D&D world it would doubtless be so much worse.

>how to handle [magic] in a meaningful way that doesn't come off so contradictory or wishy-washy
Create an internally consistent setting where you consider various factors that would affect commoner magic-competence.

There is no single solution here, even if you limit yourself to "high magic" settings. What does high-magic even MEAN? How powerful does magic go? Is a setting where everybody is magical but magic is very low-powered high-magic? Is a setting where everybody knows about magic but only a handful can use it high-magic?

Settings are built on a case-by-case basis, and the best thing I can provide is some things to consider when building a setting, but not any kind of rules, even rules of thumb, because you can and should have reasons for everything going on in your setting.

A setting where large cities have teleporting mages that fine you for unlicensed magic and also small towns where everybody is afraid of hedge mages can make sense. How? The small towns are poor, shitty, uneducated, and oppressed by the wizards in their ivory towers. They are frequently terrorized by mages from the cities. Anyone with any magical talent is hanged in the small town's square or has their tongue cut out so they can never cast anything.

And if you're going to be paying so much attention to magic, might as well devote some thought to the economy, which is hopelessly fucked in any D&D setting.

I like to imagine that many NPC wizards are straight up charlatans. Or mere alchemists who sincerely believe they're practicing magic.

It may even be that real wizards fall victim to superstition. Imagine a fourth level wizard whose handful of second level tricks were enough to convince a minor prince to finance a decade of research into some wild goosechase project (ie, turning lead into gold, an immortality serum that will never work, etc).

Wizards with no bullshit high level magic are secretive and isolated. They know that anyone close to their power level would gank them in their sleep for a chance to steal the spellbook on their nightstand. And maybe they have faerieland's version of Seal Team Six hunting them like Osama Bin Laden.