How do you like your peasant magic?

[Drakevarg]

But nothing about the system requires that everyone is capable of gaining class levels. The class/race rules really don't apply to NPCs--they're only for PCs (by explicit construction).

Most temple workers aren't Clerics, most guards aren't Fighters, most monastic dwellers aren't Monks. Most scholars of the arcane aren't Wizards. This is actually called out explicitly in the rules. There's a long-standing tradition in fantasy of the "academic who studies magic, but can't actually use it." Innate talent is explicitly called out in the class descriptions.

That's a) a conceit of The Special (the notion that the PCs are in any way distinct from their peers), which I categorically reject, and b) a notion established in 5e. In 3.5e all systems apply equally to all subjects. This is not a point of common ground so there's no point in debate.

That is, I'm disputing the validity of the conditional. Academic training is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a Wizard--you can be a Wizard who picked it up on the street (Urchin background); military training is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a Fighter--you can be a Fighter who spent his life in a library (Sage background). Or who grew up in a temple (Acolyte background).

I only used the sources as an example. But academic understanding of magic is literally the definition of a wizard in D&D; it's what makes the class distinct from a sorcerer, who understands magic intuitively thanks to their heritage. And outside of system definitions, "academic understanding = magic" was the entire concept I brought up in the first place. If that's not how wizards work in X setting/system, then those aren't the wizards I'm talking about.

[Hagashager]

I am personally partial to lower magic setting where mages are not common place and the average person, particularly the peasantry, live a pretty medieval life.

I love mages, wizards, sorcerers etc. but I love them when their power is actually meaningful, I don't care for settings where every person and their grandmother knows a cantrip or two, and where magic is an every-day occurrence that is just part of the daily routine.

so to answer your question, I like my peasants to have no magic. If a member of the peasantry possesses, or is learning to use magic, chances are they won't be sticking around that village for much longer, either to be taken by a wizard as an apprentice, or executed if they're unlucky enough to be living in a society that regards magic as evil.

[KillianHawkeye]

So I was thinking, do you think it's better for a fantasy magic world to have peasants with medieval technology, or peasants with magically enhanced medieval technology?

I don't understand your question. If they had either of those things, they wouldn't be lowly peasants.

[Knaight]

This part is pretty much my point with "if academic understanding is sufficient for magic, then everybody with an education should at least be capable of rudimentary spellcasing." Sort of in the same way that anyone who has been through military basic training probably has at least one level of Fighter (or some other martial class as appropriate). Obviously a professional wizard is going to be a better wizard than the vast majority of other people, and a black-ops operative could probably trounce most E1 privates with next-to-no effort. But they're also not level 1 characters, i.e. "just barely better than the dishwasher at the inn."

The problem here is that academic understanding isn't just one thing. There are fields which require a lot of knowledge to enter at all, and there are fields that can be entered with minimal training. It's entirely possible that even rudimentary spellcasting is one of those fields with really high entrance requirements, and thus not everyone educated is able to do it.

[Mechalich]

The problem here is that academic understanding isn't just one thing. There are fields which require a lot of knowledge to enter at all, and there are fields that can be entered with minimal training. It's entirely possible that even rudimentary spellcasting is one of those fields with really high entrance requirements, and thus not everyone educated is able to do it.

That's certainly possible. It is entirely possible that learning to use magic requires a concrete understanding of a particular set of principles that most brains aren't able to do easily. This, in fact, the setup of the Laundry universe, where magic is a effectively a branch of specialized mathematics and is really, really difficult to do without the aid of computers because doing the calculations in your head is really hard and when you screw up elder horrors literally eat your brain. That does tend to cut the field down significantly.

However, and this is a very important caveat, magic isn't like learning quantum theory. Learning to use magic has practical impacts that are immense. You could be the greatest physicist since Einstein and no matter how much you learn in your field you won't learn how to kill people with your brain, but if you're learning magic you very well could become able to do that. As a result, the more potent the magic available in a universe, the greater the pressure to master it will be. The greater the pressure to achieve mastery, the more extreme the steps taken to produce magic users will be. All the stories you see out there - particularly common in East Asian storytelling - about taking little children and turning them in fanatically loyal death machines in the service of the state will be doubly true, only with spellcasters instead of assassins. This absolutely can be done with intellectual endeavor by the way - the national examination system used in imperial China - which forced young men who wanted to ascend in the bureaucracy to master Confucian theory until their eyes bled - is a good example of how such a thing might work.

So while there are advantages to saying that magic is powerful but has substantial barriers to entry that prevent it from being widespread, there are some dark consequences to that approach too.

The bottom line is that high-powered magic or highly abundant magic is always more difficult to balance than low powered or uncommon magic. When you add magic to a setting what you're doing is adding energy to the system, and the more energy you add to a system, the more unstable it becomes. That's inevitable. Applies to chemistry and storytelling.

[oxybe]

low level wizards & clerics are somewhat rare by virtue of the "studious" and "pious" archetypes, but druids, sorcerors & warlock types not so much rare as powerful ones are uncommon. lots are able to use a single cantrip or weaker level magic. People known to have offensive magics are basically treated as armed individuals.

quality of life magic items are common enough: magical firestarters, chalk that can write in mid-air, self-filling canteens, portable campfires, gloves of prestidigitation, quills of copying, etc... are common enough that you can possibly see a few of these things stocking shelves in larger cities or those with a large adventurer population be it new, used or recovered from a corpse.

Basic magic swords aren't stocked in large amounts, but it's not uncommon to see one on display. More esoteric weapon types or a stronger enchantment would require special order.

High level magic stuff is rare or hidden away in out of reach areas, but low level BS is all over the place.

[ahyangyi]

I prefer to have clerics available to everyday rural life. They can fix your minor wounds and their existence reinforce your faith (if you happen to believe in the same deity).
Wizards are slightly more urban and therefore farther from peasant's life. If you are really lucky (or unlucky) you might actually have a witch or alchemist living nearby, but you just don't know.

[ImNotTrevor]

My favorite system is essentially like this:
Fairly basic folk magic (practical magic) works just fine.
(Disclaimer: my knowledge of how real-life folk magic works is highly limited, so I'm just making things up for most of my examples.)

Want to prevent scrying? Ring of salt works.
Want to keep bad spirits out of your house? A sprig of holly over the door or a holy symbol on prominent display does just that.
Need your crops to grow bigger? Sprinkle the blood of the firstborn pig of the season onto the western fence of your homestead.
Make your axe stay sharp longer by covering it in the ash of a birchwood fire before you sharpen it.
Need an extra hand for an hour or so? A bit of potash and mouse blood mixed into a cornmeal cake and placed in a salt ring is sure to attract an imp. Make a deal to break the salt ring in exchange for some help around the house!

This lets peasants emulate the most handy spell effects for practical purposes using very minor, simple rituals.

With this, pretty much every town has a local Witch or Wizard who knows how to do all these practical magicks and will give minor additional boons that require greater mastery in exchange for coin or favors. These boons are temporary and weak, but are better than not having them. This makes the local Witch or Wizard a town eccentric that everyone puts up with and respects because they have genuine power, but it also makes the peasants basically competent human beings who use the rules of magic to better their lives in practical ways that don't make things unrealistic.

[Psikerlord]

I prefer peasants to have zero magic, but then I prefer low magic worlds, where even great cities have but one or a handful of known casters - if any.

[Waxpapers]

Personally, I like my peasant magic like traditional medicine. A lot of it is bunk, just like a lot of herbal cures are bunk. But some of it is the equivalent of boiling willow bark, which contains Salicin (a precursor to asprin) to stop a fever. The farmwife's circle of salt isn't good for keeping away anything of real power, but it still does something, and it'll keep out mischievous faeries of no importance. And just like we can refine and mass produce the salicin in willow bark and get asprin, we can take the circle of salt to keep out faeries and refine it into the magic circles used by mages of true power.

[Grim Portent]

I prefer to have peasants basically magic free, though not superstition free. One in every few dozen villages and hamlets may have a hedge wizard, someone with just enough magical ability to light campfires, cure minor ailments and other minor magics. Skilled hedge wizards might become court wizards some day if they attract a nobles attention and don't get killed because someone had a bad harvest or a stillbirth and blamed it on them.

Real mages are rare, usually there's less than 3 to a kingdom and their power is terrifying but arbitrarily applied because by the time you have as much power as them you tend to go a little off in the head.

Permanent magical items are rare beyond measure. A powerful mage can create maybe three in their lifetime and most never bother because of the personal investment involved.

Peasant superstitions like iron to keep elves away and scary masks to scare off monsters are quite common, though most don't do a whole lot. Peasants as a whole have little exposure to life outside their own home area and whatever market town they sell goods at. The most the average person knows about magic is that their great-great grandfather's village was burned to the ground and it's people burned by dark lightning for refusing to join the army of some tyrant mage or a friend of a friend's tale about his cousin being turned into a newt for bothering the local hedge wizard.

[Jay R]

Do you want the arcane mysteries of unknown forces or simple, straightforward technology?

A light spell available to everybody is not significantly different from a flashlight.

[Max_Killjoy]

In the setting I'm working on right now, there will be "small magic" among the common folk, based on animism and little rituals and taboos and the like, that does have some noticeable effect but doesn't radically alter things. I'm trying for a feel like it could be the magic, or it could be a natural effect; so there's an special recipe for fighting infections that starts with a certain mold... implying it could be the little plant spirits or it could be rudimentary antibiotics. And not the impact of modern antibiotics, but it can make the difference between dying or coming out of it after hitting bottom.

[Necroticplague]

It's not magic if everyone has it. At that point, it's just modern technology with a coat of pain and a BS handwave. Your average person should have no access to magic whatsoever. Neither should the PCs regularly, for that matter. Magic should be kept actually magic by ensuring that only very rare NPCs and plot devices can make use of it. Ideally, plot devices kept out of PCs hands (so that they don't ruin the mystery of it from regular use).

[Max_Killjoy]

It's not magic if everyone has it. At that point, it's just modern technology with a coat of pain and a BS handwave. Your average person should have no access to magic whatsoever. Neither should the PCs regularly, for that matter. Magic should be kept actually magic by ensuring that only very rare NPCs and plot devices can make use of it. Ideally, plot devices kept out of PCs hands (so that they don't ruin the mystery of it from regular use).

So magic pretty much 100% plot device and GM tool?

[Necroticplague]

So magic pretty much 100% plot device and GM tool?

Yes. That what makes it magic, instead of just technology different from our own. If you let the PCs use it, it stops being magic, and just becomes 'a thing they can do.' A massive conflagration that roasts an entire room is impressive the first time. It's less so when you do it 5 times a day.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yes. That what makes it magic, instead of just technology different from our own. If you let the PCs use it, it stops being magic, and just becomes 'a thing they can do.' A massive conflagration that roasts an entire room is impressive the first time. It's less so when you do it 5 times a day.

In the real world, magic is mysterious, and strange, and personal... because it's either completely unreal or so unreliable it might as well be.

In a world with real magic, I'd expect it to be about as mysterious and personal as water wheels, flint and steel, or a carpenter's mallet. At most it would be like the "wonders" of Hero/Heron of Alexandria, mysterious to the layman but not to any person with access to knowledge of how it works. I don't really expect magic to be both useful and "strange".

[Pleh]

Ah, the blanket, objective definitions phrased to rule out dissenting ideas placed on a subjective topic in a thread attempting to survey various opinions.

Magic can be whatever you want it to be, because we make it up.

In general, we can say, "magic is something" or "magic can be anything."

When we talk about "magic as something," it really is always science with the perception of the fantastic, because as being a set thing, it will have particular properties and behaviors that can be predicted and manipulated.

When we talk about "magic as anything," we emphasize the mysterious, often incomprehensible nature whose behavior specifically is not predictable or routinely manipulable. It can manifest in any way at any time.

Both of these are valid definitions of magic.

[Max_Killjoy]

Ah, the blanket, objective definitions phrased to rule out dissenting ideas placed on a subjective topic in a thread attempting to survey various opinions.

If I came across that way, it wasn't my intent.

(Thus the phrasing "I'd expect it to be" and "I don't really expect".)

Magic can be whatever you want it to be, because we make it up.

In general, we can say, "magic is something" or "magic can be anything."

When we talk about "magic as something," it really is always science with the perception of the fantastic, because as being a set thing, it will have particular properties and behaviors that can be predicted and manipulated.

When we talk about "magic as anything," we emphasize the mysterious, often incomprehensible nature whose behavior specifically is not predictable or routinely manipulable. It can manifest in any way at any time.

Both of these are valid definitions of magic.

That's an interesting distinction. The unspoken mismatch of "something" vs "anything" might explain some of the going around in circles that happens in these discussions.

[Vogie]

It really depends on the world you're trying to create. If you're going Tolkien-esque, then yes magic has to be mysterious and unknown, and you're only going to find it if you're a traveler or part of the chosen few. On the other hand, you can have perfectly captivating worlds that you could build a world in where it is commonplace. If there's a magic university, then there's going to be a way for the dropouts to make a living as well.

I don't understand your question. If they had either of those things, they wouldn't be lowly peasants.

Why? In Avatar: the Last Airbender, there are entire villages of peasants that are still benders. Earthbenders that are just elevator operators, Firebenders that work in the smithies. In Brent Weeks' Lightbringer series, many drafters aren't really allowed to leave their villages - they need those green drafters for building maintenance, or orange drafters acting as mechanical engineers.

Being an adventurer just means you've risen above the need/desire to stay home. Just because we have automated tractors in the modern day, doesn't mean there aren't farmers anymore.

Applying magic to a world doesn't mean that people aren't lowly peasants anymore. If a smith has Mage hand, they're still a smith. If the merchant can prestidigitate to make their wares slightly more sparkly, still a merchant. Scribes with Comprehend languages are just slightly better scribes. A farmer may still not own their own land if they can cast continual flame, but they will certainly would be able to work into the night; in fact, I can already picture an elderly subsistence farmer who just uses animate dead solely during harvest time for extra hands. A funeral director that can cast Gentle Repose or a beat cop that can use Hold Person while he or she reads them their rights isn't going to break anything, nor does it mean they're ready to take on the world.

Depending on the level of magic in the world, you could have broke wizards with dead end jobs as teleportation specialists that just move people from place to place to until they get their student loans paid.

[NovenFromTheSun]

Potions always felt appropriate as peasant magic. After all, they tend to require plants, and many peasants specialize in growing plants.

[Friv]

It's not magic if everyone has it. At that point, it's just modern technology with a coat of pain and a BS handwave. Your average person should have no access to magic whatsoever. Neither should the PCs regularly, for that matter. Magic should be kept actually magic by ensuring that only very rare NPCs and plot devices can make use of it. Ideally, plot devices kept out of PCs hands (so that they don't ruin the mystery of it from regular use).

Magic is only technology if it behaves like technology.

If magic requires certain attitudes, or conjunctions of mystical energies, or for the person using it to empty their mind properly, it can be common, and also mystical. If the local hedge witch can steal luck from one person and give it to someone else, that is a reliable and difficult to judge effect that leaves its user in great demand and also kind of distrusted. If true belief in the gods allows a priest to hasten the healing of disease, but only if the penitent makes a sacrifice by giving up an indulgence that is important only to them, and the disease returns if they do not keep their oath, your village will not have the same threat of plague, but it's not like getting penicillin from the pharmacy. If the blacksmith knows a ritual which binds hope into a blade, ensuring that it will not break so long as its wielder stands alongside their friends, you have a good steel knife, but also you have a weapon that encourages certain types of combat.

Technology changes the world because of what it can do. Magic changes the world because of what it can do, and because of what it requires of you.

Which is a really long-winded way of saying, "Yes, I love to have a lot of very little magical things in my world, such that most villages have someone who knows one or two old rituals passed down through the generations".

[Jay R]

Potions always felt appropriate as peasant magic. After all, they tend to require plants, and many peasants specialize in growing plants.

Yes, and today's alternative fuels require plants as well. But today's farmers aren't developing alternative fuels. They are selling corn to scientists who develop alternative fuels. Similarly, miners of guano pits aren't developing Fireball sells; they are selling guano to wizards, who can develop spells.

[Mechalich]

Magic is only technology if it behaves like technology.

If magic requires certain attitudes, or conjunctions of mystical energies, or for the person using it to empty their mind properly, it can be common, and also mystical. If the local hedge witch can steal luck from one person and give it to someone else, that is a reliable and difficult to judge effect that leaves its user in great demand and also kind of distrusted. If true belief in the gods allows a priest to hasten the healing of disease, but only if the penitent makes a sacrifice by giving up an indulgence that is important only to them, and the disease returns if they do not keep their oath, your village will not have the same threat of plague, but it's not like getting penicillin from the pharmacy. If the blacksmith knows a ritual which binds hope into a blade, ensuring that it will not break so long as its wielder stands alongside their friends, you have a good steel knife, but also you have a weapon that encourages certain types of combat.

Technology changes the world because of what it can do. Magic changes the world because of what it can do, and because of what it requires of you.

Which is a really long-winded way of saying, "Yes, I love to have a lot of very little magical things in my world, such that most villages have someone who knows one or two old rituals passed down through the generations".

Technologies have requirements too. Fossil fuels being the most obvious case. So in a world that did not have fossil fuel deposits - which is quite possible, it would apply to almost all recently terraformed planets - the supply of fuels would be limited to what could be produced and refined from present-day sources such as ethanol from corn (something like this is part of the premise of the Greatwinter Trilogy). Magic requirements tend to be different than technological requirements, but it is usually possible to industrialize them in the same way - though this can be extremely grimdark if magic requires 'blood' or 'sacrifice' or something similar.

The real difference between magic and technology in their ability to apply change is that technology is by nature, consistent. Effectively, technology as we understand the term is dependent upon Uniformitarianism holding true as a principle of the universe. This is necessary for science, and by extension technological developments that follow from science, to work. If you break uniformitaranism by spontaneously altering the laws of physics for the purposes of fiction then you've crossed the line between science fiction and fantasy.

This is commonly seen with fantasy magic. The most apparent cases are those of religious magic that depend on the active mediation of 'divine' beings. If magic is a gift of the gods, and the gods get mad they can take magic away for no explicable reason. By contrast, magic may well be consistent, in that it represents a set of alternative laws of the fictional universe that can be manipulated and this happens in a consistent way such that it produces results that are repeatable and verifiable, at least within a closed system - D&D has many different planes, magic functions differently in each one, even when casting the same spells, because each represents a different system.

It is at this point that we hit on an important deviation between game design options and narrative design options. Consistency in the operation of magic is irrelevant to world-building for narrative purposes. If I'm writing a novel I can have emotional and fickle gods coming out of the wazoo and magic can be an inexplicable force with no verifiable replication. In fact some of the most famous fantasy stories ever are structured this way. By contrast, if I'm designing a game that's not an option, because it's inherently unfair to the players. If a player performs a magical effect, they expect to get the same result each time - or at least have that result be tied to a legitimate source of randomness such as a die roll. You can't build a system where the GM gets to arbitrarily say if effects succeed or fail (and highly flexible magic systems, like the sphere magic of Mage The Ascension, have a huge problem or putting a massive amount of adjudicatory power into the GMs hands, which has all sorts of issues for play).

And, of course, this has an impact on game settings, because since the game design requires consistent magic that means the people in the setting will experience that magic in a consistent fashion and will be able to react and study it accordingly. At least, so long as the design isn't willing to openly come out and say that the consistency is a compromise may for the purpose of gameplay and not how the universe is expected to work (Star Wars is the best example here. The Force is most assuredly not open to repeatable study and it's incredible fickle, but Star Wars games treat it like it is anyway).

The bottom line is that, if you have a consistent magic system in place in a setting you need to consider the implications as if it were a technology and consider what that might mean. That does not mean you have to embrace the crazy 'magitech' future that might be implied there are workarounds available. The Wheel of Time is a fairly good example. The Age of Legends represents the magitech tippyverse fully embrace of the One Power's capabilities leads to, but the actually stories take place in a post-apocalyptic mess where essential knowledge has been lost and society has developed extremely powerful barriers (with good justification) to prevent it's recovery. What it does mean is that, if your fantasy universe doesn't match the full implications of where the industrialized applications of whatever magic is available then you need a good reason why this is so. The most common reason is apocalypse followed by socialized barriers, which is convenient because it allows the protagonists to recover lost knowledge in time for the epic to unfold.

[VoxRationis]

At most it would be like the "wonders" of Hero/Heron of Alexandria, mysterious to the layman but not to any person with access to knowledge of how it works. I don't really expect magic to be both useful and "strange".

That's an interesting comparison. The engineers of the classical and Hellenistic periods do make for an interesting parallel with wizards as they are commonly depicted in D&D and certain other fantasy worlds: figures that create works on internally consistent principles and do communicate with one another, but nonetheless are almost wholly inscrutable to the majority of society and whose proficiency in their fields so outstrips that of the rest of the world that they represent actual strategic assets (when you take Syracuse but lose Archimedes in the process, the victory becomes bittersweet). Of course, the Hellenistic period was one of near-continuous change and development, and was by and large pretty unstable—unlike most fantasy settings, I doubt the status quo of the Hellenistic period could have maintained for very long.

[Zombimode]

Really depends on the setting. Eberron? Magitek.

Peasants don't have Magitek in Eberron.

[Necroticplague]

Technology changes the world because of what it can do. Magic changes the world because of what it can do, and because of what it requires of you.

Technology also has requirements and sacrifices. They're just different from magical ones.

[Vogie]

Technology also has requirements and sacrifices. They're just different from magical ones.

Precisely. And both should trickle down to the people at the lowest echelons of society. No one has ever created an entire car for $500 USD, yet $500 cars exist.

If something like a ritual, sacrifice, or ritual sacrifice consistently guarantees a certain outcome, like recovery of illness or a fertile harvest, it will spread as long as the populace has a means to communicate it. That ritual could be a "reduce fever" spell or the administration of white willow bark (which contains the primary component of Aspirin).

[Frozen_Feet]

Magic is the act of using spells, charms and rituals to invoke supernatural or to effect nature. As both what is supernatural and what is natural are up to the author in case of fictional settings, as are the forms of rituals, charms and spells, we rapidly find out that "magic" in context of fantasy is an empty buzzword. It means whatever arbitrary thing a setting author wants and there is no general case for it.

This is, however, useless for understanding what "feels magical" to the actual people around your table. That feeling is largely based on what in psychology and anthropology is known as "magical thinking". In real life, its primary cause appears to be gaps in causal knowledge filled by associative heuristics. Example: you perform a dance and it subsequently begins to rain. In absence of better knowledge, you come to associate that dance with rain. So now you avoid that dance to avoid rain, or perform it to invoke it. Once a ritual becomes a habit, it is rarely questioned even if no proof of efficacy exists. The act becomes more important than the result and intent is lost in it.

Other features of magical thinking are symbolic association and law of contagion. The former is the belief that similar things are linked and can affect each other through that similarity. Related is the belief that thoughts, emotions and feelings have direct impact on reality. Law of contagion is the belief that things which have been in contact will remain connected. An well-known example which captures all these elements is the Voodoo Doll: thoughts and actions targeted at a doll crafted in the likeness of a person, containing a part of that person, will have direct impact on that person.

How common or mundane an object is, is not really relevant for triggering the feeling of magic. Another well-known example: dice. There are few more common and mundane objects in gaming. Yet, due to a combination of their random nature, people's inability to understand probability and pitfalls of human intuitive heuristics, it is just as common for dice to give rise to weird superstitions.

There are also artificial objects which were made to appeal to human intuition and consequently are easy triggers for magical thinking. Example: graphical computer interfaces. The symbol of the text editor, invokes the power of the text editor. Similarly, it is not a coincidence contemporary people tend to draw parallels between programming and spellcasting - in both cases you are using symbolic words to cause real effects. Add to this generally poor understanding of why and how computers actually work, and it shouldn't be surprising that computers too, despite being common, are frequent targets of superstition.

Based on the above, it should be also easy to see why too rigorous or too revealing fictional versions of "magic" cease to feel so. Once causality between events is fully understood, and especially if it breaks from symbolic association, law of contagion and the idea that thoughts have direct effect on the world, the "magic goes away". It is exactly the same phenomena of ceasing to be impressed by sleight of hand once you know how its done. It's not a coincidence that in real life, some well-known skeptics of the supernatural happen to be stage magicians. After all, such position requires keen understanding of magical thinking, how to manipulate it, and how little the real events resemble the "magical" narrative.

The takeaway should be that it is obtuse to use "magic" as a catch-all term for any breaks from reality, and even worse to pretend it's an explanation. Trying to cram things which don't have to be related under the same umbrella can, ironically, itself be example of magical thinking.

(My own setting reflects the above. As side-effect, pretty much no-one who thinks they know what they're doing calls what they do "magic".)

[Drakevarg]

Related to the above, my general rule for magic is that if it's just "different science," it's not really magic. My own setting runs more-or-less along the lines of antiquated natural philosophy, so things like miasma theory and the notion that plague can be spread by the evil eye are literally true. By the same notion, if it's just a simple fact of life that the right words, gestures, and ingredients in the right combination will conjure a fireball, that's not magic. It's just a thing that happens in this world.

Part of the thing that makes magic what it is, is that it doesn't follow the rules. Magic is alive and if you take it for granted it will either abandon you or make your life hell. Which isn't terribly compatible with archetypes like D&D's wizards, who are basically their universe's version of scientists wearing snuggies, or indeed Vancian magic in general. But that's a completely different topic. Point is, that if magic can be safely and reliably used by anyone then it's not really magic, just alternate-universe science.