I came across this video & had a visceral reaction to the suggestion that, if fantasy realms had magic, they would naturally be completely dominated by mass-produced magic. Now, you can run a high-magic campaign if you want, and certainly there would likely be pockets of fantastical magic here and there in a low-magic world, but there are a few fatal assumptions in the premise that D&D magic would naturally lead to ubiquitous, society-shaping changes.

First, the whole video is basically “what if modern tech bros had access to magic?” It sort of assumes a very modern culture of ruthlessly exploiting resources for capitalism. Middle Ages Europe didn’t have that mindset; it was illegal to even lend money at interest. And guilds were highly secretive, siloed, & anti-competitive, and a sorcery guild would be even more so.

Worse, the church dominated the culture as it was. Imagine if priests could actually work miracles. They’d likely never tolerate arcane magic at all, especially with necromancers and liches to point at. All a fantasy world needs is a religion that just generally dislikes arcane magic or public mistrust of wizards, and no industrialization of magic would ever happen. Look at the Roman Empire. They loved engineering but didn’t care about real science, so all that Greek science went nowhere. They didn’t even adopt Arab numerals to make math easy.

Worse still, Middle Ages Europe was run by knights who owned farms and constantly fought wars (and in a fantasy world would also be fighting dragons and liches). They wouldn’t care about creating portals for trade. They’d want enchanted armor and swords. Middle Ages Europe couldn’t even get their act together to teach everyone to read. There’s no way they would have educated an army of weird nerds to reshape their world.

He suggests that magic would wreak havoc on the legal system, since it could be used to alter documents or memories. But historically, people had to swear to God they were telling the truth and–especially in a trial by combat–that they weren’t using magic. In a D&D world, that oath would be upheld by the gods themselves. That fact alone would keep just about everybody just about as honest as the day is long.