Realbumpbert said:
Only in some settings. Again, the basic idea of magic is no different than that of technology: skills, goods and services available by certain means.
Medieval society had no concept of technology.
Only in some settings. And so on and so forth...
Granted, some bizarre settings do have both magic and technology, or replace the former with the latter, but they aren't usually very consistent or convincing.
Suspicious, poor people use technology all the time these days. Plus, people were suspicious and poor in the past, during the birth of technology.
Okay, how many people in third world countries own something as inexpensive (for us) as a calculator?
Lack of demand will drop prices. And why shouldn't magic be mass-producible?
Okay, let's explore medieval society a little more closely shall we?
First of all, the majority of the population were poor. Not poor in the sense of "Can I afford a new computer game and go to the cinema this week, or will one have to wait until next week?" but poor in the sense of "Can I afford to eat
anything today?"
Food production was the most important aspect of most people's lives, and the farming methods were nowhere near as advanced as today, which made the yield much lower. Farmers generally only produced a little over what they needed to feed their own families and workers.
You might want to read
this article on food production in fantasy settings.
Education was virtually non-existent, and only a tiny few knew how to read or write, with even fewer knowing how to do both.
Consequently, if there were wizards in a similar society, very few would be able to afford to pay for the many years of training. Also, it would be extremely hazardous, so even fewer would survive to become high level mages.
To start mass production of anything, you need a mass of workers to set up the automation process. As almost everyone was busy in the fields trying to grow enough to eat, gathering those workers would be difficult.
Walks with the Snails said:
It depends. Magic has the advantage of being everywhere and freely available. You still have to have the right facilities and raw materials to make batteries, it's doubtful you're going to whip them up in your garage unless you're just a total badass with lots of nice tools and supplies and time to kill.
Go outdoors during the day, and light is everywhere and freely available - unless you're blind.
Most fantasy books/games that bother to explain magic, tend to describe magic casting as being a special ability. The general population could not learn magic even if they could afford the training.
As for batteries, sure I can make one. Just give me a lemon and a strip of zinc - that would produce more than enough power for a calculator.
I'm really not sure how limiting this is. You'd probably really have to strain to suck a place dry of magic. If anything this is a strength of magic. It's renewable. Think of the limits on our current mass produced technology thanks to limits on the availability of neat stuff like platinum. Natural resources are actually harder to come by, I'd suspect.
You'd probably really have to strain to draw any power anyway. In most RPGs, a magic user has to rest for quite a few hours to regain all their spell/magic points, and that's obviously as much a simplification as regaining hit/health points is.
As for natural resources being harder to come by, I'm not sure what you're implying by this. Are you saying that magic isn't a natural resource? Either way, it wouldn't be easy to obtain, and neither would ingredients such as dragon's blood.
That's one thing that always bugged me. It just doesn't make sense. Sure, people here were supsicious of magic, just like they were once suspicious of technology. Guess what. At least here, magic doesn't work and technology does work. At least most non-Wiccans would probably tell you that. Therefore it didn't really take that long before people embraced technology when it's usefulness could be physically proven to all beyond any doubt. If that crazy old witch's love potions or healing spells actually visibly worked, it doesn't seem so far-fetched it wouldn't take that long for people to catch on to that.
That is because we take such things for granted these days. We also understand that technology/magic/power is not inherently good or evil, whereas in the past they didn't.
The church was also much more powerful, and often made life difficult for those they considered to be competitors (which mages would have been) and those that associated with them.
Think you meant supply rather than demand. To some sense it is true that magic will always be labor-intensive. It's not quite the same as high start-up cost for new technology, though. The problem there is more in physically building the factory and streamlining the process. Magic just needs a guy with a pointy hat and some skill.
I meant demand too. You need a large customer base to be able to produce things cheaply, which is why games software can be bought for about 1% of the price of certain specialist business software.
If it takes 2 hours to make and bake a loaf of bread, yet only 3 hours to make and bake 12, you might be able to make each loaf cheaper - but only if you actually sold most of them.
After spending all that time, effort and money learning magic, mages would obviously wish to recoup some of it by charging high prices. The lack of magic users would increase their value, so yes, they would be in short supply.
However, the demand would also be low, as the majority of the population, being simple folk, would not be able to afford their services, or have any particular reason to use them.
As for merely needing a guy in a pointy hat with some skill, I think that's a little over-simplistic.
What you're really saying is that you'd need an educated and literate man that had spent many years of expensive training and was still basically the same shape as when he started (as opposed to being a frog, inside out or a pile of ashes).
Permanent spells and golems and such also keep on working after the initial spellcraft is done. They naturally draw on magic and run themselves with no need for somebody to refuel and repair them. So you could easily argue that magic goods might have a higher initial cost but lower (or non-existent) upkeep. If you can create self-replicating magical constructs, you can even one-up historical and present day technology and go out into the nanotech utopia realm. Then it takes no human effort or even much in the way of natural resources at all to create useful goods, which trumps mass-production in economic terms.
Advanced spells would be beyond all but the most skilled mages, and considering how secretive most guilds were, that would mean maybe one or two per kingdom were able to do so. The costs would be extremely high, and when all is said and done, a golem wouldn't do much more work than the average draft horse.
I doubt
any mage could make more than one a day, even if others provided the prebuilt metal shape, and if mages were even as common as 1 in every 1000 people, it would still take several years for them to become in as widespread use as a modern day cooking stove or washing machine.
, 2 things can happen in that case: the animated suit would stop an opponent from attacking (an equivalent of Hold spell) or take over completely and attack whoever the mage points to (Dominate spell). Both spells are helpful but not uber.
