Wish Economy Trickle-Down Theory

[TheFlatline]

If magic is your greatest threat as a wizard, and magic only comes from those who are magically trained, why on earth would a wizard EVER train someone? After all, given time that pupil will grow in power to where they could threaten a wizard.

People share power with people with aligned interests all the time, because they expect a return on that power they can't get by not sharing that power. If you're the only wizard in the world, you've got a pretty unique advantage over everyone. If you're one of two wizards in the world, you want to find a like-minded apprentice and suddenly you now have a significant advantage over your only competitor.

Blacksmiths will take apprentices because they do work, and the increased productivity means more money for them. In this case, the productivity we're talking about is "having magical power," but the principle is the same.

That's kind of my point. If you're a bladesmith you don't go around destroying swords because they might stick you. In fact, destroying a well-made blade probably is offensive to a bladesmith.

[Foxwarrior]

From what I can tell, K, half of your arguments are attempting to prove that 2.b. (revised set) is complete nonsense in a typical setting. While pessimistic, they do seem to be based on the way real humans have acted in the past.

The other half of your arguments would apply equally well to non-wish-granted magic items. To which I respond: "If low-level characters destroy minor magic items so much, why would there be any left if rich people weren't throwing them away like candy?"

[Kaelik]

Your revised set of premises leaves much to be desired.

A statement about probabilities that vary is not very useful for conclusions.

See:

1) There are very few Ceramic Jar makers.
2) Most of them do not sell the jars to South Africa, but some do. Call this Z.
3) Ceramic Jars tend not to be destroyed. Call this R.
4) Therefore as time goes to infinity, South Africa should have infinite Ceramic Jars.


This is obviously false for the same reason your revised set does not lead to the conclusion you think.

Za - Rb = X
X is new jars in South Africa per year.
X times number of years is the current number of Ceramic Jars in Africa, or Y.

If you don't know what Z, a, R, or b are, and they might even be variable based on Y, how can you possibly tell me that you know that the number of Jars in South Africa must be infinity over time when you don't know any of those things?

[Foxwarrior]

Okay, I added a word. Given how emphatically I've seen people say that sundering is a bad idea, it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that an Everfull Mug you make is likely to stick around forever.

You're right, I don't know what Z, a, R, b, or Y are, because you haven't shown me your D&D setting.

[Foxwarrior]

So here's what happens when you try to avoid my assumptions.

1. You don't have a Wish Economy.
2. You don't have a Wish Economy.
2. b. All characters level 11 or higher in your setting act like gods: epic and irrelevant. Unless they're common enough for the weird golems and magical monstrosities they make by hand to be occasionally seen.
3. If you make periodic spellplagues scale to be more likely to destroy the item the cheaper the it is, you tone down the number of cheap items dramatically, but still nobody actually crafts minor magic items ever.
4. You might have a setting about cutting-edge technological progress, in which case the magic items available from this source should be used to build skyscrapers, perpetually flying helicopters, and other handy things. Otherwise, you've just toned down the Trickle-Down effect.
5. You have a setting about god-emperor liches, reincarnated people, dragons, and/or elans, who have formed some sort of resurrection pact.
6. You have basically any setting, ever, although Decanters, Bags of Holding, and Lyres of Building are still useful enough that you're likely to see a few of them in the hands of low-level people.
7. People who don't like being assassinated don't participate in the Wish Economy.

[DSMatticus]

That's kind of my point. If you're a bladesmith you don't go around destroying swords because they might stick you. In fact, destroying a well-made blade probably is offensive to a bladesmith.

The situation between an artisan making shit and a magic user making magical shit is pretty different. When you get a horse shoe from a blacksmith, you having that horse shoe in no way threatens the blacksmith's role and livelihood as the blacksmith. You cannot use a single horseshoe to match his blacksmithing prowess. You just have a horseshoe. That's it. End of story.

When you get a magic item that replicates wizard abilities, you have a piece of condensed wizard power that was previously unique to wizards. The more people who have magical items, the less special being a wizard is.

Consider these two situations:
1) A blacksmith finds a crate of standard iron goods. He sells them and takes a vacation from work.
2) A wizard finds a crate of dispel magic wands. He throws them in his vault or disenchants/destroys them, because wide access to dispel magic is not something that wizard wants to happen.

To which I respond: "If low-level characters destroy minor magic items so much, why would there be any left if rich people weren't throwing them away like candy?"

You're getting pretty confused here. Low-level characters keep magic items when they find them because that is a huge plus to them. Well, that may not be true; some settings probably have magic phobia as an actual thing (the first time a sorcerer with a wand of fireball decimates your town, you probably take an aversion to magic really, really fast). So for purely social stigma reasons, they might just destroy them. But ignoring that, low-level characters would keep and use them. And then medium- or high- level characters come along and say "ooh, shiny," and take it from them.

But mostly, even beyond that that just didn't make any sense at all. Magic items totally exist. Low-level characters have no safe way of getting their hands on them. Adventurers find magic items by raiding places where magic items are. Commoners can't do that because they would die. Wish economy characters wish up a full compliment of magic items they want, and then they either get bartered around or whatever and excesses get stored in a vault or destroyed or something. Commoners can't get those because they have nothing wish economy characters want.

The actual set of assumptions required for your interpretation to be true are as follows:
1) The rate of in-flow of magic items is greater than the rate of out-flow. (In-flow happens from wishing them up, making them normally, or finding lost ones; out-flow happens when things get destroyed, lost, moved to other planes).
2) There is some mechanism for downward mobility of magic items that is faster than the mechanism for upward mobility of magic items.

Both of those have to be true (from the initial point of peasants not having access to magic items) for peasants to ever get their hands on abundant magic item wealth. The problem with #1 is that you can't possibly show this and it doesn't have to be true, at all. The problem with #2 is that you've shown no reasonable mechanism for downward mobility of magic items. Seriously. There's no reason to think "wish economy people have lots of magic items, therefore eventually everyone will have lots of magic items." As a matter of fact, that is exactly the opposite of what happens in reality. Having a really, really excessively lucrative upper class does not do much for spreading wealth around to people not in that upper class.

So even if #1 holds, and you are correct that D&D societies produce more magic items than they lose, all you've shown is that the average high-level character's vault of magic items is getting larger over time. There's no reason to believe anything at all has changed from the perspective of turnip farmers anywhere.

[Foxwarrior]

I guess this means I need yet another assumption:

8. People don't collect magic items they have no use for. After all, a commoner who happens to have acquired fifteen Decanters still has nothing the wish economy characters want.

If you deny this one, you end up with a setting where the only way characters under level 11 ever get magic items is by looting tombs and palaces of deposed rulers that are either excessively well-guarded or very recently discovered. Also, if you can loot one of those Wish vaults, you will suddenly have the option to make the town of your choice into the most influential non-wish town on the continent for a short while.

Perfect for dungeon crawl campaigns, but there's still no such thing as a +1 sword or +1 or +2 plate.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You don't need to be in the wish economy to construct +1 swords or +2 plate. They're a huge fucking ripoff for anyone but adventurers (would you as a king rather get your Praetorian guard 5 +1 swords or just hire a drillmaster for three years to make them all gain a level?), but a lot of things are a huge fucking ripoff like purple dye or blocks of ice in the desert or gold rims on your carriage that continue to spin while it's stopped. While the economy couldn't function on people sinking thousands of gold pieces into making a batch of +1 swords or gloves of dexterity +2, they could still make their way into the economy if some spoiled aristocratic brats are asking for commissions from level 7 wizards.

[Foxwarrior]

Why is the aristocracy not composed entirely of the Wish Economy character's relatives, again?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Who says that they aren't? Most people in traditional aristocracies don't even come close to earning their positions; they just happen to be related to or be friends of someone that kicked ass.

When Hercules gets himself a harem and sires twenty children and gives them all provinces either out of misplaced fatherly pride or because he can only trust his blood that's aristocracy. If someone makes noise against Hercules Jr. Papa Hercules can roll down, kick the ass of several thousand rebels, and put junior back in charge. If Hercules dies or gets his own ass kicked then if none of his offspring rise to the challenge they get overthrown and/or reduced to petty warlords.

Welcome to the pre-Leviathan times, man.

[Foxwarrior]

Grandpa must be pretty busy if he can't even spend a day to outfit his grandson's personal bodyguard.

[Ice9]

Because Minor Magic Items are not chump change. They take a 3rd, 4th, and 6th level spell slot or two on an off day. They take a fair amount of time.

It is assumed that every member of the party has whatever minor items they want to use. It is assumed they all get +5 to all their stats from inherent bonuses.

These are assumed because we can see the obvious concrete benefit to the Wizard to spend his time and spell slots doing this when it makes him more likely to keep living.

That does not mean that they are chump change.

The issue with this is that there are two cases:

1) Wishing up stuff is non-trivial. Therefore people in the Wish economy do actually care about things the pre-Wish economy could provide them, because Wishing for those things would be a pain in the ass. So they may be willing to trade for those things.
2) Wishing up stuff is trivial. People in the Wish economy don't care about most stuff the pre-Wish economy can provide. But equally so, they have literally piles of the stuff and could easily give it out for reasons of convenience, charity, or popularity-building.

I mean, let's be honest. You give any player the ability to generate large numbers of items for free, and as soon as they have enough downtime all their minions are going to be sporting magic crap, and they'll have a big stockpile for future bribes/gifts/whatever. Because why the fuck not?

They're paranoid? Meh, maybe some people. But how about the rest?
* People who are actually nice and don't only care about personal power.
* People who are confident. They've gotten exponentially more powerful as time has passed. At this rate, they'll be fucking demigods before any of the items they toss around comes into the hands of foes.
* People who want to destabilize the existing order.
* People who need more short term power now (such as a stronger army, or slightly-pre-Wish allies), and don't care about later.

[K]

They're paranoid? Meh, maybe some people. But how about the rest?
* People who are actually nice and don't only care about personal power.
* People who are confident. They've gotten exponentially more powerful as time has passed. At this rate, they'll be fucking demigods before any of the items they toss around comes into the hands of foes.
* People who want to destabilize the existing order.
* People who need more short term power now (such as a stronger army, or slightly-pre-Wish allies), and don't care about later.

We have a name for those people. We call them "stupid."

From an RP perspective, blowing a huge amount of your personal time to make everyone near you a threat is blindingly retarded. This is a world with mass charm for fuck's sake, so even your minions are suspect.

From a game perspective, it's asking a DM to hurt you with Gygaxian consequences.

I mean, players will cut that crap out the first time a DM says "yes, the dark lord looted your palace while you were in another dimension. I hope you can survive 150 Magic Missiles and dozens of high-level dispels a round since you equipped every single soldier in your army with items that cast them."

[Red_Rob]

The issue with this is that there are two cases:

1) Wishing up stuff is non-trivial. Therefore people in the Wish economy do actually care about things the pre-Wish economy could provide them, because Wishing for those things would be a pain in the ass. So they may be willing to trade for those things.
2) Wishing up stuff is trivial. People in the Wish economy don't care about most stuff the pre-Wish economy can provide. But equally so, they have literally piles of the stuff and could easily give it out for reasons of convenience, charity, or popularity-building.

Wishing for something takes about half an hour of effort once you have the spells memorised. Therefore people in the Wish economy will trade for things they could Wish for, as long as its easier than spending that half an hour. That means that most of the time they'll simply Wish for the things they want, but occasionally they'll trade some gold or a minor item if it saves them a little time. It just doesn't happen often enough to flood the world with gold or magic items.

[Ice9]

I mean, players will cut that crap out the first time a DM says "yes, the dark lord looted your palace while you were in another dimension. I hope you can survive 150 Magic Missiles and dozens of high-level dispels a round since you equipped every single soldier in your army with items that cast them."

Meh, that's really only an argument for not seeing certain items produced en mass. The majority of items don't really "voltron together" enough to be much threat for a high-level caster. Also, a bad argument, because it cuts both ways:
"Oh, your entire army died while you were in another dimension. The dark lord sent a single Shadow/Wraith/Allip/whatever, and you didn't give anybody anything that could hurt it."

As for "a huge amount of personal time", I'm talking about spending maybe a half-hour a day. Or even every few days. That still adds up to a hell of a lot of items over time.

And again - not even every PC is only interested in maximizing personal invincibility, much less everybody ever.

[K]

I mean, players will cut that crap out the first time a DM says "yes, the dark lord looted your palace while you were in another dimension. I hope you can survive 150 Magic Missiles and dozens of high-level dispels a round since you equipped every single soldier in your army with items that cast them."

Meh, that's really only an argument for not seeing certain items produced en mass. The majority of items don't really "voltron together" enough to be much threat for a high-level caster. Also, a bad argument, because it cuts both ways:
"Oh, your entire army died while you were in another dimension. The dark lord sent a single Shadow/Wraith/Allip/whatever, and you didn't give anybody anything that could hurt it."

Items that are useful to an army do Voltron together. That's what makes them useful for armies.

As for a shadow, don't be stupid. If your army lacks the ability to cast a 1st level spell like Magic Weapon, you shouldn't be paying them.

----------------------------

On the issue of binding, it does take time. Crap escapes the binding and needs to be hunted down and/or fought. Crap makes its Cha check and needs to be guarded for a day until you can ask it your demands again so that it won't break free while you are sleeping or dropping a deuce. Crap can hunt you down for abusing it's power at any old time of the year.

Chain-binding is a full-time job and doing it lightly is for people who want to spend eternity with their souls in black gems.

[Kaelik]

Wow...

@Ice

It is not too much work for be to brush my teeth every day. Yet, it is too much work for me to brush everyone's teeth every day. Wish takes a certain amount of work that is non negligible, but also not all that much.

Therefore, anyone who can wish will not trade things they can't wish for, for things they can. They will further have every single wishable thing that is worth that non negligible work.

They still won't give things away, just like I do not brush other people's teeth even though I totally could, because it's not fucking worth it.

@ Foxwarrior.

You are apparently an idiot.

Things Tend not to get destroyed ever is still a probability statement.

TEND.

If you say magic items never get destroyed, you are objectively wrong. If you say they usually don't, then you have to figure out how much is unusually.

Probability.

Of course, items also get lost, not destroyed too.

[Grek]

Not all items, no. Food, buildings, healing items, masterwork weapons/armour, boats, mounts and other similar things can be extremely useful to your minions but not really harmful to you. Piles of low level scrolls to teach your wizard apprentices with, divination items to help your underlings plan campaigns on your behalf, piles of low level traps to keep bears out of your fortresses, etc. etc. If you get immunity to poison, giving poison to your minions becomes an option. If you get significant amounts of DR/whatever, then giving out any sort of weapon unable to bypass that DR is fine. If you and everyone you care about is immune to fire, passing out wands of fireball stops being an issue.

If you can't think of anything at all that a post-Wish Fighter who gets a kick from leading tiny men around might want to outfit his guys with to amuse him better in his latest war on goblinkind without actually being threatening to anyone that matters, you're not trying hard enough.

It doesn't even have to be military goods. I'd be very suprised if you have a compelling explaination of absolutely no Good Clerics ever even consider trying to feed the poor and heal the sick with wishes, or why the King doesn't outfit his neices and nephews with magic weapons and whatever else they want when they go out on baby's first adventure.

[Josh_Kablack]

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

If you accept that (which you don't have to) you are accepting that magic items of 15,000 GP and under are trivial for high-level characters to have. Just in case you're unsure about the wooden nickel bit, that means that such characters value such items about the way modern citizens might view a coupon for a free drink at a specific bar - you might give them away to curry favor or for tiny errands, but you're not getting someone to mow your lawn that cheaply. If you accept that the wish economy exists as described in the Tomes, then you are accepting that minor magic items are the junk promo swag, for firms who are too cheap to give out free tee-shirts.

Now the reality of trickle-down economics is such an affront to humanity behaviors that I cannot personally countenance it's metaphorical inclusion in a game world in a positive way. I would sooner write a game about how great it is to be enslaved - because at least that would be taken for satire, The past three decades of American history have shown quite well that Reagan had it wrong and "a rising tide swamps small boats" or perhaps, "don't even bother to pity them poor suckers what can't afford a yacht" would have been a more accurate sound bite. And that drives me to want invent in-game world reasons why such items would not trickle down in any meaningful way - such as malicious wish-economy participants producing nothing but cursed items for the lulz; or having pre-wish economy item devourers / sacrificers / quest givers to keep the supply constant; or doing something funny with the wartime-all-the-time economy and having the "superstitious" aversion to magic actually being a societally wise meme for allowing turnip economy farmers to avoid drawing the usually lethal attention of wandering bands murder hobos who all suffer from gunslinger mentality and poorly-defined alignment morality which allows them to kill your entire family for a couple potions which might give them an edge in their lengthy multi-part quest to enter the wish economy.

[souran]

all of this stuff happens because the wish economy solution is one devised to try and do something that was a wierd idea to begin with.

The wish economy was supposed to answer questions about why player characters can/can't buy really expensive magic or why the world is or isn't overun with magic items just like this post is finding it does.

Its solution is mostly designed to force a wealth reset on players at right around level 11-12. This is actually not really a bad thing as it provides a pretty stock dungeon crawl reason for players to keep playing after level 10.

However, it doesn't actually make any more sense than the situation it was suposedly resolving, and thats because it assumes that every monster, craftsman, ruler, and NPC of any stripe is effectively playing their own game of D&D every second of their existance. And this doesn't work. The idea that theoretical NPCs in another part of the game world that the players never enter or go to are making theorical craft/attack/whatever rolls in order to perform their daily functions is what creates this problem. It creates a problem because it is damn near cosmically stupid.

The only way D&D (and really any RPG) world does not descend into a parody of itself is if the "world" operates on narrative convention, natural law, author fiat, and reasonable expecation outside of the sphere of the players.

[DSMatticus]

2) Wishing up stuff is trivial. People in the Wish economy don't care about most stuff the pre-Wish economy can provide. But equally so, they have literally piles of the stuff and could easily give it out for reasons of convenience, charity, or popularity-building.

I'd be very suprised if you have a compelling explaination of absolutely no Good Clerics ever even consider trying to feed the poor and heal the sick with wishes

The real world exists, and depressingly, this is how it works? We have some genuinely super-rich individuals and organizations in this world who are still dedicated to the acquisition of more wealth and who could easily spare some to improve the lives of everyone with any contact with them substantially, and yet they don't. I really see no compelling reason why we should even consider the idea that "there might be some super powerful altruistic dude who fixes everything" is something that happens with any reliability. If that could be a genuinely dependable basis for uplifting the downtrodden, then we would have a lot less downtrodden in the real world.

This isn't to say it doesn't happen occasionally; charity exists. There's just no reason to think it exists with any scale or regularity to actually accomplish anything significant. And then there are other problems, like this one again; once you start handing out magic items that feed the world and cure the sick, people are going to want those items and eventually they'll just end up back in the hands of the powerful. It's nothing more than a temporary state of affairs.

There really could have been countless collapsed magical utopias in your D&D world. Someone powerful could have got their shit together and built a functional society off of cheap magic, but then they went on to do something else, like be dead, travel the planes, or be a god, and then what they built fell apart. Rinse, lather, repeat as many times as you like. The point is that the typical D&D state of affairs is a stable state and you can spend centuries with things running like that even if it's possible that you can change things for a little while in certain locations.

But... yeah. The idea that the powerful will get so powerful that they start paying turnip farmers in magical trinkets instead of not being stabbed in the face tokens is insane, because that defies everything we know about human behavior and human history.

[hogarth]

The real world exists, and depressingly, this is how it works?

No one is claiming that, in the real world, organizations can print arbitrarily large amounts of money and still have it worth something. But in writing about the wish "economy", that claim is made some of the time. Of course, it's also denied some of the time as well, because it's really a hot mess of contradictory statements, depending on who's talking and which version will help win the argument.

[RadiantPhoenix]

No one is claiming that, in the real world, organizations can print arbitrarily large amounts of money and still have it worth something. But in writing about the wish "economy", that claim is made some of the time.

Could you give an example?

[K]

If you accept that (which you don't have to) you are accepting that magic items of 15,000 GP and under are trivial for high-level characters to have. Just in case you're unsure about the wooden nickel bit, that means that such characters value such items about the way modern citizens might view a coupon for a free drink at a specific bar - you might give them away to curry favor or for tiny errands, but you're not getting someone to mow your lawn that cheaply. If you accept that the wish economy exists as described in the Tomes, then you are accepting that minor magic items are the junk promo swag, for firms who are too cheap to give out free tee-shirts.

They aren't vendor swag, but more like signed copies of your salable product that you give away for free to a limited number of special customers. This makes them special because they are rare.

You can just buy people with the actual gold or other goods you can get, so it's not like you even need to trade +1 swords for minor favors or hand them out as promo items when a handful of silver works instead. Heck, in many cases cash works better because they can trade it for something to eat and a place to live and other luxuries you can't be bothered to provide directly.

In fact, you want to limit the numbers of magic items you give out simply because the instant they become common among your friends they lose all power to curry favor.

[hogarth]

No one is claiming that, in the real world, organizations can print arbitrarily large amounts of money and still have it worth something. But in writing about the wish "economy", that claim is made some of the time.

Could you give an example?

An example of someone claiming that a Gold Economy and a Wish Economy exist at the same time and that Gold is not scarce in the Wish Economy? Sure.
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