Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
Is the fact that those fancy mages(the tome and social ones) make people believe that they are the most helpful for the society the phenomenon making them the most useful for the society?
I mean with such a world it is hard to guess.
IT is very hard to guess.

But comparisons are possible. The book-wizards straight-up have more flexibility than the hedge-wizards. So the society that subsidizes a wizard population in their major cities has a lot more options when hill giants or young dragons or minor demons or devils show up outside the city walls, or mind flayers take over the sewers beneath the cities etc.

Having a critical mass of social casters, of course, is better in that you catalyze the process of everyone convincing each other that such terrible things couldn't happen HERE in the well-run League of Seven Cities.

Thank you, noob. "Catalyst" is the word I've been looking for to describe the crunch role of social casters in creating social magic. The ritual/ incantation/ epic spell project is created by a team effort of wizards, pantheon priests and other sages--the thaum is supplied by the population at large--the social casters are in charge of being the power conduit that takes the energy of 100,000 tipsy drunks singing the national anthem and turns it into a magical barrier preventing high-CR threats from entering the core territory of the kingdom.

(One thing the PCs could aim for in a campaign that runs to E6 + Many is to carve out some Wilderness into Frontier area, and upgrade part of the Frontier area into a province of the Core Kingdom.)

EDIT: Note also that to natives of the world, this is no more baffling and confusing that quantum physics is to us. For one thing, people don't think about it too much. For another thing, everything seems to work, and it's always been this way, so it's an esoteric argument among sages speaking in a barely comprehensible gibberish, somewhat like debates over the nature or existence of dark matter.