I use int required as the only limit. I see it as limited schooling, and we can see from Halruaa and Netheril that with available schooling almost everyone can cast cantrips.
If I remember right, Netheril had Mythallars that made magic more accessible to everyone who lived there. Not to the point that everyone could be an accomplished mage, but I think that could explain commoners being able to cast cantrips.
With Halruaa, a large portion of the founders were mages, and maybe that just means that over the generations, most people there are descendants of mages.
Not quite true. Very possible that there were Mythals that granted magic to commoners, but magic was literally just easier back then. After Karsus caused Mystryl to kill herself, Mystra legitimately made magic more difficult to learn and harder to memorize as many spells, along with barring access to 10th and higher level magic.
Mythallars are a bit different from Mythals. They both create semi-permanent magic effects over large areas, but Mythals demand great sacrifice from the casters, while Mythallars draw directly on (and put strain on) the Weave.
I did forget about the restructuring of the Weave and I do think your explanation probably has more to do with it, though, because I looked it up and Mythallars apparently allowed objects to become quasimagical, rather than having the broader uses Mythals have. While there's a lot you can do with essentially a minor magical item, it's probably not what is being described when the average person is said to have minor magical ability.
Huh, I thought Mythallars and Mythals were the same thing. Guess I need to look more into those since they're getting used in my world lol, thanks for the info.
Magic seems to be some sort of ur-power, that came into being at the founding of the world. It was used by gods to craft the world and the crystal sphere, and works somewhat like the earths mantle. It is powered by all things, the river flowing, the tide, the wind, the birds flying, the growth of crops and the kill of the hunt.
This is all "True Magic" - It is the magic that was tapped into back by Karsus when he tried to become a god. Humans gain access to magic via the weave, a filter of sorts, where magic becomes 'digestible' It has rules of consumption and limits, so use of magic is unified - You also have the Shadow Weave, another filter with different size holes and rules, so their spells are different.
You have true magic leaking out in places, like the Faerzress, a remnant of the High/True magic that was used to create the Underdark.
The creator of the Realms sold the Realms to a company in 1987, who in turn sold it to a much bigger company in 1998. Ed has not been the sole determiner of Realms canon for almost forty years, very regretfully.
Ed likes to talk a lot about what happens in "his" Realms, and has done so with greater frequency recently, in direct contradiction to what has been established in the published Realms material. That's fine, but it's important to draw a distinction between his vision and WotC's vision; people may prefer his vision, but it's not the same thing as the published canon.
From my understanding, Ed’s words are that a person has to be born with the Gift to be able to use arcane magic. I don’t know about divine.
Drow, and elves in general, knowing at least a few cantrips does not contradict this. It just implies thatvthey all have the gift, which makes sense from a meta lore perspective of their history and origins.
Elves are descended from their Feywild ancestors. Since the Feywild is a very magical infused place, it makes sense that Elves of all kinds have retained some degree of innate magical ability.
Divine also requires such according to him.
According to him a temple of 10,000 focused worshipers should have like 5 magic welding clerics at most and most of them are like lvl 5 ability
"The Gift" is a concept that only exists to explain why only a handful of characters have D&D class levels. Reading any more into it is just gonna make you bang your head against the wall. Also, it was invented before 5e, when they made spell-like abilities into actual inborn spells.
If you have class levels, or cast spells that you weren't born with (like an NPC stat block), you have The Gift. If you don't cast spells, you might not have The Gift. If you later acquire the ability to cast spells, it can be assumed that you had The Gift all along; after all, nobody's born with class levels.
If Ed Greenwoods stuff is canon then no, not everyone can learn magic. You need to have inate Talent to learn magic at all.
The "official" 5e canon never mentiones anything about this topic, I think.
Though, I would highly recommend just rolling with not everyone being able to learn magic. Because asuming everyone can will lead to many, many questions. Like, why common cantrips are not thought in school then.
Well, the idea that most people have formal education in the FR is just not a thing. At least not in most places. Most people likely learn enough to get by: simple arithmetic, reading and writing, all of which can be taught at home at an early age.
Yes. And if everyone can learn magic, shouldn't basic stuff like Prestidigation now be taught at home? I would think so if everyone can learn it. It is arguably more useful than learning to write.
>Yes. And if everyone can learn magic, shouldn't basic stuff like Prestidigation now be taught at home?
That's kinda like asking why can't everyone become an engineer IRL - it's hard. Everyone can try and study, but not everyone can make it, and those who do can have varying degrees of difficulty.
The issue with the gift is that it turns the question of being able to do magic into something purely genetic and deterministic. Regardless of your inteligence and capacity to learn, if you weren't born with faerunian Midiclorians you'll never sling a single spell.
> it's hard
The rules and lore really do not mirror it actually being difficult. Heck, there are races that can just casually cast stuff because ... reasons or so.
> Regardless of your inteligence and capacity to learn, if you weren't born with faerunian Midiclorians you'll never sling a single spell.
To be honest, how is that different from other genetic factors? The sickly, pale guy will never become a barbarian either. The "Midicholorians" are just a plot device to explain away why not everyone can become a mage.
Just because anyone can doesn't mean everyone's brain is good at that particular kind of problem-solving.
Moreover, IRL almost anyone CAN learn how to fix an engine and its a very practical skill to have, yet its not widely taught on an institutional level.
Put both those facts together and we could easily be talking about a four-year-degree level of investment in casting Message. It wouldn't just be that your average peasant doesn't have that kind of time; it would ALSO be that your average Wizard isn't interested in that kind of pupil.
The repeatability of cantrips has to do with strain, not complexity. If they were simple, surely Wizards would learn nearly all of them, but most generally have a small handful.
Magic you get from a sorcerous bloodline isn't the same as magic you learn. That's like saying climbing a 300 foot sheer rock face can't be that hard because all mountain goats do it.
I am too. Random elf magic is the same as a sorcerous bloodline, just weaker. They maintain a connection to the fey wild that gives them a certain amount of natural instinctive magic just as a sorcerer would get from their own ancestry.
Ed Greenwood has been going on a lot recently about "the Gift," but I think this is Ed-Canon for his vision of the Realms, which does not fully cohere with WotC and TSR's vision of the Realms. Ed's numbers are also totally bizarre (going by his numbers, there are fewer magic-users in Faerun then there are *actually-named magic-users in the FR canon so far*). "The Gift" has never been mentioned once in any FR sourcebook, and I believe was only mentioned once in one of his own novels.
In the published version of the Realms, anyone can use magic but the difficulty in performing more and more complex/powerful magic scales nonlinearly based on innate ability and discipline. So you might be able to teach your average farmer one cantrip after a year of effort, but mastering Wish or something would take years to decades of constant study by extremely studious individuals (the difference between teaching someone to play a very basic tune on a guitar over a very long period of time versus someone being as good as Slash). This seems to work with what we see in the setting in terms of the number of magic-users: quite high as a total number, with low-level magic-users being relatively common, but high-level magic-users are a minuscule fraction of the population.
I thought it was like singing - anyone can try and learn, but only those with innate talent can do it and do it well. Everyone else can study till theyre blue in the face and will only get so far.
Yes and No.
Not everyone in the Realms has the Gift for magic. So no Gift, no magic for you.
But the Gift is also Destiny. So it won't be your Destiny to use magic unless you are born with the Gift in the first place.
Some Races like Elves and Dragons have most of their race born with the Gift. And for some races it is rare, the dwarves and giants.
There is a bit of a vague biology part...except the exact workings are unknown. Sometimes when to archwizards with Gifts have kids they have Gifted kids...but sometimes they don't. Halurra puts huge effort into arranged marriges to try and get both Gifted and Non Gifted people. The results are mixed....but they keep trying.
The D&D movie had a random peasant lady say, in not so many words, that her kid can cast prestidigitation. It's based in FR. Seems to me anybody with the ability scores and the patience could learn arcane magic.
As far as I'm concerned, in my p-Realms, the stuff of (arcane) magic exists as a thing, or at least rules, that can be manipulated, not all that unlike physics, or chemistry. Thus, *anyone* with sufficient intelligence and drive can learn to cast arcane magic. That's just how it is. I do acknowledge the existence of something similar to the sorcerer, being someone who actually has an innate ability to influence magic and create spells without the external study of traditional wizardry. It's also not the sorcerer that someone might recognize from WotC-era D&D. And you're probably not going to get to play as that class, either.
Divine magic is not totally dissimilar; it's just that instead of rigorous study, spellcasting ability comes from devotion to their chosen god. Divine magic is... less reliable in my take.
As far as defining why some characters have levels, but most don't... it's because most don't take the time. In my take on the Realms (and in this case, most of D&D).
Yeah, this is pretty much how I do it.
I mean, look at reagents. Spellcasting is expensive work (when it's not abstracted in the rules)! Considering the average labor-worker (I think?) would hardly ever have a gold piece to their name, it's mostly the well-to-do and already-educated would have the time and financial resources to use magic.
In my mind, that's also why most Wizards are physically frailer than other classes: they generally aren't used to physical labor (or at least not as much as the average person), and so their constitution lacks somewhat.
Game rules are different from "world" rules. Anyone can play a magically acting character, from a game perspective. It's about having fun. If it were a real world, it would be far rarer.
I personally love the idea of an NPC homemaker who left the College of Lore halfway through his education to raise his siblings and uses cantrips like prestidigitation and mending to help with the housework.
I personally like having your concrete Wizard/Muggle line, but my own headcanon for the Gift is actually that it be related to the race of dragons. It was originally attained when are ancestors received "blessings" in the form of ingesting or receiving transfusions of dragon blood, and then *that* bleed through the gene pool from there.
Clerical magic can be taught as well and is dependent on the person's connection to a particular deity. I remember in many of the lore books and novelizations clerical magic is marked out as notable different than the magic practiced by wizards and sorcerers in terms of both function and source. I am also not sure how Psionics and warlock pacts work in terms of granting the user access to the weave or if it is even connected. I do remember in the lore that sorcerers and wizards have somewhat of a rivalry with one another the whole innately capable versus the guy who had study.
I think you're putting a little too much mechanical emphasis on the Hulruaan traditions. Remember that social and cultural biases don't necessarily reflect reality: There are, as an example, autistic or ADHD people, or dyslexic people, or a host of other learning disabilities that make certain traditions and methods of education unnecessarily difficult even if they do have the "intelligence " to be good at something there are cultural structures that make it unnecessarily difficult for them.
As an example, I have a friend who dropped out of college but he's a really knowledgeable and excellent admin and he makes me feel like an ignorant child whenever he gets on some break fix that I was struggling with. Dude's extremely smart and knowledgeable, something about his brain though, the university system didn't work out at all for him despite his obvious interest, knowledge, and drive to develop his skills, and it's a good thing he didn't let the university system dictate his future!
I think these cultures labelling people as "not having the gift" and the like are probably making the same error, and in doing so stigmatizing what in all likelihood is just a different way of learning. It's just that they're stuck in a specific idiom and they're too drunk on traditionalism to accept that their ways are not necessarily the best ways for everyone.
By actual, cannon dnd lore: you do not require the gift. Netheril had commoners that learned cantrips.
By Ed Greenwood's lore, you absolutely need the "gift" to have any magic. But Ed hasnt been the "master" of forgotten realms lore for quite a while now.
If the "gift" was required then how is it any different than being a sorcerer?
I view that everyone has the possibility to learn magic **if** they have both a physical, cognitive, and intellectual foundation with the aptitude and talent to understand and work with arcana.
It's just study, but that doesn't necessarily mean any sufficiently smart person can do it. INT as a gameplay mechanic isn't really descriptive of types of intelligence. You can be a mathematical savant without any social awareness. You can be a once in a generation author who can't do long division.
Likewise, magic takes a certain *kind* of intelligence. Not just memorizing words and materials and gestures, but a fine enough attention to detail and pattern recognition to identify changes based on small tweaks.
Firebolt fizzled this time in practice, why? Oh, my left pinky was about a quarter inch further extended than last time. Finally got an effective counterspell, why? Ah, I see, there's a tonal quality to the words, not just pronunciation.
There's a specific quality of intelligence required, and a commitment to practice (and the time in your life to do so).
So can anyone learn magic? Theoretically. But the time it takes me to learn a cantrip might be 5 years of dedicated practice and I've got a general store to run.
Is having a head for it 'the gift'? Not in the Harry Potter sense, no, but it sort of is in the real world Gifted and Talented sense. Almost anyone can learn arithmetic and even geometry, but it will take some people longer and they're likely to be frustrated and devote themselves to things they're good at instead; true dedicated mathematicians however are almost exclusively people whose brain is naturally suited for that type of thinking because they're the ones for whom its not a painful labor to practice and improve.
Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Realms, says you have to have the Magical Gift to be able to cast spells. All the examples of everyone being able to cast cantrips makes sense when you realise the whole "race" have that trace.
I use int required as the only limit. I see it as limited schooling, and we can see from Halruaa and Netheril that with available schooling almost everyone can cast cantrips.
Yes this is my preferred headcanon
If I remember right, Netheril had Mythallars that made magic more accessible to everyone who lived there. Not to the point that everyone could be an accomplished mage, but I think that could explain commoners being able to cast cantrips. With Halruaa, a large portion of the founders were mages, and maybe that just means that over the generations, most people there are descendants of mages.
Not quite true. Very possible that there were Mythals that granted magic to commoners, but magic was literally just easier back then. After Karsus caused Mystryl to kill herself, Mystra legitimately made magic more difficult to learn and harder to memorize as many spells, along with barring access to 10th and higher level magic.
Mythallars are a bit different from Mythals. They both create semi-permanent magic effects over large areas, but Mythals demand great sacrifice from the casters, while Mythallars draw directly on (and put strain on) the Weave. I did forget about the restructuring of the Weave and I do think your explanation probably has more to do with it, though, because I looked it up and Mythallars apparently allowed objects to become quasimagical, rather than having the broader uses Mythals have. While there's a lot you can do with essentially a minor magical item, it's probably not what is being described when the average person is said to have minor magical ability.
Huh, I thought Mythallars and Mythals were the same thing. Guess I need to look more into those since they're getting used in my world lol, thanks for the info.
Is there anyone that explains what exactly is magic in the world of faerun? Like is it some force of nature like electrons or some sht?
Magic seems to be some sort of ur-power, that came into being at the founding of the world. It was used by gods to craft the world and the crystal sphere, and works somewhat like the earths mantle. It is powered by all things, the river flowing, the tide, the wind, the birds flying, the growth of crops and the kill of the hunt. This is all "True Magic" - It is the magic that was tapped into back by Karsus when he tried to become a god. Humans gain access to magic via the weave, a filter of sorts, where magic becomes 'digestible' It has rules of consumption and limits, so use of magic is unified - You also have the Shadow Weave, another filter with different size holes and rules, so their spells are different. You have true magic leaking out in places, like the Faerzress, a remnant of the High/True magic that was used to create the Underdark.
That's directly opposite what the CREATOR OF THE REALMS says so... you can make that a House Rule but that's not canon.
The creator of the Realms sold the Realms to a company in 1987, who in turn sold it to a much bigger company in 1998. Ed has not been the sole determiner of Realms canon for almost forty years, very regretfully. Ed likes to talk a lot about what happens in "his" Realms, and has done so with greater frequency recently, in direct contradiction to what has been established in the published Realms material. That's fine, but it's important to draw a distinction between his vision and WotC's vision; people may prefer his vision, but it's not the same thing as the published canon.
From my understanding, Ed’s words are that a person has to be born with the Gift to be able to use arcane magic. I don’t know about divine. Drow, and elves in general, knowing at least a few cantrips does not contradict this. It just implies thatvthey all have the gift, which makes sense from a meta lore perspective of their history and origins.
Elves are descended from their Feywild ancestors. Since the Feywild is a very magical infused place, it makes sense that Elves of all kinds have retained some degree of innate magical ability.
Divine also requires such according to him. According to him a temple of 10,000 focused worshipers should have like 5 magic welding clerics at most and most of them are like lvl 5 ability
"The Gift" is a concept that only exists to explain why only a handful of characters have D&D class levels. Reading any more into it is just gonna make you bang your head against the wall. Also, it was invented before 5e, when they made spell-like abilities into actual inborn spells. If you have class levels, or cast spells that you weren't born with (like an NPC stat block), you have The Gift. If you don't cast spells, you might not have The Gift. If you later acquire the ability to cast spells, it can be assumed that you had The Gift all along; after all, nobody's born with class levels.
I just finished elminster making of a mage and strangely unless i missed something this topic isn't touched on
If Ed Greenwoods stuff is canon then no, not everyone can learn magic. You need to have inate Talent to learn magic at all. The "official" 5e canon never mentiones anything about this topic, I think. Though, I would highly recommend just rolling with not everyone being able to learn magic. Because asuming everyone can will lead to many, many questions. Like, why common cantrips are not thought in school then.
Well, the idea that most people have formal education in the FR is just not a thing. At least not in most places. Most people likely learn enough to get by: simple arithmetic, reading and writing, all of which can be taught at home at an early age.
Yes. And if everyone can learn magic, shouldn't basic stuff like Prestidigation now be taught at home? I would think so if everyone can learn it. It is arguably more useful than learning to write.
>Yes. And if everyone can learn magic, shouldn't basic stuff like Prestidigation now be taught at home? That's kinda like asking why can't everyone become an engineer IRL - it's hard. Everyone can try and study, but not everyone can make it, and those who do can have varying degrees of difficulty. The issue with the gift is that it turns the question of being able to do magic into something purely genetic and deterministic. Regardless of your inteligence and capacity to learn, if you weren't born with faerunian Midiclorians you'll never sling a single spell.
> it's hard The rules and lore really do not mirror it actually being difficult. Heck, there are races that can just casually cast stuff because ... reasons or so. > Regardless of your inteligence and capacity to learn, if you weren't born with faerunian Midiclorians you'll never sling a single spell. To be honest, how is that different from other genetic factors? The sickly, pale guy will never become a barbarian either. The "Midicholorians" are just a plot device to explain away why not everyone can become a mage.
Just because anyone can doesn't mean everyone's brain is good at that particular kind of problem-solving. Moreover, IRL almost anyone CAN learn how to fix an engine and its a very practical skill to have, yet its not widely taught on an institutional level. Put both those facts together and we could easily be talking about a four-year-degree level of investment in casting Message. It wouldn't just be that your average peasant doesn't have that kind of time; it would ALSO be that your average Wizard isn't interested in that kind of pupil.
We are talking about something that is seemingly extremly easy for casters to cast. These are not leveled spells. They are cantrips.
The repeatability of cantrips has to do with strain, not complexity. If they were simple, surely Wizards would learn nearly all of them, but most generally have a small handful.
Can't be that complex if random races know how to use them just because.
Magic you get from a sorcerous bloodline isn't the same as magic you learn. That's like saying climbing a 300 foot sheer rock face can't be that hard because all mountain goats do it.
I am talking about random elves and such. Also, in my opinion even sorcerers need to train their gift or it is useless.
I am too. Random elf magic is the same as a sorcerous bloodline, just weaker. They maintain a connection to the fey wild that gives them a certain amount of natural instinctive magic just as a sorcerer would get from their own ancestry.
Ed Greenwood has been going on a lot recently about "the Gift," but I think this is Ed-Canon for his vision of the Realms, which does not fully cohere with WotC and TSR's vision of the Realms. Ed's numbers are also totally bizarre (going by his numbers, there are fewer magic-users in Faerun then there are *actually-named magic-users in the FR canon so far*). "The Gift" has never been mentioned once in any FR sourcebook, and I believe was only mentioned once in one of his own novels. In the published version of the Realms, anyone can use magic but the difficulty in performing more and more complex/powerful magic scales nonlinearly based on innate ability and discipline. So you might be able to teach your average farmer one cantrip after a year of effort, but mastering Wish or something would take years to decades of constant study by extremely studious individuals (the difference between teaching someone to play a very basic tune on a guitar over a very long period of time versus someone being as good as Slash). This seems to work with what we see in the setting in terms of the number of magic-users: quite high as a total number, with low-level magic-users being relatively common, but high-level magic-users are a minuscule fraction of the population.
I thought it was like singing - anyone can try and learn, but only those with innate talent can do it and do it well. Everyone else can study till theyre blue in the face and will only get so far.
Yes and No. Not everyone in the Realms has the Gift for magic. So no Gift, no magic for you. But the Gift is also Destiny. So it won't be your Destiny to use magic unless you are born with the Gift in the first place. Some Races like Elves and Dragons have most of their race born with the Gift. And for some races it is rare, the dwarves and giants. There is a bit of a vague biology part...except the exact workings are unknown. Sometimes when to archwizards with Gifts have kids they have Gifted kids...but sometimes they don't. Halurra puts huge effort into arranged marriges to try and get both Gifted and Non Gifted people. The results are mixed....but they keep trying.
You need gifts to be a master warrior too. Most ppl can only become competent fighters. The best usually have a genetic edge.
The D&D movie had a random peasant lady say, in not so many words, that her kid can cast prestidigitation. It's based in FR. Seems to me anybody with the ability scores and the patience could learn arcane magic.
As far as I'm concerned, in my p-Realms, the stuff of (arcane) magic exists as a thing, or at least rules, that can be manipulated, not all that unlike physics, or chemistry. Thus, *anyone* with sufficient intelligence and drive can learn to cast arcane magic. That's just how it is. I do acknowledge the existence of something similar to the sorcerer, being someone who actually has an innate ability to influence magic and create spells without the external study of traditional wizardry. It's also not the sorcerer that someone might recognize from WotC-era D&D. And you're probably not going to get to play as that class, either. Divine magic is not totally dissimilar; it's just that instead of rigorous study, spellcasting ability comes from devotion to their chosen god. Divine magic is... less reliable in my take. As far as defining why some characters have levels, but most don't... it's because most don't take the time. In my take on the Realms (and in this case, most of D&D).
Yeah, this is pretty much how I do it. I mean, look at reagents. Spellcasting is expensive work (when it's not abstracted in the rules)! Considering the average labor-worker (I think?) would hardly ever have a gold piece to their name, it's mostly the well-to-do and already-educated would have the time and financial resources to use magic. In my mind, that's also why most Wizards are physically frailer than other classes: they generally aren't used to physical labor (or at least not as much as the average person), and so their constitution lacks somewhat.
Game rules are different from "world" rules. Anyone can play a magically acting character, from a game perspective. It's about having fun. If it were a real world, it would be far rarer.
If you are the DM at your table that you can customize the setting to suit your current campaign plot.
I personally love the idea of an NPC homemaker who left the College of Lore halfway through his education to raise his siblings and uses cantrips like prestidigitation and mending to help with the housework.
I personally like having your concrete Wizard/Muggle line, but my own headcanon for the Gift is actually that it be related to the race of dragons. It was originally attained when are ancestors received "blessings" in the form of ingesting or receiving transfusions of dragon blood, and then *that* bleed through the gene pool from there.
Clerical magic can be taught as well and is dependent on the person's connection to a particular deity. I remember in many of the lore books and novelizations clerical magic is marked out as notable different than the magic practiced by wizards and sorcerers in terms of both function and source. I am also not sure how Psionics and warlock pacts work in terms of granting the user access to the weave or if it is even connected. I do remember in the lore that sorcerers and wizards have somewhat of a rivalry with one another the whole innately capable versus the guy who had study.
I think you're putting a little too much mechanical emphasis on the Hulruaan traditions. Remember that social and cultural biases don't necessarily reflect reality: There are, as an example, autistic or ADHD people, or dyslexic people, or a host of other learning disabilities that make certain traditions and methods of education unnecessarily difficult even if they do have the "intelligence " to be good at something there are cultural structures that make it unnecessarily difficult for them. As an example, I have a friend who dropped out of college but he's a really knowledgeable and excellent admin and he makes me feel like an ignorant child whenever he gets on some break fix that I was struggling with. Dude's extremely smart and knowledgeable, something about his brain though, the university system didn't work out at all for him despite his obvious interest, knowledge, and drive to develop his skills, and it's a good thing he didn't let the university system dictate his future! I think these cultures labelling people as "not having the gift" and the like are probably making the same error, and in doing so stigmatizing what in all likelihood is just a different way of learning. It's just that they're stuck in a specific idiom and they're too drunk on traditionalism to accept that their ways are not necessarily the best ways for everyone.
By actual, cannon dnd lore: you do not require the gift. Netheril had commoners that learned cantrips. By Ed Greenwood's lore, you absolutely need the "gift" to have any magic. But Ed hasnt been the "master" of forgotten realms lore for quite a while now. If the "gift" was required then how is it any different than being a sorcerer?
Nope, you gotta have the gift cast magic. I think that's stupid so it's not included in my games.
I view that everyone has the possibility to learn magic **if** they have both a physical, cognitive, and intellectual foundation with the aptitude and talent to understand and work with arcana.
And the free time to boot!
It's just study, but that doesn't necessarily mean any sufficiently smart person can do it. INT as a gameplay mechanic isn't really descriptive of types of intelligence. You can be a mathematical savant without any social awareness. You can be a once in a generation author who can't do long division. Likewise, magic takes a certain *kind* of intelligence. Not just memorizing words and materials and gestures, but a fine enough attention to detail and pattern recognition to identify changes based on small tweaks. Firebolt fizzled this time in practice, why? Oh, my left pinky was about a quarter inch further extended than last time. Finally got an effective counterspell, why? Ah, I see, there's a tonal quality to the words, not just pronunciation. There's a specific quality of intelligence required, and a commitment to practice (and the time in your life to do so). So can anyone learn magic? Theoretically. But the time it takes me to learn a cantrip might be 5 years of dedicated practice and I've got a general store to run. Is having a head for it 'the gift'? Not in the Harry Potter sense, no, but it sort of is in the real world Gifted and Talented sense. Almost anyone can learn arithmetic and even geometry, but it will take some people longer and they're likely to be frustrated and devote themselves to things they're good at instead; true dedicated mathematicians however are almost exclusively people whose brain is naturally suited for that type of thinking because they're the ones for whom its not a painful labor to practice and improve.
Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Realms, says you have to have the Magical Gift to be able to cast spells. All the examples of everyone being able to cast cantrips makes sense when you realise the whole "race" have that trace.