So you're an Ed Greenwood fanboy? Because you pretty much just described the Forgotten Realms.squirrelloid wrote: There has to be a distribution of threats where CR1 is the most common and the frequency of threats of CR N is decreasing as N increases. So when a CR20 threat arises, the noble tier that is approximately that badass deals with it. (Which might be the ruler, which would imply a CR 20 threat is an *existential crisis for the kingdom* in that case.) Basically, high CR threats are rare enough that civilization has time to grow before one destroys it, or at least rare enough that some monstrous badass who might decide getting paid to protect a kingdom is a good deal can handle all the high CR threats that come along while the humans are building up a heirarchy of powerful nobles. This is an absolutely essential prerequisite to even having civilization in the first place.
It's also pretty essential that explanar shit *can't get to the prime* without someone on the prime enabling that, because otherwise we know that demons and devils just annihilate civilization. Since that hasn't happened, they obviously can't freely move armies of CR10+ evil outsiders to the prime. (There is seriously an infinite number of demons and devils, so there's no way civilization survives if they can enter the prime at will). Planar warfare is thus inherently asymmetric, because the lower power civilizations control all the access.
You were just saying a few paragraphs ago that low level adventurers were relevant because they get to go on tax collection adventures, now level 20 makes anything less irrelevant?You really don't, because one 20th level wizard makes arbitrarily many 1st level warriors irrelevant. That makes it really easy to predict what happens. Heck, a 10th level fighter makes arbitrary numbers of 1st level warriors pretty irrelevant. (Not even a Tome fighter, a regular fighter).
Pretending low level armies matter would be like suggesting you fight battleships with paper airplanes. That's beyond retarded and anyone who has glanced at a 20th level character can see it.
That we can talk ourselves into having feudal lords who rule over peasants at all (and we haven't solved all the difficulties yet) is about as good as we can do to make it recognizable.
Truly consider the implications inherent in the world you are suggesting. Human and demihuman populations would be ruled over by an overclass of superheroes that fly around solving mysteries, when they aren't trying to tele-frag each other for the purpose of...what exactly?
Money and commodities mean nothing to high level spellcasters. Power, at least as the real world defines it, means nothing in this world. Instead, power is personal power, the amount of supernatural force you can bring to bear.
Why would these high level characters even be jockeying for the positions of authority over this peasant class? The peasants may as well be a different species.
But lets look at society and technology. By bother perfecting something as mundane as metalworking when you have magic at your disposal? Navigation, cartography and shipbuilding simply does not happen, because divination and teleport. No more castles either, because the lack of conventional warfare does not require them. Medicine? That is what priests are for.
The noble class is not going to sponsor the development of sciences and technology, when is does not benefit them. In fact, it only takes power away from the spellcaster and gives it to the peasant. Magical research, sure I can see that, but no noble is going to hire a bronze worker when they can simply fabricate iron.
You're looking at civilisation reaching it's technological zenith around Sumeria, then diverging into an unrecognisable clusterfuck. This is worse than superheroes acting as feudal lords, it's God-Kings of stagnant cultures.
If I tried to present that to a group of players as an authentic vision of what a D&D world should be, they would say "not Dark Sun again."