03-20-2012, 12:33 PM | #51 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
Quote:
|
|
03-20-2012, 12:44 PM | #52 |
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
That's way more common than I would make it.
Looking at ancient demographics, we can say that Ancient Greece was ten million people and Rome was sixty million. Your proposal would give them ten thousand and sixty thousand people with Magery 3. With those kinds of numbers, it's just about impossible to picture anything resembling an army in use. Unless it's an army of wizards. |
03-20-2012, 12:49 PM | #53 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
Shrug. Doesn't matter that much, since it's not like there's any real need for casting youth on 100% of the population.
Why would most wizards be in the military? I'd expect the same portion of wizards in the military as the portion of GDP spent on the military, so probably fewer than 10%. |
03-20-2012, 01:24 PM | #54 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
Quote:
How did you get that they could only cast it 48 times a day? Isn't it ten seconds to cast? If they only got one off a minute for eight hours a day, that would be 480 a day. And they could in theory cast many more than those with the right infrastructure in place. It really doesn't make any sense to have Youth cast in such a short amount of time. I would house rule to ten minutes or an hour or something. Not that it matters. The point still stands. Just replace Youth with Resurrection. I could easily see having all the Magery 3 people churning out nothing but Youths and Resurrections and three-point Blesses (which all the members of the aristocracy will have to have). I don't know what the numbers would be for accidental deaths in this world, and then add in Bless.... And I think that Bless is going to be such an economic boon that you want to keep it cast on everyone. Depending on the circumstances, you might see lots of resurrections as well. Imagine elite soldiers you can keep alive for centuries with Youth, and at their prime, no! better than their prime, because they've spent centuries training and fighting. You send them off to battle and then Resurrect the fallen. I think those sorts of things might be in very high demand. Quote:
These people are going to be viewed as too dangerous to the political rulers to be allowed to do as they please. People who can potentially have mind control magic are not going to be allowed to live free lives and study magic as they please. I would expect the rulers to keep access to learning magic to themselves, the same as they do with their top secret technologies today. I don't know the capabilities of their secret spy planes, and the only people who would get access to learning magic are people the rulers are sure aren't going to use it to threaten them. |
||
03-20-2012, 02:27 PM | #55 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
That 100 extra fatigue comes from the onlookers, and it takes them 10m to recover it.
And? There are people other than the military with money. |
03-20-2012, 03:04 PM | #56 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
Quote:
Quote:
|
||
03-20-2012, 03:34 PM | #57 | |
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: The Athens of America
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
Quote:
But I want my magic to be rare...mages to be special (as PCs or enemies)...and mages to be an important factor in world affairs...not the end all be all... But then again I divide the Magic book up so no one order of mages can 'cast all spells' so there are choices to be made...and all mages have a flavor of their own...sitting down a PC with the entire text of Magic and saying 'have fun' is about the last thing I would ever want to do... YMMV tho...
__________________
My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.-Foch America is not perfect, but I will hold her hand until she gets well.-unk Tuskegee Airman |
|
03-20-2012, 04:43 PM | #58 |
Banned
Join Date: Apr 2008
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
That only seems viable if the rulers themselves are an aristocracy of mages.
|
03-20-2012, 05:00 PM | #59 | |
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
Quote:
A kingdom is like a corporation. There's no reason for the CEO of a music corporation to know anything about playing rock music or dropping fat beats. He knows how to run a business. In the same way, a king knows how to run a kingdom. He can understand magic without being a magician. If we're doing random Magery, and it's a hereditary monarch, then he's probably not a wizard. He'll know how magic operates and all that--he'll have to--but there won't be any need for him to cast spells. As king, he probably wouldn't want to waste his own time casting spells. Just like how the CEO wouldn't do all of his own secretarial work, even if he was better at it than his secretary. Division of labor. I'm sure the king has an IQ score as high as any of his wizards. He can afford a +5 Wisdom crown, after all (which wouldn't help him with magic, anyway). He keeps wizards as his servants. The same as how he has soldiers as servants, and tailors, and butchers, and bakers, and candlestickmakers. He probably personally controls access to the books containing the more powerful spells. These people don't have the internet. They probably don't even have the printing press. And it's a lot easier to control wizards learning spells that would serve the same function than it is to control what peasants are printing up in their basements. It would be incredibly easy for a king to control access to magic. He could have all the books with that information in it, and he can simply ban any unlicensed teaching of magic. It takes so long to learn a spell. And they would test everyone at birth for Magery. So they could just check on all those people constantly, if they weren't taken separately at birth. And they could scan everyone entering the cities with Aura. It seems trivial to control access to magic when you already have such access yourself. |
|
03-20-2012, 06:22 PM | #60 | |||||
Banned
Join Date: Apr 2008
|
Re: Ceremonial Magic used to support an army.
Why would mages tolerate a social system that confines them to a life of being controlled by non-mages? How could such conditions be imposed on them except by other mages?
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
|
|||||
|
|