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Human Inventiveness
There are many games where humans, who are psychologically like you and me, have access to some power which we do not in the real world, like magic or a higher technology. Frequently games are written without thought to what inventive humans would do if they had access to this power. The history of human development is full of people looking at things and saying 'We could use that to do such-and-such,' and developing new uses for the things they see around them, or new ways of using their existing technology to better effect. A classic example is the story of firearms: people discovered that a powder could make a bang, and eventually this led to people putting the powder at one end of a tube and igniting it to push something out of the other end very fast for purposes of killing. Subsequent bright ideas led to more and more effective weapons as people spotted new ways of doing clever things.

But commonly games are written without thought to what uses would be made of a power to which people had access. Take magic in fantasy games as an example. The archetypal hack fantasy RPG has a society that it basically a direct copy of mediaeval western Europe, yet powers exist which could utterly change the way society works. If these powers have existed for centuries, I would expect them to have had an impact on the development of society.

For example, suppose a charm spell exists whose effect is permanently to make the target completely loyal to another person. The spell permanently imposes on the target a desire to serve that person, whch overrides all his natural desires. Now, if such a spell existed, and there were plenty of magic-users around who had the ability to cast it, then people would want to make use of it to gain control of society. Magic-users would use it for themselves, and warlords would pay magic-users to cast the spell for their benefit.

If a person wanted power, he would naturally want to get this spell cast on anyone else who had power, so that those others would obey him. So when lords swear loyalty to a king, he has this charm spell cast on them so that they won't rebel against him. In history, plenty of wars have ended with the losers agreeing to swear loyalty to the winner. In such cases, surely the obvious thing to do is to use the charm spell to ensure that loyalty. Or suppose that you capture an enemy agent. You can cast a charm spell on him to change his loyalty, and use him as a double agent. This is so obvious that it should be used as standard procedure. Charm spells would replace the use of torture as the standard method for getting information out of prisoners, because it’s quicker and more reliable (a prisoner under torture might still manage to lie convincingly, but with his attitude changed by a charm spell he would not want to mislead his interrogators).

Some may argue that this would be socially unacceptable and that no-one would ever stand for it. This may be true in some cases (although in history, people have had to put up with a lot of things being imposed on then, and were given no choice). But in this case, the idea would have been thought of, but it would be forbidden, and unscrupulous people would still do it. So the leader of an underworld organisation might use the charm spell to maintain the loyalty of his subordinates, even though this is a forbidden and shocking act according to the values of the society. The point is that whether or not it is allowed, people would have thought of it.

In fact, if a magician can cast a charm spell often with no difficulty, then he has a vast potential for gaining personal power. He can charm a large number of people in a short time. He can soon built a loyal cult or army around him, knowing that his followers will never betray him. If he can get to people in positions of power and add them to his followers, then he can make himself a king in very short order. In a world where this power has existed for many centuries, this sort of this should have happened so often in the past that it’s now normal practice for magic-users to rule, and to do so by charming their underlings.

HOW WOULD A POWER BE USED?

If a power such as magic existed in the world, how would people use it?

Magic, if it is widespread, should be a tool of statecraft, just as armed force is a tool of statecraft. Rulers should regularly employ all the means put at their disposal by magic for the purposes of ruling - this is what real people would do. You might say that there’s a taboo against using magic to rule, but this is like saying that the commandment 'thou shalt not kill' was a taboo against war in mediaeval Europe - it didn’t stop Christian kings making war on each other, with the blessing of the Church in many cases. The fact that something is considered immoral does not stop people in power from using it for their own ends.

Magic would also be employed by those who could use magic for themselves, or hire the services of a magician. A town might reasonably keep a magician on the municipal payroll to do all sorts of useful things. A magician might be able to increase crop yields, heal the sick, predict the future, spy on people near or far, provide artillery support for troops, create illusions, create golems or zombies to act as cheap labour or troops, and a lot else besides. Many towns should see the sense in maintaining a wizard to provide these useful services.

DOES IT KILL THE ROMANCE?

Many people will object that this sort of rational analysis of how a game-world would work kills the romance of the setting. This is fair enough, and if you want to write a game whose background can not be justified in realistic terms, go ahead - but you should make it clear that the game is not intended to make sense.

It seems to me that going into battle with just a great big sword would be great fun, swinging it about and hacking up the enemy. But it's not the most effective way to fight. The Romans found that it’s much more sensible to have lots of men together, with big shields in a wall and relatively light stabbing weapons poking out between them. Thus, they found a way of fighting that was more effective than swinging a big sword, but had less romance (it’s ironic, then, that 'romance' literally means ‘Roman-ness’). They replaced the heroic image of a wild-eyed maniac swinging his great war-tool with rank upon rank of rather faceless grim troopers. Homer’s Iliad makes battles read like a series of duels between individual heroes; the Romans replaced the glory of individual exploits with masses of nameless men following well-rehearsed drills, owing their success to mass action.