The Great Leap Forward in FantasyLand

[Username17]

Thus begins the quest to magically enslave a Formian queen. That actually sounds like a pretty cool plot for a plot-arc.

There's something interesting and on-topic. What are some interesting general plot arcs or specific adventures revolving around taking an iron age hellscape and turning it into a post-scarcity magical utopia? Tippyversing is only a partial success at best; huge chunks of the world and population still live in constant terror of monster attacks even if the cities (whose self-sufficiency is never explained anyway) are basically free of all trouble.

You're basically going after the hierarchy of needs for your civilization:



Your first and most pressing needs are to take care of basic provisioning for your people. That is a rolling demand, because as you expand, you'll have more people who need clean water and nutritious food. Secondly, you are concerned with defending your people, which includes building shelters, fighting monsters, and providing sanitation. Only then are you concerned with making a better life by sponsoring art and producing luxury goods.

But these all feed back on each other. More comfortable shelter is a luxury good. And the nicer a place you have, the more people will want to move there and the more food and water and shelter you need.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

Those are some seriously good quotes. "Constitution: more than just a stat" sounds like the title of an entire chapter in a book.

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I have a weird impression that DND generally addresses higher levels of the pyramid more effectively. Wish is straight self-actualization, Leadership and Dominate are recognition, status, and sense of belonging, and things like blasting and Purify Food and Drink are way down at the bottom. Am I imagining this and it's just some general principle about spells addressing more complex needs being more powerful by necessity, or is there something to this?

[codeGlaze]

Low level spells address the basic needs pretty readily and at low level. There are a ton of spells providing shelter and food.

[Vebyast]

Sorry, I lost the thought while writing. Meant that, the higher an ability is targeted on the hierarchy, the more powerful it is, and vice versa.

[tussock]

I hereby posit that D&D as it is, with murder-hobos scrounging the ruins of the last clown who thought he'd make a benevolent demigod, is in itself caused by everyone trying to "fix" the world to be all post-scarcity.

See, you need high level casters to reshape society, which means you need high-level challenges and monsters, which means you need massive monster preserves and cabals of epic Druids and ancient Dragons who protect them from annihilation. Then you need to produce 1st level casters (which takes fucking decades), and let them level. As they do this they get ideas and start changing their town, then the country, then the world. Only some of them are self-centred assholes (CN), some are actual psychopaths (NE), and only a few genuinely care about creating a great society for others no matter the personal risks (LG++).

And even the epic Paladin of "making life easy for everyone in the vain hope that works out well" is actually a bit of a dick when it comes to keeping the monster preserves open and generating hordes of goblins and giants, because he needs even more high-level spellcasters, right now, for the greater good.

And then Chairman Evil Cleric and Chairman Paladin get bored with trying to fix Toril in their own unique way because the Gods keep interfering in ways they can't even touch. So they go become Gods, and interfere in the next lot's plans to change the world into something more modern. And their magical ruins and hordes of strange magic items are scattered around the monster preserves to help the next lot who want to give it a bash.

D&D bitches, players' attempts to fix the game world getting cock-blocked since 1974.

[JigokuBosatsu]

If skeletons are everyday machines, you can tell stories about a lich that's hiding among them

I am totally jacking this for a book pitch contest I am in.

Also- I like how every thread on the Den that involves "transplanting boring day job/PolySci class discussions to Fantasyland" produces a wealth of awesome ideas.

EDIT: I'm also stealing the thread title as a logline. If this pitch gets picked up, I'll buy you guys a beer.

[fectin]

Please do. Were you thinking of making the lich the protagonist or the query?

I grabbed the idea from Asimov, but there are so many stories you can tell around the same theme that it's a veritable gold mine.

[JigokuBosatsu]

TITLE: "We Need To Talk About Bonesy"

LOGLINE: Get your idealogically correct Magic Missiles prepared... it's time to play Pogroms & Partisans!

DESCRIPTION: Cracklen- an ancient skeletal undead sorceror- has fucked up now, and the King of Arfalfa has it in for him. Problem is, this isn't the first time it's happened, and he's running out of nice, normal, free kingdoms to flee to. When he hears that a distant land is undergoing some very interesting social changes- including using animated skeletons and zombies as cheap labor- he decides it's the perfect place to hide. Unfortunately, that means getting his hands dirty, and trying to keep his smartass nature in check. Soon the skeleton labor corps becomes a dumping ground for the Benevolent Leader's political enemies, and revolution is brewing. Before he knows it, Cracklen- in his disguise as "Bonesy", just another skeleton- becomes poster boy for the revolting proletariat. Will his new comrades still trust him when his secret is revealed- even if he gives the Benevolent Leader a fireball to the face? The Great Leap Forward comes to Fantasyland... now with 200% more Commie skeletons.

[hyzmarca]

The Three Laws of Necromantics

A Skeleton may not harm the living nor through inaction allow the living to come to harm.

A Skeleton must obey the orders of the living, unless they conflict with the First Law.

A Skeleton must protect its own existance, unless doing so would conflict with the first or second law.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Any solution that has people creating custom magical items of 'goodberry' or whatever the fuck should only be allowed if you're willing to accept that wizards or clerics can craft infinite-use miracle rings. This goes triple if you're going to accomplish this through 3.5E chain-binding.

[Vebyast]

Any solution that has people creating custom magical items of 'goodberry' or whatever the fuck should only be allowed if you're willing to accept that wizards or clerics can craft infinite-use miracle rings. This goes triple if you're going to accomplish this through 3.5E chain-binding.

I'll quote Asimov here:

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Items that cast spells like Goodberry and Purify Food and Drink are powergaming. Chainbinding and items that cast spells like Wish are powergaming. But if you think that infinite Wishes are no better or worse than infinite Goodberrys, you are powergaming harder than both of the powergamers put together.

More importantly, there's an element of elegance to the Goodberry solution that the Wish item doesn't have. It is surprisingly simple that you can feed the entire world's population by having one in four third-level Druids build an item that repeatedly casts a simple, common, thematically-appropriate spell, just like one of the dozens of similar items described in the core rulebooks. The same is true for solutions like the Decanter of Endless Water and the item of Heat Metal: you just don't expect that a second-level spell and an item that's inside Level 3 WBL could power an entire industrial revolution. Yes, these things exist in the same world as the items of infinite Wish. The difference is that these schemes are interesting in a way that the item of infinite Wish is not.

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I like that book description. Kind of reminds me of Rick Cook's Wizardry series

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The Three Laws of Necromantics

I think that a discussion of Friendly AI might be a good addition to some future construct writeup in some future Book of Gears Mk II.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What does any of that crap even mean? Are we Pathfindering it up in here, laying down subjective and arbitrary definitions of 'balance' that we can just shift at will to avoid admitting that our underlying assumptions are wrong?

If you allow customized magical items that have no precedent in the game just because they technically follow the printed rules despite the fact that customized magical items are so broken than any serious CharOp build will be rejected on those grounds alone, you have to allow them all. Otherwise you're just whining that using Spelldancer to cheese yourself a 60 INT is allowable but 200 INT is broken.

[Foxwarrior]

The wish economy stuff is cool, Vebyast. You should be disregarding it because it's been covered already, not because you don't like it.

[Vebyast]

I hope nobody minds if I rant for a while.

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I know exactly what our goal here is. Our goal is to have fun.

Character Optimization is fun in the same way that Sudoku is fun - it's complex problem-solving with a set of well-defined constraints and a wide range of optimizations and solutions. This is why custom magic items have been outlawed in modern "serious" charop - people had had most of the interesting ideas to do with custom magic items and they've become boring, so the community has agreed on additional constraints to make the problem-solving more rewarding. There's a parallel here to Formula 1 racing - huge swaths of modern automotive technology, things like antilock brakes, traction control, and ground-effect aerodynamics, have been banned because they make the sport "less interesting".

But we're not doing character optimization here. You're thinking in terms of Formula 1, but the rest of us are thinking about open-source tractors, jet-engine-powered "cars" built for land speed record attempts, tanks, autonomous cars, minibikes, and segways, and occasionally limiting ourselves to Formula 1 or NASCAR or "made in Ethiopia" to make things more interesting. The rules are there only to drive us toward more interesting ideas and to make problem-solving more rewarding. "We Need to Talk About Bonesy" isn't particularly DND. Porn Groves aren't DND at all. Three-laws compliant skeletons aren't DND. Using Temporal Stasis and Major Creation to build vacuum airships is DND, but only because the fun part was doing it while staying within the bounds of DND. Same with Decanters of Endless Water and Heat Metal.

And that's what I meant earlier. Yes, infinite Wishes could do everything we're talking about. Yes, if we allow infinite Prestidigitations we're also allowing infinite Wishes. And I don't give a flying fuck, because that's not the point. Call it wishy-washy pathfindering if you want, call it ignoring balance, whatever you want, but you are the one that has fundamentally misidentified our assumptions, because we're not thinking in Formula 1 terms, and there is no balance. This is not a character optimization discussion. This is not even a DND discussion. This is The Great Leap Forward in Fantasyland. And in the Great Leap Forward in Fantasyland, custom magic items are still interesting.

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The wish economy stuff is cool, Vebyast. You should be disregarding it because it's been covered already, not because you don't like it.

That's kind of what I was getting at. In the context of playable DND economics around 2006, the WE solved a bunch of problems with wealth and magic item creation and the original writeup was a seminal work in our understanding of sane DND. But here, the implications of infinite wishes are relatively obvious and most of the interesting ideas about them have been had. Kind of like custom magic items being boring in the context of charop and antilock brakes being boring in the context of Formula 1. You'll note that we still bring in infinite wishes, but only when they become interesting - for example, when trying to figure out how long a chainbinder would have to be bored for to solve world hunger forever.

[DSMatticus]

What does any of that crap even mean? Are we Pathfindering it up in here, laying down subjective and arbitrary definitions of 'balance' that we can just shift at will to avoid admitting that our underlying assumptions are wrong?

Your argument is basically as follows:
1) The magic item creation subsystem sometimes produces broken results. This is obviously true, because you can get limited wish at will without those cost reductions and wish at will with those cost reductions, and both of those are massively, ridiculously game-changing.

2) Sorting the broken results from the acceptable results is an almost impossibly difficult task that no one wants to do and no one can even agree on how to do, so they just ban the custom magic item rules because it's easier to do and easier to agree on. This is also true.

3) Therefore, because the magic item creation subsystem rule outputs broken results and sorting broken results from acceptable results is a difficult task, all outputs of the magic item creation subsystem are actually equally broken and have to be discarded with equal vehemency. This is total fucking bullshit. CharOp boards don't ban all the results of those subsystems because they are all equally broken. They ban them because some are obviously broken, some are obviously not broken, and 90% of them are somewhere inbetween and large communities can't possibly agree on a classification system for something so complex and essentially arbitrary. But even after banning the whole fucking subsystem, everyone still agrees that 1/day magic missile is less offensive than at-will limited wish, so the results are not all equally bad.

Or, to quote myself from the other thread in response to you making the same stupid argument:

So how about we do the intelligent thing, and care about how likely something is to fly at the table, instead of how much you personally hate a rule for occasionally leading to broken results. And yes, that is a very relative tipping point. And yes, that does mean even a strategy that uses innocuous custom magic items (goodberry at-will) is less likely to fly at a table than being able to feed people with troll flesh or something, so a strategy that doesn't use those rules has a lot more palatability.

So your point is completely noted and completely valid (even if your attempts to paint an extreme dichotomy of "no custom items or all custom items" is bullshit). A solution that uses the item creation rules will fly at less tables than a solution that doesn't, so having a solution that doesn't is better. But there are also lots of tables where a DM would allow goodberry but not limited wish, and at those tables the goodberry strategy is relevant and your bitching isn't. Let's just hear both and put a steroid asterisk next to one of them.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Been musing over different methods of cheap labor, and I think a druidic revolution could look pretty interesting. After seeing the power of fey and nature spirits do something amazing, a government could try making everywhere into magical forest, giving druid circles enormous amounts of power as intermediaries between nature and civilization.

You could have the mindless labor force be shambling vine men instead of zombies. There'd still be magical bleed off resulting in weird phenomena, but the diseases and food shortages would probably be less of a problem.

[codeGlaze]

My favorite regenerating-monster-as-food was the hydra in OOTS.

[ishy]

But even after banning the whole fucking subsystem, everyone still agrees that 1/day magic missile is less offensive than at-will limited wish, so the results are not all equally bad.

Not really. 1/day MM is probably just as bad as at-will limited wish. If suddenly everyone has access to 1/day MM all threats to a population of significant size just flop over dead unless they know the shield spell.

[codeGlaze]

But even after banning the whole fucking subsystem, everyone still agrees that 1/day magic missile is less offensive than at-will limited wish, so the results are not all equally bad.

Not really. 1/day MM is probably just as bad as at-will limited wish. If suddenly everyone has access to 1/day MM all threats to a population of significant size just flop over dead unless they know the shield spell.

So all threats to a people disappear because they have access to a gun with one bullet perday? Or is it because the gun is 'unerring'?

[Antumbra]

So all threats to a people disappear because they have access to a gun with one bullet perday? Or is it because the gun is 'unerring'?

In combination with their actual, erring, guns it lets them bunch up into groups of "enough" and take out things that are way above their weight class quickly and with very few losses - such as bruisers with damage reduction or Regeneration X/Mundane - and so clear out lots of "[LOCATION TYPE] of [MONSTER NAME]" encounters with very high reliability and confidence on part of the commoners involved.

No good against intelligent threats/spellcasters, but it'll tame a land.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Therefore, because the magic item creation subsystem rule outputs broken results and sorting broken results from acceptable results is a difficult task, all outputs of the magic item creation subsystem are actually equally broken and have to be discarded with equal vehemency.

Here's a question for you: do you allow epic spells into your game? If not, how come? Not all epic spells are a priori broken. If you do allow epic spells into the game, why aren't we expanding the discussion to include them?

So how about we do the intelligent thing, and care about how likely something is to fly at the table, instead of how much you personally hate a rule for occasionally leading to broken results.

'Occasionally' leading to broken results? That's extremely misleading of you. Customized magical items frequently lead to broken results, even when used as intended. They break the game so goddamn easily that anyone who is not a total moron should suspect that the problem is with the system and not just a few degenerate outputs.

Do you seriously want me to go down the laundry list of ways that custom magical items quickly and obviously break the game? Because I do not think that you and Vebyvast are comprehending just how completely nonfunctional that subsystem is. And considering how spectacularly customized magical items cause the system to collapse if you don't realize this at this point in the game I am going to have to conclude that you just don't know 3.5E D&D very well.

[fectin]

So all threats to a people disappear because they have access to a gun with one bullet perday? Or is it because the gun is 'unerring'?

In combination with their actual, erring, guns it lets them bunch up into groups of "enough" and take out things that are way above their weight class quickly and with very few losses - such as bruisers with damage reduction or Regeneration X/Mundane - and so clear out lots of "[LOCATION TYPE] of [MONSTER NAME]" encounters with very high reliability and confidence on part of the commoners involved.

No good against intelligent threats/spellcasters, but it'll tame a land.

Agreed, but that sounds like an advantage, not a problem. It does also push you into a wild west society, but it also turns out that the west really wasnt that wild.

[Grek]

You know what this thread lacks? Druidic eugenics programs.

The plan:
Be a 9th level druid. Go to the outer planes and get some celestial acorns and some fiendish acorns. Then go to prime and plant both of them. Do druid shit to get these to grow quickly into full grown oaks - I'm sure there's a spell somewhere for that. Once you have a full grown Celestial Oak and a full grown Fiendish Oak, cross-breed them into a bunch of Half-Celestial, Half-Fiendish Acorns. Plant these and do the same druid shit to get them to grow to full size. Cast Awaken Tree on the resulting oaks once they reach Colossal size.

They get stat lines as follows: Str 36, Dex 10, Con -, Int 3d6+6, Wis 3d6+4, Cha 3d6+6. They're native outsiders that live like plants, making them super easy to upkeep. Each one has 8+Int skill points times their 32 HD, for an average of 11 skills at 36 ranks. Also all of them (except the unfortunate ones that rolled all ones for Wis) get the following SLAs, 1/day except where noted: Protection from Evil 3/day, Bless, Aid, Detect Evil, Cure Serious Wounds, Neutralize Poison, Holy Smite, Remove Disease, Dispel Evil, Holy Word, Holy Aura 3/day, Hallow, Mass Charm Monster, Summon Monster IX (celestials only), Resurrection, Darkness 3/day, Desecrate, Unholy Blight, Poison 3/day, Contagion, Blasphemy, Unholy Aura 3/day, Unhallow, Horrid Wilting, Summon Monster IX (fiends only), Destruction, Daylight at will.

Further, since they have such great mental stats, half of them have at least 16 in Int or Cha, making them good candidates for training as sorcerers and wizards. Slightly less than half will have enough Wis to make good druids and perpetuate the "make more awakened trees" cycle.

So, what can Comrade Tree do for you? Well, first they're going to go run around and Hallow huge sections of the forest. Housing will be created using Endure Elements for heating instead of burning the sacred forest. Groves will be blessed with Freedom of Movement, Protection from Energy, Remove Fear and Resist Energy and your citizens encouraged to pass through them once every five hours in order to maintain the benefits. They will also be encouraged to come visit groves blessed with Detect Good, Detect Magic, Detect Evil, Discern Lies, Tongues and Zone of Truth when conducting trade with suspicious foreigners. The wise and noble Comdrade Tree will be perfectly willing to heal you of wounds, cure you of sickness, and ressurect you in the unfortunate event that you are killed within the borders of the Great Leader's Forest Paradise.

Food is provided by Comrade Tree using Mass Charm Monster to keep 2048 HD worth of woodland creatures charmed per tree at any one time (Each casting charms up to 64 HD worth of creatures and lasts 32 days) and asking them politely to please share their prey, spare eggs, collected nuts and berries, milk and so forth with the people of the Great Leader's Forest Paradise.

[Ted the Flayer]

I am imaging the druid to be a yellow pegasus for some reason...

[Winnah]

Celestial and Fiendish trees have the Plant (extraplanar) type, not the Outsider type.

You're not going to get a half-fiend oak tree unless you can convince a Dretch to fuck a knothole or something.