scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/2exfht.md

[D] What spells do you have to eliminate from D&D if you want to keep a mostly functional medieval economy?

• Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2exfht/d_what_spells_do_you_have_to_eliminate_from_dd_if/

• Score: 28

• Created: 2014-08-29T16:04:38

Post:

Tayler's Law is that if magic can do something more cheaply than a donkey, your medieval economy is basically shot. I'm going to be running a D&D game this weekend, and while I think it's fine to just go with a setting that doesn't make sense, I've been giving some thought to what you would need to do to the magic system in order to not completely betray the "standard" quasi-medieval setting, beyond just limiting the number of magic users.

A cleric gets Create Food and Water at 5th level, which (at that level) feeds 15 people a day, and gets better as she increases in level. Even if the food is bland, this pretty much eliminates the need for almost all farming if you've got around one fifth level cleric per 15 people. A 20th level cleric can feed 300 people per day using only his 3rd level spell slots. The economy starts to fall apart, and not become like what you would historically expect. A starve-your-enemies siege can't even really happen in a world like this. I don't think that a full-on Tippyverse necessarily results from the spells as presented in the SRD, but I do think that you get something close when you begin destroying the foundations of the historical era that D&D is sort of meant to be aping. (Tippyverse uses a number of RAW vs. RAI stuff that I disagree with, and makes some not-so-solid assumptions about how the D&Dverse works.)

So here's the challenge: what do you need to eliminate in order to get a D&D setting that makes sense? This is essentially a reverse-munchkin challenge - you're the god who's trying to restrict the universe from getting too far away from medieval. (I realize that in part this depends on population assumptions - my general rule is that half the population has no character levels, a quarter are level one, an eighth are level two, and so on.)

tl;dr: Imagine a D&D world that actually has a DM to prevent the stupidest abuses of the rules. You'd still need to make some rules changes to prevent the world from warping into something completely unlike a default setting. What spells do you need to remove?

Comments:

u/Escapement [+20] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (an hour later)

For 3e/3.5e D&D, there are a huge number of spells that can be removed or altered to make more sense with the D&D rules for economics.

The best resource I've discovered for reconciling the rules with the presented economies are Frank and K's houserules. The Index post of Houserules, No Wishing for more wishes, and The Economicon may all be of interest. However, in brief:

• An artifical cap of 15,000 gp is imposed on Wish (a change from the 3.5e standard) and all wishes for items or whatever costing more than that require payment and cannot be obtained from 'free' wishes.
• All items costing more than 15,000 GP are not obtainable from gold currencies, and must be traded for with other things also worth more than 15,000 GP and therefore you can't exploit creating walls of iron or created food or anything else of that vein to peasants for gold to eventually total up to a +4 sword - you have to get real treasures instead, and 'breaking the economy' via mundane goods and services doesn't help you so most people don't do it.

A big, highly relevant post of Frank's on this topic:

We don't want to throw Astral Diamonds at the problem, but D&D's economics are badly in need of a serious overhaul. Here is an essay about the direction I would like it to go (note: assumes that we use 3e wish as opposed to the broken 3.5 version):

Spending the Loot: the Three (or so) Economies

"I'll give you five pounds of gold, the soul of Karlack the Dread King, and three onions for your boat, the Sword of the Setting Sun, and that cabbage…"

Life in D&D land is not like life in a capitalist meritocracy with expense accounts and credit cards. There is no unified monetary system and there are no marked prices. All transactions are essentially barter, and you can only trade things for goods and services if people genuinely believe that the things you are trading have intrinsic value and the people you are trading to actually want those specific things. Gold can be traded to people only because people in the world genuinely think that gold is intrinsically valuable and that they want to own piles of gold.

That means that in places where people don't want gold – such as the halfling farming collective of Feddledown, you can't buy anything with it. It's just a heavy, soft metal. But for most people in the fantasy universe, gold has a certain mystique that causes people to want it. That means that they'll trade things they don't need for gold. But no matter what they are giving up they aren't "selling" things because money as we understand the concept doesn't really exist. They are trading some goods or services directly for a physical object – an actual lump of gold. Not a unit of value equivalency, not a promise of future gold, not a state guaranty of an amount of labor and productive work – but an actual physical object that is being literally traded. And yeah, that's totally inefficient, but that's what you get when John Locke hasn't been born yet, let alone modern economic theorists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Benito Mussolini. If you really want to get into the progressive economic theories that people are throwing around with a straight face, go ahead and check out theoreticians like Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, Sir Thomas Moore, or Zheng He. If you want to see what conservative opinions look like in D&D land, go ahead and read up on your Draconis, Li Ssu, Aristotle, or Tamerlain.

The Turnip Economy

"We got rats! Rats on sticks!"

Most settlements in a D&D setting are really small and completely unable to sustain any barter for such frivolities as gold or magical goods. The blacksmith of a hamlet does not trade his wares for silver, he trades them for food. He does this because the people around him are farmers and they don't make enough surplus to hoard valuable metals. So if he took gold for his services, he would get something he couldn't spend, and then he wouldn't be able to eat. So even though people in the tiny villages you fly over when you get your first gryphon will freely acknowledge that your handful of silver is worth very much more than their radishes, or their tin cups, or whatever it is that they produce for the market, they still won't trade for your metal because they know that by doing so they run the risk of starving to death as rich men.

The economy of your average gnomish village is so depressed by modern standards that even the idea of wealth accumulation and currency is incomprehensible. But the idea of slacking off is universal. There is a static amount of work that needs to be done on the farm each year and the peasants are perfectly willing to put you up if you do some of their chores. Seriously, they won't let you stay in their house for a copper pfennig or a silver ducat, but they will give you food and shelter if you cleanout the pig trough. They have no use for your "money", but they do need the poop out of the pig pen and they don't want to do it. On the other hand, they also don't want to be eaten by a manticore, so if you publicly slay one that has been terrorizing the village the people will feed you for free pretty much as long as you live. That's why people pay money to bards. Bards spend a lot of time in cities and actually will take payment in copper and gold. And if they sing songs about you, your fame increases. And fame really is something that you can use to buy yourself food and shelter from people in the turnip economy.

"Costs" in the turnip economy are extremely variable. In lean times, the buying power of a carrot is relatively high and in fat times the buying power of a cabbage is very low. It is in this way that the people in tiny hamlets get so very screwed. No matter how much they produce or don't produce, they are pretty much going to get just enough nails and ladders and such to continue the operations of their farms. However, such as there is a unit of currency in the barter economy of the turnip exchange – it's a unit of 1000 Calories. That's enough food to keep one peasant alive for one day. It's not enough to feed them well, and it's not enough to make them grow big and strong, but it's enough so that they don't actually die (for reference, a specialist eats 2000 Calories a day to stay sharp and an actual adventurer eats 5000 Calories a day to maintain fighting shape). In Rokugan, that's called a Koku, and in much of Faerun it is called a "ration". It works out to about 2 cups of dry rice (435 mL), or a 12 oz. steak (340 g), or 5 cups of black beans (1.133 kg), or 4.4 ounces of cooking oil (125 g).

Higher Calorie foods like meat and oil are more valuable and lower calorie foods like celery or spinach are less valuable because a lot of people exist on the razor's edge of starvation. The really fatty cuts of meat are the most valuable of all (it's like you're in Japan or Africa in that way). The practical effect of all of this is that people who have a skilled position such as blacksmith or scribe get enough food to grow up big, healthy, and intelligent. The peasants actually are weak and stupid because they only get 1000 Calories a day – they won't die on that but they don't grow as people. This also means that the blacksmith's son becomes the next blacksmith – he's the guy in the village who gets enough food to get the muscles you need to actually be a blacksmith.

When you start a party of adventurers, note the really tremendous expenditures that were required to make your characters. A 16 year old first level character didn't just get a longsword from somewhere, he's also been fed a non-starvation diet for 5844 days. That means that at some point your newly trained Fighter or Rogue seriously had someone invest thousands of Koku into him to allow him to get to that point. If your character is a street rat or a war orphan, consider where this food may have come from. Perhaps when the orcs destroyed your village leaving your character alone in the world the granary survived and your character had a huge supply of millet to sustain himself until he could hunt and kill deer to augment his diet.

(continued in next post)

u/Escapement [+11] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (an hour later)

A Note on Peasant Uprisings

Peasants may seem like they get a crap deal out of life. That's because they do. And regardless of whatever happy peasant propaganda you may have seen, peasants aren't really happy with their life even under Good or Lawful rulership. That's because they work hard hours all year and get nothing to show for it. So the fact that they don't get beaten by Good regimes or stolen from by Lawful regimes doesn't really make them particularly rich or pleased.

In Earth's history, peasant uprisings happened about every other generation in every single county from Europe all the way to China all the way through the entire feudal era (all 1500 years of it). It is not unreasonable to expect that feudal regions in D&D land would have even more peasant uprisings because the visible wealth discrepancies between Rakshasa overlords and halfling dirt farmers is that much more intense. Sure, as in the real world's history these uprisings would rarely win, and even more rarely actually hold territory (if lords can agree on nothing else, it is that the peasants should not be allowed to rise up and kill the lords). The lords are all powerful adventurers, or the family and friends of powerful adventurers, so the frequent peasant revolts are usually put down with fireballs and even cloudkills.

Students of modern economic thought may notice that cutting the remote regions in on a portion of the central government's wealth in order to buy actual loyalty from the hinterlands could quite easily pay itself off in greater stability and the ability to invest in the production of the hinterlands causing the central government's coffers to swell with the enhanced overall economy and making the entire region safer and stronger in times of war – but as noted elsewhere such talk is considered laughable even by Lawfully minded theorists in the D&D world. After all, since abstract currency doesn't see use and the villagers don't have any gold, it is "well known" that it is impossible to make a profit on investment in the villages. The only possible choices involve taking more or less of their food as taxes/loot as that is all they produce.

The Gold Economy

"What pleasures can I get for a diamond?" "We'll… have to get the book."

People who live in cities mostly trade in gold. This is not just because living so far away from the dirt farmers makes the hoarding of turnips as a trade commodity a dangerous undertaking – but because people living in cities are surrounded by a lot of people who provide a wide variety of goods and services they are willing and able to trade for substances generally acknowledged to be valuable rather than trading directly for the goods and services that they actually want. These valuable substances range from precious metals (copper, silver, gold, platinum) to gems (pearls, rubies, onyx, diamond) to spices (salt, myconid spores, hellcandy flowers). In any case, these trade goods are traded back and forth many times before they are ever used for anything

When someone sells an item or a service for trade goods they are doing it for one of two reasons. The first is that they want something that the buyer doesn't have. For example, a man might want a barrel of lard or a bolt of silk – but they'll accept silver coins or something else that they are reasonably certain they can trade to a third party for whatever it is that they are actually interested in. Whoever is using the trade goods is at a disadvantage in the bargaining therefore, because while they are getting something they actually want, the other trader is essentially getting the potential to purchase something they want once they walk around and find someone who will take the silver for their goods. It is for this reason that the purchasing power of gold is shockingly low in rural areas: a prospective trader would have to walk for days to get to another place he might actually spend a gold coin – so all negotiation essentially starts with buying several days of the man's labor and attention. The second reason for accepting a trade good is the belief that the trade good may itself become more valuable. Indeed, when were crocodiles take over a nearby village all the silver becomes a lot more interesting. This sort of speculation happens all the time and is incredibly bad for the economy. People and dragons take enormous amounts of currency out of circulation and the resulting economic downturns are part of what makes the dark ages so… dark.

Gold and jewels can be used to purchase magic items that aren't amazingly impressive. No wizard is ever going to make a masterpiece just to sell it for slips of silver. However, there are more than a few magicians who would be willing to invest some time in order to get a handful of gold that they can use to live their lives easier with. Making even Minor magic items is hard work, and wizards demand piles of gold to be heaped on them for producing even magical trinkets. And because these demands actually work, there's really no chance to purchase anything that would take a Magician a long time to make. That means that Major magic items cannot be purchased with standard trade goods at all. There's literally no artificer anywhere who is going to sit down and make a Ring of Spellstoring or a Helm of Brilliance in order to sell it for gold – because the same artificer can acquire as much gold as he can carry just by making Rings of Featherfall or Cloaks of Resistance.

The Wish Economy

"They scour the land searching for relics of the age of legends. Scant remnants they believe will grant them the powers of the Vanished Ones. I do not. The Age of Legends lives in me."

Magicians can only produce a relatively small number of truly powerful magic items. While a magician can produce any number of magic items that hold requirements at least 4 levels below their own – a wizard is permitted only one masterpiece at each level of their progression. It is no surprise, therefore, that characters would be vastly interested in acquiring magic items produced by others that are even of near equivalence to the mightiest items that a character could produce. A character could plausibly bind 8 magic items, and yet they can only create one which is of their highest level of effect. Gaining powerful magic items from other sources is a virtual requirement of the powerful adventurer.

So it is of no surprise that there is a brisk – if insanely risky – trade in magical equipment amongst the mighty. All the ingredients are there: characters are often left holding onto items that they can't use (for example: a third fire scimitar) and they are totally willing to exchange them for other items that they might want (magical teapots that change the weather or helmets that allow a man to see in all directions). And while the mutual benefit of such trades is not to be downplayed, it is similarly obvious that the benefits of betrayal in such arrangements are amazingly amazing. Killing people and taking their magical stuff is what adventurers do, so handing magic items back and forth in a seedy bar in a planar metropolis is an obviously dangerous undertaking.

(continued in next post)

u/Escapement [+13] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (an hour later)

Tamerlain's Economy: The Murderocracy

"The soldier may die, but he must receive his pay."

Let's say that you don't want to exchange goods and services for other goods and services at all. Well, it's medieval times baby, there's totally another option. See, if you kill people by stabbing them in the face when they want to be paid for things, you don't have to pay for things. Indeed, if you have a big enough pack of gnolls at your back, you don't have to pay anything to anyone except your own personal posse of gnolls.

The disadvantages of this plan are obvious – people get super pissed when they find out that you murdered their daughter because it was that or pay for a handful of radishes. But let's face it: if that old man can't do anything about it because you've got a pack of gnolls – then seriously what's he going to do? And while this sort of thing is often as not the source for an adventure hook (some guy comes to you and whines about how his whole family was killed by orcs/gnolls/your mom/ ogres/demons/or whatever and suddenly you have to strike a blow for great justice), it is also a cold harsh reality that everyone in D&D land has to live with. Remember: noone has written The Rights of Man. Heck, noone has even written Leviathan. The fact that survivors of an attack may appeal to the better nature of adventurers is pretty much the only recompense that our gnoll posse might fear should they simply forcibly dispossess everyone in your village.

So people who have something that the really powerful people want are in a lot of danger. If a dirt farmer who does all of his bargaining in and around the turnip economy suddenly finds himself with a pile of rubies that's bad news. It's not that there aren't people who would be willing to trade that farmer fine clothing, good food, and even minor magic items for those rubies – there totally are. But a pile of rubies is just big enough that a Marilith might take time out of her busy schedule to teleport in and murder his whole family for them. And he's a dirt farmer – there's no way he has the force needed to even pretend to have the force needed to stop her from doing it. So if you have planar currencies or powerful artifacts, you can't trade them to innkeepers and prostitutes. You can't even give them away save to other powerful people and organizations.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a peasant who runs around with a ring that casts charm person once a day or there isn't a minor bandit chief who happens to have a magic sword. Those guys totally exist and they may well wander the lands trying to parlay their tiny piece of asymmetric power into something more. But the vast majority of these guys don't go on to become famous adventurers or dark lords – they get their stuff taken away from them the first time they go head to head with someone with real power. Good or Evil, Lawful or Chaotic, noone wants some idiot to be running around with a ring that charms people – because frankly that's the kind of dangerous and an accident waiting to happen. If you happen to be powerful and see some small fry running around with some magic – your natural inclination is to take it from them. It doesn't matter what your alignment is, it doesn't matter if the guy with the wand of lightning bolt is currently "abusing" it, the fact is that if you don't take magic items away from little fish one of your enemies will. There is no right to private property. Noone owns anything, they just hold on to it until someone takes it from them.

Beelzebub's Economy: The Trade in Favors

"I'm certain that there's something we can do to help you… but eventually you'll have to help us."

Every transaction in D&D land is essentially barter. People trade a cloth sack for a handful of peas, people trade an embroidered silken sack for a handful of silver, and people trade a powerful magical sack for a handful of raw power. But in any of these cases, the exchange is a one-time swap of goods that one person wants more for goods the other person desires. But there is no reason it has to work like that. Modern economies abstract all of the exchanges by creating "money" that is an arbitrary tally of how much goods and services one can expect society to deliver – thereby allowing everyone to "trade" for whatever they want regardless of what they happen to produce. Nothing nearly that awesome exists anywhere in the myriad worlds of Dungeons and Dragons.

What one can see in heavy use is the trade in favors. This is just like getting paid in money except that your money is only good with the guy who paid it to you. So you can see why people might be reluctant to sell you things for it. And yet despite the extremely obvious disadvantages of this system, it is in extremely wide use at every level of every economy. And the reason is because it's really convenient. There is no guaranty that a King will have anything you want right now when he needs you to kill the dragon that is plaguing his lands. In fact, with a dragon plaguing his lands, the King is probably in the worst possible position to pay you anything. But once the lands aren't on fire and taxes start rolling in, he can probably pay you quite handsomely. Heck, in two years or so his daughter will be marrying age and since she's just going to end up as an aristocrat unless she becomes the apprentice and cohort of a real adventurer…

Failing to pay one's debts can have disastrous consequences in D&D land. We're talking "sold to hobgoblin slavers" levels of bad. Heck, this is a world in which you can seriously go into a court of law and present "He needed killing" as an excuse for premeditated homicide, so people who renege on their favors owed are in actual mortal danger. Of course, everyone is in mortal danger all the time because in D&D land you actually can have land shark attacks in your home town – so it isn't like there are any less people who flake on duties and favors. Of course, if people know you let favors slide they might be less likely to pull you out of the way of oncoming land sharks. Even in Chaotic areas, pissing off your neighbors is rarely a great plan.

The Economicon: Making Sense of the Gold Standard:

"100 pounds of gold for a house? How does anyone make rent without a wheelbarrow?"

Since time immemorial, D&D has used the "gold piece" as its primary currency. It is apparently a chunk of reasonably pure gold of vaguely standardized weight that people use fairly interchangeably in different cities populated by different species. In the bad old days, each gold coin was a tenth of a pound, which was hilarious and inane. In the current edition, each gold piece is a fiftieth of a pound. That's 3.43 gp to the Troy Ounce, which means that in the modern economy, each gp is about $171 worth of gold. Obviously, gold is significantly more common in D&D than it is on Earth, gold is also undervalued because its status as a currency standard drives it out of industrial uses and causes inflation. Further, populations in D&D are orders of magnitude smaller than they are in the real world, so the gold per person is higher even with the same amount of gold. So the gold piece is massively less valuable in D&D economies than it would be in Earth's economies.

Nonetheless, things are really expensive in D&D, and the high price in gold means that there's a distinct limitation of how much wealth can be transported by any means available. The economies of currency transaction are actually so unfavorable that currency as we understand the term does not exist. Things don't have prices or costs – all transactions are conducted in barter and a common medium of exchange is heavy lumps of precious metal.

Wish and the Economy

An Efreet can provide a wish for any magical item of 15,000 gp or less. A Balor can greater teleport at will, but can only carry 30 pounds of currency while doing so. Even in platinum pieces, that's 15,000 gp worth of metal. The long and the short of it is – at the upper end of the economy currency has no particular purchasing power and magic items of 15,000 gp value or less are viewed as wooden nickels at best. You can spend 15,000 gp and get magic items, but people in the know won't sell you a magic item worth 15,001 gp for money. That kind of item can only be bought for love. Or human souls. Or some other planar currency that is not replicable by chain binding a room full of Efreet to make in bulk.

Powerful characters actually can have bat caves that have sword racks literally covered in 15,000 gp magic items. It's not even a deal because they could just go home and slap some Efreet around and get some more. But even a single major magic item – that's heavy stuff that such characters will notice. Those things don't come free with hope alone, and every archmage knows that.

(continued in next post)

u/Escapement [+7] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (an hour later)

Wartime Economies Make for Shortages:

Many people wonder why a masterwork dagger goes for more than its weight in gold. That's a pretty valid question to ask; certainly I'm not going to attempt to justify the 600 gp price tag on a masterwork walking stick – that's just an example of simplistic game mechanics run amok. But to an extent the crazy prices can be justified by the fact that every settlement in every D&D world is on a war footing all the time. The idea that Peace is somehow a natural state is a fairly recent one, and based on the frequency of wars all over the world – it's obviously just wishful thinking anyway. War is the default position of every major economy in the world, and that means that weapons have an immediate, and desperate, clientele. Iron is still relatively cheap, because you can't kill people with it right now, but actual weapons and armor are crazy expensive.

That doesn't explain the fact that the PHB charges you over a quarter Oz. of gold just to get a backpack, and it doesn't explain the fact that the markup on masterworking a buckler is the same as the markup on masterworking a breastplate – that's just a game simplification that makes no real-world sense. But it's a start.

Coins are Big and Heavy

"How many boards could the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored?"

From the standpoint of the adventurer, the primary difficulty of the D&D currency system is that the lack of a coherent banking and paper currency system means that there are profound limits to what you could possibly purchase even with platinum. But the currency system hurts on the other end as well. Untrained labor gets a silverpiece a week. That's 500 copper coins a year, which means that no matter how cheap things are they can only make one purchase a day most of the time. That's pretty stifling to the economy, in that however much gets produced, noone can buy it. Demand, from the economics standpoint, is strangled to the point where large production outputs don't even matter (remember that in economics Demand doesn't mean "what people want", it means "what people are willing and able to pay for", so if the average person only has 500 discreet pieces of currency per year, that puts an absolute cap on economic demand, even though the people are of course both needy and greedy enough to want anything you happen to produce).

What's worse, those coins are heavy. For our next demonstration, reach into your change drawer and fish out nine pennies. That's a decent lump in your pocket, neh? That's about one copper piece. Gold pieces are smaller (less than half the size, actually), but weigh the same. D&D currency, therefore, is more like a Monopoly playing piece than it is like a modern or ancient coin. There's no reason to even believe these things are round, people are seriously marching around gold hats and silver dogs as the basic medium of exchange.

Now, you may ask yourself why these coins are so titanic compared to real coins. The answer is because having piles of coins is awesome. Dragons are supposed to sleep on that stuff, and that requires big piles of coins. Consider my own mattress, which is a "twin-size" (pretty reasonable for a single medium-size creature) and nearly .2 cubic meters. If it was made out of gold, it would be about 3.9 tonnes. That's about eighty-six hundred pounds, and even with the ginormous coins in D&D, that's four hundred and thirty thousand gold pieces. In previous editions, that sort of thing was simply accepted and very powerful dragons really did have the millions of gold pieces – which was actually fine. Since third edition, they've been trying to make gold actually equal character power, and the result has been that dragon hoards are… really small. None of this "We need to get a wagon team to haul it all away", no. In 3rd edition, hoard sizes have become manageable, even ridiculously tiny. When a 6th level party defeats a powerful and wealthy monster, they can expect to find… nearly a liter of gold. That is, the treasure "hoard" of that evil dragon you defeated will actually fit into an Evian bottle.

There are two ways to handle this:

1. Live with the fact that treasures are small and unexciting in modern D&D.
2. Live with the fact that characters who grab a realistic dragon's hoard become filthy stinking rich and this fundamentally changes the way they interact with society.

But once you accept that the realities of the wish based economy, you actually don't have to live with characters unbalancing the game once they find a real mattress filled with gold. That's not even a problem once characters are no longer excited by a +2 Enhancement bonus to a stat or a +3 enhancement bonus to Armor. Which means somewhere between 9th and 13th level it's perfectly fine for players to find actual money without unbalancing the game. Really, you can stop worrying about it.

-Frank

u/None [+12] (an hour later)

Good, I was hoping to be unproductive today....

u/Nepene [+13] (an hour later)

You don't really need to do this.

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2

A fifth level character is so exceptional that they'd be a one in a million person in our world. They are the sorts of people who can break or make a war or a world. If you have one per fifteen people be at that level the world is generally going to be very broken.

A twentieth level character is closer to a god than a human and, as such, being able to feed 300 people isn't that big. If 1/64 people are level 5 there is very little you can do to make the world not broken.

Edit. For one, a fifth level character has a typical wealth of 9000 gp. They can hire a thousand mules, vastly more effective than donkeys, and feed them for quite a while.

u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)

The problem with making higher level people rare is that in D&D, they're incredibly powerful. My experience of D&D is that the party is always about five minutes away from turning into a pack of murder hobos. If you're level five and the guards are level one, you can cut straight through them like butter, and there's no point in following their laws. If a party of fifth level characters go to a very large medieval city (15th century Moscow was a fifth of a million), they can crush their way through all of the guards with relatively little trouble.

And you can run campaigns at a persistently low level, but the expectation set up by the rulebooks is that characters will level up every four or five encounters - the game is built around that, and it's part of what people sign up for when they sign up for D&D. Either the world is ready for the PCs or it's not, and I would prefer that it is.

u/RMcD94 [+4] (2 hours later)

The most powerful would naturally be drawn to positions of power, this will very likely mean that if some powerful individual goes rampaging around the top men of the country will be sent out at them.

Not to mention that depending on your edition 30 or 40 1st level guards with you know intelligence would be enough to handle 5th level characters.

If you can turn wealth by level into real world GDP, you can then start estimating how much a city of Moscow would have. IMO wealth by level sucks completely though and I don't really like the assumption of a billion magical items in 3.5 and Pathfinder yet no changes at all to the worlds economy.

u/Nepene [+3] (2 hours later)

They should be able to cut through a city guard with ease. Hence a city should have contact with other adventurers, powerful mages and clerics, golems and such. If a group does start rampaging they can summon them, though guards and whatever local militias can be raised will be slaughtered in the meantime.

It's like... you run a campaign of the Iraq war, and your honest assessment of Iraq is that they'd lose. So you give Iraq technology similar to America. Then you're surprised why the sociopolitical situation of Iraq doesn't really work any more.

but the expectation set up by the rulebooks is that characters will level up every four or five encounters

So you keep your players in the city for 20-25 encounters?

u/VorpalAuroch [+2] Life before Death (a day later)

but the expectation set up by the rulebooks is that characters will level up every four or five encounters

This is very, very wrong. First, the number is 13, not 4-5. Second, it's only true in the counterfactual world where every encounter is a serious challenge which exhausts significant resources, which is very specifically not what a campaign is supposed to look like. If you look at the same page (or maybe give or take a couple pages), in the same place where it tells you that 13 encounters of EL N for a party of Nth level adventurers is about a level, there is a table which gives the assumed distribution of encounters. IIRC, it is 5% impossible, 10% impossible-except-with-a-catch-that-makes-it-doable, 15% EL = party level, 30% easy, and 20% very easy.

There's another set of essays about this very subject on the Alexandrian, along with how it, as a side effect, makes the Batman wizard totally impractical until about 16th level. With a side helping of minor house rules to put off scry-and-die as a practical tactic until about that same time.

u/None [+3] (3 hours later)

But there's a strong incentive to become a higher level something. Since it's an economic incentive, you can get a rich person investing in a bunch of high quality low level armor, strapping it on young commoners, and sending them at easy encounters until they level up. A rule of thumb is ten standard encounters per level (at least in 4e), but if you want something commoners can survive, it might be fifty or a hundred. Still, that's going to be maybe three encounters per day (with a higher level person supervising ready to jump in if the fight goes south), which means at least a level a month, assuming you have appropriate opponents.

How do you get those opponents? You start out with a pool of candidates of level 0 and have them fight each other as a challenge. As individuals level up, you adjust the teams to keep the challenges even (so you don't get a team with a person who luckily levels up first and then ends up trouncing the other to the end of time). You can do this by shuffling the teams around or having people sit some encounters out.

Within a couple years, you have a steady supply of mid-level adventurers. The starting money is enough to feed a few dozen people for that time, the cost of the land and buildings, money for instructors, and a few sets of armor and weapons. A few thousand gold, all told -- maybe two hundred per trainee. A trainee at fifth level (assuming you're going for all clerics) can get you 12gp/week by feeding people (it's 5-6gp a week for a family of five on not-so-great rations to cook for themselves, and you want to undercut it so they can add seasonings to your "nourishing", "bland" food, so 12-ish gp total earnings). That helps you make back some of the training cost, and then they stay as a part of your organization (hopefully), making easy money with no risk and giving you a cut.

Of course, with Zone of Truth to assist in trials, group-casting Eagle's Splendor on a chosen leader, finding lost people with Helping Hand, defending a town from outsiders with a variety of spells, stopping thieves with Command, and breaking up riots with Enthrall (or making them less damaging with Bane and Obscuring Mist), clerics are in a good position to become local governments. With Shape Stone, clerics are also useful as builders -- after that year of training, each one can create 60 cubic feet of wall per day, plus another 15 for each that specializes in the Earth domain. Convenient, since that means they can build the prisons that your commoners will inevitably require.

Convincing them not to go off adventuring is left as an exercise to the reader.

For one, a fifth level character has a typical wealth of 9000 gp. They can hire a thousand mules, vastly more effective than donkeys, and feed them for quite a while.

This requires them to have been adventuring in places where they would reasonably have gotten that sort of loot. Raising a cleric army from scratch, you'd expect them each to have much less money.

u/Nepene [+2] (3 hours later)

Since it's an economic incentive, you can get a rich person investing in a bunch of high quality low level armor, strapping it on young commoners, and sending them at easy encounters until they level up.

Awarding EXP is left somewhat up to the DM, and they often refuse to give it for cheap hacks like this since the monsters aren't really a challenge. They can choose the challenge rating somewhat depending on the environment. Plus, often, npcs don't get exp, they just get levelled to an appropriate level. You actually have to be in a dangerous situation.

u/None [+2] (2 days later)

Awarding EXP is left somewhat up to the DM, and they often refuse to give it for cheap hacks like this since the monsters aren't really a challenge.

If we have a DM, we can posit that very few people have the aptitude to get PC classes, and the item prices in the books are typical prices assuming nobody's buying up millions of ladders, pulling them apart, and selling them as firewood and staves, and anyone trying to game the system will find out that they can't. If we have a DM, the problem goes away.

We're instead assuming we have an in-world patrician whose rule is guaranteed and who is extremely knowledgeable about and adept with manipulating the D&D rules as written.

You actually have to be in a dangerous situation.

Where in the rules is this "dangerous situation" criterion written? I've never seen it before.

If it does exist, does it specify "danger of death"? Does it specify a minimum probability of dying? Technically, a level 1 vorpal rat could be able to kill a lesser deity with enough lucky rolls and some stupid behavior. It also means that a player gains no experience from defeating Bahamut and all his spawn if Bahamut wants to capture the player (using nonlethal means of dealing damage, which is only a -4 to hit for melee attacks) and exile her to a place of madness for all eternity rather than killing her outright.

If you need a nonzero probability of death, you can have your participants using lethal damage for some portion of their attacks. A lucky critical hit combined with multiple unlucky heal checks would leave a combatant dying. It's possible that the proctor would fail the perception check to notice. Assuming the proctor notices, she might become distracted while attempting to cast a healing spell, forcing her to make a Concentration check, which she might fail. It takes about ten critical failures for a person to die in that case, assuming everyone has plenty of bonuses in the right areas, with higher probabilities with lower bonuses. 1/20^10 is small but nonzero.

If you need a nonzero probability of anything unpleasant for the character to receive experience, that fixes the Bahamut problem, but it doesn't change the exploit to any noticeable degree. The losing team for each engagement suffers some mildly humiliating punishment, like jogging naked through the city. Or they

If we have 4e mechanics available, we can use skill challenges as well. No danger required.

Plus, often, npcs don't get exp, they just get levelled to an appropriate level.

Even easier. All NPCs get a title: Archpriestess or Grand High Wizard or the like. Whatever corresponds to a high-level spellcaster of the appropriate type. Unless the rules as written explicitly say how rare those titles should be, you can have as many of them as you like. This is an initial large boost to the economy -- you're creating high-level NPCs with level-appropriate wealth and magic items.

u/Nepene [+2] (2 days later)

If we have a DM, the problem goes away. We're instead assuming we have an in-world patrician whose rule is guaranteed and who is extremely knowledgeable about and adept with manipulating the D&D rules as written.

Imagine a D&D world that actually has a DM to prevent the stupidest abuses of the rules. You'd still need to make some rules changes to prevent the world from warping into something completely unlike a default setting. What spells do you need to remove?

Actually no, we're assuming a DM. One who wants to have the nature of the world naturally flow from the rules to make a functional society. Their issue isn't with item buying rules abuse, it's that they believe magic would break the world if the spell casters acted naturally. It's easy to say no to buying items, it's harder to say no to a core class.

Where in the rules is this "dangerous situation" criterion written? I've never seen it before.

Dungeon master's guide, page 36. It better covers both the spirit and application of giving experience points, including this quote. "The more dangerous the monsters, compared to the party's level, the more XP the characters earn." And it talks how it's somewhat up to the DM whether they want to award XP for certain victory objectives.

If it does exist, does it specify "danger of death"?

It leaves it up to the DM's whims. You can't abuse it with maths, they get to decide whether a non standard combat resolution is actually a resolution within the normal rules. It explicitly says that the DM is never obliged to award XP for a non challenging situation.

Even easier. All NPCs get a title: Archpriestess or Grand High Wizard or the like. Whatever corresponds to a high-level spellcaster of the appropriate type. Unless the rules as written explicitly say how rare those titles should be, you can have as many of them as you like. This is an initial large boost to the economy -- you're creating high-level NPCs with level-appropriate wealth and magic items.

The DM could do this, but it wouldn't really solve anything. An NPC doing this wouldn't do anything as the DM levels NPCs.

u/None [+1] (2 days later)

Okay, so the solution is continuing DM intervention. If something starts breaking the economy, the DM steps in and stops it from working. If twenty percent of the population becomes clerics and starts selling the results of Create Food and Drink, suddenly most of them lose their powers.

Once you have a DM interfering with daily life, none of these questions are interesting.

u/Nepene [+1] (3 days later)

Once you have a DM interfering with daily life, none of these questions are interesting.

That's kinda the point, the DM wants to make a universe that requires minimal intervention to run. The DM has a limited amount of good faith from the players, interventions often expend some of this good faith.

As such OP wants to set up a fair universe where everyone knows the rules from step one.

u/None [+1] (3 days later)

The rules make sense (for the most part) as an approximation of a world in which PC class people are extremely rare -- and don't care about other people too much, since we don't see Rings of Polymorph Any Object and Rings of True Resurrection as standard kit at each village apothecary. Or maybe death in D&D is actually pleasant compared to life on the Prime Material (but then everyone would be engaging in risky behavior or outright suicide -- or at least it would be very prevalent compared to our reality). And in that case, Rings of True Resurrection would be rare, but Rings of Polymorph Any Object can heal anyone of anything -- as could Rings of Cure Critical Wounds and Rings of Remove Disease, with less opportunity for mischief.

Okay, so we have a world in which people who can use mid level magic and craft magic items don't care about other sapients, no matter their alignment. And the rules are approximations of the way the world works, so it's an error for you to extrapolate based on them. This pretty much solves all the problems. It brings us to wonder why people turn uncaringly evil, if not actively and aggressively evil, when they can cast a third level spell bard/cleric/paladin/ranger spell and craft a magic item, and that might be an interesting campaign (find the reason people go crazy and eliminate it).

That's all we need. Or we can try to run the whole world on D&D rules, but that produces a world with a very different economy, where at least the rich need never die, and where (absent a deity of the Rules As Intended) a lot of interesting exploits can vault a person to moderate levels very quickly and safely.

u/Nepene [+1] (3 days later)

You don't seem to be replying to me at all, so there's not really much point in me saying stuff.

u/trifith [+10] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (an hour later)

What physics do you have to eliminate from the real world if you want to keep a mostly functional medieval economy for a few centuries?

None, because that's how it happened.

Recognize that you (the player or DM) have an outside view of the world and understand what things are possible, while the characters living in that world have to discover them through experimentation. At the time your campaign takes place, they haven't figured it all out yet.

As to the above abuse of the Create Food and Water spell, it is a cleric spell, which means it's basically an answered prayer by an otherworldly being that can choose to intervene or not. Maybe the god doesn't want the world to work that way.

Using your level rules, in a population of 1 billion persons (all races) you have

• 500,000,000 0 level peasants
• 250,000,000 1 level characters split among all classes
• 125,000,000 2 level characters split among all classes
• 62,500,000 3 level characters
• 31,250,000 4 level characters
• 15,625,000 5 level characters
• 7,812,500 6 level characters
• 3,906,250 7 level characters
• 1,953,125 8 level characters
• 976,562 9 level characters
• 488,281 10 level characters
• 244,140 11 level characters
• 122,070 12 level characters
• 61,035 13 level characters
• 30,517 14 level characters
• 15,258 15 level characters
• 7,629 16 level characters
• 3,814 17 level characters
• 1,907 18 level characters
• 953 19 level characters
• 476 20 level characters

There are 11 standard classes, using 3e rules (the last set I am familiar with), so assuming an even distribution of classes, there are 43 20th level clerics globally, and 2,840,858 people capable of casting Create Food and Water, which feeds 42,612,870 people at one cast per cleric per day.

Assuming that after 5th level, a cleric is obligated to use all spell slots he can to cast Create Food and Water, and all clerics always do so, you can feed 150,057,180 people, which leaves 849,942,820 globally starving, or farming.

Math

u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (22 hours later)

assuming an even distribution of classes

You wouldn't get that though. This is where D&D rules get in the way. The only way to level up is to put yourself in legitimate danger for your life, and so each encounter is like a roll of the dice. (This wasn't even a pun, I swear.)

The higher the level, the more encounters needed. As you go furthur and furthur up the scale, the classes that are either just flat out more powerful or which are more likely to win fights(or simply escape alive to fight again) are going to be disproportionately represented.

I would expect many more 20th level wizards, clerics, and druids than Bards or Monks.

u/trifith [+1] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (22 hours later)

I updated the math, and you would need more than 50% of all characters past 5th level to be clerics to make that work.

If the number of other classes at 5th level is 11, and the number of other classes goes down by one each level thereafter, till at 15th level, only clerics are left, you still only feed 208,715,898 people.

The high levels don't matter nearly as much as the low levels, simply because there are so many more of them.

Math

u/None [+1] (2 days later)

The only way to level up is to put yourself in legitimate danger for your life

Enemies can deal nonlethal damage. Some attacks are inherently nonlethal, and all melee attacks can be done as nonlethal attacks for a -4 to hit. (Except in 4e, all attacks can be done as nonlethal attacks for free.)

So if you singlehandedly, at level 0, face down and defeat Bahamut, who wished to subdue you rather than kill you, does this mean you don't level up at all?

u/Nepene [+1] (2 days later)

The DM can decide whether a less dangerous situation deserves XP. It's up to their whims.

u/None [+1] (3 days later)

A DM intervening in daily life for all NPCs in the world means it's no longer an interesting problem. The DM can proclaim by fiat that something wouldn't work, and she doesn't need to provide an explanation. Or she can provide a technobabble explanation. Or she can try to come up with something vaguely reasonable.

But that requires a judge who is reviewing all actions in the world.

I suppose the DM can say that no NPCs will ever consider any rule exploits. This would require NPCs to be stupid -- they can't realize, for instance, that a ladder is a couple of ten foot poles with some extra sticks, allowing you to generate 3.5 silver per round for 336 gold per day. They can't realize that you can pull a zombie-smashing lever to gain levels.

I suppose also that the DM could say that PCs operate under different mechanics than NPCs. They could say that NPCs have a real economy, for instance, and people can't actually buy nine hundred ladders a day from the same shop. They could say that PCs have hidden selection criteria including aptitude for PC classes, and most NPCs don't have that aptitude and therefore can't take any levels in Cleric or Sorcerer, so there will never be enough spellcasters for most spells to have a large impact on society.

Of course, Craft Wondrous Item breaks that entirely. You don't need a huge number of spellcasters; you just need enough to create wondrous items to take their places. A wondrous item that casts Create Food and Drink at caster level 3 costs 108 experience points and 1350 gold. You'll need to prestidigitate it to make it palatable, which means another wondrous item at the same cost. (The item creation guides don't say that you have to determine the spell's specifics when crafting the item, so you can use the same item to prestidigitate the created food into cheeseburgers or pizza or elven ghanoush.) So the DM needs to outlaw or restrict creating magic items.

(Similarly, for a lesser form of immortality, a level 15 wizard can create a Ring of Polymorph Any Object, which will transfigure her or any target she chooses into any form desired; specifically, she can polymorph a person into a younger version of themselves, which is a permanent effect. This takes about three months and a hundred thousand gold. For a greater form of immortality, you need a magic item with True Resurrection, preferably on a command word, and that only takes eight years to create. Once created, you can use it 1440 times per day, and it takes no material components.)

u/Nepene [+0] (3 days later)

A DM intervening in daily life for all NPCs in the world means it's no longer an interesting problem.

Yes, hence why this thread was created, to minimize the need for intervention by creating.

I suppose the DM can say that no NPCs will ever consider any rule exploits.

I get the feeling that you're not really listening to me- as I noted, the purpose of this thread is to minimize the need for NPCs refusing to consider how to break the world. You're talking about an unrelated situation that no one here is supporting. You are arguing against a strawman. Why are you arguing against a strawman? Yes, I agree, if the DM is continually fixing everything it isn't fun to discuss it. Can we move on?

that a ladder is a couple of ten foot poles with some extra sticks, allowing you to generate 3.5 silver per round for 336 gold per day.

There's no rule that allows you to convert a ladder to a ten foot pole, if we're going on a strict rules world.

They can't realize that you can pull a zombie-smashing lever to gain levels.

I see you're ignoring what I said earlier about danger.

If you're going to ignore what I say is there much point in replying?

u/AmeteurOpinions [+3] Finally, everyone was working together. (an hour later)

Most of them can be solved with simple rarity. Sure a 5th-level cleric can generate enough food for 15 people, but there may only be one per 15,000 people, like the head bishop of a city cathedral. The village cleric might be only level two or three.

How many Bill Gates's are there in the world? A twentieth-level wizard would have a similar level of power and capability.

u/VorpalAuroch [+2] Life before Death (an hour later)

How many Bill Gates's are there in the world? A twentieth-level wizard would have a similar level of power and capability.

Less. Bill Gates is about as common as ~8th-level characters.

u/duffmancd [+3] (20 hours later)

I was interested to compare Create Food and Water to modern farming techniques. So, using Australian data (due to patriotism!) I find that each farmer can produce enough food to feed 600 people. This is somewhere between 13th (546) and 14th (672) level clerics using all their level 3+ spell slots for Create Food and Water.

I just enjoy thinking of Technology as a god granting us boons of food production, instant global communication, etc.

u/None [+2] (a day later)

It would be an interesting project to state various production data in terms of magical classes, abilities, levels and quantities.

u/eaglejarl [+3] (21 hours later)

I haven't had time to do more than skim all the comments, so pardon me if some of this is redundant. I want to jot some quick thoughts before I have to fold up tents for the night.

Problem with balancing by rarity is that the people who CAN do it will have a disproportionate effect on the world. Their kingdom will have a post-scarcity lifestyle that means everyone will either want to conquer them or move there...which will destroy the labor base of surrounding nations, which will mean the rulers basically have to either impose draconian controls over their populace to prevent emigration, or go to war and conquer the rich country.

Also, unless you are artificially starving the PCs of money / loot / XP, they will level up pretty quickly, so "rarity" is not a viable long term balancing strategy.

Spells that, off the top of my head, you would need to remove in order to maintain a medieval economy:

• Wish, Miracle, Limited Wish
• Teleportation Circle, Greater Teleport (GT + a Portable Hole full of stuff = effectively infinite free cargo transport)
• Create Food and Water
• Wall of: Iron, Salt, Fire (infinite money, infinite money, steam engine)
• Create Undead (free workers that never get tired or need to eat)
• Possibly Plant Growth (the 'increase crop yield' version)
• True Creation
• Polymorph Any Object (mostly just because it's about the most abusable spell in existence)
• Create Food and Water (and possibly Goodberry as well)
• Fabricate
• Elemental Swarm (also Lyres of Building)
• Probably Move Earth
• Planar Binding (actually, pretty much just every form of summoning)
• Scrying and related (allows rapid information exchange leading to mercantile optimization and arbitrage)
• Shapechange
• Portable Holes should probably go too -- they make trade too easy

That's just off the top of my head. There's undoubtedly more.

u/None [+2] (a day later)

My perspective is that the question is not as simple as banning every spell that could be used to create an abundance of some good. There is enough food production in the world to feed everyone, yet many go hungry. The economic problem is not simply the production of stuff, but the incentive to produce, the incentive to produce well (e.g. no one wants to eat the same bland food three meals a day every day) and the distribution of the produced goods. Why would clerics want to make food for everyone, why would anyone want to eat said food, and how would the food get from the clerics to everyone else? How is need determined? A census? Costly and intrusive. Market prices? But with what income do the commoners buy food? Dropping a pile in the middle of every village every day? Costly, a single mistake could mean everyone goes hungry for a day or longer, and who polices that to ensure no one takes more than their "fair share?" Are people happy about being told what their fair share is? The clerics might see themselves as the noble benefactors of the commoners and demand much obsequiousness and material rewards, while the commoners will see the clerics as stuck-up, distant and unfairly dominant. Conflict will occur. (Actually, this could be a good plot for a game.)

In any case it seems to me that there are two ways this question can be handled without dropping any spells. One is to realize that when a spellcaster is engaged in economic production, she is not engaged in adventuring-production; that is, she is not slaying dragons and so forth. Thus it could be that the opportunity cost is too high for magic to have significant economic applications. Another alternative is to posit that there is an attitude among the magically puissant of negativity toward using magic for mundane purposes. In our world the equivalent to magic would be intelligence, the tool that broke us out of the Malthusian trap and into the world of modern economic production, yet it has often been the case that it was considered undesirable for "higher" thought to be concerned with practical matters. (Confronting this stigma could also be a good plot.)

u/None [+2] (an hour later)

After reading the Two Year Emperor, I think that DnD systems are only be abused by those who are not part of the system. Of course, this is only from his point of view.

I think the spell Wish pretty much breaks everything.

u/eaglejarl [+2] (18 hours later)

The Flobovians and Anundjåns have their own rulesbreaks:

• They buy and sell whatever physical goods they want in the market, in any quantity desired, without affecting prices.
• They buy whatever magical spells they want, in arbitrary amounts, without affecting prices of anything (goods or spells). They can even buy more spells at once than there are casters in the city. Well, they could until Arros stepped on that idea.
• The Anundjåns use Polymorph Any Object as a rejuvenation spell. This plus True Resurrection means that no one ever dies unless they want to.
• They use spell engines (resetting magic traps / spell clocks / spell turrets) to manufacture goods, create food, etc. (This is part of the backstory; it's been casually referenced but hasn't really been focused on.)

Other things...

u/Riddle-Tom_Riddle [+1] (14 hours later)

I Wish I was smarter, I Wish I was smarter, I Wish I was smarter...

u/None [+2] (an hour later)

Also, after doing a little looking I think this would be in your banned category.

Cancer Mage

Enter the Cancer Mage, a prestige class also from Book of Vile Darkness. Among the grosser Prestige Classes, Cancer Mages revel in filth, disease, and decay. Their allies are vermin, assassins, and undead. At first level of the class, Cancer Mages acquire the “disease host” ability. Cancer Mages suffer no ill effects of disease except purely cosmetic ones (like Festering Anger’s black boils). That means ignoring Festering Anger’s daily Con damage, while enjoying a daily escalating strength score. Within a week, the Cancer Mage has a +14 enhancement bonus to Strength. After a month, he’ll have a +60 bonus to strength. And he’ll be really, really ANGRY!

With a strength score of 70 and an ability modifier of 30, an Illumian gains 8 bonus 1st and 2nd level spells, 7 bonus 3rd to 6th level spells, and 6 bonus 7th to 9th level spells. But let’s say the rage continues for an entire year more. At a year of living with Festering Anger, the Cancer Mage has hopefully found a good support group for coping with lifelong illnesses (and refrained from angrily slaughtering them), and probably has learned to be careful everywhere he or she goes. When your strength score is about 740, you could sneeze and take out a village. With a strength modifier of roughly 365, you’d have 92 bonus 1st level spells, 91 bonus 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th level spells, and 90 bonus 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells. That’s a lot of spells. And as long as you can avoid a Cure Disease spell, you’ll just keep accruing strength every day! Be sure and make your will save, otherwise you might Hulk out and destroy a continent.

u/TimTravel [+2] (5 hours later)

Since when does strength give you extra spell casting?

u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (13 hours later)

Illumians are a race from Races of Destiny. They can get this racial.

Aeshkrau: The illumian can use her Strength score to determine the bonus spells she gains for a high ability score, instead of the normal ability score used by her class to determine this feature. If she has more than one spellcasting class, she may use her Strength score in place of any or all of the ability scores used by those classes for this purpose.

It's stupid good when you combine it with Cancer Mage and Festering Anger. It's one of those tricks that you basically would never get to use because a DM would take you aside and explain that while it's an interesting theoretical exploration of the rules, it would absolutely ruin the game. That, or the DM just kills you.

u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (22 hours later)

Well if you accidentally spread Festering Anger to your DM, I wouldn't be surprised.

u/bbrazil [+1] NERV (an hour later)

I think level progression needs to be made much slower. My D&D group has spent about 3 months in game, and we are up to level 17.

No matter how much you try and nerf spells, if an "average" person can get to epic levels in less than a year things are going to be broken. I'd propose that an average person should be only able get at most a few class levels in a lifetime, such as making each level take exponentially longer to achieve.

u/VorpalAuroch [+2] Life before Death (an hour later)

Well, PCs are above-average. That's what the weird stat array and rolls are for. The problem isn't that the level XP thresholds are too low, it's that you're being given XP too quickly; you're probably finding high-level encounters at a terribly implausible rate.

Also, remember that there is a very significant chance of death if you're fighting often enough to powerlevel. Less so in actual campaigns, because dice get fudged.

u/Escapement [+0] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (an hour later)

4 encounters a day, 13.333 encounters a level, means that you get like 2 levels per week - so your group is actually still slightly slower than the core rules of d&d 3e say you 'should' be going. In less than the time it takes to bring a pregnancy to term people can ascend from 1 to 20, becoming overlords of a world, be overthrown by a group of plucky level 1 adventurers who in the process of rebelling eventually rise to level 20, and who then eventually themselves become overthrown by a group of plucky young adventurers... Basically, the setting can be overthrown three times over by a group of young adventurers who rise from 1-20 in the time between sowing crops after winter and harvesting them in the fall, by the core 3/3.5e assumptions.

On the other hand, if you have a lot less encounters than that for example suddenly giving lots of downtime and less encounters/day means Wizards and other similar casters become (even more) powerful compared to fighters and rogues who get nothing out of downtime and have few day-limited abilities.

u/Nepene [+3] (2 hours later)

Without a nice DM to intercede for them a lot of their encounters will likely lead to death. Let's suppose you have an 80% chance of surviving any encounter. About 5% of adventurers will level up.

u/VorpalAuroch [+2] Life before Death (a day later)

Again, that's finding high-level encounters at a grossly implausible rate, way faster than actually suggested by the DMG.

This is a common misconception, particularly in CharOP regions of the internet.

u/Geminii27 [+1] (an hour later)

Taking into account, of course, the ratio of high-level spellcasters in the population, the physical distribution of said population, and how feasible it is to train non-adventurers up to high spellcasting levels.

E.g. If there are 1 in 300 people in the population who are 20th-level clerics, great. But what if only 1 in 15,000 people can ever get to that level?

If all the population lives in a big city with many high-level clerics, and can travel to the local cathedral or monastery to eat (or pick up food if it doesn't spoil), great. If they live spread out in the countryside, not so easy. Even if a village of 300 people has one high-level cleric feeding them, what if that cleric is injured or dies?

Even if 1 in 300 people are high-level clerics, what if the fastest way to get to that level is by adventuring? Are the adventurer clerics who hit level 20 going to suddenly call it quits, hang up their weapons, and spend the rest of their lives as food machines?

Not to mention that people generally won't be satisfied forever with bland conjured food.

What you might get is the occasional small town or city with a high-level cleric who creates food for the poor each day, using it to bulk out donations of more varied foodstuffs.

Generally, you're not going to break an economy if one person in a thousand (or less) can, after years or decades of training and experience, produce a limited amount of goods or services - particularly perishables - cheaper than a donkey. If most members of the population, after widely available levels of training, can use magic (either a spell or item) to produce something cheaper than a donkey, then it's not all that different from them using any other tool unless they can reliably produce significantly more than a donkey - in which case the economy might alter a little towards using fewer donkeys in that particular sector.

Now if a chunk of the population can produce something trivially more easily than the cost of using a donkey to do so, that can change an economy to the point where it might be noticeable to a passing band of adventurers. However even significant changes might not be visible on the surface - for example, what if farmers regularly learned enough agricultural magic so they could sow, grow, harvest, raise, and transport a thousand acres of crops and animals without the need for work animals or mechanical assistance? Would player-characters notice the absence of workhorses in a farming community unless the GM pointed it out?

u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (an hour later)

Well, get rid of Wish for starters. And self-resetting magic traps that let you cast a single spell hundreds or thousands of times per day.

u/eaglejarl [+1] (18 hours later)

14,400 times a day, to be precise. :) (10 / minute * 60 mins / hour * 24 hr / day)

u/TimTravel [+1] (5 hours later)

If high level magic is difficult enough to learn then it shouldn't be too bad, I guess. It could help.

u/Paladin_Neph [+1] Knights of Slaanesh (9 days later)

tl;dr? don't. try. to. make. DnD. make. sense. that path leads to insanity.

look at this from the SRD: http://www.systemreferencedocuments.org/resources/systems/pennpaper/dnd35/soveliorsage/goodsAndServices.html

cost of an untrained hireling per day: 1SP. cost of a poor meal... 1SP!? so the average menial worker is literally just making enough to eat with nothing left over for rent, clothes, savings, etc? baker is specifically mentioned in the notes, and a loaf of bread is listed as 2CP. say half of that goes to operating costs, and that baker's only making 10 loaves a day. what a lazy ass baker!

the entire system makes no sense. anywhere. don't even try to make it make sense, just get a different system.

u/None [+1] (an hour later)

Oh, good, something to do on a lunch break....

What must be acknowledged at the outset is that this is impossible to answer. There are too many spells, and our knowledge of economics is too impoverished, to give a detailed and accurate answer. Still, some individual trends on the cet. par. condition can be identified, and important questions raised.

Let us look at your example of a cleric creating food. It might seem counter-intuitive, but producing large quantities of food is not the solution to hunger. In our world there is enough food production to ensure that no one goes hungry, yet hunger exists. There are basically two reasons. The first is taste. It is easy enough to demonstrate that no one should go hungry in the United States, for example. A diet of simple grains, cheap proteins will sustain you much better than fast food and is much cheaper. It will, however, taste like poo. I don't have time for links, but it should be easy to confirm that when aid organizations have given money to the extremely poor to buy food, the amount of calories the poor consume not only does not necessarily go up but can even fall as the poor substitute better-tasting foods for cheap muck. So how does the food created by this spell taste? Does it come cooked? Can it be cooked? How much does salt cost in this world?

Second is the distribution problem. So clerics can feed everyone. Why should they want to? Who is paying them, and what are they paying them with? And even should they want to, how will they do so? Do they conjure a bunch of food and leave it in a pile in the middle of a village? Do they conduct a census and bring food to individual households based on their need as determined by clerics? Does a large man who labors all day get the same portion as a thin girl who sews? Are the villagers given tickets of some kind to be traded for a portion of a food and water spell? How do festivals and celebrations work, where one would typically expect more food? Indeed the very poor often spend a lot of their money on splurges of this kind. People like to have fun and eat good things in peace and relaxation. They do not want to bow and scrape before a cleric for a predetermined portion of dry rations. Perhaps the spell would be better for feeding animals.

There is also the cost of the spell to consider. When a cleric is creating food and water, she is not doing some other thing. According to the list of cleric spells, clerics can connect two planes, heal people, speak to gods, command people, raise the dead, repair objects, understand languages...why should they want to make food and water? As more clerics are produced, the marginal rate of substitution of the create food and water spell will rise, which means that the cleric will be willing to give up casting more of other spells to create food and water. Of course, there are many spells a cleric can cast, so this effect might be negligible over a significant amount of cleric production. Is it hard to make a 20th level cleric? What is the supply schedule?

There could also be cultural issues. Clerics might see it as base or vulgar to use their divine powers to make food for the common people. Magical food might have its own stigmas.

Clerics could, however, be used to travel with and feed armies on campaigns if the cultural issues are low enough. Sieges would be impossible if the enemy fortification has enough clerics.

Let us consider the question more generally. Magic is a labor saving device analogous to machines. The introduction of magic into a medieval world might be similar to the Industrial Revolution, and indeed over time the percentage of the labor force employed in agriculture dropped enormously. For decades the economy grew rapidly, becoming much more productive, but these gains flowed to a relative few, the owners of capital (magic), and the workers did not gain much or even fell in their standard of living. Over time, however, laborers began to reap more of the surplus. Probably something similar will occur over the course of the 21st century.

As machines or magic replace labor in one sector, the law of comparative advantage ensures that the division of labor will be expanded to sectors that had not previously existed. Think factory jobs in the 19th century or service jobs today. What does a magical waiter look like? If wizards replace people in one industry, people will go and find some other productive thing to do that was not previously able to be done, limited as the division of labor is by the extent of the market.

The more that can be produced for present consumption without sacrificing some present consumption, the more interest rates will rise. But is present consumption not being sacrificed? This requires some imagination and some knowledge of the spell list. Probably not, is my guess. (Low interest rates do not explain the industrial revolution, but the opposite! The interest rate was five percent in Britain and 30 percent in China!)

Generally reasoning about this is harder than it might initially seem. Let us examine the Tippyverse. First of all, if it is as easy as the author says to attack with no possibility of defense, then we are living in a Hobbesian nightmare. Very little production exists. Interest rates are extremely high. No one is willing to invest in anything if their town might be wiped out tomorrow. What might happen, however, is something like the Cold War, assuming the attacked side can retaliate just as effectively. This would not be so bad, and might be an improvement on the medieval world, leading to improved growth. This depends on communication magic and the ability to protect one's army and transportation circles from sudden attack. In any case small villages and towns, however, would not be raided for their meager surpluses by a large army. It would not be cost-effective. They would be harassed by bandits. If the bandits do not have teleportation circles, then the villagers can be defended.

The use of teleportation circles to trade is more problematic. First of all, there is the same problem as the food and water spell, namely, why would the spellcaster want to cast it? Second, there is the enormous question of who controls access to the teleportation circle. Are there a small number of people who can make these circles? Is it hard and public to learn how? Then they will probably demand a stiff price for the use of the circles and crack down harshly on competitors. If anyone can make them, there is the problem of, say, someone dropping a hundred pounds of cow dung into a city. How are property rights delineated here, and what is the Coasean solution? Actually, considering how significant the problem of animal waste was in the medieval world, teleporting waste to uninhabited regions could potentially have large economic and health benefits. At the same time, teleporting in diseased waste could be a very effective war strategy. But I do not know how these circles work, yet it seems the possibility of violence over them could be very high.

If gold and silver can be conjured, then they will not function as money. Something immune to such forces would be necessary.

But to return to the original question, the answer to your dilemma lies in the opportunity cost of magic. If spellcasters are sufficiently rare, and the rewards for using magic for adventure-related things like monster-slaying and so forth are sufficiently high, then magic will not have very significant economic effects. The economic effects of dragon attacks and so forth will be similar to banditry.

tl;dr: I don't know, no one knows, but if magic is rare enough and adventure-things as opposed to mundane-things are rewarding enough, magic will not have significant economic effects.

u/None [+2] (2 days later)

So how does the food created by this spell taste? Does it come cooked? Can it be cooked? How much does salt cost in this world?

Bland but nourishing, according to the books. So give everyone a level in Sorcerer or Wizard and they can prestidigitate their food. As long as there are at least 1.7 sorcerers per non-arcane, everyone will have tasty food. (5 cantrips per day per sorcerer at level 1, and assuming 3 meals/day.) Most people will do it for themselves and their family.

If someone has unused cantrips, they can spend them on Message, Mending, and Resistance. And they get a familiar out of the deal -- probably a raven, since they can talk -- none of that "Did Timmy fall down the well? Bark once for yes, twice for no."

So clerics can feed everyone. Why should they want to?

Of course I'm feeding my family. And that includes my brother and his spouse and their kids. And my mother and father. And my aunt and her kids. And let's bring in the neighbors too, they gave us some wool last week. And...oh look, that's fifteen people, the limit of my ability to feed.

Cleric Yolanda doesn't have a family; she was an orphan raised at the temple. There are only a couple orphans, and she makes food for them; the remaining food she creates, she gives out to those who need it. It's part of her duty of charity as a member of the temple priesthood.

Who is paying them, and what are they paying them with?

A skilled laborer's earnings per week add up to half their skill roll in gold. A family including two skilled laborers can easily earn 15-20 gold per week. Cooking food at home costs half of what it would be to purchase it pre-made; that is, a nonzero amount of money. A cleric insisting on earning coin would thus be able to extract that from people as long as they pay less than they would for an equivalent meal at home.

According to the list of cleric spells, clerics can connect two planes, heal people, speak to gods, command people, raise the dead, repair objects, understand languages...why should they want to make food and water?

Clerics can connect two planes, heal people, speak to gods, command people, raise the dead, repair objects, understand languages...why should anybody want to make food and water? Maybe because people need to eat much more often than they need two planes connected or dead people raised. If most clerics are roughly the same level, they're going to serve the same purposes for the most part. That means not so many jobs raising the dead and lots of jobs feeding people.

Or to put it another way, people need things accomplished. We're taking the bakers and butchers, putting them through cleric training, and sending them back into the community. They continue their job with a new means of accomplishing it.

The use of teleportation circles to trade is more problematic. First of all, there is the same problem as the food and water spell, namely, why would the spellcaster want to cast it?

Because the government of this large city is paying them a buttload of money for thirty teleportation circles with permanency. And that government is stationing guards around who charge a tariff for all goods passing through.

If gold and silver can be conjured, then they will not function as money. Something immune to such forces would be necessary.

Depends on the rate at which they can be created. In one world I have heard of, people could dig in the ground to get gold, and yet it was used as the basis for currency for millennia. In D&D, there is a seventh level spell allowing you to create 5 cubic feet of valuable material per caster level at a cost of experience. Not much experience, though, so you can smash some zombies over the head and turn that into 200 platinum coins.

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