Grek wrote:The "project" is rapid industrialization. I shouldn't have to point out the obvious reasons why an Evil society would want to rapidly industrialize in order to do more evil, and why the leaders would back these efforts.
Yeah, and? If you don't have a bottom-up revolution (which isn't going to happen, because evil) then it needs to be enforced top-down, communist-style, by visionaries willing to inflict all manners of cruelties onto the people below. Unfortunately, there are more Pol Pots and Pinochets than Stalins and there are more Stalins than Lenins and Maos.
History is replete with instances of brief golden ages being exploded by the selfishness or cruelty off leaders. If you're cranking up the selfishness and cruelty, you should expect to see the number of cultures that break through the industrial and economic barriers go down.
Grek wrote:I think this effect would be cancelled out by the increased incentive for long lived races to try to improve the world and a greater willingness to plan for the long term.
Yeah, and? I'm sure that even celebrated historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Mahatmas Ghandi want to make a world a better place and even have the cred to do so. However, the morals of Ghandi would be considered vile compared to that of an average Canadian college student of today. Morals and science advance much faster than the span of someone's life.
Don't get me wrong, there are people out there who don't act as moral or academic impediments to society no matter how old they get and God bless them all. However, the biggest factors towards eroding racism and religious thinking and scientific backwardsness and all sorts of civilization-eroding nonsense isn't education or even propaganda but the death of the previous generation.
Grek wrote:. Whenever you have two competing industries (Horse Breeders and Car Makers) in a society where both produce similar goods (Personal Transportation), and one industry does so better (the Car Makers) due to that society giving one of the two an advantage, you see the weaker industry shrink and the stronger industry grow, but the total amount of product produced stay proportional to the demand for that product. As long as the dwarves value spells as much as humans do, they will have as many spells being cast, even if those spells are cast by a cleric instead of by a sorcerer.
This is the wrong way to think about it. Yes, as a
proportion dwarves will have more wizards and clerics than humans do and much fewer sorcerers. But the absolute number of
spellcasters (and of course spellcaster power) will be smaller.
Sure, if you have a human with rolled stats of a 14 in intelligence and 14 in charisma, they can be either a wizard or a sorcerer. Whatever they pick, the number of spellcasters in the society will go up by one. If a dwarf has a 14 in intelligence and a 12 in charisma, they're forced to be a wizard. The number of spellcasters in the society still goes up by one.
However, if you have a human whose pre-racial bonuses was all 10s except for charisma, which was a 14, you can still get a decent sorcerer. But a dwarf facing this situation can't become a spellcaster at all. They can't just become a wizard or a cleric to make up for it. Poking out the eyes of 10,000 people might produce more sculptors or musicians in the demographic than a random selection of 10,000 with functioning eyes, but it can't produce more
artists. The effect is only neutral if they have a replacement aptitude as good as or better than something in the visual arts, which obviously won't hold true for most people.
If dwarves had some other kind of advantage, like population densities, then it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But nothing shows that they do. And kobolds, which could have a high population density due to their size, have a laughably bullshit reproduction rates.
Grek wrote:That is completely bullshit. In my entire experience playing D&D, not once have I seen anyone stat up a character as a multiclass character between PC and NPC classes. You either have NPC levels, or you have PC levels, but not both.
I think you're just confused by the Law of Conservation of Detail and the spotlight fallacy -- you don't see the Commoner 1 / Expert 2s because they're not important for your individual story. And the anthropomorphic principle can make it so that the DM doesn't have to make you cognizant of these characters at all.
But the DMG is pretty clear. Those kinds of characters form the backbone of D&D demographics.