Also, general advice on making this more readable. I'm probably condensing some of the first 2/3s or so, where I talk about why, from a logical standpoint, the world as presented by the D&D rules would probably suck. Just because I'm not sure even an otherwise uninitiated reader needs it hammered home that hard and that often and I'm worried the essay drags its feet a bit there.
Faerun used to be a nice place to live. The terrible villains resigned themselves to skulking in the shadows, occasionally lashing out at the world, and always they were turned back by a party of intrepid heroes, usually including a scimitar-wielding Drow. Then 4e rolled around and the spellplague hit, burning half the setting to the ground.
Krynn got a similar treatment during the 3.0/3.5 era. The original Dragonlance trilogy, regardless of what you think about its quality, was fundamentally about a world finally throwing off the last of the shadows of the Cataclysm and going on to a future that was, at last, brighter than the past. That's why, thematically speaking, the seat of evil was in the ruins of the old empire at the heart of the Cataclysm. The last wounds of Krynn's post-apocalyptic past were finally healed...And then a week later another Cataclysm hit, ripping the world to pieces and sending it spiraling back into darkness.
Athas was already a wreck, so the writers just discontinued it altogether through 3.5e, then revived it in 4e for literally one day before leaving it unsupported again. Someone pass the lube to Greyhawk and Eberron, surely one of them is to be similarly decimated during the run of NEXT.
Possibly the worst part of all this is that D&D Land, the world we get just by examining the mechanics and genre assumptions of D&D without creating any specific setting details to go with it, the base template from which all original D&D settings are created, that land is in worse shape than even the post-apocalyptic nature of the majority of D&D's official settings, with possibly the exception of Athas.
In D&D Land, the world is fundamentally the same as the early 1400s Earth. Literacy rates are high amongst adventurers, but check out the starting funds of even the poorest class and then compare it to the standard 1 sp daily income of your average farmer or laborer, who are going to be about 90% of your population in this scenario. Even a level one adventurer of the majority of classes is going to have enough cash to pay a farmer's wages for 3 or 4 months. Adventurers also have significantly higher average stats than common people. While it could be argued that this is because unexceptional people do not become heroes, the fact that your party caster spent enough money on his crossbow to feed the average peasant for a year suggests the superior attributes of adventurers is in most cases just because they were brought up on a far better diet. So despite high literacy rates amongst adventurers, your average peasant probably can't read more than a few words.
There are no magic items or spells that do anything to improve crop yields on any spell list in the core game. Given the scarcity cycle that dominated European society with no real remission until approximately a hundred years after the time period your average D&D setting is apparently in, it can be assumed that D&D peasants are constantly sling-shotting back and forth between seasons of plenty and famines that shave off an extra 10% of their population. Cleric spells exist that can more directly solve the problem of food shortages, but they were built around satisfying the needs of a party of six. A single 5th level Cleric can sustain only 15 people, and Clerics of a lower level cannot create any food. While even 1st level Clerics can purify food and water several times a day, that amount is still fairly small, enough to feed maybe one family of six for a day. The way populations and class densities in the DMG work out, your average large population center is able to feed about 1% of its population on magic indefinitely, while towns of 2,000 or under are unlikely to have a Cleric who can cast Create Food or Water at all.
Transportation is not only not alleviated by the magical nature of D&D land, but made into a nightmare. Areas immediately surrounding population centers like hills and plains tend to be host to populations of powerful Good-aligned creatures, but this doesn't really help with the sort of long distance exchange of goods, ideas, and technologies that gives rise to the sort of advanced society that will develop the sorts of technology that get people living above subsistence level, because in order to get from one plains town to another you're probably going to have to cut through a marsh, or a forest, or some other "evil" wilderness location which is teeming with hydras or green dragons or other things which would require an adventuring party of at least level 5 to take care of, the sort of party an entire town of 5,000+ is unable to field more than four or five of at any given time. One caravan per thousand people is not nearly enough to sustain any kind of meaningful trade.
The highly individualistic nature of D&D land also makes things worse rather than better. It doesn't matter what your opinion on rewarding the exceptional people of the real world is, because in D&D being exceptional is exaggerated to such an absurd extreme that the policies of reality can no longer even begin to apply. An exceptional person in D&D Land is not an entrepreneur or a general or a statesman who uses their ability to lead or inspire or plan to lead large organizations. An exceptional person in D&D Land is literally a wizard who is, in terms of resources and military power, equal to a large organization all by himself. Whereas real life human society is held together by the fact that fundamentally none of us could ever create anything exceptional if we were the only sapient being on the planet, in D&D land every single ruler either is or has the protection of someone who can do exactly that a couple of times a day. And when that person dies or gets bored of the Prime Material Plane or decides he'd rather bind Succubi and have sex with them all day rather than risk injury and death (however temporary) fighting the minions of the Black Prince, the nation is getting gobbled up by another one that still does have the services of a high-level character (probably because they're ruled by one).
D&D Land is a world modeled after one of the most scarce and diseased times in European history, with the addition of horrifying monsters preventing trade and one-man militaries destabilizing nations and locking the world in an endless war in which the common people are lucky to be pawns.
Suddenly, the spellplague and Second Cataclysm seem downright optimistic, don't they?
There are a few solutions to this problem, not counting "just ignore it and have an inexplicably peaceful and stable world despite the fact the party regularly gets attacked by a pack of dire wolves when traveling between any two given population centers."
Option One: It's not a bug, it's a feature!*
Hey, Warhammer 40K is pretty popular, Dark Sun was a thing. Maybe a grimdark world where the lives of about 98% of the population are meaningless, painful, terrifying, and short is up your alley. Perhaps you'd like to play the role of epic heroes who will finally wake the world from its endless nightmare. Maybe you want to rise to be a morally ambiguous or downright evil ruler in this world. Maybe you want to play from the perspective of someone who's constantly holding at bay the horrors of an uncaring world, desperately mitigating problems that have no solution, to try and give just a few people lives worth living before something or other ends your reign and sends it all back to square one. Maybe you're just too lazy to change the mechanics of the world and don't much care about the longterm effects of your adventures so long as it all makes some sort of sense and you still get to save a kingdom and marry the princess. Just because I find that to be sort of depressing doesn't mean you're having fun the wrong way if you like it.
Option Two: The world's darkest hour
Just because the mechanics say that D&D Land is like this /right now/ doesn't mean it was always that way. Maybe Tiamat has finally defeated Pelor and unleashed a new age of monstrous horror upon the world, and now, with the light slowly but surely being stamped out by her hordes, the world has just one last chance for a band of heroes to rise up and turn the tide. Maybe the world has collapsed into a ruin in the wake of some catastrophe or internal decay that destroyed the mighty and more-or-less benevolent empire that had ruled before, and now the monsters have returned to the former empire's cracked and overgrown roads. Maybe the sudden increase in adventurers and monsters powerful as entire armies was the result of some recent magical event, and prior to this the world was pretty low-magic and normal.
Option Three: The frontier
Maybe the whole world isn't like this. Maybe most of the world is run by stable societies originally founded by organizations of good-aligned super humans who intentionally used their reign so that a totally normal guy with like three levels of aristocrat or something could call up an army of eighth-level adventurers and have them re-kill the invading armies of the Lich King before he could raze any cities. It is fundamentally true that every single modern nation is run by a civilian government despite the fact that the military leaders are very capable of throwing a coup whenever they want, and that doesn't happen because those leaders are morally opposed to overthrowing their own countries. There's no particular reason the same couldn't be true of people who are, single-handedly, the military, so long as the rulers of a country aren't stupid enough to treat them poorly and make sure they train up a successor before they leave.
In this scenario, there are constantly expanding rings of level-appropriate encounters as you reach the edges of civilization. At the edge of the ring, possibly constrained solely to lower planes and the like, are balors and ancient red dragons and other very high level monsters. In the next ring in, a group of high-level adventurers seeking to expand the borders of civilization (likely in exchange for some great reward from the heart of the enlightened world) have done away with all the balors and dragons, but there are still lots of werewolf lords and mariliths hanging about which the higher level guys have either no time or inclination to deal with, as they're too busy guarding the borders from the higher level threats in the next ring out. So instead a band of middle-high-level heroes comes in to assist the high-level ones in pushing out the lower tier threats. In the next ring, the CR ~15 threats are taken care of, but that leaves the local adventurer corps. with not time or manpower to handle the CR ~12 purple worms and cloud giants. And so on and so forth, until you get to the places where just about every goblin and orc have been chased into their holes and travel along major roads is as safe as driving on a freeway and the only heroes on hand are the ones who've retired or taken up government positions, and local law enforcement is seriously level 1 warriors and experts who hypothetically have the backup of level 20 wizards down in parliament, but who are so far removed from actual military threats that it usually doesn't matter.
Option Four: The frontline
The world is at war between two major powers. Like the frontier option, the heartlands of the good faction are totally stable and prosperous except for when the evil faction is screwing things up for them. The campaign takes place on the front lines, however, and in a plane-spanning superwar between all the forces of good and evil, the front lines can be in all sorts of exotic places. The heroes get their start because of the trickle-down effect. In a fight between an epic level archmage and an epic level archmage with a couple of mariliths on his side, the second one is going to win, even if those mariliths would pose little threat to the first archmage on his own. Similarly, each of those mariliths could be killed by a pack of friendly storm giants. And so and so forth down the CR ratings until we get to the point where the party is fighting a pack of enemy orcs as part of a massive army 90% of which is dedicated solely to preventing the archmages fighting the main battles from losing those battles for want of a nail. Ultimately, of course, the party will become the high-level heroes fighting the major battles and strike down the Lord of Terror once and for all. The advantage to this scenario is that it's very similar to the Lord of the Rings or Chronicles of Narnia or most of the other fantasy fiction that D&D is rooted in. The disadvantage is that it requires the party to be at least loosely affiliated with a chain of command that is, for 90% of the campaign, filled with people who are monumentally more powerful than you, and that your accomplishments seem kind of pathetic in a big picture sort of way for a long, long time. Fortunately, this is easily mitigated. Sure, from the grand strategic perspective saving a tiny kingdom from destruction in Prime Material Plane #28 is not even worth noticing and the high-level officers instead receive a report on the status of the battle for that entire world, but the people of the tiny kingdom are probably going to be pretty happy that they weren't overrun by an army of ten thousand orcs, ogres, and trolls.
Krynn got a similar treatment during the 3.0/3.5 era. The original Dragonlance trilogy, regardless of what you think about its quality, was fundamentally about a world finally throwing off the last of the shadows of the Cataclysm and going on to a future that was, at last, brighter than the past. That's why, thematically speaking, the seat of evil was in the ruins of the old empire at the heart of the Cataclysm. The last wounds of Krynn's post-apocalyptic past were finally healed...And then a week later another Cataclysm hit, ripping the world to pieces and sending it spiraling back into darkness.
Athas was already a wreck, so the writers just discontinued it altogether through 3.5e, then revived it in 4e for literally one day before leaving it unsupported again. Someone pass the lube to Greyhawk and Eberron, surely one of them is to be similarly decimated during the run of NEXT.
Possibly the worst part of all this is that D&D Land, the world we get just by examining the mechanics and genre assumptions of D&D without creating any specific setting details to go with it, the base template from which all original D&D settings are created, that land is in worse shape than even the post-apocalyptic nature of the majority of D&D's official settings, with possibly the exception of Athas.
In D&D Land, the world is fundamentally the same as the early 1400s Earth. Literacy rates are high amongst adventurers, but check out the starting funds of even the poorest class and then compare it to the standard 1 sp daily income of your average farmer or laborer, who are going to be about 90% of your population in this scenario. Even a level one adventurer of the majority of classes is going to have enough cash to pay a farmer's wages for 3 or 4 months. Adventurers also have significantly higher average stats than common people. While it could be argued that this is because unexceptional people do not become heroes, the fact that your party caster spent enough money on his crossbow to feed the average peasant for a year suggests the superior attributes of adventurers is in most cases just because they were brought up on a far better diet. So despite high literacy rates amongst adventurers, your average peasant probably can't read more than a few words.
There are no magic items or spells that do anything to improve crop yields on any spell list in the core game. Given the scarcity cycle that dominated European society with no real remission until approximately a hundred years after the time period your average D&D setting is apparently in, it can be assumed that D&D peasants are constantly sling-shotting back and forth between seasons of plenty and famines that shave off an extra 10% of their population. Cleric spells exist that can more directly solve the problem of food shortages, but they were built around satisfying the needs of a party of six. A single 5th level Cleric can sustain only 15 people, and Clerics of a lower level cannot create any food. While even 1st level Clerics can purify food and water several times a day, that amount is still fairly small, enough to feed maybe one family of six for a day. The way populations and class densities in the DMG work out, your average large population center is able to feed about 1% of its population on magic indefinitely, while towns of 2,000 or under are unlikely to have a Cleric who can cast Create Food or Water at all.
Transportation is not only not alleviated by the magical nature of D&D land, but made into a nightmare. Areas immediately surrounding population centers like hills and plains tend to be host to populations of powerful Good-aligned creatures, but this doesn't really help with the sort of long distance exchange of goods, ideas, and technologies that gives rise to the sort of advanced society that will develop the sorts of technology that get people living above subsistence level, because in order to get from one plains town to another you're probably going to have to cut through a marsh, or a forest, or some other "evil" wilderness location which is teeming with hydras or green dragons or other things which would require an adventuring party of at least level 5 to take care of, the sort of party an entire town of 5,000+ is unable to field more than four or five of at any given time. One caravan per thousand people is not nearly enough to sustain any kind of meaningful trade.
The highly individualistic nature of D&D land also makes things worse rather than better. It doesn't matter what your opinion on rewarding the exceptional people of the real world is, because in D&D being exceptional is exaggerated to such an absurd extreme that the policies of reality can no longer even begin to apply. An exceptional person in D&D Land is not an entrepreneur or a general or a statesman who uses their ability to lead or inspire or plan to lead large organizations. An exceptional person in D&D Land is literally a wizard who is, in terms of resources and military power, equal to a large organization all by himself. Whereas real life human society is held together by the fact that fundamentally none of us could ever create anything exceptional if we were the only sapient being on the planet, in D&D land every single ruler either is or has the protection of someone who can do exactly that a couple of times a day. And when that person dies or gets bored of the Prime Material Plane or decides he'd rather bind Succubi and have sex with them all day rather than risk injury and death (however temporary) fighting the minions of the Black Prince, the nation is getting gobbled up by another one that still does have the services of a high-level character (probably because they're ruled by one).
D&D Land is a world modeled after one of the most scarce and diseased times in European history, with the addition of horrifying monsters preventing trade and one-man militaries destabilizing nations and locking the world in an endless war in which the common people are lucky to be pawns.
Suddenly, the spellplague and Second Cataclysm seem downright optimistic, don't they?
There are a few solutions to this problem, not counting "just ignore it and have an inexplicably peaceful and stable world despite the fact the party regularly gets attacked by a pack of dire wolves when traveling between any two given population centers."
Option One: It's not a bug, it's a feature!*
Hey, Warhammer 40K is pretty popular, Dark Sun was a thing. Maybe a grimdark world where the lives of about 98% of the population are meaningless, painful, terrifying, and short is up your alley. Perhaps you'd like to play the role of epic heroes who will finally wake the world from its endless nightmare. Maybe you want to rise to be a morally ambiguous or downright evil ruler in this world. Maybe you want to play from the perspective of someone who's constantly holding at bay the horrors of an uncaring world, desperately mitigating problems that have no solution, to try and give just a few people lives worth living before something or other ends your reign and sends it all back to square one. Maybe you're just too lazy to change the mechanics of the world and don't much care about the longterm effects of your adventures so long as it all makes some sort of sense and you still get to save a kingdom and marry the princess. Just because I find that to be sort of depressing doesn't mean you're having fun the wrong way if you like it.
Option Two: The world's darkest hour
Just because the mechanics say that D&D Land is like this /right now/ doesn't mean it was always that way. Maybe Tiamat has finally defeated Pelor and unleashed a new age of monstrous horror upon the world, and now, with the light slowly but surely being stamped out by her hordes, the world has just one last chance for a band of heroes to rise up and turn the tide. Maybe the world has collapsed into a ruin in the wake of some catastrophe or internal decay that destroyed the mighty and more-or-less benevolent empire that had ruled before, and now the monsters have returned to the former empire's cracked and overgrown roads. Maybe the sudden increase in adventurers and monsters powerful as entire armies was the result of some recent magical event, and prior to this the world was pretty low-magic and normal.
Option Three: The frontier
Maybe the whole world isn't like this. Maybe most of the world is run by stable societies originally founded by organizations of good-aligned super humans who intentionally used their reign so that a totally normal guy with like three levels of aristocrat or something could call up an army of eighth-level adventurers and have them re-kill the invading armies of the Lich King before he could raze any cities. It is fundamentally true that every single modern nation is run by a civilian government despite the fact that the military leaders are very capable of throwing a coup whenever they want, and that doesn't happen because those leaders are morally opposed to overthrowing their own countries. There's no particular reason the same couldn't be true of people who are, single-handedly, the military, so long as the rulers of a country aren't stupid enough to treat them poorly and make sure they train up a successor before they leave.
In this scenario, there are constantly expanding rings of level-appropriate encounters as you reach the edges of civilization. At the edge of the ring, possibly constrained solely to lower planes and the like, are balors and ancient red dragons and other very high level monsters. In the next ring in, a group of high-level adventurers seeking to expand the borders of civilization (likely in exchange for some great reward from the heart of the enlightened world) have done away with all the balors and dragons, but there are still lots of werewolf lords and mariliths hanging about which the higher level guys have either no time or inclination to deal with, as they're too busy guarding the borders from the higher level threats in the next ring out. So instead a band of middle-high-level heroes comes in to assist the high-level ones in pushing out the lower tier threats. In the next ring, the CR ~15 threats are taken care of, but that leaves the local adventurer corps. with not time or manpower to handle the CR ~12 purple worms and cloud giants. And so on and so forth, until you get to the places where just about every goblin and orc have been chased into their holes and travel along major roads is as safe as driving on a freeway and the only heroes on hand are the ones who've retired or taken up government positions, and local law enforcement is seriously level 1 warriors and experts who hypothetically have the backup of level 20 wizards down in parliament, but who are so far removed from actual military threats that it usually doesn't matter.
Option Four: The frontline
The world is at war between two major powers. Like the frontier option, the heartlands of the good faction are totally stable and prosperous except for when the evil faction is screwing things up for them. The campaign takes place on the front lines, however, and in a plane-spanning superwar between all the forces of good and evil, the front lines can be in all sorts of exotic places. The heroes get their start because of the trickle-down effect. In a fight between an epic level archmage and an epic level archmage with a couple of mariliths on his side, the second one is going to win, even if those mariliths would pose little threat to the first archmage on his own. Similarly, each of those mariliths could be killed by a pack of friendly storm giants. And so and so forth down the CR ratings until we get to the point where the party is fighting a pack of enemy orcs as part of a massive army 90% of which is dedicated solely to preventing the archmages fighting the main battles from losing those battles for want of a nail. Ultimately, of course, the party will become the high-level heroes fighting the major battles and strike down the Lord of Terror once and for all. The advantage to this scenario is that it's very similar to the Lord of the Rings or Chronicles of Narnia or most of the other fantasy fiction that D&D is rooted in. The disadvantage is that it requires the party to be at least loosely affiliated with a chain of command that is, for 90% of the campaign, filled with people who are monumentally more powerful than you, and that your accomplishments seem kind of pathetic in a big picture sort of way for a long, long time. Fortunately, this is easily mitigated. Sure, from the grand strategic perspective saving a tiny kingdom from destruction in Prime Material Plane #28 is not even worth noticing and the high-level officers instead receive a report on the status of the battle for that entire world, but the people of the tiny kingdom are probably going to be pretty happy that they weren't overrun by an army of ten thousand orcs, ogres, and trolls.
