Fantasy setting where nearly everyone can use and has ready access to magic

>Fantasy setting where nearly everyone can use and has ready access to magic
>Multiple different types of magic. Basic magery, thaumaturgy, drudic traditions, runes, etc.

Good idea or bad idea?

>powerful Magic user use their power to take over the world
>Minor magic users and normal humans are now forced to defend their homeland

I always think these settings create world that is technologically in the stone ages.
I mean why develop any tech or medicine if magic can do it all?
It's just so hard to see where the society would evolve too since so much power is so widely distributed.

I personally prefer having a few types of magic that are related, so they can have consistent rules and not fall into the "shut up it's magic" style of fantasy, but whatever floats your boat.

So long as magici/applicable knowledge is being. researched and magic can benefit society, things will progress.
Along a different path to ours, but still.

Depends on the execution.

If you rigidly define the rules of magic so most people can't do the really broken shit then I feel a society where everyone has access to magic is fine. In fact in societies like that it would probably be treated just like another form of science or technology. I always thought Fullmetal Alchemist was a good example of a society like this.

The real reason you want to define the rules so rigidly is so you can start breaking them when you want to let your players/readers know some shit is about to go down.

>I mean why develop any tech or medicine if magic can do it all?
It's possible that technology has a multiplicative effect with magic, such that developing better technology makes magic more powerful or useful. For example, a magical sword might plausibly be a more effective use of its enchantment than a magical sharp rock, or perhaps proper use of a tool like an astrolabe makes performing certain divination magics easier and more accurate.

Glorantha m8.

Cult magic is commonplace, helps people do everyday things like plow fields, predict or alter the weather, detect foobar and help women give birth.

It's pretty handy, but is balanced out by weird metaphysical accidents that can occur from displeasing the gods.

Say rains of fish, magical plagues and total anomalies like fire and water switching physical properties.

I see it as a "many rivers to one sea" type of deal

like you can use general magic but can augment it using specific practices or certain methods to boost it or specialize it as you continue studying magic in general.

all for the goal of dominating the universe

>dominating the universe

The Wizard's Council has very strict guidelines against that sort of thing.

it's like capitalist making laws to prevent one from destroying all competition.

technically you aren't suppose to do that but it's still pretty much the whole point

So like an average d&d setting, only written by people intelligent enough to extrapolate the consequences of omnipresent high magic in the world?

Shh, you'll trigger the autists.

>Vitaly Klichko is a frost wizard
>Not necromancer
>Not Diviner

But that's half the fun.

An idea I had for a setting is that magic is real but technology as we know it is pre-historic, language is a novel concept only used by a few tribes.

if powerful magic is readily available then you run the risk of your world becoming unrelatable. It'll make it difficult to run and most people don't enjoy settings they can't relate to.

If you want a world where everyone can use magic more or less, keep it contained to a proxy for technology - people magically wash their dishes instead of owning dishwasher, etc.

I've always enjoyed both the "numerous types of magic" and "ready access to magic" tropes.

It's really hard to pull off well and I'm still not satisfied with my own attempts.

Especially because I really like the classic fantasy "do anything" wizard magic. It's a little bit easier if you stick to something much more rigid and well defined in its capabilities.

It's hard to speculate about the realistic outcomes of all that magic, when just one small thing can get out of control and become a culture defining phenomenon. (Then again, reality is unrealistic. There was a good 50 years or so where the pneumatic tire and the rubber tire had both been invented, but nobody thought to combine them. It's possible that if it had happened sooner, the modern railway network as we know it would never have existed, we'd just have a more extensive high way system.)

One of the things I think helps is really limiting what magic can do for people that aren't the magic users. For example, a wizard might be able to fly, but not make flying carpets that let anybody fly. If a person wants to sail over the clouds, they have to put in the personal work to be able to do that.

That's the defining difference between magic and technology for me. Once somebody's invented the gun, everybody has the potential to kill somebody hundreds of yards away. Imagine if a country wanted a troop of fireball hurlers, they had to give all of them a Ph.D's worth of schooling.

That's not classic fantasy, that's classic d&d.

And no, it's not the same.

I kind of like it, as long as each type of magic is well-defined and at least maintains an illusion of variety. Works very nicely for different cultures, too.

Technology is just another field of magic.

What's the difference between pyromancer and fire wizard?

Pyromancer has more variety and can cast at will, Fire Wizar has more power but has to prep?

Sounds good. Magic, in anthropological terms, is the attempt to affect change in the real world through use of symbols. In many cultures, this kind of magic achievable by all, although the specific knowledge regarding its execution may be guarded or restricted in some way. Runes, the classic "voodoo doll" fetish, that rugby football jersey you wear at home when watching the game, these are symbols used to affect the the whole.

Some cultures, particularly african ones, do distinguish quite specifically between different kinds of magic and magic practitioner, which is interesting given the strict differences in definition we find in fantasy rpgs (which actually do reflect real world belief and practice in the case of african tradition) but don't seem to reflect the western fantasy literature from which things like D&D supposedly draw.

Anyhow, anything is a good idea if it works on the tabletop to produce a fun game, because that is the point. If you want to ask "is this particular idea representative of how different human cultures have understood the practice of magic?", that is a different question, and one I'm not sure you asked. Creating new mechanics can take some trial and error, but you can't really have an inherently "bad idea" about world building if it creates the world you are trying to build successfully.

Technology is the practical application of knowledge. Magic would be the world's technology